Outside my window is a bamboo grove. I grew up beneath one just like this: it means home to me, where I’d climb the roof, warm asbestos under my feet and bamboo towering over my head, to throw fallen leaves shaped and sharp like knives and watch their arc. Now, in my first-floor apartment—that’s second floor in American—I’m submerged as if the grove were an ocean. The distant sun filters greenly from the surface and the grove creaks and groans against my hull—my first night in this apartment, I couldn’t sleep for the noise. I got used to it. It’s just my turn to be the knife, no, the leaf. At least, I tell myself, I’m thrown now.