相家的時候就聽小時候喜歡聽的歌。

If you’re ever missing home, just listen to the songs of your childhood. 

1. 知足 Satisfaction

怎麼去擁有 一道彩虹

How does one own a rainbow?

怎麼去擁抱 一夏天的風

How do you embrace the summer’s wind?

天上的星星 笑地上的人

The stars above laugh at the people below

總是不能懂 不能覺得足夠

They’ll never understand what enough is

如果我愛上 你的笑容

If I fall in love with your smile,

要怎麼收藏 要怎麼擁有

How do I keep it? How do I cherish it?

如果你快樂 不是為我

What if your happiness comes not from me?

會不會放手 其實才是擁有

Would I be able to let you go? Is that really what enough is?

五月天

Mayday

Humans can never have what they want. Regardless of our deepest desires, we are always seeking something–whatever it is, just as long as it’s more than what we already have. 

What does satisfaction mean? Is it possible to measure content? Because I never felt like I had enough of it. Because the moment someone admits that they have enough, then wouldn’t their life become stagnant? Wouldn’t life actually be meaningless then? When we are willing to admit that we have enough?

So even though I’ve broken through this month and started to figure out where to look for happiness, I don’t know if I’ve actually found it. Because wouldn’t being happy mean satisfaction? Wouldn’t it mean that I am fulfilled? Wouldn’t I be standing farther away from the edge–because I’m happy?

I’ve always known that happiness is fragmented into many pieces. It’s one thing to feel happy and it’s another to actually be happy. One is fleeting and the other one lasts. Which one was mine?

I can fill up every minute of my day with plan after plan to fill up the pool of sadness inside me. I can let my mind wander away from the crippling ache gnawing against my bones. But nothing takes away from the fact that I still wake up some mornings with tears in my eyes. 

Because I don’t get it. I’m so confused. I’m doing everything I can. I wake up early in the morning to exercise, and after I shower, I feel energized to start my day. I’m doing things I like, and I’m trying to…relax. Am I though? My bones and muscles are telling me otherwise. Every fiber in my body is tense, and I can hear the bones cracking, shifting inside me, begging me to listen. It still feels like I’m going through the motions. I still feel like a silhouette of myself. 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m much better, and I feel a lot more comfortable in my own skeleton. I can last longer than six hours a day and I don’t spiral the instant a roadblock falls in my path. But the truth is, every time I feel myself slip, I’m staring death in the face again. I’m still crashing through my emotions, and I have to resist every urge to give into the chiling comfort of rock bottom. After all, rock bottom doesn’t take anything; it just sucks the very life out of you. 

I’m still missing something. Some obscure part of me is still hurting, and I just have to figure out where. I know that I can’t tear into my own skin anymore. So where is this sadness still coming from? Why does it take every ounce of my concentration to not focus on the melancholy? I’m tired of telling people that I’m starting to figure it out, only to fall back to square one when they’re not looking. Why can’t this nagging feeling just fucking go away?

In my journey to reclaim my skin, I forgot a vital component. I never reconciled my identity with my body and mind. The way I think of myself is very different from how I see myself. The picture I paint of myself in my head belies the reflection I see looking back at me. In my head, I am proud. I am a woman of color, a first-generation immigrant. In my eyes, I’ve lost touch with my culture. My Mandarin has an accent now. I can barely piece together a sentence in Taiwanese. My calligraphy hand is shaky. I can hardly have an entire conversation with my family. 

My culture sets the foundation on which my narrative lies. I’ve been angry for a long time. It’s hard to admit that I can feel anger, especially when anger is the very emotion I’ve spent my life hiding from. But with time, my anger fizzled into resignation and I suppressed my roots on my journey of self-discovery. 

Little did I know, my greatest weakness was my inability to ask for help. I’d been taught that finding a shoulder to lean on was vulnerability, a character flaw that would ultimately come back to get me. But without outside help, it is difficult to evaluate our lives from another outlook. So we lose focus, and oftentimes, ourselves. 

I gave up the communities along the way that pieced together the puzzle of my identity. In my desperate attempt to move forward, I stagnated because no matter how hard I tried to let go of my past, it wouldn’t let go of me. 

2. Community

Give me some rope

Tie me to dream

Give me the hope to run out of steam

Somebody said it can be here

We could be roped up, tied up, dead in a year

I can’t count the reasons I should stay

One by one they all just fade away

The 88

I have since decided that I no longer write to vent, because it lets anger cycle again and again in an endless, nagging loop. I write instead to heal, to let the extremities of my emotions wash over me, so I can move on and leave them where they belong–well, I don’t really care so long as they aren’t in my future. Letting words air helps me process and think about where they fall in my life. 

I wanted to find the source of my anger, because it was simmering in the pit of my stomach. This anger left an obvious charred trail wherever it burned, and it was starting to scorch the relationships in my present. So I followed the dry, blackened pathway to the blackhole inside me, not knowing that I was actually following the sprawling fingers to my roots. 

While the western hemisphere spent a large part of its history expanding outward to conquer the world, the Chinese stayed within its own lands for the most part. We believe in building community, one generation after another, tied to the roots that we grow from.  It’s hard to ever rid yourself of that community, especially when it’s constantly nagging at you in the back of your mind. My problem was that I never knew where I fell in this community. I’d spent so long trying to belong, to be the puzzle piece that fit…but when you’re a part of many overlapping communities, you’re bound to feel out of place. 

I’ve written extensively about myself, but I haven’t really credited the communities and the people that have made my story possible. But that’s because I’ve spent a lot of time jumping from one community to the next when I moved from place to place. The thing is, the more I sought “belonging,” the less I felt like I fit in. Because aren’t communities supposed to be tolerant and welcoming? How come all the halves that sewed me together never got along?

So what’s better? America? Taiwan? Tell, which do you like more? Which one are you? Choose carefully. Think about who’s treated you better, given you better things, better opportunities. Who opened more doors for you? Where does your loyalty lie? Who gave you more? Who built you the life that you have now? Who do you belong to?

So I learned that communities could be exclusive, that belonging to one meant cutting off the other. I learned that my roots needed to be purebred, or they were filthy, half-blooded and unwanted. 

They wanted me to be so many things, even before I was born. A boy, if a child must be had at all. If she is to be a girl, then dress her like a boy. Erase her individuality and make her question every single decision she makes. Or don’t let her make any decisions at all. Own her. Force her to be the thread that holds the fragments of her communities together. 

I’ve always wanted to be that missing puzzle piece for so long. But every time I molded myself into the right shape, the winds changed direction and I had to round out the corners of my independence so I didn’t get blown away. 

I can’t heal if I don’t have closure with my anger, my culture, my family. As hard as I’ve tried to forget them, to let them go, they haunt everything I do, everywhere I go. But I don’t think I can do it alone anymore, so here I lay out the pieces of my history. I’m ready to puzzle the narrative of my childhood and the communities that have shaped me, and I want you to weather this path alongside me. 

3. 譚苡然 Name

If you can directly translate sound into letters, then my Chinese name reads Tam Yi Ran. My passport spells out Yi Jan Chen. My friends call me Ella. My AP Chinese school teacher called me Chen Yi Ran. So which of these names is actually mine?

I wouldn’t really say that my identity is built on lies. I’d say it’s built out of convenience. It’s so much easier to find a blanket identity that doesn’t require me to bare every part of my lineage. But without baring my lineage, no one outside of my communities would understand the bloodlines that run through the veins of my family tree. 

I am fiercely proud of my heritage. To you, I might look like any ordinary Chinese girl. I have black hair, dark eyes, a tan complexion. But that phrase, Chinese, that option over which my mouse hovers when I’m filling out applications, the blanket term I choose to cover the branches of my heritage. I’m not saying I’m not Chinese. I’m just saying that I’m more than just Chinese. 

My mother’s bloodline runs along the ceramic cobblestones that dot the downtown streets of my village. Downtown if you call a single narrow walkway dividing the storefronts that crowd together in the cramped town center. My maternal grandparents and great-grandparents hail from the countryside, slurring our Mandarin with local slang. To people not from these communities, our Chinese is considered dirty, not proper, lowly. 

Oh you must be Taiwanese. I can tell from the way you speak. It’s so cute! Almost like a child that doesn’t know how to pronounce words properly. 

But the family that came before me, they’d still prefer to speak to you in Taiwanese. It’s just hard to find someone outside of the island that’s fluent in the dialect these days. I forgot most of mine when I moved here. My first language, buried in the pits of my mind. My grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, my great-aunts and uncles travelled to the city like everyone else in the farms around them, looking for work and enough money to support their future families that would continue their bloodline. Anything to continue the name, the word that bound our generations together. 

I was born in Taoyuan, the closest city to my village, where the hospital was. My mother’s family is from an island that the rest of the world doesn’t seat at their round table. 

My father…he’s not from Taiwan; my father is from the Mainland. Not Beijing “Mainland,” mind you, which is a vibrant community of its own. He was born in Hong Kong, because his parents, like my mother’s, sought the promise of big-city living. But unlike my mother’s parents, who ended up on the outskirts of a small city, my father’s ventured into colonial Hong Kong. They lived in the slums of the city, occasionally venturing out to Kowloon or Macau to admire the bright lights and smell the stink of cash in the sewers. But that’s no difference to most people because when my father’s family opens their mouths, they speak Cantonese, the dialect of choosing in Hong Kong. Only my great-grandmother spoke colloquially in their mother tongue. My father is not Cantonese. I just tell people I’m half-Cantonese because it’s easier. No, my father is from 台山, Taishan, located in the south of Guangdong province. Still part of the “Mainland,” but distinct in its own way. 

Does that mean you HATE China then? What the hell are you then? If you’re not just Chinese? Who are you?

The difference between ethnic minorities lies in the subtleties with which they build their communities. There is a difference in dialect, in customs, in traditions, in the gestures we use. So it’s hard for me to swallow my pride and click the button that defines me as “Chinese.” My halves outline nuances in my heritage that belie this blanket identity. 

In Taiwan, your name is tied to your land. For women, we are tied to the land of our fathers. When we are born, we take our father’s last names, and when we marry, we take our husbands’. So when we register for citizenship, when we receive our identification cards, we are filed under the names of the men in our lives.

Because I was born in Taiwan, my birth last name was Chen, the same as my maternal grandfather. My name was tied to the land in Yingge County that he owned, and no matter where I went, that location and name would follow me. When I moved to America, my identity changed from a Taiwanese infant to a first-generation Chinese immigrant, and so my father’s family expected my name to change with my identity. No matter how we tried in my documentation papers, we couldn’t change my legal last name to Tam, the last name of my father’s lineage. The word that would carry down my Taishanese and Cantonese bloodline ended the moment I stepped foot into the country of white picket fences and the American dream. Forever on paper my last name would be Chen, the word that tied me to my homeland, the land of my birth. And that was the first time that I learned that personal identity was not malleable but rather a fabric that grows with our skin. 

My father’s family does not mention my last name to this day. They call me by my birth nickname instead, 然然, the name that everyone has chosen to call me to shorten the three words that carve the facets of my character. The day before I started preschool in Los Angeles, my father brought home a name dictionary and he threw the book on the counter, letting it fall open before us. The dictionary thudded, gaping the letter E before me, and my father told me that if I wanted to fit in at this new school, I’d need a name that the other kids could pronounce. 

He told me to choose between Ellie or Ella, and I chose the latter. Only years later did I realize that he had meant Elle or Ella, but his thick Chinese accent prevented him from pronouncing the first choice the right way. I breathed a sigh of relief the first time I found out, glad that I had dodged a bullet. But now I wonder why I had to change my birth name to fit the clicks and clacks of someone else’s language. 

For the longest time, I was ashamed of my name. It didn’t roll off the tongue like everyone else’s and I didn’t want to carry the weight of its meaning. Plus, it didn’t seem too cool with my friends at school either. 

Yi Jan…Yi Jan…hey Yi Jan. What does that even mean? Yeeeee jaaaaan…it’s not like anyone can actually say it right, anyway. So why do you care if we play with it a little?

So I thought it was my fault that no one could accept my name for what it was, and I only ever used it when signing official, legal documents. Because to me, this name only defined me on these physical papers, and to me, it was just a name. Over time, it was gone with Yi Jan. Just Ella, please. I chose this name myself, when I was five, when I didn’t know better and only picked a word that sounded pretty to my young ears. 

Having inhabited leadership positions over the years, I have had the opportunity to work with people from all backgrounds, all cultures. I learned that the best way to gain the respect of a fellow coworker was to be respectful to their identity first. But one day, one of my friends pulled me aside and asked me to revise the way I pronounced her name. She told me that her name was special to her, and she didn’t want to have to compromise that for anyone else. That means everything about it, everything down to its pronounciation was important. I wondered to myself if I had the same respect for my own name as I had for hers. For years and years, my name was just words on a paper, but never were they the words that my parents chose to characterize my identity. 

