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Harrison Scott Key| Longreads | December 6, 2023 | 17 minutes (4,850 words)

I have enjoyed many happy Christmases and plenty of disappointing ones, like the one I spent eating alone at a Waffle House due to an ice storm, or the Christmas my father accused all the unmarried relatives of being gay. But of all the sad Yuletides of my life, the one I spent guarding $100,000 worth of explosives on the surface of the moon tops the list. The year was 1996. I was 21 years old and, in a way, quite homeless. Home is one of the enduring themes of Christmas, the joy of being in its midst and the thundering melancholy of longing for it, wondering if you can ever really get that feeling of belonging back—if you ever had it in the first place.

At the time, I was a college student in Jackson, Mississippi, and rarely went home. I would only fight with Pop about why I stopped going to church or entertain questions from Mom about my sudden hair loss and what this did or did not mean about radon poisoning. I did love my family, or at least the idea of them, and took great pride in our being rednecks who lived far off in the Piney Woods, a lawless land where nobody would deliver a pizza. So many of my college friends came from civilized places with public parks and museums. When somebody asked where I was from, I would pull out the atlas to poke my finger at the unmarked point on a map of Mississippi, between Brandon and a subatomic little village called Puckett. “Traveling circuses wintered there,” I’d say, a detail I learned from the Rankin County News as a boy.

It was a nonplace, really. The boonies. The sort of place you only went if you were searching for an escaped convict or a coonskin cap. It did not feel like home. Nowhere did. Mom was from the Delta, Pop from the Hill Country up near Coldwater. “Mama and thems,” he called it, in a county where all the cemeteries had tombstones full of Scotts and Keys, which are two of my names. It felt nice to be in a place where so many of my family members had been embalmed. 

As a young man, my father declined an offer to take over the family farm and split for Memphis to seek his fortune like a character in an old country song, though he never found it there. Memphis is where I was born. Was that my home? When I was nine, Pop’s work brought us down to the Piney Woods near Puckett, some three hours south, where we had no kin. In a place like Mississippi, where kin matters, we might as well have moved to Tierre del Fuego. But I had my first kiss here, and hit my first homerun. Maybe this was home. 

It was, I suppose, until a week before Thanksgiving in my senior year of college. I’d come back to do a little laundry when Pop strode into the kitchen and gravely informed me that they were selling the house and moving again, due to a land dispute with a choleric farmer up the road who hated everyone but his cows.

“Where are you moving?” I asked.

“Up to town,” Pop said.

He meant the Ross Barnett Reservoir, an artificial lake with weedy marinas surrounded by forgettable subdivisions, which would allow my father to carry on his illicit affair with the largemouth bass. It was hardly 30 minutes away, but the people up there were all new.

“You coming up to mama and thems to hunt?” Pop asked as I folded laundry.

I didn’t want to spend Christmas with my family at a farm that never would feel like home, staring backward into a past that only made you sad. I wanted to stare forward. I wanted something new. I needed money, for one. My parents sure didn’t have any. “You have to come,” Mom said. “It’s Christmas.”

“Maybe,” I said, walking out of my last childhood home for the last time. I would never come back to this place. We had no people here. Why would I come back? Where would I stay?

I hadn’t been to church in years but still read my Bible often, with all those horrid battles and beasts and skin diseases that reminded me so much of my Mississippi childhood. The elusiveness of home is one of the Bible’s great themes. God himself was mostly homeless. “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests,” he says, “but the Son of Man hath nowhere to lay his head,” Jesus says, a little passive-aggressively. 

God doesn’t seem to care too much about where you’re from, and when you’re from a place, he likes making you go somewhere else, usually worse. The whole book is a fever dream of exile and real estate development, beginning in a garden and ending 1,200 chapters later in something even better than New York in autumn, a hermit’s grand hallucination of a city almost impossible in its beauty and cleanliness and tax revenue. 

I remembered my Bible, and all those hymns, too, so many songs about looking for a home you can’t quite put your hands on. In “We’re Marching to Zion,” we sang about the “beautiful city” that awaited us, reached via “The Gloryland Way,” a spiritual highway leading into a metaphorical Canaan’s Land where there exists a habitation on a hilltop for peoples of every nation with no war or passport requirements. Until then, we slouched through arid and inhospitable lands, filled with stumps and snakes. The message was clear: you could find a home—you just have to die first.

I drove through woods and up into town toward Jackson, wondering if God had a home for me out there, somewhere. He’d led the Israelites to theirs with a pillar of smoke by day and fire by night, but driving back to campus in the dark, I saw no burning signs pointing the way. All I saw was a great big billboard off the interstate, bathed in spotlight. In a blaze of fluorescent fire, the sign shouted with holy ghost power: fireworks!

