Dear Vyasa:

One day, I received a telephone call from you. In those years, I was working at the television station; how did you find me in those dark ages before cyber? Perhaps you wrote to me through my publisher, and appropriately we corresponded. You were editing a book about Asians in the Americas. Would I contribute something about Japanese in Brazil? I was amazed and gratified. You were among a half-dozen American scholars interested in the subject, but unlike the specificity of most academic scholarship, you were expansive in your reach, casting your net across the entire hemisphere, across any genre of cultural production that could be represented in a book, and encompassing the diaspora from the broadest possible geography that might define Asia, from Lebanon to Japan. In one book, you reclaimed the halving of the world—north and south, old and new, occident and orient, first and third—by twisting the globe in a crisscross of human migrations. Your vision was expansive in your desire for inclusion—amateur and professional, academic and layperson, matured and youthful—all would be given voice. I realize that is why we met; you sought me out on a hunch, that some obscure writer hidden in the engineering department of a television station might have something to say.

It must have been years later that we actually met face-to-face for Chinese lunch. You invited another guest, a Chinese American scholar. None of us had ever met. You arranged what you call a contrapuntal meeting to create a beginning of some possibility. Three American women from multiple diasporas—Chinese, South Asian, Japanese—met over tea and tofu and created a new space of knowing. This day stays in your memory because, as you confessed later, you went home with an MSG attack. You might have been tricked by the sensation of dying, but if it’s any consolation, memorable for me was learning to value the surprise of the contrapuntal.

It took me many years from that first meeting to get to know your traveling body and its traveling memories. You were born in Bombay, raised in Karachi, educated in Beirut, Durham, and Berkeley, and adopted by a second family in Oaxaca. And by complicated routes that I have no doubt confused, your great-great-grandmother was Chinese from Shanghai, your great-grandfather born in China, and your mother in Yokohama. You speak Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, English, Spanish, and read Sanskrit and Greek. One day you explained how, in the seventh century CE, the Persian Sassanid Empire was replaced by the Arab, and thus the Zoroastrian by the Islamic, which heralded the exodus and diaspora of your people. Pondering this starting place, I asked if your folks ever thought of returning to claim Iran as a homeland. Your response was angry and adamant: Absolutely not! I was taken aback by the fierceness in your voice. It was only later that I understood, not that I had asked a stupid question, but that the idea of a national home is antithetical to everything you believe. You would teach me that there are dreams and memories that make human creation possible, but to dream the memory of home might be the most dangerous. It is, you have insisted, not always where you were born that makes you who you are.