I have been paying close attention to my baby’s mouth to see if he will inherit whatever it is that has allowed me the good fortune of straight teeth. No braces. No retainers. Just a slight overbite when I…
My writing career started in journalism, so it’s no wonder this essay began with a journalist’s curiosity. I had just given birth and my husband and I had just moved into a new house and moved my aging parents and disabled brother in with us. As the eldest daughter of Vietnamese refugee parents, I knew I would be needed as my family’s health began to decline. My hope was that I could take on all of my new identities with grace. Instead, I was overwhelmed by my familial duties. Writing about this time in my life from a reporter’s perspective helped me make sense of it all.
This was my first attempt at writing a fragmented essay. And because I didn’t really know what I was doing, I at least tried to do something surprising or unexpected throughout the essay. There’s one line that reads, “That same week, I fulfilled other familial duties.” I had meant to type “familiar.” A reader might expect that, but I kept the original word to reiterate the heaviness of duty and obligation I felt. It was more than just familiar. It was familial. In another part of the essay, I write about feeling worried when my mom has to undergo a dental procedure. But my anxiety is not about my mom, but my dad—a reflex from various traumatic encounters in my childhood.
Not having the constraint of a chronological structure allowed me to find my voice and break out of my journalistic proclivities. The short sections allowed me to explore complex emotions, of which there were many. There was shame, guilt, rage, and grief. I was also thinking about concepts like duty and indebtedness, survival and sacrifice, inheritance, luck, privilege, burden, and trauma. I thought about what we pass down—both knowingly and unknowingly.
When I started writing, I think what I wanted to say was that teeth can be an enduring artifact of a family. I was also grappling with what it meant to pay back my refugee parents for their sacrifices. I wanted to be a good daughter and I was driven to help them. But I was also tormented by this drive. In my writing, I learned that teeth were an unlikely edifying example of how I should approach being the kind of daughter that I wanted to be.
Craft-wise, I learned what it means to play with cadence and tone. I learned what embodied writing means to me. I have a tendency to be very reflective and too obvious about what the reader should feel. But I could also be obtuse and not provide enough context. Over time, I learned how to spot that in my writing and how to balance it. Writing this essay was healing in many necessary ways and marked a new direction for me as a writer.
MAGGIE THACH MORSHED is a Vietnamese Khmer American writer based in San Diego. A former award-winning sports journalist who received her MFA in creative nonfiction in 2013, she now writes at the intersection of assimilation, duty, and autonomy from a refugee family’s perspective. Her writing, which explores the tension between obedience and identity, has appeared in Catapult, Full Grown People, Undomesticated, Off Assignment, and diaCRITICS. She was part of the Women’s National Book Association’s 2024 Authentic Voices cohort. She is an academic support specialist at UC San Diego, where she works with low-income and first-generation college students on developing their voices through writing. She is currently working on her memoir. Find her on Instagram @first_daughter_energy.
