Dear Father,

Yesterday I needed to find your Medicare number and I couldn’t find it. Yesterday I searched through files and boxes. Yesterday I learned that you had an American name, Peter.

On the social security card, it says you lived at 4109 Walnut St., Phila., Pa. 19104. Your signature looked like you were learning how to write cursive. I imagined you with your round head, bent down, signing in one continuous, strained motion, without lifting the pen.

In the same box, I found my first social security card. I, too, was learning how to write cursive. I marveled at how you and I both wrote in perfect cursive when asked for a signature. I, too, wasn’t sure what to call myself so I wrote it twice. My M is for Ming-Kai, my Chinese name. Look how it’s hidden. Look how Peter gets to sit in the front.

I wonder why I never heard you say your name was Peter, never heard anyone call you Peter. I heard that the nice elderly people who housed Mother when she first came to this country called her Felicity because she smiled so much.

I hardly ever remember Mother smiling or laughing. My memories of Mother were of her frowning. Now I know. She left things in other countries. Like a bird who sheds a wet feather without knowing it. And the joy of the child who finds the feather. The joy stays with the child. The bird keeps moving.

On another card, someone crossed out Peter. I wonder when this was. I wonder why you gave up your future.

Yesterday I finished the book Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother’s Disappearance as a Child by Laura Cumming. Cumming investigates her family history and learns about her mother’s story and background, how her mother was kidnapped by her grandmother for five days. Her mother’s story is a skein of secrets and discovery.

After I shut the book I grieved all the details of our lives that disappear like geese. That maybe we only see any bird once. That seeing a new bird is an elegy.

I marveled at how Cumming could speak the same language as the people who might know her family’s secrets, how she could read documents in English, how she could trace the geese through language.

There’s so much I would like to know about geese—what it feels like to go in and out of weather, in and out of history, of time. Father, I am ashamed by how much I yearn. Father, I grieve in acres. This land is a facade for the land I really come from. There are lands behind lands.

When I grieve for Mother, I think I am also grieving for my history. I want to fly perfectly above my history like geese. I want to watch the cities pass as I go from one to another. But all the people have no faces. My eyes are deciduous.

Dear Father, or Peter, do you know that 4109 Walnut St., Phila., Pa. 19104 is now a Homewood Suites? I imagine how many people have slept in your dreams since then.

I follow the Google car’s path with its big camera on the roof. I see a woman pulling a wagon with a child in it. I see the woman wave to someone, her hand frozen in midair.

Someday, when the woman is dead, the woman’s daughter may find the photo and wonder what her mother was doing that day on that street. She may not remember her mother or the street. But she may remember the wagon and the creaky sound it made when it moved.

Father, I wonder what you were doing there. Was that where you landed when you first came to America? Was this your first address? I will never know. But I now know what your cursive looked like, what the street looked like, that you once had an American name. That you once had American dreams.