Never have I had such a hard time making a start for my birthday essay. For two or three years here on the forum I've kept an annual ritual of celebrating my birthdays through my articles. As an "old" netizen, however, I find it getting hard to keep the ritual, particularly difficult this year. Who will think it easy to write something on the day he or she waves farewell to the teen years and says hello to a new set of numbers that begins with twenty?
I am searching my mind for birthday memories I have accumulated over the two decades...and surprisingly the first picture I see is not birthday cakes, candles, or parents' tearful gleaming eyes, but a little doll a friend gave me. She was the first friend I've ever made in my life, apart from my net-pals, and the doll was the first birthday present I've ever received in my teen years, apart from the birthday cakes my parents bought me.
Four short rubber limbs and a pink rubber face made the doll girl plump and soft. Flowery green dress covered the electronic box in the body. Above two big, eyelid-movable eyes is a cascade of bangs, two shoulder-length braids on each side. She is a blonde in height of a small cat. With two batteries set in her stomach she can sing Happy Birthday for hours on end, until you pull the batteries out.
Dolls always have not been my favorite, but I put this one on the top of my computer speaker, a most prominent place to display gifts. She and I would spend several hours everyday in the computer room. For the first time in my life I loved being watched by this quiet girl when using the computer and savored every bit of pride to have a friend my age. That year I was seventeen.
It was not that bad to be given a singing doll in someone's late teens when she had got no gift at all from whom she considered to be friend in the previous years. In Chinese we may say, "It is a gift that arrived late."
If the doll was not a bad present, I would say that on my nineteenth birthday the presents I received by land mail were prefect. A friend in Zhejiang sent me an exquisite wind chime consisted of five small yellow glass dolphins, each hung at different levels on a glass ring, each accompanied by a long brass pipe. A green jade seal was also found in the package. In an attached birthday card she explained that the seal was homemade by her father, who has been following his father's steps to be a seal-maker all his life. Another package came earlier from Chongqing. Another wind chime! It was larger, green, and made up of translucent apples.
Of all the presents pouring into our doorsteps that year there was a group of what you may not think to be called present at all. Those were "greetings." I was delightedly surprised to find on the birthday eve that someone wrote a post announcing the arrival of my birthday. It was the very friend who sent me the green-apple wind chime, and her name is Isabella.
Down under her post Mary's reply revealed an even bigger surprise for me: A work offer! And that drew a prefect period mark to my eighteen past years.
Also in that year I bought some books online as birthday presents and sent separately to the two friends who both sent me the wind bells. It felt just as wonderful to give as to get, with sincerity of friendship.
Still I will have another "first time in my life" experience on the first of only half a dozen birthdays that ends with ty. Thousands of miles away from home, away from Father, away from the familiar city, tomorrow I will celebrate with Mother and my extended family of ten people in a strange city. A birthday cake will sure be there. Around it will be twelve candle-lit faces, the Happy Birthday song in the air. Each family member will make a toast. Along with all these, what I hope to see around the table is that what they pull out of the pockets are not bills but hand-picked little gismos that represent personal characters, city cultures, or simply good wishes. Then I will use them to decorate my rooms, with honor and pride that all these come from a faraway city where all of Mother's dearest ones live. Or perhaps a hug can also be a gift, a spiritual one. Then from earlier generations as my relatives I will have tokens of love keeping me company through another decade that starts with twenty, that brand-new experiences are to dawn.
A birthday without presents is like a river without fish.
