One Moon: What if
ONE MOON COLUMN | ISSUE THIRTEEN | SPOOKY
Written by Priscilla Zhang (she/her) | @p.zhangxy | Columnist
Halloween is coming. It reminded me of a Christmas a few years ago, when I went to London to visit a friend who was studying there. I was excited to spend Christmas with her, until she said, “Honestly, you might as well stay home. Shanghai has a stronger Christmas atmosphere. Everyone here is on holiday.”
She had a point.
Halloween was never a traditional Chinese festival, but growing up in Shanghai, that hardly seemed to matter. Shanghai has always been very good at making room for things that did not originally belong to it. We celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival, the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year), and the Dragon Boat Festival, but we also put up Christmas trees, dress up for Halloween, and find excuses to celebrate Valentine’s Day.
Perhaps Shanghai simply likes a reason to dress up, and Halloween is particularly good at this. For one night, people become someone else. Ancient gods, mythological figures, Buddhas, the Monkey King, characters from Chinese novels and opera – all suddenly appear on the streets of a modern city.
It is a strange kind of nostalgia. We borrow the past for a night, put it on our bodies, take some photos, and then go home and become ourselves again.
But perhaps the stranger thing is what happens when we look backwards without a costume. As the year comes to an end, I find myself thinking about the decisions I made this year, and, inevitably, the ones I didn’t.
What if I had never come to New Zealand?
What if I were still the spoiled daughter in Shanghai?
What if I had stayed in one of my old jobs and never decided to go back to university?
What if I had never met certain people?
What if I had made a different decision on one ordinary day?
The funny thing about “what if” is that we usually imagine the alternative version of ourselves using the person we are now. But that isn’t how life works. If I had stayed in Shanghai, I would not simply be the same person living in Shanghai. I would have become someone shaped by everything that happened there instead.
And that is what makes these questions so impossible to answer. We can imagine another life, but we cannot know the person who would have lived it.
Sometimes I look back at an old decision and wonder why it mattered so much to me. Why I worried so much. Why I wanted something so badly. Why I thought I knew what would happen next.
It is easy to understand the person I am now. It is much harder to understand the person who had not yet lived everything that I have lived since.
Perhaps that is why “what if” is so tempting. It lets us imagine a past that never actually happened – a version of our life that remains perfectly preserved precisely because it was never lived. We can put on the costume of another time, but we cannot actually live in it.
Perhaps “what if” works the same way. We take something from another time and imagine ourselves inside it. But we never really become it.
And perhaps that is what makes it a little spooky. Some ghosts are not people who used to exist. Some are the versions of ourselves who never did. Maybe we don’t need to know what would have happened. Some versions of us are meant to remain what ifs.
A few days from now, I will be back in Shanghai.
My mother is already more excited than I am. On the phone, she said, “Oh my, you’re coming back in just a few days!”
“Yes, soon,” I told her. “I just have to survive a few more assignments first.”
“Oh, then you have to make sure you eat properly,” she said.
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