We are winding down Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Hertiage Month (AANHPI) and because life was life-ing, I haven’t been able to do much outside of manage my daily life to the best of my ability.

That changed this week.

On Wednesday, a dear friend of mine, T, took me out to see Selected Shorts at Symphony Space in the city (yes, that city, also known as Manhattan, for those who are not from around here). If you didn’t know, Selected Shorts is a series that Symphony Space runs where actors read and perform literary short stories on stage. This particular event was focused on AANHPI heritage month and featured short stories written by Asian-American writers that were focused on the theme of “generation gap”, read by Asian-American actors. You can glimpse the roster HERE.

I didn’t know what to expect. I love stories. And I love being read to. (This is one of the reasons I love audiobooks. But the voice actor can make or break an audiobook. So… it depends.) I was excited. T was excited for me. She had been a regular at this series pre-pandemic and was looking forward to sharing her love of this kind of performance with me.

I was not prepared.

Or maybe I was, but I had forgotten. Forgotten what it was like to hear my own experiences reflected in the stories of others. Forgotten what it felt like to know I wasn’t alone in my struggle to raise Asian immigrant parents in American culture while still a kid. Forgotten what it felt like to have my childhood traumas reflected back to me, a trauma that was recognized and acknowledged. Forgotten what it felt like to be seen—truly seen—as a third culture kid of the diaspora.

Sure, I’ve had experiences where survivors of r*pe have shared their stories which resonated with me. I’ve had moments of a shared recognition and understanding with other women who have been harmed by the patriarchy. But more often than not, those stories and those women were inevitably white.

There’s a different kind of connection when the stories are from your own people. It’s deeper. More personal. More intimate. There’s a level of nuance and understanding that no one else will get, no matter how much you try to explain it.

And that’s the thing: there’s no need to explain. There’s an inherent, shared knowing.

As I sat there, listening to these stories being—yes, read to me—but also being performed for me, I was pulled into my own memories of what it’s been like to be born and raised here in the U S as a brown person.

So many times I felt myself nodding. And I felt the other AANHPI members of the audience nodding their heads with me.

Yes, this is how it happened. Yes, this is how it unfolded.

One story, “The Hawk” by Jules Chung, read and performed by Ruthie Ann Miles, touched the Asian-American mother in me. That feeling of being caught between honoring, preserving, and passing down cultural heritage to our children while also trying to do right by our children, to do better, to minimize whatever trauma we might inflict upon them. To see and honor our own children as individuals. AND the pain that comes with the stage of life when our adolescent children want to individuate, to separate from us; that time when they pull away from us and want nothing to do with us. And they do it in such sharp and painful ways.

For me, that pain still smarts. And while technically I am past that stage, my daughters still continue to move forward into their own lives, separate from me. Which is not always easy to accept, but at least it’s not as sharp and abrupt. There is now a kind of understanding of what’s happening on both sides of this evolution, and we do our best to move more kindly through it.

Tears welled in my eyes as I listened to this story unfold.

The final story of the night, however, was compelling and riveting. “The Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu was read and performed for us by BD Wong. And WOW. And WHEW. Two days later, I’m still processing what I experienced.

It’s the story of a boy, Jack, whose mother, a mail-order bride from Hong Kong, makes him origami animals, breathing life into them (literally). They are the boy’s companions during his childhood. The rest of the story follows Jack through his evolutionary understanding of his identity as a mixed-race Asian, self-hate and all, and tracks his relationship with his Chinese mother. It’s so painful and magical and true.

The tears flowed freely down my face. It was hard to breathe. I restrained the sobs that wanted to come out because I feared that 1) I would interrupt the magical bubble that BD Wong had created, 2) I wouldn’t be able to stop, and 3) I’d trigger a wave of sobbing in the audience because I could hear the quiet sniffles, the kind where you know people are holding back, restraining themselves, likely for the same reasons.

Afterwards, T and I went grabbed coffee and dessert so we could process what just happened before we got in the car to head home.

Aside from what I’ve already shared here, the biggest moment that still lingered in my mind, body, and spirit (even now as I write this two days later) was when Jack heard the words of his mother’s story in her native language. He says:

“The language that I had tried to forget for years came back, and I felt the words sinking into me, through my skin, through my bones, until they squeezed tight around my heart.”

As he hears his mother’s story, read to him by a stranger, she writes: “Because I have to write with all my heart, I need to write to you in Chinese.”

And I couldn’t help but suddenly feel that moment in my own skin, in my own bones, the squeeze around my own heart. It was then I transported back to a moment in my own life, quite recently, where—during a deep and intense healing session— my memories let loose the fact that English was not my first language, but that Tagalog was. And that was where home felt to be.

All this time, I had been looking for home to be a physical place, and it turned out to be in sound, in music, in language.

*

Yesterday, I attended an online salon on Asian-Americans and mental wellness, offered by AAPI Women Lead. The three guests, JS Park, Tersia Siagatonu, and Susanna Barkataki, were all amazing in their own right. Each offered a little something from their own pockets (Park: a convo on grief; Siagatonu: a poem as offering; Barkataki: a gentle yoga practice rooted in liberation) and then they came together with Dr Connie Wu in conversation, addressing some real, deep-inquiry questions. (When the replay is available, I’ll add it here.)

What was so potent for me was the palpable energy of community, despite the digital flatness of a zoom call. The reaction emojis and the comments in the chat were full of camaraderie and encouragement, witness and support. And yes, jokes, too. Humor is necessary in order to survive and tear down the oppressive systems we live in.

But this was different. This was different from a zoom room I popped into for a few minutes two nights prior. That room was a gathering of folks who were looking to reconnect with the sacredness of the earth, the sacredness of ritual. And if you know me, I’m all about ritual and magic and earth and sacred spaces. But that particular space from two nights prior felt… MEH. The energy was flat, two-dimensional as my laptop screen.

Why? Because it was full of white women. Middle-aged white women with whom I share nothing, except for maybe a few Gen-X cultural references. Generally speaking, they didn’t seem engaged. The chat was dead. The emoji reactions not present. Their faces stared blankly into their cameras. As if they were waiting to be fed. Like little baby birds in the nest. Waiting to be fed instruction on what to do next. To be told on how to BE rather than getting curious and exploring possibilities for that or, at the very least, asking questions. I kinda felt bad for the facilitators as I could see the labor they were putting forth without reciprocal engagement. I’ve been in that position before and it was likely frustrating for them.

What a contrast to last night with my AANHPI people! I didn’t mind that we went over the allotted time by a few minutes. I actually was ready and willing to stay a bit longer. And what this gathering showed me and reminded me was that community is possible, even in the flatness of a digital zoom call. That it’s truly about the people who are gathered, about the energy with which the gathering was created, and the energy that the people bring.

*

These two events – last night’s AAPI Women Lead online mental wellness salon and Wednesday night’s Selected Shorts—reminded me of how important it is for us to have our own spaces. Not to exclude anyone, but instead to feel seen and heard, to feel safe enough to share our stories, and to build nervous system resilience required for this fight toward liberation. To strengthen bonds across our shared inherent knowing so that we can then begin to build alliances and coalitions across other communities and feel assured in the work we are doing, in the worlds we are creating. When we can strengthen trust in ourselves and in our own people and communities, that inevitably leads to strong bonds of trust in others. And this is what’s key in building movements that affect real meaningful change.

Happy AANHPI Heritage month y’all! Go hug (with permission of course) your fave AANHPI person and tell them you’re glad they’re here.

I’m glad you’re here. ❤