All stories are rooted in reality.
This story emerges from one of those early memories that lodge themselves in the mind like a splinter—small, nearly forgotten, yet somehow never fully dissolving. I was about seven years old, in Primary Two in Hong Kong, 1967. Our English teacher was Miss Lee, a young woman whose exact age I couldn’t gauge through a child’s eyes, where all adults existed in that vague territory of “grown-up.” Looking back now, she was likely in her twenties—barely begun.
One day, she simply wasn’t there anymore. The classroom door opened to a substitute, and Miss Lee’s absence stretched from days into permanence. Then came the whisper that travelled through our school in that mysterious way news reaches children: she had taken her own life. I cannot recall now who told us or how we came to know. The official story was sparse: young teacher, tragic decision, life cut short. Details, if any, have worn away like text on old paper. But sparse stories haunt precisely where they omit.
It was my first encounter with mortality though to a seven- year old, death was abstract and incomprehensible —something that happened elsewhere, to others. Miss Lee hadn’t been close enough to trigger immediate grief in a child’s heart. She was simply our teacher, a figure at the blackboard, a voice reading stories. Yet her absence left something behind, a kind of shadow that has never quite lifted.
For many years, I carried the convenient explanation: a young woman who took her own life at her prime must have died for love. It was the story that made immediate sense, the narrative that required no further questions. When tragedy strikes someone so impossibly young, we tend to reach for the familiar plot—the failed romance, the broken heart, the love that destroyed rather than saved. I viewed her story from this assumption, because the idea that dying for a love that failed, however banal, offered a framework that made the incomprehensible seem comprehensible.
But as years accumulated and I grew more nuanced in my understanding of the complexity of human condition, this neat explanation began to feel like another form of silencing. Life resists singular explanations. A person is never just one story, one disappointment, one unbearable weight. She was a twenty something lady — old enough to have accumulated layers of frustration, aspiration, suffocation and longing that had nothing to do with just romantic love. Perhaps she was crushed by the weight of others’ expectations, by a future that seemed to be a corridor with no doors. Perhaps it was the specific exhaustion of being brilliant with nowhere to apply that brilliance, or being seen only as what she could never fully be.
The truth is, I’ll never know the precise calculus of her decision. But in growing older myself, I’ve learned that reducing her to a love story was my child-mind’s way of organizing chaos—and then my adult mind’s lazy acceptance of that childhood framework. The real gift fiction offers isn’t the ability to solve her mystery with a convenient plot, but to acknowledge the mystery’s true dimensions: that a life can be unbearable in ways that have nothing to do with romance, that despair can accumulate from a thousand small refusals rather than one dramatic rejection, that sometimes the story we tell about someone’s death says more about our need for comprehension than about their actual experience.
Over the decades, this memory – if memory is even the right word for something that time has dissolved into imagination – has settled into the sediment of my consciousness, mixing with other losses, other moments when life revealed its fragility. The specifics of Miss Lee herself—her face, her voice, the particular way she held chalk or turned pages—have faded beyond recovery. What remains is not her portrait but something more elemental: an early understanding that lives can simply stop, that young women with their whole futures ahead can choose to step out of time entirely.
I find myself calculating sometimes: she would be in her eighties now had she lived. All those unlived decades accumulate into a kind of shadow existence, a parallel life that never was. In Hong Kong’s relentless forward motion, her story was quickly paved over, but something in me refused to let her disappear completely.
I’ve borrowed the shape of my seven-year-old bewilderment and wrapped it in fiction, creating a ghost who waits in that flat, suspended between departure and arrival. Because that’s what haunts me still—not just her death, but all those interrupted possibilities, the thesis never defended, the pupils never taught, the life never fully lived.
Fiction cannot resurrect the dead, but it can offer them what history denied: complexity, interiority, voice. In imagining Sylvia’s ghost, I’ve given Miss Lee a space to exist beyond the verdict of her final action—not to excuse or explain, but to insist on her fullness as a person who was more than her ending.
She can therefore be given a second life in the reconstructed reality of a story. And perhaps that’s the power of fiction: to create parallel realities where different laws govern what’s possible. You might argue that, as with Bryony’ s alternate ending in Atonement, these reconstructed lives and possibilities are self-delusion—comfortable lies we tell ourselves about permanence and loss. But here’s what unsettles me: I’m not sure our own sense of existence is any more “real” than the reality we create for the dead in stories. We live inside narratives too—the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, why we matter, what our lives mean. Our consciousness is already a kind of fiction-making machine, constantly constructing coherent narratives from the chaos of experience. We’re all , in a sense, fictional characters under our own self-authored stories.
This story, then, is my attempt at what the living owe: to tell a story for someone who can no longer speak, to imagine her not as tragedy but as a complete consciousness, still waiting to be understood. In giving her fictional form, I haven’t changed what happened, but I’ve changed how she’s allowed to exist in memory—not as a cautionary tale or a tragic statistic, but as a woman who lived, who struggled, who mattered, and who deserves more than silence.
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