My name is 譚苡然. 譚 meaning “to speak” and “to communicate. 苡 is a scholarly word, an ancient word like the word “behoove”… out of touch, outdated, but the indication of an academic. 然 means “nature” which I think is pretty self-explanatory. I can relate to all of these words. They don’t define every aspect of my life, but they settle in their own corners, highlighting the shades of who I am. 

Our birth names don’t have to determine the future of our lives, but they set the structure of our characters, and we choose how we want to fit into those molds. I’m growing weary of outrunning my roots. 

My culture and my identity are so much more than just the names you choose to call the lands I am from. 

4. 鶯歌 Village

我的小時候　

When I was young,

吵鬧任性的時侯

When I was rowdy and willful,

我的外婆總會唱歌哄我

My grandmother would sing to amuse me.

夏天的午後　

Afternoons in the summer,

老老的歌安慰我　

Her songs would soothe me,

那首歌好像這樣唱的

This is how the song goes:

天黑黑　欲落雨　

“The sky is dark, it’s going to rain.”

天黑黑　黑黑

“The sky is dark, dark and black.”

離開小時候

Leaving my childhood,

有了自己的生活

I built a life I called my own.　

新鮮的歌　新鮮的念頭

With new songs and new ideas,

任性和衝動　無法控制的時候　

I was no longer willful nor rowdy,

我忘記　還有這樣的歌

I forgot how there was still that song:

天黑黑　欲落雨　

“The sky is dark, it wants to rain”

天黑黑　黑黑

“The sky is dark, dark and black.”

孫燕姿

Stefanie Sun

Does a village raise a child? I’ll tell you about mine so you can decide for yourself. 

When I was applying to college, I wasn’t just applying for myself. I was applying as the first person in both of my immediate families with the chance to attend a university for four years in America. My father, who is the most educated man in either of my families, transferred to UCLA from Pasadena City College, and he got his Master’s degree by taking night classes every week for four years. But as the sole child bearing both of these bloodlines, I was shipped to America at four years old with my mother to pursue the dream no one in my family had. The dream of a traditional American education, because a village was no place for a child. Especially not for a child with ambitious parents, young parents fiercely clawing for independence of their own. 

So when I applied, my life hinged on being accepted to an affordable school with a name prestigious enough to bring back home. I am an only child, so we only had one chance. One chance, one shot at securing a stable foundation for our family name in this country. I was reminded of my family every time I made a decision. Because if family gave you everything, then family must be more important than anything else. 

It wasn’t like I wasn’t going to get into college. My parents made sure of it. We moved enough times, took out enough loans, somehow managed to afford a small house in the heart of Silicon Valley after the stock market crashed. And they didn’t let me forget it either; all of these sacrifices were for me, for the good of our family. 

But could I get into a good enough college? Enough to repay them for every sacrifice they made? Enough to make up for the debt drowning both sides of my family? They did everything they could to make it happen, to get me somewhere good enough. So when I didn’t, they just stopped talking about it. But they didn’t stop praying every week at the temple or asking where everyone else I knew was going. And that’s how I learned to deal with disappointment and anger. I stop talking about it, because if I do, maybe it didn’t happen at all. 

I’d rather forget the whole college application process altogether, but I know there’s a wellspring of anxiety there I need to explore. I can feel my blood pressure rising as I remember him breathing down my neck, eyeing every word I was typing. Hawk-eyed, slicing through my words, my stories, my narrative. Picking and choosing what parts of myself I get to share, what parts of me were interesting, what was worth telling and what was best to keep locked away. How do you stop a whirlwind? You don’t. You let it terrorize your wake because it’s supposed to know best what to erase. 

So when they weren’t looking, I wrote my own stories. Hidden in the covers late at night, I typed down my own answers to those questions. I didn’t care if I didn’t get into college, but I couldn’t let them dictate my own story. I didn’t have enough time to write a second copy of every single one of my applications, but I sure tried. I’d rather have a cohesive draft of one application that perfectly encapsulates my being than several disjointed patches kept apart. 

This is my fourth and final draft of my Common Application essay: 

In the Taiwan I know, every mountain tells a story. Mine weaves together the tale of a girl and her journey to rediscovery. I chase down the memory, elusive as a daydream.

In my mind’s eye, I gaze upward in awe, defying gravity and following the fence my grandmother had painstakingly nailed into the sun-baked dirt. I wonder how much longer my tiny legs can last before collapsing, until suddenly, I am standing at the top of the world. The sweet air fills my lungs just as the sun waves a greeting over the conquered earth. Leafy green vegetables sway to the melodies of the wind as tadpoles waltz inside a miniature pond of rainwater. Drinking in the wonders around me, I fall into the rhythm of life pulsing on this small mountainside. As I help my grandmother harvest the ripest fruits, she pauses and folds her frail hand over mine. With a tender smile breaking into her face, she says in Taiwanese, “Your roots will always be here.”

That was many years ago. Time pushed me through the stages of life without settling long enough for me to pause and take in the changes in the seasons. After moving to California, I immersed myself in all things American—the heady bustle of the city, the lyrical quality of English words, and the widespread use of technology. It was easy to forget about the mountain and farm so far away. I focused my energy on what brought me temporary joy to uphold my dignity and make the people around me proud of my accomplishments. So I became a puppet of sorts, allowing others to project their emotions and opinions on me.

As I grew older, I began to wonder why it was difficult for me to keep friends close. I asked myself what made me happy and came up with answers people had given me instead of my own thoughts. So after another school year ended, I vowed the next one would be more memorable. My parents announced that we would be visiting Taiwan for the summer. I longed for the simplicity of my childhood and welcomed the opportunity to slow down and grow reacquainted with myself and the past I had left behind.

The house is just as I had left it ten years ago. In this kitchen, I pestered the womenfolk with questions about what spices went into which dish. In that living room, I read my first picture book, ogling at the bizarre animals around the world. Up on the third-floor balcony, I mapped out the stars in the dreamy night sky. I ask myself where that girl had gone.

My grandmother had stopped asking me to accompany her on her morning hikes to the farm. Nonetheless, I wake up at the crack of dawn one day and join her just as she unlocks the door. She merely offers the faintest of smiles and leads the way. As I marvel at the flowers along the familiar path, I am reminded of the roses in my lawn back in Fremont. I have not watched them bloom in years, and I realize the small blessings I have overlooked in my attempts to please others. Watching my grandmother work, I regret neglecting her phone calls and hearing about her progress on the farm. And I realize, just like the farm’s yearly harvest, self-reflection is a cycle. Understanding myself begins first by listening to others. From there, it is my responsibility to remember those lessons and make my own decisions. As I learn and grow, my ideas will blossom until eventually, I can reap the fruits of my own labor.

My journey had started at the mountain and come full circle. As my grandmother and I sit, watching the sunrise together, I intertwine her wrinkled fingers with mine. Teary-eyed and in my broken Taiwanese, I say, “My roots still grow here.”

I was already losing touch back then. I wrote these words when I was 17, but I never quite deciphered what I was trying to remind myself. I know my village just as well as any place I’ve lived in. There is a scary man with a half-burned face halfway down the street, and I’d hide behind the light pole every time he was near. It wasn’t just the kids and aunties in every house that knew my name, but every single uncle and cousin and grandmother and grandfather, too. Gossip spreads like wildfire from cramped house to the next, but I guess that’s what you get when you practically share walls and balconies with your neighbors. The house in the kitty corner is the mahjong house, smelling of stale cigarettes and betel nut juice. It used to be mine when I was tiny, but that was before my Ah Gong would come home drunk every night. 

I was so scared every time I heard him pound up the stairs, curling up against my Ah Ma before bolting upstairs when his gravelly roar would bellow through the bedroom door. People say that Chinese sounds rowdy and ugly, but the dirtiest words exist in countryside Taiwanese, flung at you like cannons in the dark. But I couldn’t hate him, not like my Ah Ma does, because he loved me, he really did. When he wasn’t drinking, he would do anything to make me happy, but I didn’t know how to fix the ache that was tearing him apart. No one did, and I don’t know if anyone tried. 

My Ah Gong stopped drinking and smoking on his own, after he had driven away everyone in the house. But I loved him, I really did. We all did, but we had our own devils to face, our own problems to worry about. I wanted to know why my Mama never talked to me, and why she was always annoyed or angry when she had to. My uncle, my Ah Gu, I didn’t like being in the same room as him, even though he tried to get me alone. My Ah Ma saw and told me to stay quiet, because no one would believe me if I said anything. She was right. He is the eldest son of the house after all, so it doesn’t matter if all our money funnels down the drain with him. My aunt, my Ah Yi, I am the spitting image of her and my Ah Ma. She smiles the most, and unless you count my parents as a happy ending, she got it the best out of every marriage in our house on DaHu Road. But she had to move out, to the house that her husband’s name is tied to, and it is hard for her to find acceptance there. My cousin is a boy, and so long as he doesn’t roam wild in the streets, it didn’t matter how he turned out. His mother left my Ah Gu, and because it is unseemly for a woman to divorce her husband, we don’t talk about her anymore either. So maybe she actually got it the best out of anyone in that house. 

But it didn’t matter how broken everyone in that house was. We were a family, and we held our heads high every time we walked out of that metal door. And the village didn’t care either. They had their own demons, too, so who were they to judge? I mean, they probably did, because that’s just what Asian people do. But they don’t let it cloud the fact that we were a community. We raised our kids together, generation after generation. The ladies passed groceries and recipes around while the men huddled outside for a smoke break. The children flitted around, feral animals hunting down the next game. We made it work by keeping our doors open to each other. Cultural holidays were a neighborhood affair, the smell of incense thick and acrid as each family prayed for prosperity, joy and longevity. I can’t tell you who we were praying to or why even, but I remember being happy because that’s when everyone in the family came together. That was when my Baba might pay me his bi-yearly visit, and my Mama and Ah Gong might come home early from work. Each house welcomed me with open arms, inviting me to taste their family’s version of the same dish my Ah Ma made. 

I remember every detail about the moment my Mama told me we were moving to America. 

“You mean to visit Baba?” I asked in rapid-fire Taiwanese. 

“No,” she responded, annoyed, “Forever.”

I remember the party my house had that night. We had the entire neighborhood over, and the TV was blaring. I remember sitting on the couch with the cluster of my closest friends. I remember telling them that I was leaving in a few days. 

“You’re just lying to us,” my best friend, Kai Kai, sputtered. 

“Yeah, it’s just a joke,” Jian Qian and Mei Ge, my neighbors, agreed in unison. 

“I’m not,” I remember the tears pricking in the corners of my eyes. “This is the last time we’ll ever be like this again.”

I was four years old, but I still remember. How could I not, when I felt the pieces of my tiny child heart break for the first time?

5. 洛杉磯 City of Angels

All my life I was never there

Just a ghost running scared

Here our dreams aren’t made–

They’re won.

Lost in the city of angels

Down in the comfort of strangers

I found myself in the fire burned hills

In the land of a billion lights.

30 Seconds to Mars

When I lived in Los Angeles, my paternal grandfather hadn’t gone bankrupt yet, so my grandmother had a lot to hold over our heads. It was chilly the night I arrived, and my mother had soothed me on the plane, promising me that we’d go to a toy store if I behaved. 

“Behave and be quiet. Speak when you’re spoken to. If you’re good, they will give us money and we will be happier,” my mother warned in the narrow airplane seat beside me. 

I didn’t speak a lick of Cantonese and I could only nod as I met these strangers for the first time. I recognized my Baba when he picked us up from the airport, and I was so tired and sad I wanted to bawl. But my mother’s warning hung above my head, so I stayed silent.

I couldn’t sleep that first night, or for the next month after that. The first morning, I had fallen asleep at the crack of dawn, so it was afternoon by the time I stepped out of the bedroom with my bedraggled mother. 

A steaming bowl of ramen noodles awaited me on the table, complete with an egg and vegetables. My eyes gaped. 

“公仔麵,” my grandmother pointed and beamed. In Taiwan, we called it 泡麵, and that’s when I learned that different sounds could mean the same thing to different people. 

“公仔麵,” I repeated slowly, rolling the strange sounds on my tongue. Everyone smiled, amused. I was reassured that I was doing the right thing, and that made me feel good. So in my four-year-old head, I correlated their approval with my own happiness. I’ve sought out that moment every moment after in my life, but never have I felt that same fleeting satisfaction so strongly again. 

