micro memoirs | On Chinese-American Identity

Alluring titles such as The Root of Elitism, How to Invent a Religion, I Was Better at Math than at Fortune-telling, and more ;)

Autobiographical Rhapsody #19 Continued: Introducing the Armchair, the Pencil, and Paper, with Proved Healing Power
Arden Yin, 2019
Mixed Media

I have known how to play Go, an ancient Chinese chess game that uses a board of 19×19 grids, since age four.

One day, after I did a reading of The Waking Hours on DL186 in workshop, I saw my writings from the past five months weaving into one web. Recurring themes: China, America, lost teen, planes, parents. Every piece of writing reveals the lineage that I had to hide and bury in the U.S.. I wrote a note to myself: “I keep writing about home and my parents. I reconcile with my memories in writing, because I can’t tell them anywhere else.”

As I grow comfortable in the armchair of introspective silence, it becomes possible that I reconcile with my Chinese identity, so I begin to remember and write, to dis-cover and heal. As I write about what pains me, which I couldn’t have talked about otherwise, I think back to my childhood. I unload what has occupied a part of my mind for the past four years, like closing that first tab in the background to free up disk space. Writing becomes a necessity. I have developed a peculiar hindsight and become my own doctor. When memories overwhelm, I prescribe myself an hour to write.

I also try to write in Chinese about my Chineseness. My first pieces sucked, for I had been so disconnected from my first language. So, after four years, I pick up Chinese books again. Reading gives me the confronting honesty I need to write. I’m writing some more in Chinese — better, this time.

Here We Go

I Envy Cy Twombly Paintings for They are Untitled

At age five, I wanted to write, like I saw my mother do effortlessly for work. In my A4 notebook, I wrote my name, mom’s name, dad’s name, their numbers, our address, then moved onto paragraphs of individual scribbles, O ╳ ⛋ ☆, each taking up the space of a Chinese character. My parents didn’t take the hint to send me to school earlier. I saw a Cy Twombly in Rhode Island last year that reminded me of my childhood writings.

I asked my parents about my name. Dad explained the backstory of 殷雪滢: first coming up with a melodic tone combination (1–3–2), then flipping through the dictionary to find the characters. Mom explained the meaning: 雪 (snow) comes from the idiom 冰雪聪明 (clever as the ice and snow). Teacher Feng gave my essay a passable grade. Here I am, writing about my name again, and I am still subject to evaluation from you, my reader. I wonder if I’ll ever be free from it. External judgements, like names, stick. Both are arbitrary. Complete social construct.

Which is why my mother wanted to change the last character of my name from 滢 to 莹 when I was nine but decided against it before I turned ten.

Which is why when my fetus restlessly kicked my mother’s belly from the inside, she thought I was a boy, and planned to name the could-have-been me 殷震霆 (my voice shakes the thundering sky). I love the name so much that exclaiming “I wish I were a boy!” was my first reaction to the story. I will steal 殷震霆 for a pen name, an alter-ego, or a sex change.

Which is why in middle school, a boy nicknamed me 恐龙妹 (dinosaur sister). They meant that I was a tomboy. I am quite queer now.

Which is why I was both free and forced to change my name at age fifteen, when I arrived in the U.S.. I adopted Judy, first given to me in kindergarten, when I knew nothing and could decide nothing.

Which is why this time, I am Arden. I have a habit of adopting names. I will rename myself again and again.

My Boarding Pass Reads:
PVG to ORD.
I Write on the Back.

Pack light. In the air
I need little — camera
and a window seat.

If we fly in the
opposite direction, I
could request, “Wine, please.”

Meal service came and
went. My book falls asleep on
me, bathed in blood

orange. Cabin air, crisp,
Bites me like English, crisp.
Seven thousand miles

to go. I’m lost in
those American mountains,
Forest-green below.

In such turbulence,
I seek peace, writing tidy
haikus from mid-air

lucid dreams. I am
red, young, and lost in the clutch
of topography.

The Waking Hours on DL186

Hour 1: I am crying. Hopefully, without drawing much attention. Why haven’t they dimmed the cabin lights yet? How did I forget to put tissues in my pants pockets? Tears fall onto my sleeve as I leaned sideways to pat around my waist. Mom always had tissues in her coat. Hold on — she put some in mine too.

Hour 2: Flights make me imagine if’s. If the plane crashes and I die. If mom dies when I am away from her. If I could find just one song that doesn’t remind me of home. Take my mind off such impossibilities. Sing me to sleep.

Hour 6: I wake up to a toddler’s crying, Mama, mama. His mother peels an orange for him. I feel an impulse to cling to the back of his seat, force his shoulders to turn, and yell, Cherish every slice, child!

Hour 7: I read a meditation prayer. I allow the emotion to develop and the breath to go through my body. There is no judgement to make. The only thing I do is to allow. Observe. Only observe.

Hour 8: I look up over-priced inflight WiFi. I text mom. I stare at the grey loading signs next to the messages.

Hour 9: I press into the skin of the last orange mom packed for me. I have never cherished a fruit more. Every bite and swallow squeezes out a day from my time at home. A week ago, Mom and I walked in the streets of Chengdu, peeling two giant oranges and laughing at ourselves.

Hour 13: DL186 left Shanghai on March 27 and arrived in Cleveland on March 27. 度日如年: a day feels like a year.

Stuck in Limbo, Studying Abroad

written with newspaper headlines from a week in Feb 2019.

COME IN WE’RE OPEN.
“Open twenty-four hours,
No saying when it ended or began.”

