On not writing
What we write about when we write about others; and other reflections on family, language, and community from my time away from writing
At some point in the last two years I told myself, “no more personal essays.” I still liked reading them, but I had more or less sworn off writing them — not indefinitely, but at least for the not so distant future. I told myself I’d write when I had something to say again. I acknowledged that could be years.
Would I still be a writer, then? I still wrote. I spent a lot of my time writing. I wrote memos at work. I wrote community newsletters. I wrote the occasional email to a friend I’d lost touch with. I wrote research papers for school. I wrote agendas for meetings. Once in a blue moon, I wrote a book review on Goodreads. But I no longer wrote personal essays. I did not feel like my voice should take up space in this political moment. I was weary of writing a diaspora narrative that co-opted the stories of my family members and their traumas. I did not want to pretend that I knew what I was talking about, that I was an authority on much of anything, when I still had so much to learn.
Sometimes I cringe at the sheer confidence with which I wrote in my mid-20s—freshly politicized, but far from knowledgeable. I was angry about whiteness and I needed people to know! I felt deeply and I needed people to know! And yet, I am trying to be gentle with this younger version of myself, one who was so excited by this new way of naming the world around me, one who was figuring out what it meant to be Chinese, one who finally felt safe enough to write and publish, one who was desperate to be witnessed, to feel seen.
As many children of immigrants do, I gravitated to writing about family.
I wrote a lot about my paternal grandparents, who I grew up seeing every Sunday; a 90-minute drive to Scarborough from my small and white hometown. Despite our regular visits, I never managed to understand Shanghainese. Sometimes I could piece together the vague meanings of sentences—which were often infused with accented Cantonese, but most of the time, I was totally at a loss as to what my Mah Mah and Yai Yai were saying. It was just too different from the Cantonese I was used to hearing. As a teen, I dreaded the long walk from the parking lot to my grandparents’ apartment unit—five minutes of painful silence as I helped them carry their weekly groceries, usually unable to muster up more than “bye bye!” and a hug when I was leaving. As an adult, I continued to feel anxious and inadequate about phone calls, which were tightly scripted for special occasions, and often no more than a couple minutes long.
I wrote about this: the deep shame that came with not being able to communicate with someone you love; the quiet ways we nevertheless attempted to express care.
After my Yai Yai passed away, I continued to write about Mah Mah. It was largely observation: things I noticed about her, assumptions I made based off those observations, how it all made me feel. It was almost as if I was trying to get to know her better, to fill in enormous blanks with nothing but my own reflections.
Here’s the thing: all those years writing about Mah Mah didn’t bring me closer to her.
Perhaps that should have been obvious. So much of writing, after all, is a solitary activity.
What did change things was when I started to call more often.
It had been my older sister’s idea to gift Mah Mah an iPad, who we worried was becoming increasingly isolated during the pandemic. We would teach her to FaceTime! My brother-in-law made little widgets with everyone’s faces on them that she could press if she wanted to call us—an icon for every cousin, uncle, and aunt. Cantonese Siri would announce when we were calling. After a brief period of protest, two crash courses (from my sister and dad respectively), and a few practice sessions, Mah Mah had become a pro at accepting video calls!
My sister encouraged me to call so that Mah Mah could practice getting the hang of this new technology. And although my worries about comprehension were still there, somehow I was no longer as anxious. Maybe it was the ability for us to see each other and gesture, or maybe it was through sheer willpower, but somehow, at the age of thirty, I was finally slowly learning to understand Shanghainese. Mah Mah had always understood Cantonese, so any gaps in communication had always been on my end — I used to simply nod or say “hai mai?”, or try and change the subject when I didn’t understand. Now, I found myself exclaiming, “I don’t understand!” and asking her to repeat herself by saying “hah?”
On a call last month, she informed me she had passed on a “yeeut been” to my parents to give to me. “Hah?! Oh eem sik tang ah!”—I told her I couldn’t understand. She repeated “yeeut been! yeeut been! yeeut been!” a dozen times, louder each time, exasperated—until it finally dawned on me that she was talking about a mid-autumn festival mooncake. I laughed and told her I couldn’t possibly eat a full one by myself. She shook her head and told me she had just explained that it would be for me and my sister to share. We both chuckled. Where there used to be shame, was now levity.
We’ve also started doing indoor visits again, now that we’re vaccinated. A couple weeks ago, she asked my younger sister and I to pull out a stack of old photo albums from one of her cabinets. We poured over them together until her eyes got tired. Flipping through each album, I stopped to point at photos and ask her questions, and somehow—to my own disbelief—I was able to understand most of Mah Mah’s answers and reflections. Perhaps to others this interaction will sound mundane, but to me, it just felt like such a radical shift in our ability to communicate.