I didn’t realize this until now, but I slowly stopped speaking Taiwanese. My Mama only used it in our room, when she was on the phone with my family in Taiwan. With time, the calls became less and less frequent, and she stopped telling me to come to the phone every time they came. I was silent unless I was trying to say something in Cantonese. My Mama was learning too, and she spoke Mandarin with my Baba. So I picked up both side by side and unwittingly let go of my Taiwanese. 

My Mama never seemed happy in that house in the city of angels. At least not when my grandmother was around. My grandmother who doted on us. My grandmother who was home all day and never failed to remind us who had been kind enough to let us stay in that house. For family only, she said incessantly, We only do this for family. There is no debt between family. 

That never changed the fact that the house was still hers, not my Mama’s. My grandmother didn’t like the way my Mama did laundry. The Taiwanese, she laughed, your customs are just not like ours. 

After a year, I learned more about my identity. I started preschool, and I picked up English by listening in on other kids’ conversations. I met my great-grandmother and the rest of my paternal family, who had fled the Mainland to the city of angels. They are proud Taishanese folk, or Hoishan as they pronounce it. But they didn’t tell anyone that right away. 

“We are from Hong Kong,” they always said first. Taishan is a village city that only people in the region have heard of. There are about half a million Taishanese-Americans scattered across the fifty states. It is known as the Home of the Overseas Chinese, because no one wants to stay in Taishan. Everyone wants to leave so they can bring money back home. That’s why most North American Chinatowns spoke Taishanese before the 80s, before everyone else wanted to leave, too. 

They’re not wrong either. Most of them had moved to Hong Kong after communist rule tightened. My grandmother was the first of her five siblings to leave, the oldest sister and the daughter of her father’s second wife. My Baba told me that my grandmother had two mothers, and I didn’t know what that meant. But back then, they could do that, so my great-grandmother shared her husband with another woman, one who was unable to have children. 

My father grew up in the slums. He told me that he used to watch squatters poke heroin needles into themselves just across the hall. He was ten when someone tried to rob him and my grandmother at gunpoint in the elevator. My grandfather, like my Ah Gong in Taiwan, was always working. He also smoked cigarettes. He started waiting tables when he was just a kid, and had he kept serving the restaurant industry, he probably could have managed a large tea parlor. He used to sleep in the trunks of taxis when the drivers would go inside the restaurant for a morning meal. 

While my grandparents worked, my grandmother sent money back to Taishan. When her third sister had her second baby, they sent him to the countryside because back then, it was one mother, one child. Every one of my great-aunts moved to the city when they were old enough to pay for each other’s passage to America. 

And so they came and settled into the Chinatowns of Los Angeles. With time, each sister either stayed in the same dingy apartment or moved to the suburbs, away from the filthy, urban sprawl. My grandmother was the only one to move to the suburbs. My great-grandmother, until her death, didn’t live with any of the sisters. Not even when my grandmother pleaded. No, she chose to stay with her only son, the youngest, over 20 years younger than my grandmother. 

I lived in LA for two years, and I was sick for much of it. I came down with fever after fever, and I slipped in and out of the herbal doctor’s office in Chinatown. I watched the pharmacist measure out foul-smelling herbs that my grandmother brewed into disgusting, dark teas that she forced down my throat. I only looked forward to one thing every year, the family reunions we would hold during either of my grandparents’ or my great-grandmother’s birthday. But the budget dwindled over the years and family secrets unraveled the sisters and their lone brother. I stopped seeing my cousins and great-aunts and uncle. My parents stopped talking about them, too. I missed my great-grandmother’s 90th birthday and to this day, that memory haunts me. They wouldn’t let me go. 

“You have school,” they said. “School is more important.”

I didn’t see her, or any of my family, again until the funeral. And no one bothered to tell me about it until two weeks after my great-grandmother died. I let my tears drip as I looked at her serenity in the casket. She lay peacefully, her back finally straight after having hunched over from years of tending the fields, and I let myself remember. I remember my Baba called that night at the reunion, and I was standing with my Mama in the middle of an Urban Outfitters. I had wanted to buy a new white sweater and I nudged it toward my Mama until she told me to go try it on. My Baba handed over the phone and I wished my great-grandmother a happy birthday. Her voice laughed in fireworks in response to mine. The sweater hung on the rack, forgotten. 

I remember how her face lit up when she met me for the first time, her first great-grandchild. I’ll never forget how clumsy my Cantonese sounded against her agile Taishanese. We were probably comparing apples to oranges when we talked, but she gripped my child hands in her calloused ones and told me, “I hope that there is never a day your hands are as rough as mine.”

My great-grandparents on both sides were field workers. Except in Taiwan, over time, they owned the lands they tended and turned agriculture into a family business. I missed Taiwan dearly when I was in LA, but my Mama hushed me any time I spoke about it. 

“You’re here now,” she hissed, “Appreciate it. You’re lucky to be here. You’re lucky they’re letting us stay.”

We visited Taiwan once or twice when I was in LA. I try not to remember because every time I came back, I cried myself to sleep night after night for months and months. Ever since I was old enough to pray, my naivete prayed to be sent back to Taiwan, to live out the happiness I so desperately clung onto, despite the broken house we left there. 

My Mama was the only memory I had of Taiwan, and she never acted like she wanted me. Sometimes, I wondered if she even wanted our family. When I was 17, I found out that my parents got married years after I was born. The date on their marriage certificate looked familiar. I remember that date. They had picked me up in the preschool parking lot with a new used car. It was the first time they had ever picked me up together. It was the first and only time I had seen bands on their fingers. It was also the first time I remember seeing Mama smile. 

She left a year after we moved to LA, to somewhere up North. She didn’t tell me she was leaving, my Baba did. 

“We’ll go find her when she’s ready. She’s doing some searching right now,” he told me. 

I didn’t know what that meant, but my grandmother, like my Ah Ma in Taiwan, raised me then. While my Baba and grandfather worked, she held down the fort at home, nagging in my ear about how much better it was here than in Taiwan. That I had to be a good girl, to show that I was grateful. My Baba and even Mama too were doing everything to make sure that I had a comfortable life here. 

“So go fix that smile in the mirror,” she encouraged me, “It’ll make people want to look at you more.”

When I was applying to college, my grandmother told me that she had been saving money over the years for me to go to school. I thought with my high school savings and that money, I could surely go anywhere I wanted. Rumbles had already begun my junior year of high school, but it was senior year when my grandfather fell from his self-built heaven. He lost the small wealth he had been sitting on, pulling my grandmother’s comfort from right under her. They almost lost that house in the city of angels, and they were nose-deep in debt. My grandfather had been hiding the bank notices every time we came to visit. My Mama found out on accident through her usual snooping. 

By the time my Baba had found out, it was almost too late, but we did it slowly. Baba had been going through a string of tough job situations lately, and only much later did I learn that he was barely making enough to scrape by the welfare line. My Mama, strong in her engineer job after decades of midnights arguing with men above her pay grade, stepped in. We withdrew my college savings account, the one my grandmother had put together for me, the money I had saved in high school, we took out loans, and we refinanced our house. My mama told me she would disown me if I left the state, that it’d be shameful to abandon the family in such a state. She managed the checks in our household, paying the bills and still sending money back to LA and Taiwan. 

I tucked my tail between my legs and declined all my acceptances except the farthest in-state public school from home. My grandparents visit us in the Bay just as often as my parents go down to LA now. Before this all happened, my grandmother couldn’t hide her disdain at our tiny house, bereft of family and close friends. She bemoans her fate often, but she doesn’t direct it at my Mama anymore. 

I noticed that my grandmother was nicer to my Mama and I brought it up to her one day. 

“For family only,” she finally said, “We only do this for family. There is never debt between family. That is the price we pay.”

So tell me, where do angels really come from?

6. 長頸鹿 Giraffe

每一次 都在 徘徊孤單中堅強

Everytime I wander in loneliness, I persevere 

每一次 就算很受傷也不閃淚光

Everytime, even when I’m deeply hurt, I hold back my tears

我知道 我一直有雙隱形的翅膀

I know I will always have a pair of invisible wings

帶我飛 飛過絕望

That let me fly, fly over despair

不去想 他們 擁有美麗的太陽

I won’t think about the beautiful sun in others’ lives

我看見 每天的夕陽也會有變化

I see that even the sunset changes everyday

我知道 我一直有雙隱形的翅膀

I know I will always have a pair of invisible wings

帶我飛 給我希望

Letting me fly, giving me hope

張韶涵

Angela Chang

Silent was the daughter placed before you,

Bowl cut, gaudy hair clips, unsure of herself,

You took her in regardless, embraced her

Believed in her, nurtured her when no one could.

Silent was the child you picked up everyday,

Waiting for you quietly in the yard of an empty school,

Trying her best to blend in with the wallpaper,

To disappear behind the bookshelves and hide.

Silent was the girl you introduced to the class

Eyes looking down, voiceless unless being addressed

Obedient and meek, round cheeked and shy

Not knowing how long she had to stay before being uprooted.

Small, quizzical eyes staring back at me,

“Hi, you can call me Ella, it’s nice to meet you”

I started with that sentence and built from there

Piecing together words that the other kids could get. 

You started out as just the place I went after school

But over time you became home before I went home

I knew your carpets better than the back of my hands

I knew the best hiding spots for hide and go seek

Perhaps you don’t remember everything

But every single detail is etched so clearly

I can see it, taste the snacks fresh out of the oven

I had nowhere else to go and so I stayed. 

Year after year I roamed from room to room

Teacher after teacher, class after class

Lesson after lesson, even after the ones at school,

I was still sitting there with worksheets in my hands.

There was comfort in those yellow-green walls

The shelves where we stacked our shoes,

Everything was familiar, even the cramped office

She would call us into every time someone got in trouble.

And even on the days I didn’t think I’d see you,

I did, every time my house was empty, I was there

Blending into the walls again, this time next to

Someone else, a friend maybe, who helped pass the time.

But I always felt the gnawing ache of being stuck

Of being homeless even though I had a bed to sleep in

But homeless in the way you don’t know what to say

When someone asks you where you want to go after a long day.

Winter after winter, summer after summer,

The seasons may change but never where I went

Even after I was too old, I found work and

I wound up back on your carpeted floors.

So the chill faded and the dog days passed,

Just like that I weaved in and out of my childhood

Laying my memories on the foundation this place

Had given me and the dear friends I made along the way. 

They were just as much parents

To me as my actual parents were

They fed me, asked how I was, watched me cry,

Reprimanded me, encouraged me, observed me.

“She’ll never be good at finding things,

That daughter of yours,” he told my father.

And embarrassment, shame I felt when I heard those words

Because that was the only window I had to my parents.

I remember late nights, midnights, ticking clock

I sat in the front lobby, waiting, waiting, waiting

Deliberately going to the bathroom so I didn’t have to see

When the last kid had been picked up at 8 o’clock.

I sat in the chair at the end of the long day,

Telling myself elementary school graduation

Wasn’t even graduation so much as it was

Just pushing me into the next chapter of my life.

So I bit back my tears when I didn’t see their faces,

Turning my face the other way as I sat in the car

Pinching my satin red dress between my fingers

Wishing they had seen me instead of those yellow-green walls.

Whatever you needed, I was willing to give,

Because this place has given me so much 

Year after year, rain or shine,

Giraffe Learning Center stood in its faithful corner.

I remember those yellow-green walls spoke to me,

Edging closer to my face before ebbing out of my reach,

Driving me crazy, I’d ask my friends, 

“Hey, do you guys think the walls are farther away than usual?”

They’d laugh and say no I must be going crazy

So I excuse myself to the bathroom, different walls,

Against the black granite, I watched the world spin

As I spiraled for the first time in my life. 

As time passed, the little gym wasn’t so little

The basketball net wasn’t even that high

Every time I passed by it, I realize that it’s not

The place that’s changed, but me, I have. 

Over the months, the walls would start

To suffocate everyone inside them,

So we awaited the coming of summer,

Of summer camp, of water balloons and watermelons.

I go back to Giraffe and summer camp again and again,

Once upon a time a child, a silent, timid girl,

But back time after time, becoming a leader like those before me,

To nurture the next generation of kids like me.

Kids whose parents work more than 9-5 days,

Whose parents have to live paycheck to paycheck,

Making sure that rent is paid and dinner is there,

Kids like me that can’t call their house a home. 

The teachers there, the friends I made, 

Everyone is part of my first American family

The first time I saw communities bridging the gap

Between East and West with grace and acceptance.

The adults still spoke Chinese but the kids spoke English

And the Chinese would be different, dialects thrown around,

From person to person to identify the background

That they brought to enrich the space we were in. 

No, this community was far from perfect,

But I was one of the threads that sewed it together,

And these people knew me, had seen me grow

Even after 15 long years, I can still go back.