And I got to thinking.

There are places that matter, sites of consecration and meaning, both natural and human, that possess, through the alchemy of time and memory, a holiness: very old churches, ancient baseball stadiums, certain groves of trees on certain campuses. The Romans called it genius loci, the spirit that inhabits the earth and air of a place. 

There are places and there are also nonplaces, forgotten or ignored or transformed by human progress into blind spots of experience where nobody wants to be, like the landscaping in front of a Burger King. The expansive lot with the fireworks billboard off the interstate was a nonplace, which is perhaps why I felt so irresistibly drawn to it. 

The billboard stood high on a pole, just off I-55, alongside US Highway 80. Once known as the Dixie Overland Highway, it stretched from the briny waters of the Atlantic near Savannah, Georgia, to the raging tempests of the Pacific near San Diego, California, and through a now-forgettable piece of Jackson over the brown sad water of the Pearl River. As I drove by this nonplace, I beheld a magnificent wasteland below the billboard, once a truckstop, now a field of gravel featuring the sort of tattered sheet metal structures where they chain hostages to the floor. 

The fireworks sign stayed up all year, because every June and December, a capacious candy-striped circus tent filled with all manner of fiery delights materialized in this post-industrial apocalypse as if by some strange wood-elf magic. It seemed like the perfect place for a boy from nowhere to spend the upcoming holiday. I don’t know what prompted me to call the telephone company and find the phone number of the company that operated this fireworks tent, but that’s exactly what I did.

“Absolutely not,” Mom said, when I explained over the phone that I’d found holiday employment with Boom City, LLC, a subsidiary of The Hunan Group, Inc., managing Central Mississippi’s largest fireworks tent on a dark patch of highway just over the river from the Murder Capital of the New South. Death was rampant in the area: stabbings, execution-style shootings at the river or the strip clubs just over the hill.

“You’ll be robbed,” Mom said. “What kind of company hires a child to sell explosives?”

Something possessed me, a hunger to escape, to hurry up and exile myself and get it over with. Missing Christmas would be a hard stop, a clean death for the past. 

A few days later, during finals week, my father made a rare appearance on campus. Most of the students were gone already. 

“I brought you some things,” Pop said, opening the trunk of the car to reveal gun cases, ammo, and a machete wrapped in an army blanket.

“Your momma’s worried, son. The machete will make her feel better. I sharpened it,” he said, thumbing the blade.

Pop had brought along my old 12-gauge pump, my .30-.06 rifle, and three preloaded clips with 220-grain shot, in case the fireworks tent was attacked by a team of bison.

“And some pistols,” he said, handing me a bag of pistols.

“Thanks, Pop,” I said, transferring the arsenal to my trunk, a few parking spaces over.

Sometimes, when I think about my life, I think about the quiet moments that may have shaped me more than I could’ve known, like the time my father handed me a sack of guns in a dormitory parking lot because he didn’t want me to die. 

I reported for duty on Wednesday, December 18, 1996. I brought long johns, a hunting coat, bedroll, cookstove, radio, books, and the weapons; along with sufficient foodstuffs for the long dark winter: boxes of ramen, several gallons of Dinty Moore Beef Stew—enough survival gear to stage a delicious, hearty coup. 

The lot was hemmed in on two sides by interstate overpasses and a vast junkyard to the rear. In between the tent and the interstate sat a midcentury motor lodge for travelers using this highway, back when travelers used this highway. The place was still open, rot be damned. A sign announced: telephone in every room. Presumably, so you could call and say goodbye to your loved ones as you bled out on the floor.

The enormous circus tent had gone up overnight. A tractor-trailer the color of dry mustard backed up to one corner, but otherwise, the site was empty—a moonscape. Here I was to meet a man called Donny, who’d show me where the execution-style murders would take place.

Donny was maybe 30 years old with a .44 Magnum on his hip and ran all the Boom City tents in this part of the state. Orientation began in the tent proper, big enough for a church revival, strings of naked bulbs draped across the expanse of it. He opened the trailer, the merchandise stacked to the ceiling. 

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“It’s a hundred grand worth of fireworks,” he said. “I hope you got a gun.”

“I have enough guns to start a new government,” I said.

Behind the trailer, tucked away in the back, were my sleeping quarters, a tiny trailer the color and shape of a Grade B egg.

“There’s a hot plate in there,” he said. “But don’t use it.”

“Got it.”

“You get caught leaving, you’ll be fired,” he said.

“Got it.”

