I once owned an apartment complex in China.
I was a generous landlord. I never asked for rent. Instead, I asked for stories. That was the only currency I accepted.
Storytelling came easily to my tenants. Some wove vast, glittering worlds, others offered quieter narratives that settled gently and stayed. I spent my afternoons drifting from floor to floor, listening for distant places, for voices that carried me beyond the walls of my room. If stories had weight, I believed they would outweigh gold. They were my most precious possession.
Through them, I learned how to live many lives at once.
On the first floor lived a boy and a monster. The boy’s eyes were bright with trust. The monster had little more than a mouth of sharp teeth and a pair of eyes just as bright, though sharpened by menace. The boy told me he had found the creature after it was exiled to Earth and had cared for it ever since. He said the monster was gentle. I wanted to believe him. Still, I kept my distance.
The second floor belonged to a child my own age. His apartment overflowed with friends who arrived in laughter and left in exhaustion. They were restless, always moving, yet never cruel. After dinner, when their games wore them thin, I would sit nearby and listen as they traded stories of triumph and embarrassment, their small defeats already shaping who they would become.
The third floor was home to philosophers who had lived and died long before my birth. Their ideas mattered less to me than their lives. When they spoke of righteousness, I drifted away. When they confessed love, ambition, jealousy, and failure, I leaned closer, unwilling to miss a syllable.
The fourth floor housed scholars I privately called the encyclopedias. The name felt impersonal, but they accepted it without protest. Their identities were worn openly, their names stamped boldly across their chests, as if knowledge itself demanded visibility.
The fifth and sixth floors belonged to visitors from Japan. Their stories burned with color and motion, filled with demons, honor, and impossible feats of strength. I admired them without reservation. I dreamed of wielding a blade taller than myself, of standing unafraid against darkness.
The seventh floor was reserved for refinement. Tea was poured at precise hours. Laughter was polite and carefully contained. If I arrived improperly dressed, they would smile and whisper. I did not mind. I came for their language, for the elegance of their sentences, and for the strange humor of their tightly buttoned coats and exaggerated trousers.
Those floors carried me through long summers and quiet afternoons. Then, one summer, the building emptied.
My father accepted a job overseas, and I was told we were leaving. I said goodbye to tenants who had filled the entirety of my inner world. The departure was sudden and painful. In the unfamiliar days that followed, when everything around me felt unmoored, I returned to their voices. Their stories became shelter.
Eventually, I rebuilt the apartment inside my bedroom. It stood where the old one had been, similar in shape, altered in spirit.
For the first time, I began to understand what my tenants had been trying to say. The stories still dazzled, but meaning slowly surfaced beneath them. As my English grew steadier, new tenants arrived. The language of the building shifted. Chinese voices faded. English ones multiplied.
In America, the tenants grew more complicated. I met Jane Eyre, Sydney Carton, and Ponyboy. They spoke of dignity, sacrifice, and quiet courage. They did not speak with the simplicity of childhood. They spoke as people wrestling with themselves, and they taught me how to do the same.
Later, I encountered an old name I thought I already knew. Odysseus stepped forward and told his own story. Through him, I entered a world governed by honor, hospitality, and fragile boundaries between civilization and savagery. I was struck by the Greeks’ devotion to their gods and their fear of divine punishment. These were voices from a distant past I had never heard before, voices that widened the walls of my apartment beyond imagination.
If ancient cultures had once been hidden from me, another history unsettled me even more.
Growing up in China, civil rights were not part of my vocabulary. The stories I knew rarely reflected racial difference. Even the European tenants of my seventh floor lived protected lives, preoccupied with romance and war. Invisible Man shattered that illusion. It revealed a world where justice could dissolve entirely, where a man could be rendered unseen by the color of his skin. I struggled to comprehend how such cruelty could belong to the recent past. The story forced me to look at the present with clearer, more unsettled eyes.
One reunion surprised me most of all.
When I returned to One Thousand and One Nights, I remembered the child who once strained to reach the highest shelf, laughing at exaggerated figures and bright illustrations. Reading it again, I found what I had missed. Beneath the humor lay fear, power, survival, and desire. I saw, with sudden clarity, how far I had traveled. The stories had not changed. I had.
The apartment no longer stands. I do not wander its floors as I once did. Yet the tenants remain.
Their voices live on my shelves and in my memory. They carried me across languages, cultures, and continents. They softened my arrival in a new country and quietly recorded my becoming.
One day, I hope to return to the tenants of my childhood and hear their stories again. This time, I will listen not only for wonder, but for the lessons they were whispering to me all along.