A morning in Pavia

Today I went to Pavia again. To meet a friend I hadn’t seen in two years. I took the chance to bring a present from Japan to my Chinese teacher, since I don’t expect to come back here anytime soon in the future. When I was in Tokyo, one day in Akihabara, I was looking for a pen to give to one of my friends there as a birthday gift. I was looking around in a stationary store, when I found a nice object, which instantly reminded me of my teacher. It was a set of chopstick rests in the shape of origami swans. The rests were made of ceramic and painted with different colours. There was one of these rests that caught my attention more than others. It was painted in blue. It reminded me of the origami my teacher gave me at the end of my first Chinese course, I think it was early summer of 2017. It was a swan origami, made with blue paper. Inside, she placed a note. She didn’t give it only to me, each student received a different origami with a different note. I remember that, in the note, my teacher said I reminded her of a 大熊猫 (a panda).

I took the train from Milan’s Central station at half-past eleven. I was busy reviewing my daily dose of Chinese characters, so the trip went fast. Before I realized, I was back in my old university town. Getting off the train and walking outside the station, memories inevitably started to resurface. Here’s the hotel where I spent a night because the next day my exam was early in the morning, and my parents were worried that I wouldn’t have made it from Milan on time. Here’s the giant statue of Minerva at the entrance of the old city center. I remember walking by it and refraining from looking at her eyes. Then, the corner where I used to turn left to enter a small alley and get a shortcut to the Economics department. I find it right away because of the huge elementary and middle school, on the right. Instead of taking the shortest route to my teacher’s office, I decide to follow the same path I used to take when I went to class back then. Eventually, I arrived to my old department. The Economics department used to be a monastery for Benedictine nuns. The church built in the 9th-10th century, which is now a library, is probably the oldest building in which I have ever studied. The empty streets, the silence of my steps on the floor, made of stones collected from the nearby river: who could guess that this was once the political capital of an entire Empire?

I left my gift at the teacher’s office. The secretary at the information desk looked annoyed at first. Who comes looking for a professor in August? ‘We haven’t seen her in a while’, he told me. He was an man in his 50s or 60s, wearing a green polo. And one of those masks from China. I replied that it didn’t matter, that I just had to leave my present in her office, because I was in Pavia only for one day. When he found out I had to leave a present, his mood changed. He almost looked happy, as if the present were for him. After leaving the box with the chopsticks rests on my teacher’s desk, he locked the door and brought me back to the entrance hallway. Right outside her office, we passed by a large room: it must have been a sort of library once. The ceiling, old and wooden, looked like it came straight from the end of the Middle Ages, when the university was founded. I asked him when would classes start again. He said September 27. I remember on my first day of school there, it was September 26. This implies that 5 years have passed since then, with one being leap. When I asked him if classes would be online, he raised his shoulders. ‘We don’t know, it depends on the number of contagions. It will probably be mixed, with live classes being recorded’. The man looked kind. It must be boring to work at the Political Sciences reception desk, at the end of August. His accent revealed his Southern origin. He reminded me of the old colleagues at my dad’s office.

I took a photo of the poster advertising Chinese evening classes. This is where it all started for me. I appreciate the picture they put. Instead of showing the classic Shanghai’s soaring skyline, they decided to show an image of Southern rural life. The poster advertises coursed up to level A2, which means they don’t provide intermediate classes anymore. The number of students must have been too low. It saddens me to know that. My wish is for there to be, somewhere around these arcades, another student who finds this language as bewitching as I did.

Walking on the side of the department, I get flashbacks of the first day in which I came here. It must have been the end of August, just like today. I came to take the admission test. I remember that the sky had the same colour as today. It was in the afternoon. I arrived to Pavia with the car. My parents were on holiday, but I stayed home to attend the test. There, in the alley next to the red bricks building, that’s where I was standing, waiting to get inside. Surrounded by strangers, full of uncertainties. Coming from a summer in which I had lost myself. I dropped out of engineering school and gave up going to Bocconi for bachelor degree. Then, I had spent the summer doing nothing. Until figuring out that I would have gone to Pavia. It feels strange thinking about it now. Thinking that this corner was the beginning of everything. If I didn’t choose to drop out of engineering school, I wouldn’t have gone to a summer school in the Netherlands in 2017. And I wouldn’t have known that there was a similar summer school in Seoul in 2018. I wouldn’t have known Korea and I probably wouldn’t have chosen to spend an entire semester there. I wonder how my life would be different from now if I chose to become a physical engineer. How different would I be?

I had lunch at a tavern called ‘old Pavia’, sitting at a table in the alleys of the forgotten center of town. I almost felt like a tourist. There is something that I missed about the simplicity of this food. Since I came back from Japan, I am obsessed with two things: alcohol and fish. I was glad to know the restaurant served a lunch menu with mostly fish dishes, and white wine.