How do you ever repay the people that opened their arms

When your own family had no options left?

Do you expand your universe of obligations?

Or do you leave them in the fragments of your memories?

Giraffes are long-necked, graceful, elegant

But I’d hardly describe my time there that way

It was more awkward, growing pains, and longing

Resignation really more than anything else. 

Longing for attention just out of reach,

Always staying out of everyone’s notice

So I wouldn’t give my family any more trouble

Than the trouble they went through to make ends meet.

Most kids breathed a sigh of relief when they went home

But I didn’t always because I never knew

What to expect that night, what mood to anticipate

So I anxiously dreaded hearing my name being called. 

I always saw you as the dumping ground

For unwanted kids whose parents had no time

When really you were nothing more

Than reality wrapped in tiger parent dreams.

Not all have fond memories of this place

Except for those of us that had no choice

But to call this indoor maze nothing short of sanctuary,

When most saw it as a suburban holding cell.

This is the first year there won’t be a summer camp

It’s hard to believe I won’t be going back this year,

But these walls, they are a part of me,

These walls protect me from the darkness in my mind. 

I have learned to find the nooks that my body can fit,

When I’m feeling out of place and broken.

After weathering harsh nights in my house,

These yellow-green walls don’t seem so bad. 

However you choose to see it, just know this,

Giraffe has bridged generations of my Chinese brethren,

From the middle-aged immigrants to toddling American citizens,

I have watched people come and go through the beeping door.

Part of my bloodline runs along the yellow-green walls

Part of my roots still stretch there, trailing under the concrete

And the secluded back classroom, my silence and awakening

Have long since been absorbed into those walls.

I know this building and the people inside out

Exactly the same way they’ve come to know me

And I’d be lying to myself if I told you 

That this place doesn’t hold a special corner in my heart.

Because it does, it always will. 

As do all places we want to forget but can’t,

Because even when everything falls apart,

They stay standing, waiting for us to come home. 

7. 算數 Calculations

Another head hangs lowly

Child is slowly taken

And the violence, caused such silence

Who are we mistaken?

But you see, it’s not me

It’s not my family

In your head, in your head, they are fighting

With their tanks, and their bombs

And their bombs, and their guns

In your head, in your head they are crying

In your head, in your head

Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie

What’s in your head, in your head

Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie, oh

The Cranberries

When I first started smoking, the hardest part was lighting the joint. Especially when there’s a breeze out, it’s hard to get the tip to catch a light. You have to angle the joint a certain way and then you have to tilt your lighter, careful not to get too close to your fingers. The easiest way to light the joint is just to balance it between your lips, to inhale as you click the lighter. I don’t like doing that. The flame burns too close to my face; it almost feels like my nose will catch on fire from the heat. 

As you smoke, you’ll notice that there’s always a bit of ash stuck to the other end. But no matter how hard you shake that piece of ash sometimes, no matter how hard you blow on it, it just won’t dislodge. Even when the wind is shaking around you, this little piece of ash just hangs on tight. Yet if you give it time, it will slowly unlatch itself and fall peacefully away. The ash doesn’t let go until the heat of the flame has passed through it, not until it’s ready. Not until the angry spark searing through the joint has dulled to a more manageable glow. So if even ash doesn’t let go until it’s ready, then why should we?

Math never really made sense to me; I just memorized the relationships between the numbers and letters and tried to piece them together as my assignments got harder and harder. But growing up with an accountant meant analyzing his seasons of work and rest, glancing over his shoulder as he hunched over spreadsheet after spreadsheet, calculating wealth, interest, finances, money money money and numbers numbers numbers. 

“If you calculate things right, you’ll always be able to make a comfortable life for yourself. Dream practically, dream within your own reach, dream so that you can actually touch your own dreams. The most important thing in life is to hold your cards close to your chest and to always anticipate before disaster hits, like that financial disaster that broke this country,” my Baba would remind me night after night. 

“The most practical thing is to plan ahead for your own future. Once we’re gone, this house is probably going to be yours. In fact, you can never really leave here, the most practical thing to do is move back here after you graduate, save money on rent and maybe you can consider a job or better yet, medical school or a big research company. Think of the insurance and stock options. Never invest money in a car. That’s stupid. Be practical and live in the future now. You’ll be thankful later on.”

So I had it mapped out ever since I moved to the Silicon Valley. I planned my future so deliberately that I would never have to move home and live in any of the houses in my past ever again. Because none of the houses or condos or apartments ever felt like home to me. I wanted any option to escape, any way to exit. I’ve been planning my own escape for over a decade, and to this day, I’m still on track. 

I guess it pays to live with an accountant, because even though I’m not good at math, I know how to calculate my own life. Even before I moved to college, I had my graduation plan mapped out, down to the specific courses I had to take every quarter for the three years I planned to dedicate to UCSD. I had learned early on to keep my plans flexible, because you can plan for just about anything, and the universe will still find some way to fuck with you. 

Never have expectations. That way, you can never be disappointed. Always assume the worst case scenario, so you’re prepared for anything. If things don’t go according to plan, that’s okay, we’ll just cut our losses, regroup, and reformulate a new plan. So long as the big picture is in focus, everything will be okay, everything will be just fine. 

I can calculate every second of my day down to the T, down to the exact number of minutes it takes to get me from one place to another. Even when I had been planning all my life to go to medical school and decided last year I didn’t want to, I was able to hammer my plans this way and that to always keep my end goal in sight. To stay out of my past and anything that reminded me of it. 

I knew that the only way to do that was to always rely on myself. Anything I wanted, I figured it out on my own, and just like my parents taught me, I never trusted anyone with anything I couldn’t do myself. 

I watched my Ah Ma and grandmother cooped up at home all day. I watched my Mama silent in her duty to bloodline that’s not even hers. I watched the women in my family, how they ended up, unhappy in marriage. I watched and plotted my future trajectory far from their paths. I watched the men in my family, expected to bring home enough money to support everyone. I watched my father boil in his own shame when he couldn’t. I watched my grandfather wither into a shell when he couldn’t. I watched my Ah Gong self-medicate when he couldn’t. I calculated and calculated, not with spreadsheets, but with blueprints of my future mapped inside my own mind. Not because that’s what everyone in my family hoped for me. To escape. At least that’s what I told myself.

So in my futile attempts to map out all the possible timelines of my future, I still couldn’t calculate the effects of societal undercurrents over time. Being part of the model minority isn’t something I’m proud to admit. Being part of the model minority is a euphemism for being complacent in a systemic problem. Asian-Americans, regardless of generation, face the stereotypes of the past to this day. We’re still considered good at math, good at calculations, good at being stingy and selfish. International politics doesn’t shine a kinder light on us either, not when we are far estranged from our brethren across the ocean. 

Asian-Americans couldn’t be more different from those that grew up across the pond. Our lifestyle choices and habits just don’t mix, and while we take from each other, we hardly give or want to acknowledge each other. Having lived in both places, I am aware of their stark contrasts. But I also know how exclusive each of these communities are, and I know that once I choose one, that was the only path I could follow. The Asians have always been bits and pieces of a shattered, completely fragmented identity. Rather than accept our differences, we close our gates to one another, building our own villages and cities in America. But in order to do that, we have to be law-abiding citizens so that they let us stay. Our ability to build communities in this country is almost contractual. They’d already kept us out once in 1882. So this was our second chance, and the best thing to do in this case was to keep our heads down and stay out of trouble. Such is born the identity of the model minority, silently toiling in a country that only lets us stay if we behave. 

Growing up, I was taught to hate the Japanese, for trying to wipe out my people, my dialect, my culture. When hatred is bred in youth, it poisons the mind and blinds the eyes and heart. I was told to watch my back, to trust no one, not even people with the same color skin as me. I even factored that into my calculations, checking off each box that brought me closer to my freedom. But I didn’t actually toss in hatred as one of those factors. I didn’t want to throw in hatred to my long list of symptoms. I chose to factor in extra wariness and caution instead, with enough time to always peek over my shoulder to make sure I did the best I could, that my execution was as flawless as possible. But never more than a glance. Looking back would be travesty to all of my calculations. Remembering too much would be fatal. I can’t. I can’t lose sight of the big picture, to get out, to leave everything behind me. I have to fucking focus, to stay on track. I can’t go back to anything back there. There’s nothing left for me but broken pieces and broken people. Pieces of people that patch me together.

Stop. Stop thinking about it. I have to get a grip, I have to keep going, keep pushing, keep chasing my independence, my full independence, complete ownership of my life. I have to have it. No matter what it fucking takes.

It was like my obsession. 

I never calculated that everything would catch up to me. I never thought my body and my mind would give out, that I’d burn out completely. That the harder I tried to kick and flail to stay afloat, the more I drowned in the weight of my memories. The air is dead. There is no breeze and the sky is completely overcast. My ears are humming but there’s no one around me. I am alone, but the dead world is spreading its sorrows before me. I have no energy left. This wasn’t part of my plan. These weren’t in my calculations. 

This last year was never a part of my calculations. Neither was adding a year to my time in college. Neither was having a complete mental and physical breakdown. Neither was losing my job and my room. Neither was my family choosing to reach out. Neither was me extending my arm back out to them. 

So if there’s any time to believe in signs and throw numbers to the wind, I guess now is as good a time as any. I have to look back. I’m not ready to let go yet, but I already did so long ago. Can I still grab ahold of the past? Or is it too late already? Am I too far gone? 

Please. I know that no one ever includes second chances in their calculations, but I’m fresh out of options.

8. 單車 Bicycle 

不要不要假設我知道

You don’t have to explain, I already know

一切一切也都是為我而做

Everything you did was for me

為何這麼偉大, 如此感覺不到

Despite your greatness, I never felt it

不說一句的愛有多好？

What good is there in never saying you love me?

只有一次記得實在接觸到

I just remember one particular trip

騎著單車的我倆　懷緊貼背的擁抱

As we rode on your bicycle, I clung tightly to your back

難離難捨想抱緊些　茫茫人生好像荒野

No matter how hard it is, I think of that day and I feel better

如孩兒能伏於爸爸的肩膊　誰要下車

If I can lean on Baba’s shoulders, here I would stay

難離難捨總有一些　常情如此不可堆卸

There’s not much to say about that day,

任世間再冷酷　想起這單車還有幸福可借

But no matter how cruel the world is, I’ll always have that happy day.

陳奕迅

Eason Chan

Dear Baba,

You weren’t really around when I was little, because you were still finishing college when I was born. So I figure you were kickstarting your own career when I came into the world. You weren’t really present in my life until many years later either, not until we moved to Fremont and Mama had already moved first to find a job. 

So when we moved to Fremont, it almost felt like you were making up for lost time. You hovered over my shoulder every day. You were there when kindergarten let out in the early afternoon. You occupied my days and nights, and you took up every hour in that small one bedroom apartment. 

I know you barely passed high school, that you were so close to flunking out and almost losing your chance to go to college. I know you skipped class to go play basketball, but I also know that no matter how much you sucked at school, you looked out for grandma. She was always on your mind, because grandpa was never really home. So I guess you must’ve been lonely too, not being able to see your dad all that often. When he was around, it was to discipline you. 

You told me that you had refused to finish a bowl of rice because you were full. No matter how much grandma prodded you, implored you to eat, you refused. Grandpa had left the restaurant without a word and when you got home, your room was smashed to pieces. He had thrown out every prized possession you had, and you learned at an early age what respect for our elders meant. I suppose that’s also where you learned the silent treatment.

“He’s not like that now. No, your grandfather has mellowed out some, but he was terrifying when I was younger,” you said to me. “You can only imagine how bad some of those nights were. But other times, he just didn’t know anything about my life.”

I didn’t need to imagine. I lived it. You said that I was lucky you never hit me. That you had a God-given right to beat me and you curbed yourself. That you could do to me what Grandpa had done to you, but you chose not to. I should be grateful, you reminded me. I was. 

But that didn’t stop you from destroying things in my life. You threw a lot of things at me, whatever was closest to you. Because you stuck by your word and never hit me, you punched the wall, the table, the desk instead. You pulled my hair, my arm, forced me to plead for my own safety. You led me out of the house and shut the door in my face when I tried to crawl under the closing garage. You locked me in the dark to think over my sins. 

You told me that I tread a thin surface in that house, but you also told me that family is unconditional. You held that word over my head, but you also ignored me for weeks and weeks. You pretended I didn’t exist. You even told me you wish I didn’t. That you’d rather I disappear from your life altogether, or you disappeared from mine, and we’d both be better off that way. 

My knees are discolored from all the nights you made me beg you to forgive me. To forgive me for lying, for being disobedient, shaming your name to the public. 

“And so God has cursed me with a child like you,” you said. “This is why I don’t believe in religion.”

