Have fun reading, and welcome to Wonderland.

2015:

Back in fifth grade, all the students would gather on the soccer field for our mandatory running exercise during recess period. We would line up, then run to the music booming out of the loudspeakers, round and round in circles, always trying to catch up with the person running before us.

When I look back on those days, I think of orderly things: blue tablecloths wrapped around desks, uniforms on Mondays, being taught to sit and raise hands and salute to the national flag in a certain way.

Being taught to behave a certain way—socially, academically, at all times.

I, with an innocence so blissful and heartbreaking at the same time, dutifully treaded the path laid out before me, moving forward, upward, with every advanced after-school program, every competition, every merit-student award.

I ran on, because fifth-graders did not question too much about the future, around and around toward a finishing line I could not yet see, wondering when the music would stop, when I could stop.

There must be something waiting at the end. And despite not knowing the destination, I did know the rules of this game that many children in the best school district of Beijing were playing—the only way to push forward was to excel at everything.

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Some might question the directorial choice of casting imaginary characters from Wonderland the same as real people in Phoebe’s life. It is without doubt the most brilliant part (and confusing as well, if you don’t look carefully) of the movie, this beautiful parallel between fantasy and reality.

“It takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place,” says the Red Queen (or is it Phoebe’s mother?). “If you want to get to someplace else, you have to run at least twice as fast.”

She takes Phoebe’s hand and they start running.

2018:

I’ve always hated running: the throbbing in my ears, the pounding of my heart, every intake of breath a painful scratch against my lungs.

Above all, I hated that I could never run fast enough, always the stranded island in the waves of students wildly dashing down the 800-meter route (two laps and a half on the soccer field, I will forever remember that), one swarm before me and one swarm behind me, but I was always alone.

My feet felt heavier as I grew older, and sometimes I wanted to stop and take a break. But I needed to carry on. It was mere months from the high school entrance exam, and 78% seemed to be the best I could do in math, which of course was not good enough, not when the saying was so drilled into our minds it almost became the most popular slang—lose one point on the exam, and you are left behind by more people than a stadium can hold.

“Getting into high school is a selective process,” my friend Ee said. “Everyone gets all A’s back in elementary school.

That’s not going to work anymore.” She was the oldest fourteen-year-old I’d ever met, and sometimes when I looked at her, I felt as if I was staring at my friend thirty years into the future.

I began to feel the shift in things.

Being a straight-A student was no longer the point, getting higher grades than everyone else was. But it was getting harder and harder to push my way through now, especially when everyone was aiming high, yet only the top 20% of students in my school district could get into my dream high school.

But at least there was something tangible in the near future for me to reach—a break station, almost—and I held onto the belief of that.

The line between fantasy and reality is often blurred in Phoebe’s mind, but several aspects of the movie help viewers distinguish between the two. Most noticeable is the shift in hues.

The Wonderland in Phoebe’s eyes is always bright and colorful—absurdly so at times, yet it draws her in nevertheless.

Wonderland is the escape for Phoebe, where she can be free, and no one will judge her for behaving inappropriately, for not being good enough.

“I’m ready now,” she says to her imaginary friend we cannot see. Looking down from her spot up on the catwalk, the whole theater swirls and glitters, transforming into a rabbit hole. She smiles, lets go, jumps.

The camera cuts to black.

There is no screaming, only the thump of something falling to the ground.

Occasionally I would recall our running exercise during recess period back in elementary school. Round and round in circles we used to run, never asking why, never questioning when we could stop, always trying to move forward, only that we always returned to where we started.

2020:

My parents told me of a new journey we were about to begin, one they had planned for years and would take place far away across the sea. For the first time the path before me was no longer dark and murky, and at the end of the racetrack I saw light, right at my fingertips.

I saw both the destination and a new starting line, a place which might be different, where maybe I no longer needed to run just as fast.

Or maybe I no longer needed to run at all—I could jump, or twirl, or soar. I liked the idea of that—of me being something else than what I already was.

Within months everything would stop: first the schools, then the flights, then the embassy and all immigration services. The road before me, the one which was paved out down to every single brick, the one I’d been dutifully treading on since a very young age, collapsed all of a sudden. I plummeted down along with it, plunging into an era of isolation and uncertainty, and the light that was so within my grasp slipped away through my fingertips.

I stopped running, because there was no road to run on, no destination to run to. The way everything stopped made me not want to pick up my pace anymore.

“Are you always supposed to feel hope?” Phoebe asks. It is late fall now, the sky dreary, and everything on screen seems to be shrouded in a fine veil of bluish sorrow.

Her mother looks back from the front seat of the car. “Did you jump because you didn’t feel hope?”

“Oh no, I felt it there,” Phoebe says. “Where?” her father asks.

“In Wonderland,” murmurs her mother. She purses her lips, tries not to think about Phoebe’s sprained wrist. “But not here.”

Phoebe nods. “But not here.”

2021:

Everything stopped. I stopped. But not completely.

I learned to pave a new way in the darkness, out of the darkness. Every brick became so strange yet so familiar at the same time. I knew not the destination I was heading toward, but I did know  this time it would be a destination I have chosen for myself.

I learned to slow down, too, to explore trails which deviate from the route designed for me, to actually think about the future, instead of just running after it, stumbling, falling head over heels.

Once again, I found myself traveling down a path toward a destination yet to be discovered, but I was no longer running blindly in circles, only moving forward because I was told to, running faster because everyone else was speeding up.

I’d like to think of this as the beginning of something new.

All stories come to an end, but not all endings come with a resolution.

“You see, I’ve lost my way,” Phoebe says at one point, as Alice, standing at the center of the stage.

Phoebe’s story seems to have come to an end when she gradually begins to piece her life back together. She accepts her OCD and Tourette’s diagnosis and learns to nurture her relationship with both her family and her classmates.

But the film does not provide us with a final resolution, for as a young girl, there is still so much about herself Phoebe needs to discover. There is still so much room for her to grow.

And so the film ends with a question: “Who are you?” the caterpillar asks the Alice on stage, asks Phoebe.

She only smiles.

Onward:

Staring out of the window, at the sun pushing up the horizon, almost 6,000 miles away from home, away from the life I was born and raised into, I think about new beginnings—new classmates, a new school, a whole new environment.

I think about new experiences. I think about the brand-new journey I’m about to begin as well, where I could be someone new, someone different.

But then again, maybe I already am.

“At a certain point in your life, probably when too much of it has gone by, you will open your eyes and see yourself for who you are… And you will say to yourself: ‘but I am this person.’ And in that statement, that correction, there will be a kind of love.”

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