It was also sobering. It dawned on me that so much of my past writing had embodied a kind of sad, diasporic longing to know my family history—when so much of that history was still living right in front of me.
That day, before we headed out, I asked Mah Mah if she’d seen her friends that she used to do tai chi with in the mornings, pre-pandemic. She said no, and added that that she had never truly been able to make friends, since none of the other Chinese seniors who did tai chi with her or who lived near her understood Shanghainese. She could understand everyone around her, but nobody could understand her.
When Mah Mah told me that, I was overcome with a wave of sadness, but also shame. I was ashamed to admit that I had not thought about how lonely it would be to live a life where most almost everyone, even people in your community, even your own grandkids, cannot understand you. I had not thought deeply about it because I had never bothered to ask. And yet, I had thought so much about this very topic: my Mah Mah and her Shanghainese. But it had always been about me — my inability to understand, my sadness, my longing.
There is an old essay by a younger me, where I say that I wrote about Mah Mah in an attempt to humanize her to an audience. I realize now that writing about Mah Mah was not so much about an attempt to humanize her to readers, but perhaps rather an attempt to humanize me.
I think that when we write about others, we are sometimes also trying to ask people to understand something about ourselves—the way we feel and perceive the world, at least in some small way.
I am never sure how to feel when I log onto Twitter and see doctors or lawyers tweeting about the people that they serve. These doctors or lawyers care about social justice. The anecdote is always anonymized, but the details are typically specific enough so as to tell a story about a bigger systemic failing. They are writing because they are angry, or heartbroken, or feeling hopeless, or exhausted. And while these stories are often moving and persuasive, my assumption is that most cases, the client or patient does not know that they are being spoken about online.
In my first year legal ethics class, we were assigned readings about how to lessen the effects of “vicarious trauma” we might experience as law students, but none on trauma-informed legal practice. I do think it is important to hold space for the heaviness that comes with witnessing and pushing back against the impacts of state, carceral, colonial, capitalist or sexual violence that many clinic, criminal, or other public interest lawyers will undoubtedly experience over the course of their careers. And there will of course be lawyers who will be intimately familiar with how these systems have caused harm in their own lives or that of their family’s. But I worry when as a whole — in our legal education, and then in practice — the feelings of the legal profession are centred or prioritized over the (often poor, racialized, or criminalized) people they serve.
I think about Sherene Razack’s writing on the limits of empathy and what it means to “steal the pain of others”. In one passage, she writes:
How do white people, Westerners in general and Canadians in particular, like to see themselves portrayed? The answer is simple: as heroes, but in our case, as sensitive humanitarians who feel the pain of others deeply.
Razack’s piece is in large part a critique of popular portrayals of Canada’s participation in the Rwandan genocide, and the Canadian public’s consumption of such ‘humanitarian’ portrayals. It is also a more general warning on how empathy—in centring our own feelings—can dehumanize and erase the subject of that empathy. I don’t think I’m exempt from this warning. I am thinking about this as it applies to writing, as it applies to my future legal practice, as it applies to how I want to show up in community organizing and in solidarity with movements. Where is the line drawn between someone else’s story and our own? How can we see one one another’s struggles as intertwined in the fight for liberation, but also be mindful of asymmetries of power, differences in social location? And, as Razack writes: “how do we recognize our own complicity and move through outrage to responsibility?”
I suppose that lately I’ve just been thinking more about the responsibility that comes with writing about others, and what we owe to those we write about.
I recently read a posthumous magazine profile on Anthony Veasna So, a queer Cambodian American writer who passed away last December at the age of 28. It was a sweeping and carefully crafted essay that gathered reflections from his boyfriend, his parents and family members, and his peers in the writing world. The piece gave context for his recently published short story collection, Afterparties, and detailed his ambitious plans for future works. It painted a layered picture of Anthony, all at once a brilliant writer, a family historian, and then to others who loved him—“bossy, cocky, self-centered, manic”. At points, the piece feels soap opera-ish: the writer mentions tensions between Anthony’s partner and his family regarding the estate. There is one section recounting the circumstances of his death by overdose, with a heading that reads: “The Cause of Death, According to the State”.
