/The Hourglass at Seventeen

Unexpectedly waiting for a connecting train at Hsinchu Station

A warm breeze blew in, drying the thin layer of sweat on my skin. The air carried the smell of bento boxes from the platform.

Standing in the same spot where I used to wait, I looked up at the old station — unchanged for decades, worn with history.

The girl who wore the Hsinchu Girls' High School uniform, inexplicably obsessed with the perfect attendance award — she felt like she was standing right beside me.

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She wanted to be a painter. She was also convinced she'd starve.

Every day she commuted, exhausted and anxious, unable to see what lay ahead.

But she didn't stop.

I know now —

painting was the only way she knew how to feel worth something.

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Over the years, I met many warm friends. Had three relationships, each a little broken.

I got married. Then came the two people I love most in this life — my twins.

Then divorce.

From a child who simply loved to draw, I became a painter, built a real company, and — by a strange turn of fate — took on the role of a teacher, passing on the language of color.

A fortune teller told me in middle school that I'd become a teacher one day.

The more I resisted, the more completely I came back to it.

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And then, finally, I learned to treat my own existence as something that matters.

Not because I figured it out. Because I was too tired to keep looking outside myself.

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I asked myself: did I become the adult I once hoped to be?

Honestly, no.

My vision of life was too flat back then. I thought that as long as I worked hard enough and stayed on track, happiness would arrive on schedule — like a report card at the end of term.

But whose life isn't a mix of joy and pain, full of noise?

Through the eyes of that seventeen-year-old, the person I've become is completely beyond anything she could have imagined.

Less of the perfection she longed for.

Much more trust in myself.

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Watching the train pull in, the wind in my face.

I wanted to say to that girl beside me:

You're going to become a painter. One who can actually support herself.