Dear Reader,

Yesterday during dinner at a writer’s colony, a fiction writer said, I’ve never written about playing hockey, even though I did it for many years and reached a really high level. Then a playwright across from me said, Maybe you just aren’t ready. Sometimes it’s just not time yet.

At breakfast this morning, I spoke to a poet about trauma and how neither of our mothers, both of whom had left their countries, rarely spoke about their pasts. My mother fled from China to Taiwan when she was eight or nine, and then left Taiwan for America when she was twenty-one or twenty-two. This poet said that maybe it’s us, the next generation, who will write in response to that history.

I think the poet was right. To borrow Julia Creet’s phrase, maybe memory is where we have arrived rather than where we have left.^xxviii And arrived means here, in this country, and also in the imaginations of the next generation. I think the playwright was right too. Willing and summoning is like dragging a small unwilling dog toward a larger dog. When I drag, the dog looks italicized, muscles tight, tail down.

Dragging a not-yet-ready memory, thought, or feeling toward language too early feels something like the dog. I can move it, but it will be difficult. More and more, I think writing is not a choice but an act of patience. An act of listening to silence, into silence.

I’m thinking about what Rainer Maria Rilke said: And it is not even enough to have memories. When there are many of them you must forget and have the great patience to wait for their return. For the memories themselves aren’t yet it.^xxix

I used to think I was a transcriber of my own experiences and memories, adding an image here and there, but now I think I am more of a shaper. I take small fragments of imagery, memory, silence, and thought, and shape them with imaginary hands into something different. What’s left doesn’t need to have a firm, precise shape that resembles reality though. It can be unshapely. Splayed.

The epistolary form was a way for me to speak to the dead, the not-yet-dead, the sky, the wild turkey scurrying away, its white feathers waddling deeper into the woods, into myself, into a younger self, away from myself. Toward my dead mother. Toward my history. Toward Father’s silence. Toward silence. Toward death.

One of the challenges of the epistolary form is that the people you are writing to can’t write back. If these people, like my mother or father, are no longer alive or can’t speak, that poses fewer ethical issues. But when people are still alive, there are more immediate ethical challenges, so I chose to maintain the anonymity of most of the people in this book. I also change important details about individuals. At some point, the actual details and the specific people no longer seemed so important.

While writing these letters, I found boxes of old photos in a storage facility. I placed a few in the book and wrote short poems in response to the photos. I also found a series of interviews that I had conducted with my mother in 2007. I can’t explain why I had asked her to speak, but perhaps the interview offered a form in which to speak into and out of silence. I had no plans for the interview. Still, I told her I was working on an essay (which I wasn’t). When I asked my mother to ask my father if he would speak to me, he refused and asked why I would do something so useless. Shortly after, he had a stroke and could no longer communicate.

I had forgotten about these interviews until after my mother died. And then it took me years to find the files on a computer. I found them only after most of this book was written. I am grateful my mother agreed, even if she was reluctant. I sprinkled bits of our interview throughout this book.

This was the only time my mother had ever spoken to me substantively about her past. There weren’t a lot of extra words. I could see how memory works (and fails) in fragments as my mother answered my questions—describing images of pickled vegetables, a servant escaping, a mother holding the hand of the wrong child.

Working on these letters and listening to the interviews made me think that grief and memory are related. That memory, trying to remember, is also an act of grieving. In my mother’s case, sometimes forgetting or silence was a way to grieve lost lands and to survive. In my case, trying to know someone else’s memories, even if it’s through imagination and within silence, is also a form of grieving.

As I began to write, though, my own memories started to return, and I began to trace in language some of my own painful childhood experiences, which I had always kept hidden. I realized I had to tell my stories in order to reflect on theirs because, while I had always thought our stories were separate, they were actually intimately connected. I realized my parents’ histories not only shaped them, but also shaped me in ways that I only began to consider after they could no longer speak to me.

I began to think about how maybe my memories are never really just my memories but are fragments of memories and stories from others. And that memory, for many of us, is shaped by motion, movement, and migration.

After I finished writing this book, I began reading Memory and Migration, an anthology edited by Julia Creet and Andreas Kitzmann, where I learned about Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory: Postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be neither fully understood nor re-created.^xxx

The concept of postmemory seems to encapsulate both this book and my own life experiences. In the same anthology, the visual artist Yvonne Singer, whose parents had left Hungary for Canada during World War II, so aptly wrote: I was between worlds, alienated from the Canadian world of my peers and excluded from the history and culture of my parents, who placed a veil of secrecy on the past.^xxxi

Mother had no words. All we had was silence. How does one interact with silence? How does one not die of silence? Maybe my thinking has been wrong all along. Maybe silence is not something to interact with, to be filled in, but rather to let wash over you, to exist within. Maybe silence is its own form of language. Maybe silence is also a life lived. Maybe the unspoken can lead to the widest imagination. Maybe it’s the most open text. The loudest form of speaking we have.

Maybe if I listen closely enough, the stone is a thought, the bell makes a sound without ringing, and I can hear children grow. Maybe our histories can never be fully known. Maybe curiosity is its own language.

After I finished writing this book, I also began to think about how, for an immigrant’s child like myself, perhaps because identity can be based on an unreliable postmemory, identity relies on the making of a present—through every teacher, friend, even enemy, and through all the books I’ve read. Maybe the act of writing for someone like me, isn’t about speaking, but about making a person.

In the end, these epistles brought me much sadness and shame to write, but the process was also joyful. I’ve always loved what Jeanette Winterson in Art Objects says about the chisel:

The chisel must be capable of shaping any material however unlikely. It has to leave runnels of great strength and infinite delicacy. In her own hands, the chisel will come to feel light and assured, as she refines it to take her grip and no other. If someone borrows it, it will handle like a clumsy tool or perform like a trick. And yet to her, as she works with it and works upon it, it will become the most precise instrument she knows. There are plenty of tools a writer can beg or borrow, but her chisel she must make for herself, just as Michelangelo did.^xxxii

I’m still learning how to make my own chisel, but everything I write, no matter how crude, is an experiment with my unfinished chisel. Each time I sit down, I pull out my imaginary chisel, listen to the words that come up, like eavesdropping, crane my neck into language, into memory, into silence. And each time I write, the chisel becomes more and more finished and distinctly mine. And with each word, I become more and more myself.