view from here

The night before NSOP, I spent an entire dinner explaining a TED talk to my parents. I think that offers a kind of karmic explanation for the rest of the evening.

In my shafted dorm room, the mornings are dark.

My father spent his life outside, nestled between the Appalachian foothills and the Ohio River. I, on the other hand, was no Laura Ingalls Wilder. I much preferred to read about the great outdoors than see it myself.

On April 24th, 2017, in the suburbs of Wilton, Connecticut, a house burned. The flame started in the attic and moved downward with an open, red mouth. The fire lasted for only half an hour, but by the time the fire department arrived, the sky shone brightly into the living room. This is what was lost: three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a hallway, another hallway, an heirloom Persian rug, family pictures, a beloved stuffed animal, a double-breasted Armani suit from the eighties saved for a daughter for when the time came, and the alphabetized library of a woman who spent 40 years gathering the books she loved.

You aren’t able to tell from my name that I’m Chinese. The first part hints at my mom’s taste in literature, the last is a small act of feminism: two long American surnames that won’t fit on a hospital wristband. I do have a Chinese name, but I don’t use it. It came on my adoption documents, and it’s supposed to mean “bean sprout,” but Google Translate doesn’t agree. I type “Qimeng” into the translation engine, and it gets regurgitated in English as “to enlighten” or “to free from prejudice.” I like “bean sprout” more.

Content Warning: This piece deals with issues of death and grief.

When I was a preschooler growing up in New York City, I would walk down Museum Mile’s cobblestone sidewalk with my mom and dad to visit The Met. I could roam the museum for hours: muffled chatter filling cavernous rooms warmed with artifacts and paintings hanging on whitewashed walls underneath yellow bulbs.

Mostly, I remember the shouting. My house is four stories tall—including the basement—and sprawls out haphazardly across a hill. I’m standing in my bedroom, maybe the living room, maybe the kitchen. It doesn’t really matter. The shouts barrel through doors and hallways and up and down flights of stairs and find me wherever I am.

Until I made the decision to quit debate in my junior year of high school, debate was my Thing. I was thrilled when I started the ninth grade because I was finally able to join the high school team. I spent the days I had practice getting home well past dark, I hardly saw friends on the weekends because I was competing in Pennsylvania or upstate New York or a New England city I hadn’t even heard of before, and I spent most of my free time reading philosophy that I am now mature enough to admit I did not quite understand.