Dear Teacher,

I shut my eyes as I waited for the woman in the pink uniform. Wait here, she said. The woman had said her usual speech, I can’t tell you what I see or don’t see. I had wondered how many ultrasounds she had already done just that hour.

Another woman wearing a white coat came into the room with the pink woman to her side. It looks like you had some bleeding behind the placenta. And the bleeding may have affected your pregnancy …

We couldn’t locate a heartbeat.

More silence.

I’m sorry.

They left and I dressed, tucking darkness back under my clothes. When I saw people near the elevator, I turned the other way into the stairwell. Once alone, my body began to shake as I walked down into the earth.

It turned out he was a boy. He had an extra chromosome.

When you were my teacher, you had an unexpected illness. I never told you that I was upset that you hadn’t sent feedback on my work when you had promised. I never told you that my greed had a heartbeat. That I equated a teacher’s attention with my ability to become a better writer. I thought teachers could fix me. Could make me overheard.

At that time, something rang so loudly in my ears that I couldn’t hear anything. I was in my thirties, still fascinated with myself. Much later, when I could finally hear, I heard that you may have had a miscarriage.

I think that when I learned about the miscarriage, it didn’t upset me enough. I think I was too busy trying to find myself to be troubled by the loss of others. What I didn’t understand at the time was that to find myself, I had to lose. To get lost. And that to become a better writer, I had to lose the self to the language.

I have often wondered how to teach my own children empathy. They say I feel bad in response to other people’s pain often enough that I don’t worry, but then I think back to myself and worry.

When I finally made it to college, my mother often drove the hour to visit me when I hadn’t asked her to. Each time she brought a small tupperware container of food with a small stack of rice on the bottom, topped with braised tofu, diced pork, and dark green vegetables that gripped the side of the container like a country.

Now I imagine all the times she must have sliced extra meat and tofu to save a container for me. All the times she had rung the button in front of Betsy Barbour, the all-girls dorm at the University of Michigan. All the times I went downstairs, and she stood there a few steps below me and handed me the containers. All the times I took the containers without any words. My mother did so much for me. What I returned to her were empty containers.

The problem with silence is that you can’t undo it. In that way, it’s like death. Small silences toward my mother accumulated over the years. Now they return as a stack of grief.

Dear Teacher, I think often about your dead baby and my dead baby. My hospital wristband, the one that simply says baby boy, still sits inside my wallet like a tombstone. I imagine all the dead babies together somewhere on a large playground, swinging and sliding. And for a moment, I forget to grieve.

I had another doctor check just in case, hoping that it was a mistake. But the baby was still dead. Small black dots for eyes, paddles for hands. When the machine automatically printed out a picture of the baby, the doctor silently ripped it off and stuffed it in his pocket.

I paid a twenty-dollar copay to see a picture of my dead baby on a screen. On my way out, the doctor told me about his new Botox business and to come back soon. He would give me a discount.

Dear Teacher, I’m sorry for not having empathy or understanding until years later. My lack of empathy was a failure of imagination. And this failure showed up in my writing. My writing always had a layer of skin stitched over it.

In the years before Mother died, I drove hundreds of miles to the best Chinese restaurants in the area to bring her braised tofu and pork, vegetables, and dumplings. I liked watching her hunch over and comb the food with her chopsticks, shoveling in something not quite like joy, but familiarity, home, a country. I now think that mother wasn’t just eating food. She was eating her memories, which were also my memories.