He looked around the empty tent and went to a dark place inside himself. 

“People will want to steal everything,” he said. “But don’t go calling the cops just because. Don’t be jumpy like the last dude.”

“What happened to the last dude?” I said.

“He got jumpy.” 

“What if I need to shower?”

“Use the motel,” he said, of the sex workers’ encampment across the lot. “They’ll give you a shower for five dollars.”

“Have you ever been inside it?” I asked.

“Hell no,” he said. 

Donny had me sign papers that relieved Boom City of any liability in the event of my dismemberment and said he’d see me in a week to empty the cash box and bury my remains.

Alone now on the surface of this godless asteroid, I tossed my bag and bedding into the egg. I’d brought a single sheet and a pair of heavy, careworn quilts made by my great-grandmother, Mama Bessie—my mother’s mother’s mother—tough as old boot leather and the size of an emaciated gnome. Mama Bessie raised six children alone and came from a time when men were men and women were also men, due to all the men dying. She made her home near Possumneck, another nonplace, east of West and west of Ethel. I could not shake the strangeness of life—how one day, you’re a boy, hoping Santa Claus answers your letters, and the next, you’re living inside a fiberglass egg with a loaded rifle and a pair of heirloom quilts from a village that Santa will never again visit, for it no longer exists.

I worked myself ragged that first day, through the early sunset and into the blue-black chill of night. My overnight security would be arriving sometime before midnight. Donny had let me hire my own night watchman, and I’d selected my big brother, Bird, the only human I knew— besides my father—who seemed capable of manslaughter. He was in town for a few days and sleeping at the new house over at the reservoir, the one I hadn’t even been to yet.

When Bird finally showed up, my body was already covered in a fine layer of gunpowder. 

“What’s the new house like?” I said.

“It’s a house,” he said.

“I’m going to bed,” I said.

“What do you want me to do all night?” he said, surveying the ridiculous tent.

“Keep us both alive.” I handed him one of the pistols.

“I brought my own.”

“If something bad happens, wake me up,” I said.

“Just come out if you hear shooting,” Bird said.

That first morning, my big brother woke me with a vigorous rap on the door of the egg. I unfolded myself, thanked him, and he drove away, to return 16 hours later, as he would every night that holiday. Even when it turned steely cold, I found the solitary work hypnotic and absorbing, a way to vanquish the dread regime of time. For 18 hours, I unboxed and priced Roman candles, M-60s, Black Cats, Saturn missiles, my body covered in combustible dirt. At sunset, I walked the lot with a price gun in one hand and a pistol in the other. I warmed a bowl of Dinty Moore on the forbidden hot plate and watched holiday programming on a small TV on the counter.

When the weather turned cold and unexpected flurries began, I donned a woolen poncho and took my smoke breaks mere steps from the explosives, using the tractor-trailer as a windbreak. I must have looked a sight to the customers and dealers who came and went with some frequency from the Sex Lodge. Sometimes I read Shakespeare. I had a Complete Works the shape and size of a Bible, tiny print on cigarette paper. I had given some thought to becoming an actor, traveling the countryside with a troupe. Who needs a home when you’ve got a stage?

A hundred yards behind the tent, out in the scrubby desert of disemboweled cars, sat a cinderblock shed where a man with a wispy white mullet lived, sexton of the junkyard. I saw him only once a day when he tootled around the lot on a small dune buggy. One day after lunch, I walked across the gravel to introduce myself. Nobody answered and I walked away. Then a voice rang out.

“Ho, there!” 

I turned and there he was, in overalls and T-shirt, waving me back.

“I’m Otto,” he said.

“I’m working the tent,” I said. 

“I do like a sparkler from time to time,” he said, his mind wandering to a happier youth. 

“I’ve seen you out here on your dune buggy,” I said.

“That ain’t me,” he said. 

“Oh,” I said, though it was obviously him.

“That’s the other Otto.”

I wanted to ask him what it was like to live with dissociative identity disorder and which Otto would be slitting my throat later. But this Otto seemed pleasant. 

Customers were scarce—a few truck drivers, attorneys who drove over the bridge from downtown. One afternoon, a local TV reporter stopped by and asked to interview me for a segment on fireworks safety and I made up some important facts about fireworks safety. I must have looked like something dragged out of a bog, the scruffy character in the holiday movie who teaches life lessons.

I called Mom from the landline that ran into the tent from a nearby pole, to give her the number and offer proof of life.

“Could you come to the farm Christmas day, at least?” she said.

“I can’t,” I said.

“I left you a turkey breast, if you get a chance to go to the house,” she said.