I said nothing. I never did, and that made you angrier. You cursed me for my silence, unmoving in the face of your barbs. But if a single tear rolled down my face, you exploded. I was weak. I couldn’t take criticism. The outside world would eat me alive. You were just preparing me, and I’d never survive. 

I raised my voice at you once. You accused me of something, like you usually did, something small. Your accusations snowball bigger and bigger, until you start to make grand assumptions about the person I am. Then you tell me I am lazy and stupid, a burden, something dirty hurled against my skin, stinging insult after another. Usually I can take it. Usually I can tune it out. But that night, I snapped a little and I matched your volume when I responded. Your lip quivered, and you began to cry. The first time I’d ever seen a grown man cry. An ungrateful daughter, a shameful one. How could I? I never did it again. 

Everything about you used to drive me up the wall. Your rules made no fucking sense. Why couldn’t I dress the way I wanted, choose how to spend the little free time I had? Why did your educational failure have to become my burden? But because you told me that it was wrong to be angry at family, I felt guilty and tried to suppress the urge. How could a feeling be wrong? I didn’t question it. It just was. 

I was terrified of you. When you came home every night, I could feel my heart dip before skipping a beat. But I already knew that feeling, it was like waiting for Ah Gong to come home from a night ot drinking. If there was a wrong way to cut bread, then anything could go wrong at any moment. If something went wrong, it would snowball into something much worse, and out of self-preservation, I strove for perfection. Just like clockwork, any time some form of failure tainted my perfect record, I would wait for you to pass judgment, holding my breath until you spoke. So I chose to hide from you, out of fear. When you found out, your fury was incomparable to the last time. I feared for my life. Some days I was scared you would come find me. Some nights I was scared you wouldn’t let me come back home. Sometimes I was just plain scared because I didn’t know what you would do to me.

You controlled me even though you didn’t know a lot about my life. You know things about me by default, because you’ve lived long enough with me to pick up the patterns. But you don’t know what my favorite color is. You don’t know that I like turtles and wolves just as much as I like horses. You don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. You just don’t know. 

I will be honest and tell you that I thought you would kill me before I did. I couldn’t figure out a way to live with you, to stand you long enough without my skin crawling with every word that came out of your mouth. You locked me in that house and you didn’t let me leave. You are the reason I hate driving, because you hit the gas and almost crashed us into a brick wall at 120 mph just to prove a point. You are the reason I flinch whenever someone reaches for my wrist. You are the reason I hate it when someone says, “What’s your problem?” You are the reason I look twice in the mirror before I’m ready in the morning, to triple check that there are no cracks in my appearance. You are the reason I am scared to be myself, because you’ve made a point of calling out every single thing that’s wrong with me. 

I hear your voice before I do anything, forcing me to analyze every aspect of every situation. I am only as good as my word, as my values, as my backbone, you’ve ceaselessly reminded me. That stays with me to this day. 

You have nailed the backbone into me, and you taught me to be true to my own backbone. You said that before I point fingers at anyone else, I have to remember that three of them are pointing back to myself. You were the first person to ever tell me to introspect, in your own twisted way, perhaps, but you introduced the concept of self-reflection to me. 

You fidget and I can feel some kind of anxiety raging inside you. I think that even though you don’t think mental health exists, that you think exercising makes it disappear, you’re hiding from some internal sadness. I think you’ve been running away from it for so long that you ended up just projecting it onto me. 

I hate remembering things about our shared past. Because you’ve turned them into memories that you use to gaslight and guilt trip me. But that’s because I let you tell the memories in your own words. 

You took me to get my first bed. We went to an Ikea two hours away, in the middle of the day, finding the cheapest mattress we could find. It took us another three hours to tie the mattress to the roof of our car, and the string seemed so flimsy. But you had that concentrated furrow between your eyebrows and I knew you would figure it out. You had to. You handed me a piece of string and told me to hold on for dear life. If I didn’t, I’d have to sleep on the futon or the air mattress for another night. So I stuck my small head out the open window, wind whipping my hair as our little car flew along the bridge, inching us closer to home, closer to my first night in my own bed. I held onto that string like my life depended on it, and in my small brain, it did. I slept uninterrupted that night. Because of you. 

You taught me how to ride a bike. Well, not really. You demonstrated it over and over again in the park, and I was too worried of falling than I was listening to you. After a futile hour, you pulled some nearby kid on his own bike over to me. 

“My daughter can’t figure out how to ride a bike. Can you explain it to her?”

I have no recollection to this day about what that boy said to me. I was mortified. Ears hot, I hopped on and pedaled for dear life, just like I held onto that bed string. I learned how to ride a bike out of sheer embarrassment. 

Another time, you bought me a kite and I didn’t know how to fly it. We got it stuck in a tree and a park ranger had to help us get it out. By then, the kite had been torn to shreds, but I didn’t mind. We had a good laugh over it. 

It would be unfair to say that I haven’t had positive experiences with you. You are the reason I love to travel, to see history before my own eyes. You taught me how to backpack, so I could see more on a budget. You are the reason I love brunch and that I can spend a day lost in a museum or bookstore. You are the reason I appreciate sitcoms and stand-up comedies. You are the reason I watch sports, and you are the reason I write letters. You are the reason I believe in the power of stories, because you taught me to find stories in everything around me. In sitcoms, in sports, in letters. Over the meals we shared, the 30-minute lunch breaks you took to come home and eat with me during holidays, the brunches you took me to if you didn’t have soccer on Sunday mornings, you filled the space with your words and your ideas. I never said much, and that made you angry. I just listened and absorbed, keeping my thoughts to myself, holding my cards close to my chest. Exactly like you taught me. 

You were the first person to ever teach me about history. You took me to see the world, and I saw the world through my own lens. We never stayed in fancy hotels. We lived in hostels, sharing the room with other people. You told me that to be safe, we should keep to ourselves. But observe, you said. Observe everyone around us and learn from their mistakes. You taught me how to read the news, from circling Chinese headlines on black and white newspapers so I could recognize characters to emailing me articles every few days. As I grew older, you told me more, criticized politics, sheltered me from the twisted ways of government, implanting your ideas, your values in me. You thought you were protecting me by preventing me from having ideas of my own. But in some weird way, you taught me to think for myself only.

Chinese people love karaoke, even the men, even if they’ll never admit it. This was your favorite song to sing. You were the first person to teach me the value behind lyrics. 

鐘聲響起歸家的訊號

The bell chimes the signal to go home

在他生命裡彷彿帶點唏噓

During his life, he always carried a small sigh

黑色肌膚給他的意義

His dark skin gives him meaning

是一生奉獻膚色鬥爭中

His life’s devotion is to the struggle of skin color.

年月把擁有變做失去

The years have changed possession into loss

疲倦的雙眼帶著期望

His set of fatigued eyes still carries hope.

今天只有殘留的軀殼

Today there is only the remains of a shell

迎接光輝歲月

To welcome the glorious years

風雨中抱緊自由

Holding fast to freedom in the wind and rain.

一生經過徬惶的掙扎

A lifetime of loss and struggle

自信可改變未來

Believing in one’s ability to change the future

問誰又能做到

Who else can accomplish this?

Beyond

This is the first song I ever heard you sing, time and time again. This is the first song you ever shared with me. It’s by legendary Hong Kong rock band, Beyond.

“Rock music brought the world together. Rock music is the way the world can channel its anger and learn from it,” you explained to me. “This song’s not about Chinese people. Most Chinese songs are about romantic love. Romantic love is stupid and shallow in the grand scheme of this world and its injustices. No, 然然, this song is about Nelson Mandela, about Apartheid, about being persecuted for the color of one’s skin. It is about fighting for freedom, whatever that means. I never knew Asian men, particularly famous rock musicians, could have the compassion, the capacity to think for someone else like that. This song is valuable because it’s bigger than just us. This song is a vision. That is why classic rock music is timeless.”

From a young age, you taught me to always be painfully aware of my heritage, the color of my skin. You railed on and on about the failure of the government to be kind to minorities. You said, “America may no longer be segregated, but discrimination seeps through every crack it can.”

You meant discrimination against Chinese people, Asian people in America. I saw it as minorities of all backgrounds, oppression in all forms, not just of my people, but of everyone who sought a better life in another land, some who had no choice, only to be persecuted for the way they looked. 

When we travelled, we didn’t spend too much money except for tickets to get from place to place. You took me to warzones, to the wall dividing Northern Ireland between the Catholics and the Protestants. We saw labor strikes in Paris when we passed by a shut-down Versailles.  When I went to Germany on an exchange trip, I saw shatters of the Berlin Wall, no longer standing except in the hearts of Berliners. Everywhere we went, I learned about the history of this world, about how cultures could be erased with the swift blade of a sword or a single gunshot. Everyone I saw had rich stories, beautiful, vibrant traditions. Everywhere I went was the touch of colonialism, of globalization. Everywhere I saw that when a story was told, it was only told from one point of view. Everywhere there were silent voices, wary eyes. Silent like me, aware of our history but unwilling to speak of it. 

That’s why I am a journalist today. I have been blessed with a powerful voice, a platform to express my mind. I know that now, but you don’t. You would rather I stayed silent, forever part of the fragmented model minority that can never rise up the professional ladder or be represented in the entertainment industry. You would rather I keep my head down and never draw attention to myself because life is easier for our communities that way. How can I, when our communities don’t even see eye-to-eye? When we are only taught to look out for ourselves and our communities, but no one else?

But without you, I never would have written this. I still have all the letters you’ve ever written me saved in a folder back home. I hold onto your words more tightly than you think. But this isn’t about you, and it’s not about me really either. 

This is our shared history. I’m just using my own words this time around. 

You have been a conflicted father to me. You were so unsure whether you were blessing or cursing me by moving me to this country that you always reminded me that we never fit in. That our stay was conditional, that subtle discrimination is always there. That I had to be hypervigilant of the color of my skin, that I could be proud of it, but I also had to know the consequences of being able to live in it. So I could be proud, but only silently proud. 

You taught me to calculate, to be guarded and keep to myself. You taught me that sharing was a weakness. To be strong, I had to be stoic, emotionless. So no one could break me. No one except for you. 

________________________________________________________________________

Day after day I’m more confused

Yet I look for the light in the pouring rain

You know that’s a game that I hate to lose

I’m feelin’ the strain, ain’t it a shame

Oh, give me the beat boys, and free my soul

I want to get lost in your rock and roll and drift away

Uncle Kracker

Dear Mama, 

I remember you and I used to sing this song together in that old Volkswagen. You only sing when you’re in a good mood, but you were the first person to introduce music into my life. You tell me that even when I was in your womb, I was listening to music. So even before I was born, I sought solace in music. 

I know I’m like you because we both like proving people wrong about us. You went to college when you should’ve dropped out after high school to work. You are the only one of your siblings to apply to college, and one of the only women in our neighborhood too. Ah Ma reminded you that education wasn’t for girls, and the only reason she let you was because you worked and saved enough to make it happen for yourself. Also because Ah Gu was too busy getting pulled over by the cops to ever go to college. 

Your love language is gift giving. I know because whenever I mention I need something, you pounce on it and hunt it down. Then you hold it over my head like a trophy and remind me that you gave me everything I asked for. 

I’ve seen you grow into your role as a mother over the years. It started with cooking, and it’s the reason I cook now too. When we moved into that first apartment in Fremont, Baba cooked because you were never home. I only got that one year with you in the city of angels. All the other years you floated in and out, always going to work, breaking gender roles while you built servers. 

Most kids have stories about their mothers tucking them into bed at night. You weren’t usually home when I had to go to bed. You were out of the door by the time I woke up too. When you were home, you were exhausted. So you didn’t cook, and I know you heard Ah Ma and Grandma nagging at you in the back of your head when you didn’t. No, you were never a proper girl, and they faulted you for it. You weren’t a conventional wife, a mindless, obedient Taiwanese daughter. You blazed a trail of your own. You proved everyone wrong. 

You told me that you liked fixing things ever since you were little. You liked listening to music, just like me, and when your scanning radio broke, you figured out how to fix it because you couldn’t afford to buy another one. That’s how you always were around the house. If you weren’t napping, you were trying to repair something before we had to throw it away. If something broke, you knew how to patch it up. You didn’t care about the state of the world or international affairs; you only cared about what was right in front of you, immediate problems that needed tending to. Baba’s head was stuck in the clouds, but your feet were always glued to the ground. 

You asked me how old I was once, when my birthday was right around the corner. I heard you tell someone you didn’t even know what grade I was in, much less how old I was turning. 

“Her father’s the one that cares about your grades,” you laughed jokingly. “I don’t know anything about her life.”

