Pocket Change Traveller

Between Hong Kong and mainland China is a long highway with a series of stops and checkpoints. The landscape of vine-wrapped bridges and buildings, strangely flat yet verdant with green and white, passes with a strange dreaminess accompanied by the breathy woodwinds of the Jade Empire soundtrack. The landscape of the game and mainland China meld perfectly in my mind. I immerse myself in the sights the same way I once used the game to escape boredom and depression. The bus is noisy, sometimes stinky. The people are, too, crammed together after long flights and no time for showers. The twilit scenery illuminating my skin is even reminiscent of the game as I used to play it: after midnight, only the screen lighting my fangirl obsessed face with the fervent pallor of chronic illness.

When the bus stops I am jerked out of my daydream of long flights in the Dragonfly with my favourite characters; my legs feel like jelly after so long on the rattling contraption - bus or flying machine, I can no longer tell fantasy from reality - and I pour myself down the steps to the strangely heaving pavement. My ankle bones seem to have fused together, but I take a step anyway, unable to resist the glittering Guangzhou Light Market. The crowds jostle me this way and that; I don't even notice that my group has gone an entirely different direction, and none of them, I find out later, noticed I was gone for two whole hours before I found my own way to the hotel.

My limited knowledge of China, gleaned from the warped mythology of a historically inaccurate video game, is soon supplanted by wonderment. I look very much the tourist – eyes wide, neck craned, so eager to see everything that I forget to look where I am going. Between the tiny street vendors, noisy tourists and bright lights the country is populated with romantic adventurers from my own imagination. The fantasy still exists for me, hidden behind every dragon statue, Chrysanthemum Festival, or Forbidden Palace is a rich pantheon of mystery and invention.

I wonder now if what I remember is true to life or merely a series of screen shots viewed through the lens of someone elses narrative. I replay the memory from my last save point - lost girl, crowded city, cast landscape to explore... oh yeah - Game On.