“I can’t, I’m not allowed to leave.”

“I just hate this,” she said. “It’s Christmas.”

Isolation works a number on you. I almost wanted criminals to stop by. In the long stretch of dark between sundown and the arrival of my brother, I took to dragging a chair out in the middle of the lot, beyond the glow of the tent, under the great black ceiling of stars, staring up into the cold. I felt like Abraham when God told him to leave home and go find another one and that his family would grow as many as the stars above. I felt like Jacob, his grandson, who sleeps on the ground at night and demands a blessing and God puts him in a scissor hold and gives him a hip injury that lasts all his days. It always seemed odd to me that God would appear to Jacob and all Jacob wanted to do was wrestle. But after a week out on the moonscape, I understood. If God had shown up, I’d have wanted to wrestle, too. 

The night of Christmas Eve, I sat out in front of the tent looking at the stars, the faint wash of interstate traffic a distant waterfall. Where were all the people going? Back home or madly away? My school friends were spread across the country. Other friends were over beyond the gelid swamp rot at Martin’s, a seedy downtown lounge always lively in the homecoming days before Christmas, filled with a neon haze of cigarette smoke and the beautiful stench of whisky and ash. The thought of all that happiness made me sad. I didn’t want to be sad but you can’t help what you think about. All those people, at least the ones I knew, had homes to go back to, right there in town, warm childhood beds in leafy neighborhoods where they’d grown up and could probably keep coming back to for the rest of their lives, if they wanted. 

The idea of having a place to go back to—a house, a village, where you would know people and they would know you—seemed a priceless luxury beyond imagination. Pop had a place like that, at the Coldwater farm. He was there now, asleep next to Mom in a bed in his parents’ house, on the land he called home and always would. I had an egg on wheels.

When Bird showed up that night to let me sleep, I’d made up my mind.

“I’m going to the new house,” I said. 

“Thought you wasn’t supposed to leave,” he said.

“If Donny shows up, tell him I’m over at the motel.”

I careened through better parts of town, everything closed for Christmas Eve but shop windows gleaming yet with light. I wanted a shower. It would be a gift to myself, a small luxury, a humanizing act, a blessing to wrest from the grip of God. I pulled into the neighborhood, tucked away on a forgettable street among a series of forgettable subdivisions, each with its own forgettable boat ramp. The design of the homes was derivative at best, another subdivision without history, all those Frankenstein facades, a Victorian gable here, a Tudor chimney there, shallow porches, hollow columns. The new house was dark, just another brick ranch with shutters that wouldn’t close. 

As soon as I saw it, I laughed aloud: I’d once gone out with a girl who lived here, two or three years before. Uncanny. The girl, Libby, was so pretty, so kind, so tall, so blond—like a captain for the Finnish national volleyball team—and I remember feeling envy that she lived here, in a house, in a place where you could get pizza delivered right to your door. Life is weird.

Pop’s boat was backed into the open carport. Through the window, I caught the unmistakable glow of our lighted Christmas tree, though the house was empty. I found the key Pop had handed me a month before and tried the side door, but it didn’t work, and neither did any other key, and neither would the windows budge nor the locks be jimmied with a credit card. I kicked the shrubberies. I cursed the name of God. I whispered fuck very loudly. 

I climbed up into the bass boat, into the only good seat available, and smoked. 

Libby! Where had her family gone? The brass knocker on the front door still had her family’s surname on it. She’d lived here all her life, she said. Why’d they leave? Divorce? Promotion? A sudden turn of ill fortune? Where did she sleep now and was she sad about that? 

I guess it was in that moment that I must have first begun to see, through a glass, darkly, that all of us lose home eventually. Otto hadn’t been born in that cinderblock shed. Mom had no family farm. She had nothing but us, her children. No wonder she called the fireworks tent every night. When I took this ridiculous job and then hired her firstborn to risk his life so that I might sleep a little, I’d done more than cancel my own Christmas. I’d canceled everybody else’s, too. 

I threw my head back and exhaled a cloud of breath and smoke and overhead saw a perfect square cut into the carport ceiling. Maybe Christmas didn’t have to be annulled. Maybe I could climb through the ceiling and sit by the tree and just enjoy it, for an hour or two.

I found a ladder in the garage and climbed into the attic, crawling on hands and knees across ceiling joists with a lighter to show me the way. I would take a shower and make a delicious turkey sandwich. It would make Mom so happy to know she’d fed me. Maybe I would make a fire, sit by the tree, and watch It’s a Wonderful Life, remembering happier Christmases. Maybe even pray for a few more, down the road. I would make Bird a sandwich, too. 