Although I had found the article captivating and moving, I could not help but feel unsettled after finishing it. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why, but part of me wished I had never read it. It was clear from the piece that the author—also an Asian writer—understood Anthony as someone who had carefully compartmentalized his life, who had set boundaries between family and the world outside of family. It seems that Anthony had presented different versions of himself to different people he loved, as so many children of immigrants do. And now, less than a year after his death, those careful boundaries were not only being blurred, but also presented to the world in this very public way.
So much of writing—about ourselves, about others—involves constructing narratives. When we write about ourselves, we stitch things together to help an audience make sense of our story; we are intentional about what to exclude. We have some sort of agency over what we grant people access to.
I think part of my discomfort stemmed from the undoing of this agency: the divergence between the way Anthony chose to write about the people he loved and the way the author of the profile chose to. At the end of Afterparties, Anthony thanks his parents, who, he wrote: “somehow clawed their way to a livable, beautiful life, who never thought to spare me from their stories, their history, who, instead, prepared me the best they could to seek growth, to not crumble under the pressure of everything bad and unjust.”
He also writes to his partner: “Thank you for being hilarious, absurd, beautiful. Thank you for showing me that a queer Cambo from Stockton, California, could find a wealth of commonality with a queer half-Mexican kid from rural Illinois.”
And while the magazine profile does capture these beautiful parts of Anthony’s relationships with the people he loved, perhaps the way Anthony would want them to be remembered, the piece also paints a darker picture—suggesting that his death, and what has followed, has called into question “how well they really knew Anthony”.
Of course our real lives are more complicated, messier, and more nuanced that the version we narrate to the world. When was it okay for someone else to be the one to grant readers access to that complexity? What power does a writer hold over someone else’s narrative? Did writers typically require the consent of the people they profile before they share intimate details of their lives? If they did, what to make of consent after someone has passed? Is there privacy after death?
That night, feeling unsettled, I pasted the article link into the Twitter search bar to look for other reactions to the piece. I mostly found a deluge of praise, much of it from fellow writers: “beautifully written”, '“stunning”, “masterclass in journalism.” Reading over those comments, I could not help but wonder: were people thinking about Anthony, his family, the people he loved — or were they thinking about writing; about craft?
I have not been writing much this year, but I have been spending more time thinking about language. I’m noticing my relationship to language changing in new and different ways, in ways that reach beyond the context of my family, in ways that feel political.
“I’m sorry, my Chinese is not so great!”, I said, as I attempted to explain a PDF document using broken Cantonese to a massage worker over the phone, as I tried to express that our legal systems were fundamentally unfair.
“I’m sorry, my Chinese is not so great!”, I said, as I conducted a paper survey for Chinese residents in a seniors building, trying to figure out what the right words were to ask: have you been lonely?
“I’m sorry, my Chinese is not so great!”, I said, as I gestured at my stomach and asked a 90-year old man if he had experienced diarrhea or any other COVID symptoms in the past fourteen days at a Chinatown vaccine clinic.
“I’m sorry, my Chinese is not so great!”, I said, as I asked fellow organizers to explain, for the sixth time, how to say ‘minimum wage’, ‘paid sick days’, and ‘we want to improve working conditions’ in Cantonese during a Zoom call. I recorded voice memos on my phone to help me remember. In the background of one of the recordings, you can hear my peers cheering me on, “you can do it! you can do it! you can do it!”, as I slowly struggled to remember each tone, each syllable.
It was true that in all those conversations, my Cantonese was not so great. Although my accent was decent, my vocabulary was that of a six year old, one who mostly knew how to speak about food—one who had no idea which words to string together to speak about the failures of the state, or the violence of the law, or more complicated emotions beyond happiness and sadness and fear. But I was also understanding—on a deeper level—the importance of learning how to have these conversations if I truly wanted to participate in multilingual movements, in organizing spaces that didn’t centre English. And perhaps, like with my Mah Mah, I was learning to be okay with the discomfort of fumbling through language.
There is an essay from 2015 by Jenny Zhang, where she writes, “O maybe no one really does care. Maybe it is humiliating to attempt anything”. A couple paragraphs later she writes, “I think everyone wants to make something touchable, but most of us don’t out of fear of being laughable.”
I am no longer coming to writing with the same certainty that I did even a few years ago. I am acutely aware that that there might be contradictions within my own reflections—of the possibility that what I am writing could be, in fact, humiliating.
I had told myself I’d write when I had something to say again. So—all this writing now, to say what? I’m not quite sure. Perhaps to say: I feel that these two years have given me the space to begin to better understand how I want to be in relationship with the people I love and write about, how I want to be in community, and how to better live my politics offline, and off of paper. Perhaps only to remind myself that it was okay to stop writing — but also to give myself permission to come back to it.