Chirped

Some stories never fade.

The first time I met Gale Jones, it was in passing while I was a piano student at McGill. We met in line at Schwartz’s, where somehow the subject of Diana Bauman Liu Qiuyue came up. She was my family friend, and from what it sounded like upon our first meeting, an important mentor to him. This made me curious, as the man seemed quite a few years older than her, who was herself almost twenty years my senior. Wanting to dig deeper into a potential story between my Aunt Qiuqiu and this stranger I met by chance, we arranged to meet and discuss everything.

At a café in Old Montreal, the same one that used to be called Génoise et Thé, we sat at the same table by his invitation and he made me a salt and butter coffee. A woman with glasses sat with us, though she spoke little and merely looked on while sipping a masala chai. As we waited for the waiter to bring a fresh cup of black coffee, he vigorously shook a container of cream. “I used to work here,” he said, holding the plastic container close to his ear and listening to the swishing. “Back then, I was only a few years older than you.”

He told me the basics of the story, many of which I retained not except in the recesses of my subconscious. One day it would be obvious that he told me certain things on that day, but which I completely neglected to treat as key details. When the black coffee arrived and my bullet coffee was made, I listened to him describe meeting Dawn, that beautiful stranger he met at the Old Port of Montreal, seven years after dancing with her on a boat. It reminded me of a visual novel I was reading at the time, titled One Thousand Lies. Maybe because of that, when I first went home and took notes on that conversation, the story naturally took the form of the work I was familiar with. In essence, it was the visual novel structured according to the couplets of a poem, The Wind at Dawn, whose title roughly matched the original working title of my concept: The Port at Dawn. (That summer I also translated a visual novel, Your Smile Beyond Twilight, from Chinese to English. Yes, the year 2017 was all about visual novels for me—and for the rest of the world, once Doki Doki Literature Club came out.)