Somehow, here—before the picnic ramadas and megaplayground and volley and basketball courts near a man-made lake with knolls bristled with grass—stood, for ninety-nine years, a residential boarding school named Phoenix Indian School. But no more. This acreage is now…
Poet, translator, memoirist, fiction writer, and visual artist Jesse Lee Kercheval’s recently released graphic memoir French Girl portrays seventeen episodes from throughout Kercheval’s life, rendered in vibrant color by Kercheval herself. It showcases the powerful immediacy of Kercheval’s twenty…
Essay by Gabriel Moseley • I had the great pleasure of meeting Deborah Jackson Taffa at the Vermont Studio Center in October 2023, where she was the Visiting Writer. It was stick season—the dismal threshold between the time of…
I. Rain gush-pummels our car. Whippet wipers slash frantically at the whitecaps. Off to Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, to watch our daughter, Lily’s, volleyball tournament. It’s the weekend before Thanksgiving, and our son, Hudson, is meeting us there from Pittsburgh. …
This used to be my go-to anecdote when warming up to strangers in bars: the one about my pageant for the repairman. It had been my parents’ first color television, a Zenith workhorse in a wooden case, complete with…
The editors at CRAFT are thrilled to welcome Donald Quist as our guest judge for this year’s Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest, which is open to memoir excerpts, personal essays, narrative nonfiction, lyric essays, and other forms of literary…
I was halfway through the show when I first saw the picture, hanging all alone on a wall. I knew I should hurry up, had other things to do. But something about the size and the color drew me…
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…
Essay by Yvonne Conza • In Splinters, Leslie Jamison exposes a live nerve that makes vivid connections between emotions of motherhood, marriage, artistry, and selfhood. Alive and strengthened within this endeavor is Jamison’s iconic, singular awareness, that like her…
“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.
