We’ve lived on the seventh floor for eleven years. We didn’t always live on the seventh floor. We were moving a lot, each time to a higher storey, each time with more books—basketfuls of books and old, cracky furniture. The neighbours would wave goodbye to us and exclaim: “Wow, how imposing!” They meant the books, of course.

Our first house was a dark small wooden one in a crowded yard. It was my cradle, or rather, Grandma’s bosom was my cradle. She would hug me as doing her needlework at the doorway, and she would carry me to visit around the neighbourhood. Every wintertime Grandma would cough, as if to cough her heart out. One winter she no longer coughed and I didn’t see her any more. She died.

Then my parents and I took farewell of the wooden house and came into a brick house in the deep of an alley, at the top of a high green-stone stairway, with only one neighbour. Our single room was the living room, bedroom and Dad’s drawing room. Mom said: “You can’t go out to play with other kids.” So I’d sit on the threshold, holding an umbrella if it rained and the roof leaked, to watch Mom busy with cooking or washing in the corridor which was also our kitchen. Occasionally the next-door boy and I would run up and down the corridor, sowing strange seeds in the empty flower-pots, imagining if they could grow as big as the tree in front of the house.

At age 7, I moved into a downtown flat on the third floor. A window hidden in the jungle of steels and concrete. An island floating on the dizzying river of car tail lights. I started reading books, dog-eared books, books with missing pages, books my cousins had used. Mom rebound them neatly for me. That’s how I began my education. With books I built up a spacious castle beyond the lonely island on the car-light river.

“We have to move. The environment is terrible,” my parents said. Three years later we sold the flat and moved to the quiet riverfront. A 20-year-old apartment on the fifth floor, wall bricks crumbling in places, and we had to pay rent monthly. Yet I immediately fell in love with the house, esp. the open balcony, which was like a bird perched above my childhood street, overlooking the Yangtze River，mountains along the banks, and passing ships on the smooth water. Around us were lots and lots of trees, an ocean of trees, an ocean of green. In spring nights I could hear the raindrops whispering to the leaves.

I don’t know if I love the house because Dad always reminded that it didn’t belong to us and we couldn’t stay long. But I think everyone keeps in heart a special place somewhere; only on returning it can you feel at home. We stayed on the fifth floor another three years; I take it as my forever home. In the balcony I slept under the summer starry sky and basked in the winter sunshine. In the balcony my best friend and I watched a red moon rise out of the opposite mountain-top together. In the balcony I daydreamed my own house in future: a wooden hut in meadowland, on the opposite sandy bank, with crabs and insects as companions, listening to the water roaring and ship whining day and night.

We’ve dwelt for eleven years on the seventh floor in the new district which I used to watch from the former balcony. It belongs to us and has three big rooms. “We have to move out! ” I complained to Dad. It’s too high from the earth and too faraway from any friend. Year after year I lean out the window and look over the post-office across the busy road, awaiting an English book or a friend letter to arrive. The white walls turn yellow and smell soft; those blank rooms are fulfilled by our hands. Still, I can’t accept it as my home. Once we visited the roof garden. For the first time I found my parents’ figures so small against so vast a blue sky. Since then I no longer said we move out. I just returned to the dim room and studied hard.

One day I wish to get free from the cage on the seventh floor in my way. I’ll pack all books and paper and tiny joys and huge shadows and move out. One day I want a house of my own, located among a meadow on my young dreaming bank, where I can tell stories in the twilight about who's me, and a bout those people who’re behind me.