Dear G,

One more, c’mon, you said as you stood with your hands on your knees at the top of the football stadium. How many times did we run those stadium stairs? How many times did you reach the top before I did? By halfway up, my thighs felt like desks. Yet you and your long legs kept going. If I looked up, I saw stars and an elk running up a hill into the moon.

During the First week of business school, we played in the sports competition. You and I were paired together in a scramble golf tournament, meaning we each teed off but used the best ball for each hole. We mostly used yours, as you played golf in college. But once in a while my shorter, more consistent shots saved us from your wilder longer ones.

We won the tournament and shot three under par as a team. I heard you and G killed the competition, said Tom. You’re so athletic, beamed Alex. Suddenly, I was the cool athletic girl in our class. It was all G, I said, wishing it weren’t true.

I’ve always loved sports, the way the body pleats, the way limbs transform into instruments. My mother used to drop me and my sister off at the YMCA, telling us to swim fifty laps freestyle or fifty laps breaststroke, and then she’d pick us up hours later. She was my first personal trainer. I was stronger, bigger, and faster than my sister, and occasionally she would succumb to racing me if I begged hard enough.

I now wonder what my mother was doing while we were swimming. I wonder if she had a secret life. If she was smoking. If she had a lover. If she was visiting her favorite bakery with the seven layer cake.

My mother also introduced us to tennis. You’re pretty good, said the coaches. But you have to be more aggressive, they would often add. Other athletic kids competed while I dabbled. No one I knew talked about competitions or teams or leagues. No one I knew played sports very seriously.

In high school, I envied the volleyball girls and their glossy, matching white jackets and then the tennis girls, with their short white skirts pleated like wings. I had never heard of JV or varsity. I didn’t know how one might join a sports team. But I couldn’t get those jackets out of my mind.

When I saw posters for tryouts, I asked my mother if I could try. You can, but it’s a waste of time, she said. Tryouts, unbeknownst to me, weren’t for learning how to play volleyball. You were supposed to have already been playing for years. My mother didn’t see the value of sports beyond general fitness. Looking back, I think this was because she didn’t grow up in a culture where sports dominated.

The ball was harder than I had thought. The ground was harder than I had thought. The girls were harder than I had thought. My heart, though, was just as soft as I had thought.

My mother drove me back and forth to tryouts. She never said much. Silence was her second language. Her looks throbbed more than the bruises on my forearms.

When the coach told me I didn’t make the team and that I could be a manager, without thinking, to save face, I told him I would do it. I wanted that glossy white jacket. I also yearned to be a part of something that wasn’t Chinese. I never did get the jacket, though. Those were for the players only.

I stood on the sidelines for a season with a clipboard and watched the powerful, mostly tall, large white girls easily pound a small soft ball that had seemed so large and firm to me. I watched my team members cheer and tried to copy them. Cheering and shouting in public felt like a new language. When they stood up, I stood up. When they sat down, I sat down. I kept records of kills and other things. I learned quickly.

After that year, I gave up on volleyball. As a senior, I tried out for the varsity tennis team. For a week, I hit balls with the other girls as the coaches watched us. I made the team as a doubles player. My partner and I weren’t very good. We were the last string, the alternates. We would play the matches but our results rarely counted.

I didn’t care. I had a white skirt, the collared shirt, the sweatshirt with my name in caps on the back. I got to be in my first—and last—team photo.

Once at a tournament, all the players who usually won, hadn’t. Suddenly, we, the last to play because a few players were sick, would determine the entire team’s results. I recall nothing of that match except the feeling of burning away and the team staring through the fence until their faces became diamonds.

If my doubt smelled like anything, it smelled like sandalwood. Before every shot, my body asked my brain what it wanted to do, but the brain had to ask the heart that had hidden itself near my ankles.

We lost. Our only match that mattered. Shame never has a loud clang. The worst part of shame is how silent it is.

That year, I didn’t attend the year-end banquet. I wish my parents had encouraged me to go or that I had enough courage to convince myself, if only to show the value of teamwork and overcoming my own shame.

Someone told me that during the banquet, the coach said: V is a good player. She’s the only player who made the varsity team as a senior. She would have been even better if she had started earlier.

With our own children, I vowed to have them start earlier. AYSO soccer. Basketball. Softball. We even coached some of these teams. I don’t like soccer, one child said. She went entire seasons without going toward the ball, instead running parallel with the other kids, back and forth. If the ball came to her, she kicked it away so the other kids would swarm in another direction.

Do you want to try volleyball? I asked this year. I hate volleyball, one child said. All those girls play volleyball. I thought back to the girls on the volleyball team at my high school. Who exactly were they? And how did they become those girls?

We tried so many individual sports. Tennis, swimming, golf. Our children did these things with less complaining but with a similar lack of enthusiasm. One still swims, but dislikes competition.

A therapist told me that I should have my children choose a team sport, that it’s essential to their development. When I told the children this while driving, I looked in the rearview mirror, only to see both of them crying.

I used to think that those girls meant white girls. But maybe it’s also about disposition, readiness, aggressiveness. Maybe to not be those girls is, in our case, about fear of competition, about fear of being ashamed. Shame.

Maybe genetics are more fluid than I had imagined. Maybe we inherit generations of shame. Of trauma. Of silence. Even of joy. Recently, I began learning of transgenerational trauma and the conspiracy of silence, although I have mixed feelings about the word conspiracy, its implication of intent.

Growing up, I had never thought much about whether my parents experienced trauma or that my parents’, particularly my mother’s trauma impacted me. She was her own person. Her experiences didn’t have anything to do with my experiences. Research and reflection now show otherwise. That while my parents may have maintained silence as a form of survival, silence had a heartbeat, grew up, and became the third sibling.

I’ve since read that children of immigrant parents simply don’t have the experience or context with which to understand their parents’ trauma, so the trauma continues onto the next generation in a different form. This new trauma departs from the old trauma’s already unstable relationship to memory.

Back in that old high school gym, the volleyball went low. Dive, the coach yelled. I tried to dive, but right before my body hit the ground, fear came from my body, as if something from my history was telling me not to do it, not to dive. When I had to cheer for my teammates, my voice felt still-birthed.

I ignored the therapist in the end. Maybe turning my children into Americans wasn’t going to be as easy as I had thought. Maybe by American, I really mean white. Maybe my children are already American, but a different kind of American. Maybe my children don’t need to be white, especially growing up in a diverse state such as California. And maybe my children aren’t really themselves. They’re thousands of years of other people. Cultures. My trauma. Mother’s trauma. Father’s trauma. Their silence. Passed down through me.

This weekend, our twelve-year-old competed in her first (and probably last) track meet. Her friends were participating, so she had asked to, as well. She had never asked to do any sport before. Not soccer. Not softball. Not volleyball. Not tennis.

I was traveling, but I watched the video of her running the 4x100 and the 100-meter. She wasn’t fast and wasn’t slow, and she wore loose, ill-fitting clothes, but it was a wonder, beautiful, like watching a hummingbird resting on a branch, escaping itself and its history for a moment that seemed to last generations.