But when they tell you that mothers know everything, they always do. Mine knew everything because she went through everything I owned. I guess you didn’t always know everything. You went through my things and flung accusations about me before you really knew what was going on. You only ever uncovered half the truth, and you already blew it out of proportion. It’s hard to imagine if I could have escaped with my life if you knew everything. 

If Baba was like an erupting volcano, you are a dormant one. You are more cunning, more sly, you watch and you wait, gathering everything you can until you’re ready to snap. And then it all comes bubbling to the surface, triggering the other volcano in the house. 

Most of my early memories of you were suffocating. I could feel the air sucked clean out of the room when you closed the door. I know how innocent suspects feel during an interrogation. I remember clearly, the beaded perspiration, not knowing what you had uncovered this time, what you were going to hold over my head. You rarely exploded in my face like Baba did, you rarely screamed and flailed. When you did, I was terrified, even Baba would be shocked. No, you would have a wry smile on your face as you twisted your questions this way and that, extorting the answer you wanted to hear. You watched me fidget as you tightened your grip around me. If I was in your good graces, you said you’d talk to Baba for me, see if you could negotiate something for me. If I wasn’t, if I had crossed you somehow too, I’d just sit at my desk, unwavering, staring out my screen door and awaiting my eventual fate. 

The truth is, you have a benevolent heart, but you always had to look out for yourself, for your family so you didn’t realize you were manipulative. The real truth is, you might’ve done everything with me in mind, but I wasn’t always the first priority like you said. I was usually the bait left out for someone to reel in, cast outside of my pond to fish secrets for you. 

It’s okay if Baba didn’t want us for a little bit. You won’t admit it but it shattered you when he tried to leave, when he wanted someone else, something that was not us. But let’s face it, none of us really wanted each other right? We were all just thrown together haphazardly in life’s game toss and ended up in the same ring. 

That was the first time in your life you realized. If he left, you would have nothing. Nothing except for me, and you were just going to have to settle for that or try to amend the relationship we never had. I was too busy listening to the sound of the running water as I did the dishes or banging on my piano keys to hear what you were yelling at each other behind closed doors. I didn’t want to know. No child ever wants to know why their parent wants to leave. They just feel like they did something wrong. 

I just wanted Baba to come back for dinner at night. I waited night after night at the dining room table, and I usually ate alone. After many days of waiting, you came and sat down in front of me.

“He doesn’t want us,” you said flatly. “It’s just you and me again. He’s not coming back.”

The only times he did come home, he slept on the couch or he was locked behind the doors with you. I only heard the crash and booms, but I never heard the words you threw at each other. I was alone most days, even though you were in the same house. I felt guilty for thinking this way, but I always wondered who I would choose if I had to choose between you and Baba. 

You told me I had no choice but you. For awhile, I didn’t know if I’d have picked you. But the truth is, no child should ever have to choose between a parent. I didn’t have to make a choice, because he wasn’t home enough to warrant one. 

Baba was always at the gym. In the morning, after work, late at night. Maybe he was, but he was definitely growing thinner. You stopped cooking for him and you refused to address him if he was in the same room. When you weren’t around, he tried to reason with me, but I didn’t want to hear it. He wanted me to absolve the guilt hanging over his head, and I couldn’t. You wanted me to let him go, but I couldn’t do that either. 

When Baba wasn’t trying to talk himself back into my good graces or fighting with you, his fury still haunted my wake. You stopped his hand once and you stood between us. 

“Enough,” you said. “Go to bed. Everyone.”

That was the first time someone stood up for me in front of Baba. I was thirteen years old. 

I remember I was in bed one night, lying awake, trying to listen between the walls. I heard your shriek split the dead midnight air. 

“He hurt me, 然然,” you screamed at me, lunging toward me as I came running into your room. “He’s done it! We’re leaving. RIGHT NOW. RIGHT FUCKING NOW. I’M LEAVING YOU I’M TAKING HER WE’RE GETTING OUT OF HERE.”

You grabbed frantically at the suitcases hiding in the back of your closet. 

“STOP IT. Listen to me!” Baba pleaded, fear ringing his eyes when he realized what he had done, “The door slammed on her finger on accident. I would never. 然然, please.”

At that moment I stared at both of you, forced to choose, my brain shut down. I crumbled to the floor, silent, hot tears pouring down my face. I was afraid to wail. I was too afraid to drown out my own mother’s cries. 

You’d both be using the phone lines at 3 am, calling your respective families, begging them to come save you. I heard everything, trapped in that bed. I couldn’t do anything more than just listen. Listen and wonder if any of this would have happened if I had been born. 

“You are the only piece holding this family together,” you told me. “I don’t know what anyone sees in you, but it is your duty.”

We used to go on random errands at night when he wasn’t home, just to pass the time, to ignore the ache of him not wanting us. We went to Home Depot once, to look at lights. I think you felt the most at home at hardware stores, where you knew your way around even if you didn’t speak the most fluent English. As we walked inside, you put your arm around me for the first time in my life. I leaned against you.

Time stopped for a split second. Everything felt okay, for just that split second. It never happened again, but I’ll never forget it. That was all I ever wanted. 

This was the first time in your life you were faced with a problem you couldn’t fix. So you chose to let me in, just a little bit. And I listened. When you weren’t gaslighting me, you made great company. You always laughed at me when I sang, telling me that I was pitchy and off-key, but I loved singing with you. I liked singing with the windows down, letting the wind and your voice waft over mine. Sitting next to each other, listening to music. That’s how I like to remember you best. 

When I went to college, I knew there was something wrong with me mentally. My first therapist couldn’t get me to talk. He told me that I had a gift for filling up space with words, but I would never reveal anything about my internal thoughts or emotions. 

It was exactly halfway through the sessions I had with him. I had been seeing him for months, and we still couldn’t untangle the web of my mental health. He sat across from me, thick notebook splayed on his lap, flipping the pages to examine his notes, picking his question. 

“When we went through your early diagnostics, you talked about feeling outside of your own body. Tell me more about that.”

That was when I learned about dissociation for the first time, how the mind casts you outside of your body, a trick that makes you feel like you’re observing yourself rather than living in the moment. It was a defense mechanism, he told me. A primitive mechanism that children with PTSD sometimes develop. Veterans experience it, too. Anything traumatic can trigger that kind of response, particularly when there aren’t enough tools in your mental toolkit to help you cope. 

He pushed me harder, urging me to cast my mind back. It was painful, because I buried it deep down after Baba came back. To be honest, he didn’t so much come back as he did fall back into our laps. Baba fell sick for months, and we nursed him back to health. He chose to stay, and you deluded the entire family into thinking we were happy, that we could no longer have any problems. We stopped talking about those turbulent years, and I forgot everything before them for good measure. 

I remember Ah Gong for the first time in a long time. 

“My maternal grandfather…he was an alcoholic,” I offered. “I guess that’s kind of hard.”

“I’d imagine it was difficult, especially when you were young. That was when you were still in Taiwan, no? You don’t really talk about that. What was that like?”

I prodded my own brain for memories, any memory. I told him about how you didn’t let me sleep in the same room as you, how I always slept with Ah Ma, how we were always just waiting for Ah Gong to come home. I told him how I was too terrified to stay in the room with Ah Ma when he started his tirade, and how I would run upstairs to my cousin’s room instead of waking you up in the room next door. 

“That might be something. All children want when they’re young is to feel motherly love. That is the first real love we experience in the world, and that’s how we are nurtured at a young age. When you’re missing that and something traumatic happens, you have to find your own ways to cope,” he said when I finally finished remembering. 

“I guess…” my voice trailed off as it cracked. I looked up in surprise. He was already looking at me because as I was talking, I didn’t even notice the tears running down my face. It was the first time I had ever cried in therapy, and the first time I didn’t hold my tears back in front of someone else. 

“All I ever wanted was for her to hold me. When I cried myself to sleep at night, when I lost all hope, I clung onto that crazy fucking wish that she would just come to me one day and open her arms to me. And I wouldn’t even say anything, I’d just run into them. I just wanted my mom every time I cried. And she was never there. She never even saw,” I told him. “I’ve never told anyone that before.”

He listened, thanked me for my time, for sharing part of myself with him. That wasn’t the last time I said those words either. 

Even after Baba came back, you two still fought ferociously. He hated that you decided to embrace Buddhism in the time that he was gone. It always made me seethe a little. I know going to temple saved you, because you had lost 20 pounds in two weeks. It was the only thing giving you hope, keeping you going. 

Temple was far, and you couldn’t leave me at home. You took me with you, and I sat in the cafeteria once a weeknight, alone save for the chanting that reverberated down the halls. As I got older, you started making me go to service with you. I never embraced your Buddhism with the same veracity you did, but I did it for you because I knew it made you happy. I learned to meditate and sat through communion with spiritual guides. I wore the dharma protector necklace daily, and I learned the core chants by heart. 

For years and years, temple was only something I did for you. I noticed that it turned you into a different person, one less quick to judge, kinder, a little more compassionate. Perhaps it was religious fervor that took you over, but you were more patient. You snapped at me less and didn’t always tell me to shut up. Baba thought organized religion was stupid, but he didn’t realize how much him leaving broke you. You never told him. 

I think when I turned 18, you realized that I was slowly trying to swim farther and farther away from your shore. I never expected you to come swimming out after me either. You didn’t so much swim out after me than you forced me to stay in touch with you. There was once a day two or three years ago that I thought you would come find me, and I was so scared you’d take me away and control me forever that I went crazy trying to hide. I almost filed a restraining order and disappeared forever, because I was so scared that if I didn’t, you would lock me away forever. 

So it was that way you forced me to go to Orange County that fateful weekend, and we fought for the first time. It was the first time I ever told you I wasn’t going to do something you wanted me to do. You told me I had no choice. Despite everything that happened that weekend, despite not sleeping at all that night, I still remember what the spiritual guide told me during guidance communion. 

“You have a light, and it is so beautiful. It is a difficult path, but keep this light burning, to reveal your true Buddha nature. Don’t let it go out. It is too bright, too beautiful.”

To hear that the morning after you tried to kill yourself, it almost felt like a sign. Whether it came from my ancestors, from Buddha, it didn’t matter. I clung onto that whisper of hope. The months after were rocky. You didn’t know how to broach the scars on my arms, but you knew they were there. You wanted to ignore the fact that there was something wrong with me, because you thought you solved the problem when you threw away my medication. But you couldn’t because I wasn’t getting better. Your words tore into me, you ripped me to pieces even though you just wanted me to get better.

But how do you bring back an estranged daughter, one who is barely holding onto life, much less her family? You share a part of yourself with her and remind her that you are with her. 

My Mama told me that she had been to a special spiritual communion for me, because she knew that I was sick. The spiritual guide saw me out in the middle of a lake, rowing alone. But the fog was thickening, and when it obscured my vision, I lost my oar. 

We were on the way to get leggings. I told you that I wanted to buy leggings with pockets so that I could keep my phone on me when I climbed. You parked the car in front of the store and turned to me. 

“I know Baba told you that he wasn’t actually trying to leave so many years ago, but he was. He was going to start his own life with someone else. I couldn’t let him go, so I tried to suffocate his options. I told him that if he was going to leave, he would have to pay for all of your education, and the house. But he wouldn’t get to keep the house either, we would. And he and I would split the cost after we sold the house when you graduated high school,” you told me. 

“When I wasn’t fighting or trying to destroy him, I was so lost. I would wander outside of the server room in the middle of the day, and just walk around looking at the leaves. I wasn’t eating, so I didn’t have much energy in my day. I always wanted the best for you. Even when we moved to Los Angeles, even when we moved from apartment to apartment, until we finally got this house. I was hurting, but I wanted to be strong for the both of us.”

I stared back at her, enraptured. 

“One day after I had dropped you off to Chinese school, I told him I wanted to talk. I told him I was ready for him to leave. As long as I had you, it would be okay,” you continued. “I felt a chilling peace inside me and I kept repeating, Namu Shinnyo. It brings calm to my heart.”

You paused.

“I wasn’t the kindest to everyone either. I was not a good wife to him, I tried to fight his fire with my own. I struck you down too and I watched him batter you. Your Baba has a good heart. You are his only child, the only way he can redeem himself for his past regrets. But he is troubled, his mind is not calm. You are more like the two of us than you imagine.”

You told me more about that vision the spiritual guide had. 

“She said the fog will clear for you someday. It will come to you one day. My fog lifted and that is why I believe. That is why I have faith.”

I decided to share a part of myself with her too. I told her about that night in Orange County, about the car. I couldn’t tell the story without my voice falling apart here and there. We sat side-by-side that day, and we let ourselves cry in each other’s company. It was the closest I would ever get to you holding me in your arms. And that was enough. 

