In college, for the first time ever, the things I found unrecognizable about my growing-up were confirmed through diaspora writing and dialogue. This golden age of diaspora writing had us listening to queer-of-color standup comedy, reading relatable Tumblr posts, posting Rupi Kaur, and sharing hard-hitting Medium articles—with particularly important quotes pulled for impact, of course. In his poem, “In the City,” poet Chen Chen calls this feeling a kind of “90’s dream of multiculturalism.”

My friends and I would talk-cry-talk sitting cross-legged in someone’s rundown college apartment eating the foods we’d avoided as kids and now wanted to make and to share and to claim. We grappled with what it meant to be together and queer, and largely, at that time, without our parents for the first time. We compared our parents’ quirks and stories about our grandparents. Together, we made and remade ourselves, writing into our lost languages.

I wrote a lot about my mom then, in essays and journal entries and stories I’ve long since deleted. Even in my current writing, my mother—and my relationship with her—feel like a second source of light: the shadows I try to capture don’t make sense without her. You can see her shape in the background, in between the lines, in your peripheral vision. In mine.

This essay is about me. Because it is about me, it must begin with my mother. My mom is a Chinese immigrant who was born right as the Four Pests famine began. After surviving the Cultural Revolution, she moved to the United States where she has lived since. In the first few drafts of this essay, I’ve expanded this section and cut it several times.

In an earlier draft of this essay, I included a note to myself in brackets indicating that, despite the urge to share, the above line should remain minimal. The note reminds me that I should do this to show you that I can resist the impulse to give her story away, to tell something that is not all mine to tell.

But the narrative pieces fall together easily. My mom is Chinese. My father is white, and Midwestern like me. It is easy work to hold up the stories my mother tells me about her childhood with stories about my own and let the contrasts thicken into something that is, or at least feels, literary. The surreal, traumatic stories I grew up hearing around the dinner table stand out in sharp relief against our suburban Ohio kitchen. These stories represent a somber understanding of just how precarious easiness is. They make an essay pop.

connect

o o-i o-ii o-iii o-iii-i o-iii-ii o-iii-iii o-iii-iii-i o-iii-iii-ii o-iii-iii-iii o-iii-iii-iii-i D D-i D-ii D-iii D-iii-i D-iii-ii D-iii-iii D-iii-iii-i D-iii-iii-ii 0 0-i 0-ii 0-iii
substrate