Grace Loh Prasad is a literary sister of mine in many ways. She is a good friend, fellow memoirist, and neighbor. We are both members of The Writers Grotto and The Ruby communities in San Francisco, and alumnae of…
I told you it wouldn’t take long to get to the river. No, I don’t come here alone at night. Yes, I do come here when night is impatiently waiting to arrive, streaking the sky with pink and cobalt…
Prologue I must begin by telling you that I am Black. This is a very strange thing to have to say out loud. It is usually something self-evident that goes without saying. But my light skin and blur of…
By Ann Guy • Wading through a sea of blond hair and blue eyes every day felt normal in the tiny, rural Western Michigan town where I grew up. So did biking to the public library and loading up…
It’s an ugly thing to follow a woman along the street but this is what I did. She was a copy of Patti Smith during the early Mapplethorpe years, before Horses and Mineshaft and all the BDSM, when they…
Is your mom a mail-order bride? I was once asked by a classmate in fourth grade while we sat at our desks making fake nails out of Elmer’s glue squeezed into the hollow of our plastic rulers. No, of…
I hold the things I need in my arms. Since the pandemic, I don’t use a basket. Today, I’m cradling a bottle of Advil gel caps, blue mascara, and a ginger lemon kombucha. Customer service associate needed in the…
/fjuːɡ/ noun A piece of music popularized during the Baroque period in which a primary melody, or subject, is introduced by one voice, then systematically passed to and developed between others in a polyphonic, intertwined texture. 1. Subject…
In celebration of the inaugural Novelette Print Prize, Editor in Chief Courtney Harler corresponded via email with Guest Judge Hanna Pylväinen, author of The End of Drum-Time. In the resulting interview below, they discuss choosing point of view, honoring…
“I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” —Alasdair MacIntyre No one would talk. It was as…
I hate foo gwa, bitter melon. I know that’s heresy because my sly uncle once said, as he grinned and spooned a heaping helping into my rice bowl, “To be a real Chinese, you have to like foo gwa!” I hid my dismay with a smile, a few big scoops of rice, and a gulp of scalding tea to wash out the aftertaste. Such was my life. I had to prove myself to my own family. For a child growing up in the 1960s white San Francisco Bay Area suburbs, legitimacy was a constant internal struggle. Am I Chinese enough? American enough? Do people see me as Chinese or American? Today, memories like this drive me to write, to finally establish my authenticity on my own terms.
“Where Am I From?” upends a tiresome alienating question with a loud clap back: I belong here. My roots in America extend back to the 1870s. My ancestors endured America’s hatred since 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act disrupted their lives and forced them into secrecy. But in trying to research my great-grandparents’ and grandparents’ stories, I was almost stymied before I began. What were their names? They had Chinese names that I could never decipher because I don’t speak or read Chinese, and Cantonese “spelling” was never standardized. How could I unlock their secrets? Openly interviewing my surviving aunts and uncles would never work, and nosing around and asking questions wouldn’t be tolerated. I suspected the worst. Were we evil? So from scattered scraps of conversation—with me hastily retreating to the bathroom to jot down notes, and later trying to confirm facts through books and newspaper archives—I pieced together my version of the truth. Once the puzzle was complete, I was shocked. Were all families like this?
One craft challenge was how to blend my childhood impressions of my grandparents with the real history of their lives. I had to imagine scenes, try to inhabit their personas. For these imagined scenes, I took what I was told as fact: my great-grandfather’s death in the South China Sea, the practical yet heartbreaking choices my great-grandmothers had to make. From this, I surmised motivation. The Chinese ethos of obeying one’s elders may have brought them here, and the Western ethos of freedom enticed them to stay. But could I reconcile the hustle and deceit of my grandparents’ young lives with the staid, benign image they presented to me? This disconnect, I realized later, was purposeful. They didn’t want us to know the truth. They silently faced America’s bitterness so my generation, and generations to come, would have nothing to fear.
Breaking the silence means telling secrets, and like most memoirists, I struggled with betrayal. The unvarnished truth finally won out. I may be rationalizing—my mother was a master at it—but by uncovering history in lives that would otherwise be lost to silence, I hope they’d be proud, as I am, to celebrate our family in all its devious glory.
AMBER WONG is an environmental engineer and writer from Seattle who writes about culture, identity, and her intimate knowledge of wastewater treatment, although usually not all in the same essay. She received her MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. Recent essays have been published in Fourteen Hills, Under the Gum Tree, CRAFT, Pangyrus, Creative Nonfiction, and other literary journals and anthologies, and short-form works have appeared in The Sun (“Readers Write”) and River Teeth (“Beautiful Things”). Some of these essays have been adapted for use in her memoir, for which she is currently seeking representation.