“I have to tell you one more thing before we go in,” you said after three long hours. “I wouldn’t have been strong enough to tell him to leave without the help of people around me. Your Baba’s mother, your grandmother, she told me to stay strong. She never turned her back on us. If he left, she would support us. She told me not to give up hope. She told me she would protect us. For family. Like she always promised. So when she needed us, of course we would never turn our back on her.”

I couldn’t believe what she had just told me. 

“There is no debt between family,” you repeated those words to me. But they didn’t bother me like they used to. “You carry a piece of your ancestors with that necklace you wear around your neck. We are always with you. We will always protect you. It’s just…in our culture, it’s hard to put it into words.”

_________________________________________________________________________

 Dear Baba and Mama, 

You have watched my growth; you witnessed my childhood firsthand. Over the years I took the pains to catalog your story, so that it’s not forgotten in my future. You always told me to keep quiet about myself, but I’m learning to be proud of our history, which is just as much yours as it is mine. There is so much about you that I still don’t know, so much I have yet to understand, but I’m working with what I’ve got. 

You were 22 when you had me. I’m going to be 22 in less than a year, and I can’t imagine the onus of having to find my own independence and having a child at the same time. I can’t imagine having to uproot my life and move to another country, hoping it’s even slightly better than what I had. But hey, our family just kind of happened and we had to go along with it the best we could. 

I see you in me because I’m becoming more and more like you everyday. I hear it in my voice, when it rises like the sea to push back against someone else’s. I see it in the things I do, the frantic energy when I nag at my friends. And that’s why it’s so hard to communicate with you, because I fell from your tree. I’m carved from your stone, and no matter what course life’s river took me, it always wound back to you. 

That’s why I can’t talk to you, just as magnets with the same pole repel one another. They’re too much alike, it’s like fighting fire with fire. It is how you have taught me to be kind to other people but the harshest on myself. I don’t know how to share my burdens with other people, much less you, because you never shared your burdens with me. You tried to keep them from me, but that tore us apart. I had to find out on my own, and that made me resent you. I had to lie and eavesdrop, go behind your back to learn the truth. You never told me anything. So I did the same to you. 

When I was in seventh grade, I made a facebook account with my friend. All hell went loose the night you found out, that I had the audacity to go behind your back and venture on my own onto the internet. You took hold of my account and changed the password. You changed it to familymatters, so every time I logged in without you knowing, my own sin would stare me straight in the face. Social media still gives me anxiety because I’m not worried I’ll get lost out there. I just don’t want you to find me again. 

How can family matter, if we’ve never learned to look each other in the eyes and tell the truth? I spent the nights I had with you hiding in your menacing shadow, watching it leer over me when you stepped foot inside my room. I didn’t even let you in; you forbade me from ever closing the door. You went through my things, and you made me feel dirty for keeping secrets from you. I still feel dirty, because how can I profess my unconditional love for my family when I lead a second life you don’t even know about? 

I’m not saving money in a separate bank account so I can go out and party and throw caution to the wind. I’m saving money so I can do normal things I’ve always wanted, like buying myself a dress I like in a store or getting my nails done. Normal things that people do, but things that you made me feel guilty for wanting. You told me I had everything I ever wanted, right before my eyes. Whatever I wanted, I just had to tell you, and yet when I steeled my nerves to share an internal desire with you, you tore my decision apart and told me I was selfish for wanting something that wasn’t already mine. 

I see now. You moved us here to prove a point. You wanted to prove that you could beat the odds. Each of you had something to prove. Baba, you wanted to prove that you hadn’t wasted your youth on a career you hate now. Mama, you wanted to prove that you could do everything a man could, and more. Both of you wanted to prove you could keep a family together, a family that wasn’t supposed to be. 

You are the foundation of all the relationships in my life. What I didn’t think I got from you, I had to learn to find somewhere else. And that’s why I can’t crack the code about love if I don’t understand yours. 

There were some things that I just couldn’t ever let you see. My roommates have seen me break down more times than you have. Not even when I was little and skinned both my knees and elbows. My tears were always silent, and you’d rather slap me across the face than hold me when I cried.  

“Love you,” I texted you once. Neither of you responded. So I looked for love elsewhere, from other people. These people didn’t always like the way you treated me, and they told me I deserved better, that I should leave. But somehow, they always left before I could make a decision. Instead of turning to myself, I hopped from person to person, just like I had hopped from community to community. Anyone to shelter me from the harsh winds of my past. 

You can tell me you wish I was never born. You can hurl words of every dialect at me, Taiwanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, English. They might sound different, but they mean the same thing. I’ll know what they mean each time. You then tell me that words don’t matter, how can they add up to anything, you ask me when I start to cry, when your blood runs inside me? But you don’t let me cry. You silence me, tell me that crying is like asking for pity. 

“You aren’t actually that spineless, are you? Spineless enough to feel sorry for yourself when you don’t even deserve to live in this house. Don’t try to trick us. You say you’re sorry every time. But not this time, your words are hollow. They don’t mean anything. I taught you that a person is only as good as their word, and you have shattered any type of trust anyone in this family can have in you.”

You glare down at me each time you force me to kneel on the floor. “You are less than a human and you know that everything you do is wrong. Crying means you don’t agree. Speak up, I dare you to contradict us. Tell us we’re wrong. No? Nothing? Then stop crying if we’re only telling you the truth. It’s for your own fucking good anyway. Or just get out of here. The door is wide open if you don’t want to be in this family. No one asked to have you, and you’ve been nothing but a burden since. Ungrateful, dishonorable bitch of a daughter. A piece of shit. Good riddance anyway. No one wants to see you in that bed come morning.”

I felt the tears stain my pillow as I sobbed myself to sleep in the room next to you every night. Some nights I was numb. Those nights, sleep never found me. I just wanted to shrivel up and die. But I believed in the morning light, so I chose to endure. 

Come morning, I still awoke in that bed. The morning light was always bleak, almost like it would smother me if I stepped out of place. It probably would. 

“早安,” I greeted you as I did every morning. “Good morning.”

Neither of you would even look at me, much less address me.

“Tell that thing in the same room as us to get out of my sight,” you told my Mama when I sat down next to you at the table. 

“You, go to your room. Figure out a way you can make this right. Not just some flimsy apology you give every time either. Don’t you ever learn your fucking lesson? You’re ruining the family, you are, making everyone so ashamed of you. What are we going to tell everyone when you have no prospects, no future, no backbone? They always wanted us to have more kids. Thank God we didn’t,” my Mama turned to me in response. 

 It was like I had actually ceased to exist. 

When you first found my pills, you laughed in my face. The second time you found my pills, you still told me to throw them away. You took away my health insurance, cut off my ability to go to therapy. You watched me wither and you didn’t realize you were the reason why.

That wasn’t a long time ago, but I can remember freely now. The memory doesn’t simmer inside me like it used to. It just comes through my brain and then passes. The change was slow, so incremental that if I didn’t pay close enough attention, I might have missed it. But I noticed. I always did. 

If it means anything at all, when I say I miss you, I really, really do. Life is simpler around you, that’s for sure, because I just get wrapped up in yours. But this is my life and it’s no longer your place to control it. You have to learn to let go. 

It hit me one day, when I was spiraling hard, lying drunk in the middle of the afternoon on that godforsaken couch. Had I actually succeeded, had I walked in front of the car that night, had the car made impact with my body, had I completely ceased to exist, all of these words would be everything I never told you.

You would never know. My silence would die with me, and you would never have heard my story firsthand. I couldn’t live like that. I didn’t want to be forgotten like a faded memory. I didn’t want to just pass through this earth. I didn’t want to stay silent any longer. 

I want you to know that I see you…for all of you. Not the facade that you put up in front of everyone else. I know you, your moods, all the little things that tick you off or make you smile. I’ve observed them over the years in my silence. I learned by listening to you and picking up your words after you let them fall as you came and went. Parents, I’ve learned, give you the gift of hating them. You are not just the bits and pieces of you I chose to tell. 

You were always giants in my life. You did what you could with what you knew and what you had. It is not my place to tell you whether or not you did a good job. I know that you tried. 

My fondest memory of the two of you is a bittersweet one. We were renting a condo when I was 9. Our landlord, a smooth-talking white lady, seemed nice enough at first. We were good tenants. We were cordial with our neighbors, and my Mama kept the house immaculate. After two years, we had to find somewhere else to live, or we had to renew our lease. We got the lawyer’s notice one day when we came home. 

“She’s suing us, Cally,” Baba sighed.

“Why?”

“She said we caused damage to her property. She said the steam of our rice cooker yellowed her ceilings. She also said 然然was rowdy and kicked the wall so hard it chipped.”

“That’s ridiculous. Does she have picture evidence? Because I took pictures when we moved out.”

“I don’t know, but they have to believe us. We’re taking out a massive mortgage for this new house. We might not be able to afford this.”

My Baba appeared in court to defend our family’s honor. Our former landlord won and my parents lost a couple thousand dollars that day. That day, my Baba stood up for me in front of the public. I was only 9 but I knew then. Family protects family at all costs, even if it is smothering. 

For the longest time, I assumed that was a debt I had to pay. You are my family, and you have provided me so much. But I don’t owe you anything. Everything I do has to be a choice of my own. I will always choose to put you first. But I don’t do it out of duty anymore. You are not my obligation. You are my family. 

If history could repeat itself, I’d still pick the two of you. I hope that one day, maybe you can read this and understand. But now, we only have time to help us heal, time with each other, time apart, and time to make sense of the years that we spent but never connected with each other. 

9. 回家 Homecoming

對這個世界如果你有太多的抱怨

If you have too many complaints about this world

跌倒了就不敢繼續往前走

You stop moving forward when you fall

為什麼人要這麼的脆弱墮落

Why are human beings so fragile?

請你打開電視看看

Just turn on the TV and watch 

多少人為生命在努力勇敢的走下去

How many people are brave enough to keep moving forward

我們是不是該知足

Shouldn’t we feel like we have enough?

珍惜一切就算沒有擁有

Treasure what you have, even when you feel like you have nothing

還記得你說家是唯一的城堡

Remember back then you said home is the only castle?

隨著稻香河流繼續奔跑

Following the fragrance of rice and the flowing rivers,

微微笑小時候的夢我知道

Smile, I know you’re thinking of your childhood dreams

不要哭讓螢火虫帶著你逃跑

Don’t cry, let the fireflies help you escape,

鄉間的歌謠永遠的依靠

Always relying on those village folk songs,

回家吧回到最初的美好

Go home, back to the beginning of beauty.

周杰倫

Jay Chou

The truth is, I’ve spent so long jumping from community to community that it’s impossible to call any one of them home. Every time I moved from one to another, I cast the last one to the back of my memories. I try to forget my communities and I’ve never found the healthiest ways of letting go. 

When I love something, I want to share it with other people. I’ve been disciplined to hold my tongue when sharing information about myself, so to ease over the lull in conversation, I choose to share my communities with each other. When I have to let one of them go, my brain usually short-circuits and I stop thinking. I stop sharing. I stop sharing about this community, no matter how vital this community is to my puzzle. 

That’s why I stop listening to old songs after a while. The memories get too painful to remember, and when I do, the sadness weighs on my mind for hours and hours. Old songs bring back repressed anger or nostalgia, and both are dangerous in the journey to self-recovery. So forgetting, suppressing is easier than finding a new home for a memory I have to let go. 

When I started going to school in America, I was always bewildered at my friends’ distaste with our culture. Being Chinese, being Taiwanese, being Cantonese just wasn’t cool. Eating Chinese food wasn’t cool. Speaking Chinese wasn’t cool. Liking calligraphy, Chinese music, talking about my village wasn’t cool. So like how I was taught to deal with disappointment, I stopped talking about it. 

I spent years chasing a different identity for myself, trying to become a whole new person despite the color of my skin. I ran away, praying everyone would see underneath my skin to what was underneath. But underneath wasn’t any prettier than the scars that cracked my yellow skin. Underneath was a bubbling volcano, on the verge of collapsing and self-destructing. I was only really half of a person for over a decade. I could only choose one. 

When I was in Taiwan, even street vendors could point me out and know I didn’t grow up there. In America, I still pronounce words wrong sometimes because my brain is switching between language to language. In Taiwan, I am American, because my Chinese is accented and broken. In America, I will always look like an immigrant, and when people ask me where I’m from, they don’t expect me to say, “Fremont, California.” They expect me to say China. 