Rare students appear in NYC’s Central Park.
The rare that predicts the personal toll.
Duke University professor commands “Speak
English” reveals the questions unanswered:
How long a day lasts
And other untranslatable signs of the time
In broad daylight.

Hopes, outraged, slip away.
“This is the most elitist thing I’ve ever heard.”
Teen away from parents found figuratively dead.
Did my parents even know

of a wasted mistake named America?
Student hands out cookies,
Made with grandparents’ ashes,
Built on patience,
Covered with loss.

What does socialism have to do with families torn apart?
Why is China under pressure to trade its children?
I was relocated to protect,
Left,
Rescued,
Returned.
“I can’t go back, can I?”
“No. But if you could, would you really want to?”

One reason to get out of bed in the Chinese morning:
Absurdly Cold Weather is Coming —
Coming Soon —
10 days —
Frozen at Two Minutes.
“This was a country, a society,
That had been designed to be virtually escape-proof.”

Misleading climate leaves
the door open.
I fall out of tape-bound orbit,
Bathed in blue,
At the world’s crosswalk once more,
In search for the next campsite,
Crossing, kicking, slipping, and running.

I Was Better at Math than at Fortune-telling

One night, I, age four, stood with my mother at the sidewalk’s edge, waiting for the pedestrian green light. She pointed to the far right and showed me where Shanghai planned to open a new Disneyland in a decade. I had distinct memory of both the conversation — because I wanted to prove myself later, much later — and my age — because the math I conducted was central to the proof.

“Will it really take ten years to build?”

“Yes, dear, it will be a huge park.”

“But by then I will be…fourteen! Fourteen-year-old me wouldn’t want to go to Disneyland anymore. Big kids don’t do Disney.”

The construction took longer than ten years. Their prediction was off, but so was mine. By the time it opened in 2016, I declared to my mother: “I’m not going. Any other Disneyland around the world, yes, but not the one in Shanghai. It would ruin Disney for me.” I had developed strong opinions towards crowds, especially Chinese crowds, who are loud, rude, unrefined, and everything opposite of the fairytales, after receiving two years of high school (read: critical period for identity development) education in America.

The Adverse Effect of Independence

In the short weeks I spent with my mother each year, I glued myself to her. On weekday mornings, she peeled me off and left me wandering about the apartment.

Like a dog agile at its owner’s return, I discerned how her footsteps rang on the stairs and opened the door before her key could touch the keyhole. I then followed her into the kitchen as she set down groceries, rambled on about the events of the day (I dug out and flipped through my sixth-grade diary this morning. Too embarrassed to read.), and asked for garlics to peel. Using garlic for any dish tonight? When she entertained my obsession, I ran my thumb along the garlic head and peeled away the skin until the naked clove stained my fingertips with a fresh, piercing smell, discarding a shell the shape of a lily.

No. We have dinner with T-Teacher tonight, remember?

At an Indian restaurant, my mom smiled at his comments, with an expression so kind that I read as humble. I leaned towards the wall and tried to look confident through my indifferent expression. My adolescent rebellion arrived late: during the years I spent abroad (a greenhouse for branching my identity away from my mother).

When people ask are you okay? at my unfocused eyes, I pause, smile, and let out a prolonged yeah in an effort to conceal myself yet remain polite. Every once in a while, in the middle of a conversation, I recognize how my expression must look exactly like hers.

Mr. Ray Always Says “Context Makes Meaning”

My family had never been a holiday-decoration fanatic, so neither was I. In my senior year of high school in the U.S., my Chinese tutee’s mother gave me a bag of lunar new year decorations, so I put lunar new year celebration on TV and turned my room into the most festive it had ever been in 18 years.

An Honest Metaphor

The Root of Elitism

In third grade, Teacher Feng made us copy paragraphs from the literature textbook onto our workbook every week. It became a race — whoever finished and handed it to Teacher Feng first earned instant glory. Not only must you write fast, but you also had to write well. The characters must look neat, or else Teacher Feng would call out on your sloppy handwriting. We quite literally raced for first in line at the teacher’s desk, which was in the front of the classroom. Seats were assigned by height; the shortest sat in the front, the tallest in the back. Someone sitting in the first row could take one stride and get ahead of someone else in the last row, who sprinted to the front. It wasn’t a fair race intellectually and dexterity-wise to begin with; now, neither physically nor geographically. I remember the popular kids, Sun Haoqi, Chen Li, and Fu Dede, always finished first. I now wonder if their popularity is related to their winning performance on these occasions. I almost always managed to make top 5 among a class of 41, so I never challenged our little system of honor.

How to Invent a Religion

T-Teacher rarely talked about himself.

Then, on a cloudless night, a few weeks before I headed to the U.S., he told me about an unpublished 500-page novel that he had written in his twenties:

All humans, before coming onto Earth, were their own gods, sitting on Venus, holding maps of their lives. They measured exact cups of personalities, overlooked the splitting paths of futurity, and performed their prophecies. They chose for themselves which households to be born into and debated between kindness and intelligence.

I must have been a sensible infant to decide that my parents’ divorce was worth their progressive, first-rate parenting. Did I have to fight another infant god for mom and dad?

A few weeks later, when I ducked into the Boeing 777 aircraft lavatory to dry my tear-swollen eyes, I thought of T-Teacher’s words, inked onto a stack of paper. Fifteen years ago, my infant god chose for me a far-flung journey in exchange for my wonderful parents’ sheltered proximity. I would never know why she had chosen so in the very beginning of things, but thinking of my little god with her meticulous calculations offered me peace in such moments of regretful uncertainty. I imagined my omniscient unborn self, sitting up in the vast, dusky universe; choosing adventure over security; and, now satisfied, diving into the green-blue planet.