Moonlight Refugee

Ever since I was a child, I have always known that the world around me was much larger, that it was not limited to a small market, a moldering temple with a desolate courtyard, a solid church that I had not entered, rows of houses, schools, and a highway. That poor and ragged landscape never limited my imagination. I did not know how I got there, but I always knew that one day I would leave it. I knew I would travel to other vast places, reach the tops of mountains, dive to the bottom of the sea, and talk to people in every corner of the world.

I don’t know why I came here. Waking at four in the morning, inside this airtight dormitory room with no windows, I can only tell the time from the screen of my phone. Below my bed, the Afghan girl is snoring softly. I imagine her bed, surrounded by piles of stuff hung haphazardly like a rumpled bed curtain. She’s been here for two weeks; the items hanging around the bed are a way for her to assert her attachment, her sovereignty, and to establish herself more firmly than the others, which currently consist of me, a Cambodian girl, and an Indonesian girl.

The previous night, the snow fell heavily. The snowflakes fell gently yet fiercely, floating through the night like magical creatures. The cold crashed on me suddenly as soon as I stepped outside, aggressively occupying all the corners in my body, sneaking into every inch of carelessly exposed skin. The cold froze on the skin, piercing my brain, aching with every breath. On cold winter nights like this, the best thing to do is to stay in a cozy room, drink a cup of ginger tea, and talk about everything — except politics, of course. Politics in Russia these days is taboo. Russians avoided the subject like a terminal illness. “War in Ukraine? No, don’t worry, we are fine.” They changed the subject. Except Varf Labec. 

The world is full of people who leave the place they were born, only to survive and then die in a place they never expected to live. The world is full of people who live without purpose, without any relationships, without any stories, or many that no one cares to know, despite the constant progress of everything around them. Such people tend to appear the most often in America, and even more in New York, the place where the no-identity-faces gather, the embodiment of the splendid America, the image that represents the most solid but also the most easily shattered dreams.

I saw one of them on the first morning after arriving in New York right after stepping out of a concrete hotel on Twenty-fourth Street, heading towards Seventh Avenue. For a moment, I had the idea of doing something different from the drivers — that is, following the African man to his destination.

by Hai Yen Ho| November 9, 2025 | Literature Among the countless fragments of memory vying to become the most precious, the one that lingers deepest within me is of a morning by the sea. In that fragment, I see myself sitting in a small coracle, watching an old starfish struggling in its quiet encounter with death. Its five arms fluttered faintly on the water’s surface, each tremor sending ripples through its frail body. The weight of its form pressed against the wet sand beneath, birthing tiny bubbles that swelled, shimmered, and burst one after another. Darkness seemed to pulse  — swelling and sinking — at the place where the […]

Perhaps it was a kind of revelation when I realized what I longed for was a lake. A still lake, shrouded in mist — peaceful, yet faintly uncanny. And Morcote, by Lake Lugano, appeared as the answer, after just a few seconds of searching on my computer. Since then, Morcote has become synonymous with Stillness to me, a word I return to whenever I need calm within my own mind.