Back when I was in seventh grade, I had a best friend named Angela. She was a year older than me, and we did everything together.

I would go to her house almost every day to read fashion magazines, talk about cloth and boys, and lip sync to Christina Aguilera. Summers, we went swimming together, biking out in the park to have occasional picnics, and jogging at night. We put ourselves on a diets to see who can under-weigh who. We gave each other makeovers, splurging on dollar lip-glosses at the drugstore. We had constant clothes swaps and even pretended to do fashion shoots in front of the big mirror in her mother’s bedroom.

Angela stayed in the US for two years and went back to China. That last day, we spent together walking around the neighborhood. It was sunny, and we stopped by a lake to contemplate our future. Would she ever be back? Would we keep in touch? We stared out at our reflections.

The next morning, she left. I opened my door and found her boom box at my steps. She couldn’t carry it back to China, so she gave it to me.

We kept in touch via email for about a year, but as our lives separated like the two countries we lived in, the emails faded and gradually stopped. For four years I went through high school with new friends and new hopes. Angela became a vestige of the past, a childhood, sunshine, bike-riding friend who resided only in nostalgia lane.

Then, a few weeks ago, I suddenly got an email from her. She started it off with “Remember me? It’s Angela!” and my heart skipped a beat. There was her unmistakably vivacious personality in those exclamation marks and her offbeat Chinglish (Chinese mixed with English) between the lines. She told me about her life so far and wanted to keep in touch. And most importantly, she’s coming back to America for college!

We have an email chain going now, filling each other in on what we’ve missed in the past four years. And funny thing is, it’s still so easy to talk to her, like we’ve never skipped a beat in the friendship. We vowed to hang out during my trip back to China this summer, and she wants to take me shopping, clubbing, and show me the real Beijing behind all the surface glittery tourism I usually see.