In college, for the first time ever, the things I had found unrecognizable about my growing-up were confirmed through diaspora writing and dialogue. This golden age of diaspora writing found 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.

connect

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