In Taiwan, I am the girl that was given the opportunity to chase the dream of a lifetime, to rise above the poverty in my village to provide a better life for my family. The other villagers expect gifts whenever we go back, because they think we can afford it. My Mama takes orders months before we even plan to fly back, jotting down everything we need to buy for every extended family member, every villager. Even some we haven’t been in contact with for years and years, they always know when I’m coming back. The American girl, the perfect, obedient daughter whose parents built a new existence, a better life outside of the village of my birth. I had to be grateful, but I was lonely. Every time I go back, they just want to know what America is like. But there aren’t any stories I can tell about myself, about school, because my parents are listening. I can’t tell them what America is actually like, how I’ve had to jump from ship to ship, fudging the details about my past bit by bit to fit in. If I didn’t spin something together, I will cease to exist in their minds. No one will talk to me. My old village friends have grown up long ago. None of them went to college, and most have either moved out or they stay in their rooms when I’m home. 

“This is the last time we’ll ever be like this again,” I had said to them. 

I was right. But everyone makes sacrifices in the pursuit of a better quality of life. The sacrifices my family made for me to have the life they never could have, the life that was supposedly more than the village could ever give me, or so they said. You see, I am good at telling the stories of other people. I never had the voice to tell my own. 

I became an American citizen when I was in the fourth grade. I remember I got to skip an entire day of school, and I didn’t even have to sit through all the tests my Mama had spent weeks preparing for. Random American facts, things I’d learned in school, but things she had to memorize–and then forget once she passed. For the longest time, I just accepted that someone with the same color skin as me would never be able to represent me, in pop culture, in politics, in entertainment. When you pledge your allegiance to the United States, you ally yourself with a nation that pledges also to bring liberty and justice for all. Model minorities weren’t supposed to speak up. They were supposed to be silent. Model children also weren’t supposed to speak up. They were supposed to yield to authorities who allegedly knew better. 

I’ve said it before. Vicious cycles breed quiet, often unconscious resentment. I resented growing up in a country that would never fully accept me for the color of my skin. I resented having to move here, to accept a life I didn’t get to choose for myself. 

So I stood out in both of the worlds on which I stood. It just felt like I was living with my foot out the door, that once my acceptance was revoked, I’d have to find somewhere else to belong. 

Now, one of my communities is threatening to crumble before my eyes, before I’m ready to let it go, and I’ll admit I’m quite lost. This community has weathered some of my hardest days with me, but this community has also hurt me. I know that there’s no growing left for me there, but how truly difficult it is to let go of something that built the foundation for the woman I am today. In this community, I found my voice and I was able to present myself exactly how I am, sharing my experiences with others so that I learn from them and they learn from me. But this community also made me question if I was enough, if I could ever be enough. It stretched me thin and dared me to doubt my own potential. And after years, I am stuck in a corner, with nowhere left to go. If my calculations have taught me anything, I don’t have anywhere else to go but up from here. 

I have been angry for such a long time, but I’ve never wanted to admit it. Anger and resentment are such ugly emotions, and I am familiar with their fury. This is my third or fourth therapist, and I’ve only been seeing her for two months at this point. I thought I was improving this quarantine, but I was still feeling anxious and conflicted. It is hard opening up to anyone, particularly a new therapist. I remembered the lessons, the rationalizing thoughts my past therapists had worked with me. 

I decided to take a leap of faith and I shared my anger with her. 

“I always felt guilty about being angry. I hate it. It’s the worst emotion. My body completely shuts down, because it is the one feeling I don’t know how to process. I rarely let myself get angry. It’s hard for me to reach that point, because I know the devastation of anger and I don’t want that,” I sputtered to her. 

She nodded and let me continue. 

“But sometimes, I just can’t help but feel it boil inside me. It takes everything I can to keep it contained, to push it down. I can’t control it, and that scares me,” I finally admitted. 

“There’s nothing shameful about being angry. It’s a natural feeling, but we often view it as negative, like guilt or jealousy so we tell ourselves it’s wrong. You have been tapping into your emotional reserves, and anger exhausts them, especially when you spend most of your time avoiding it,” she finally responded. “It’s okay to feel anger, but you have to choose how you deal with your own. You have the ability to do something before it makes you snap. It is difficult, but you have to find out what that is.”

Anger is a vulnerability, and I had learned ever since I was little that I couldn’t afford to be vulnerable. Anger clouds judgment, and it throws calculations off course. But anger is a powerful driving force in our lives, because it can push us to action. Anger fuels our voices. 

I resented my parents for the way I grew up. I was angry that I had to put them first before myself and my own dreams. I was angry that I couldn’t pass organic chemistry, that I couldn’t fix my mental health. I was angry because it felt like nobody wanted me, and I thought it was my fault. 

When we finished that session, I realized that most of my anger wasn’t directed at other people. I mostly blamed myself for things I couldn’t actively control. I noticed the double standard of my anger for others and my anger for myself. What an inefficient way to utilize such a powerful emotion. Even so, I acknowledge that I have to allow myself to feel anger if I ever want to let go and move on. I always thought that feeling anger would paralyze me and turn me into my family members. I just didn’t believe enough in myself to trust that I could handle the anger and let it go. I didn’t believe that I could be different from everyone who tried to wield anger and failed. But I had to at least try and reconcile the resentment that I’ve ignored for so long.

I will say this. Staring anger in the face and telling it to fuck off may possibly be the best kind of catharsis of all. 

I have also taken the time this quarantine to reconnect with old friends who have also undergone parallel journeys. Back then, we were too young and naive to address the great, big elephant in the room. That even though we shared the same space, we were never able to put to words how similar our experiences were. You can’t select the people who are in your community, they just come and settle in your corner, and you just have to let them. I know that now. 

I know where to find my roots. 

10. The Color of My Roots

我愛上讓我奮不顧身的一個人

I fell in love with someone I would do anything for.

我以為這就是我所追求的世界

I thought, this must be the world that I was searching for.

然而橫衝直撞被誤解被騙　

But in my own stubbornness, I was misunderstood and cheated.

是否成人的世界背後總有殘缺

Is the grown-up world always so broken behind?

我走在每天必須面對的分岔路　

Every day I walk and face diverging roads,

我懷念過去單純美好的小幸福

I miss those small things that were simple and beautiful.

愛總是讓人哭　

Love will always make me cry,

讓人覺得不滿足　

It always brings dissatisfaction.

天空很大卻看不清楚　

The sky is wide and I am without clarity.

好孤獨

I am lonely.

If we deem the world beautiful because of the vibrant colors around us, then why do we not also find beauty in the color of our own skin? 

It had to happen this way. I was young, a child, and children often have tunnel vision. Not that adults know any better, mind you. They’ve just seen more so they can interpret the patterns of time a little better. 

I was raised by women, in a traditionally patriarchal society. You see how the men in my family were broken by the men before them, and the women were left to pick up the pieces of their devastation. I saw it all with my own eyes and I wanted something more for myself. That’s all anyone in my family wanted. More than what we had, something better for the generations that came after. The intentions were always pure, always borne out of love. 

When the Chinese build community, they ingrain into every child the lineage they come from, but they never tell us the full story of each of our bloodlines. We are taught to defend our heritage at all costs, to protect the blood that runs through our family’s veins. But how do you defend history when you don’t even know exactly what you’re defending? Children are the pride of our communities, yet with pride comes pressure to live up to the pride. 

I am not unlike my family or my ancestors before me. I want to build something that lasts, too. But not the way my parents and grandparents did. I don’t want to breed duty through fear. I want to nurture and grow organically from the roots, like the people, the friends, the family members along the way did for me. My mind remembers the collective experiences, filing them into their categorized memory departments. 

No one in my family ever sat down and told me these stories in detail. I pieced them together by listening. I picked up bits and pieces through conversations, drunken hints, clues from someone’s tone of voice. I absorbed everything in my silence. I let them paint their history on my canvas. 

As you read through the lyrics of all of these songs, these puzzle pieces, you don’t know which ones are Mandarin, which ones are Taiwanese, which ones are Cantonese. The beauty of written language is that it doesn’t discriminate against the different communities that come together to share it. So as I grew up, I listened to these songs, year after year, letting these Cantonese, Mandarin, Taiwanese words fall against my ears. This is the first time I ever read the words to make sense of what they mean altogether. The words tell stories about coming of age, growing up, navigating broken systems. That’s why I think they’ve always stayed with me. These melodies, these characters the lyricists strung together, they are made of universal language, universal truth. So as my perception of my life and the people around me changed, these songs and what they mean never did. 

Songs are like puzzle pieces. Altogether, they are more than the sum of their parts. Songs aren’t just words and puzzles aren’t just pieces. They are made up of fragments that can’t stand alone, or they wouldn’t have any meaning. But meaning is derived from the way the fragments are put together, how when tied into a cohesive story, they can paint a picture that speaks to our deepest, darkest feelings. 

My roots are everywhere I go, from the songs I sing in the shower to the necklace I wear everyday. When I left for college, I tried to throw them away. My roots run through so many places, because home to me is not a single location. It is Taiwan, it is Los Angeles, it is Fremont, it is Giraffe Learning Center, it is San Diego. In some inexplicable way, I always found a way back. No matter how I tried to suppress these memories, I ended up just losing time I could have spent trying to get to know my roots better. 

But I no longer blame myself. My family had to lose me to want me back. I had to lose them before I saw how my life was tied to them. We all had to lose sight of each other and our values before we could pick up the remains of the storm. 

There is wisdom in my past, wisdom I am learning to see and unlock. But I have to be careful what wisdom to take and what to leave behind. As my Baba always told me, there is knowledge everywhere, you just have to look for it. 

But I should amend that with what I have learned in my journey. It’s true that knowledge is everywhere, but we don’t always have to look for it. Sometimes knowledge is already there, and it settles on our shoulder like a butterfly. Just like happiness does. That’s something you can’t look for, happiness. It’s not something you can find. It’ll always stay one step ahead, just out of reach. But if you go about your day as usual, play an old song, and dance in your living room like you wish you could’ve when you were little, it just might hover overhead. 

I don’t like to wish that my past was different than the way it happened. My history fuels my fire to live now, in the present, to savor every minute I have to make up for lost time. I don’t feel like I’m playing catch up either or chasing an elusive daydream. It just feels like I’m getting reacquainted with myself again, with my family, my friends, my communities. 

So as I go for my daily sunset walk or sit on the balcony of my apartment, I think about every single milestone, every bridge that led me here. It makes me want to remind the people around me about their role in my journey. I want them to know the value they hold in my life, every time they come across my mind. 

“Love you!” I text you now. 

“Ditto!” you’ll respond. 

It’s a start. Something to look forward to the next time I come home. 

Something to look forward to…once upon a time, I never looked forward to tomorrow. Thinking about that makes me cry, because it’s hard to feel all the pain that made tomorrow feel like a lost cause. All the reasons I told myself to give up, all the reasons they gave me to let go. 

I am a first-generation immigrant, a woman of color. I am half-Taiwanese and half-Taishanese. I have depression, anxiety, borderline personality disorder, and complex-PTSD. I am a journalist, a student, a friend, a cousin, a daughter. I am but one piece in the puzzles that make up my communities, but the beauty is that I am no longer confined to one. I can be any or all of these masks I choose to wear. 

I’m not ready to let go, not quite yet. I have so many tomorrows left, so many more sunsets to see, so many people to meet, so many lessons to learn, so many more days to use the voice I was gifted. A lot of those days are going to be hard, just as hard the days that made tomorrow not feel worth it. That’s okay. I’m less angry now, more steady. I am stronger knowing that I have the lessons of my past inside me. I am beautiful because I have the colors of my history painted on my skin. I am myself knowing that I have the strength of my ancestors, my family behind me. 

I stand here before you, one puzzle piece among millions of others. But I know where I fall now among all these millions of pieces, I know where I belong. I am proud of the color of my skin, the way I look, my story, my mental health, my past, my family tree. I wouldn’t be here today if I didn’t take the time to pick up all of these pieces that broke off when I was looking for myself. 

I guess that’s what being happy is. Satisfaction is the feeling of putting together the puzzle that tells all the pieces of my story. Content is the state that follows, the butterfly settling calmly on the shoulder. Fulfillment is knowing that my story will live on, the words I choose passed down to the generations after me. 

My story. Their history. Our family. 

天黑的時候　

When the sky falls dark,

我又想起那首歌

I think of that song　

突然期待下起安靜的雨

Suddenly, I am anticipating the silent rain.

原來外婆的道理早就唱給我聽

Ah, but Grandma has already instilled this knowledge in me.

下起雨　也要勇敢前進

When it rains, march bravely ahead.

我相信　一切都會平息　

I believe now, that all will become still.

我現在　好想回家去

And all I want now is to return home.

孫燕姿

Stefanie Sun

相家的時候就聽小時候喜歡聽的歌。

If you’re ever missing home, just listen to the songs of your childhood. 

譚苡然

Yi Jan Ella Chen

Translations done by Yi Jan Ella Chen. I used my own words, I promise.