“The Child in Her Gentle Slumber” (1840) by George Cattermold, published in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. More about this plate can be found here.

• Someone tries to pry open my curtains from outside of the closed window, on the sixteenth floor. It’s a boy and he yells: ‘Someone is at your door!’
• I walk out of the apartment & discover that mine is only one out of many, many, many apartments on the same floor. These other apartments — some are turned into offices, some are classrooms, there is also an operating theatre & a doctor is performing surgery on someone’s heart… I have never seen these other spaces or faces before.
• A postwoman. She delivers a letter to me. I tear the envelope, trembling. It’s a letter I wrote when I was ten years old. I recognise the handwriting: childish, happy. How did I know I will one day live in Whampoa Garden? How did my child self know I am here?
• I do not read it. Instead, I leave the building and run to the Hung Hom MTR station (this is very unlike me). I do not know what I am doing. I carry the letter close to me. On the platform, someone asks me: ‘How did you get here from Cambodia?’ I say: ‘I am not from Cambodia!’
• I think (these are my last thoughts in the dream): Why don’t I have my stupid Octopus card and money? Where am I going? There’s just me, and a letter, and apparitions of faces in the crowd.
  

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Tammy Ho Lai-Ming is Assistant Professor at the Department of English Language and Literature. She is the administrator of Agora. [Click here to read all entries by or about Tammy.]