Dear Teacher,

The tall, handsome boy who was reading my poem aloud in front of the class had stopped cold, turned around, and begun whispering to you. The rooms in the windowless high school always seemed too bright, as if they knew they were about to lose to darkness.

You called me up to your desk. I hated getting up and walking around in class. I was unremarkable and strange. I was remarkably Chinese. I was so Chinese that I didn’t know that I shouldn’t have written a poem about contemplating suicide for a class assignment.

I was so Chinese that I didn’t know that an American teacher might see this as a problem. At the same time, though, I had no idea what being Chinese meant. I had no idea what being American meant. I was here and nowhere. I could still hate something I didn’t understand. I could still be something I didn’t know.

You couldn’t help me. I needed to be in a different country, where people looked like me, even a different state, like California. Where people didn’t ignore me. Where people, when they did see me, didn’t pull their eyes out thin and laugh. But that wasn’t going to happen. And I couldn’t see outside the funhouse mirror of my life.

The racist act is not always the most harmful. It’s the surprise of it, the fraught waiting, each moment like a small trip wire. You never know when you might confront it, so to survive, you live your life in stillness, in self-perpetuated invisibility. And then there’s the aftermath of shame.

Dear Teacher, you read us so many poems, so much Shakespeare, had us memorize so many poems, that I never became American, but I became a writer.

Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –

The carriage held but just Ourselves –

And Immortality.

These words have passed through my brain almost daily. How you loved Dickinson. I remember your frilly old-fashioned powder blue blouses, tucked into tight pencil skirts, your gray hair, small wire spectacles, nylons, and little flats, how you pranced in front of the classroom reciting:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you — Nobody — too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know! …^viii

I don’t know how much of Dickinson or Shakespeare or Keats stuck in my teenage mind, but to learn from you that writing was a possibility, not as a career, but simply as a way to move into and out of pain, was the real gift.

I’m not sure if you are still alive and, if you are, you probably don’t remember me, but that chasm between us was filled with poetry instead of misunderstanding. Instead of silence. When you shared poems with me, you were filling the space between us with language.

I didn’t know what was happening at the time, but I see it now. The language of poetry reminded me to stay alive. It reminded me that, when it felt like I had nothing, I was nothing, I still had words. I could ride language as if on horseback, and it could take me anywhere, including more deeply into myself.

I don’t remember what I told you when you called me up to the front of the classroom and whispered in my ear. I’m sure my face was expressionless and burning. But I remember how your hair curled at the bottom, as if shaped by a roller, how you smelled like perfume and joy. I still remember the way your eyes looked desperate and worried, their insistence that I step out of something. You weren’t satisfied with my silence.

I remember nodding as if I was fine. I was fine. I had language. And it would be the one thing that would keep returning, like light. Language felt like wanting to drown but being able to experience drowning by standing on a pier.