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Why I Write

1.

My mom finally mailed me a box of stuff, which she picked out from what I had mailed her from the US the year before. She said she couldn't include the knives. Apparently the government had banned the mailing of sharp objects, which meant my immersion blender didn't make it, either.

My mom sent the box from China. I knew she packed it because I found two plastic bags with the Chinese label, "Bei Yi Department Store." She worked there for more than twenty years before retiring at the age of fifty. I recognized my dad's handwriting on the mailing label. In the field for "detailed description of contents," he wrote — in Chinese characters and then, using the same squarish strokes, English letters — "Clothes" and "Books".

He declared their worth: 1500 US Dollars.

Inside the box I found, besides the few books and shirts, two hiking maps from National Geographic and a knitted grocery bag I got in Oaxaca.

I suppose my dad understood the value of these things by putting down a number eleven times higher than the monies I'd paid for them.

I ordered Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke the day my college architecture advisor told me to read it. It had lived in an Amazon warehouse, a basement in Vermont, three houses in Washington DC, one apartment in New York, a storage in New Jersey. It stayed on, unlike many of its contemporaries that were given away or, somewhat carelessly, discarded throughout the moves — until it was packed into a USPS parcel from Brooklyn to Shanghai, where it lived among old documents, and packed again into a cardboard box to Rotterdam.

I have placed it in my living room.

"My dad wanted me to be a lawyer," my advisor said, "as an English major, I thought architecture would be the middle ground." I also remember him saying: the present things are clear while the past trickles away as he pressed his fingers together and made a gesture towards something far.

My first ever summer fling used one of Rilke's quotes as his email signature. I was never quite sure why he had chosen that line, "everything is gestation towards birth."

I wrote — had been writing — because I depended on it.

If I didn't write, the unsaid words would weigh in my limbs and my chest; I would collapse and burst into a pool of flames.

Things became true when I wrote. The tip of the pen touched the paper, casting thoughts into form. I used to write under a lamp, watching the ink absorbed by the paper with every twist and turns from my hand. I would often got used to a pen and felt uneasy when switching to a new one, which seemed too thick, too smooth, too shiny, too fine.

I wrote, but for the longest time I couldn't say I was a writer. Writing was then a private affair. When I eventually found ways to share I would only share a small portion of what I wrote. From the outside they resembled riddles, poetry and sarcasm.

There was a distance between me and me, and therefore, there was a distance between me and the world.

2.

When I was 17 or 18, before going to the US, I wrote a letter to myself. Around that time I was enamored by Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jewish writer most prolific during the 1920's. I bought all the books I could find under his name, thinking one day I would learn German just to read his works in their original language.

There is one line from that letter that I revisit ever so often, my mind's eye watching my moving hand.

"One day I will be an author."

3.

I wrote in Chinese for all those years.

I don't remember when exactly I stopped doing that.

4.

Four short stories filled with inner monologues:

A woman waiting for her flight to a Thanksgiving dinner.

A woman losing her favorite color.

A woman afraid of the color green.

A factory worker unable to find a stone from his pocket.

images

The first time I saw a dandelion I was twenty years old.

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"Being here is a demarcation of time," I wrote that in September, 2018.

I wanted to make a speech about the physical and internal turmoil, some of which I endured and some of which I inflicted on myself. But I didn't. Instead I showed some works from the past. The first website I made, the last website I made. A series of photos. A snapshot of a play script.