Up in the rafters now, above what I reasoned was the kitchen, I kicked at every hole in the ceiling that looked like it might be an attic door, but nothing would give. I kicked and cursed like a failed St. Nick, with no gifts and no magic and no way into a house that would never be a home. No room in this inn. Not tonight.

I climbed out and drove back to the emptiness on US 80, where I half-expected to find Bird dead, all the money and fireworks gone, but he sat there, perfectly unharmed, a rifle across his lap, watching a snowy feed on the television. 

Later, Bird and I sat there together in the dark beyond the light of the tent and smoked. From the interstate, the warm red light of the striped canvas must have looked inviting in the blackness. The Bible says Jesus is just like that, a tent you can crawl inside. “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God,” writes John in the Book of Revelation. 

“Merry Fucking Christmas, little brother,” Bird said.

“So merry,” I said, fingering the safety of my rifle.

We looked at the stars and told stories. I did not want to leave him alone and I think he did not want me to go to sleep. Whatever sadness I felt was as much my fault as anybody’s. I’d made my choices. Home was out there, somewhere. All the hymns said so. Maybe it would be a city or maybe it would be a church or a wife and children or a house on a beautiful street, or maybe it would just be peace in the invisible tabernacle that was Jesus. Who could know.

A few days later, the world descended upon the house of explosives and bought almost everything. Nobody died, I saw no drug deals gone wrong, nobody shot anybody, and Otto didn’t show himself again and neither did the other Otto. I hired a few friends to help out on New Year’s Eve, and it was nice to have company. 

After midnight, when the crowd finally thinned and the traffic slowed, out beyond the glow of the tent, my friends fired off bottle rockets and multi-shot aerials, which burst in bright bouquets of color and light over the junkyard and far across the darkness of the river, and it was fun to see them having fun, but my mind was already down the road, toward some new future where I might never have to be alone again at the most wonderful time of the year. A family. A wife. A place to sleep without wheels. My last night on the lot, in the trailer shaped like an egg, I felt ready to hatch and fly toward some new home. 

These days, I don’t know what to tell people when they ask where I’m from. I have lived in Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Illinois, North Carolina, and Wyoming, and I’ve lived in Savannah, Georgia, now for 17 years—longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere. My mother lives here and my father is buried here, under soft green grass five minutes from my house. I have a wife, too, who moved as a child even more than I did. We have three girls. One will be off to college next fall and the other two after that. I like the idea of staying here so that our children can be from somewhere, even when they leave. It’s nice to know where you’re from.

When people ask where I’m from, I still say “Mississippi.”

And people say, “Whereabouts?”

Sometimes I say, “The Piney Woods.”

Sometimes, “Brandon,” where I had my first kiss.

Or “Star,” where I went to high school.

Or “Puckett,” where I hit that homerun. 

Mostly I just say “You haven’t heard of it. I haven’t even heard of it.”

I still think about that big circus tent. Strangely enough, I now live mere blocks from the very origins of the old Dixie Overland Highway, US 80. They call it Victory Drive here in Savannah, Georgia, but it’s the very same road that runs right by the tent where I worked that December, some 600 miles to the east. I ride my bike across this road to go to work. Crossing that road is like fording a river of time that runs back through the weird history of my little life and all the places I’ve lived and left. Sometimes I think the only home any of us have is in the tabernacle of memory, though I do own a pretty brick house on a leafy street, which feels as close to paradise as I’ll ever get, at least on this side of the Gloryland Way.

The year after I worked the tent, I heard that my successor had been robbed of all his money in the middle of the night and stripped naked, gagged, and bound to a pole. Discovered hours later he was believed to be dead but was only asleep. They say he was fine. I still drive over that piece of interstate every few years when I come back to Mississippi, and I always look off toward the moonscape with fondness; that desolation where I spent the loneliest Christmas of my life. The motel is still there, and so is Otto’s cottage. I don’t know if the tent goes up anymore. In place of the large fireworks sign is a great big banner promising romantic adventures. I have often considered stopping, to have a closer look and stand there amid the wasteland and feel the sweet pang of lost youth, but having no weapon, I drive on.

Harrison Scott Key is the author of three nonfiction books, including How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told, Congratulations Who Are You Again, and The World’s Largest Man. He lives in Savannah, Georgia.

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens

I wanted to call and tell them to turn around and go back, but it wouldn’t have been any use. They wanted to be closer to me and my children on the East Coast. People can be heliotropic, their faces turning toward the future the way flowers lean to the sun. They were always going to follow their grandchildren, and I was the one who’d spirited them north in the first place. I had been the one to end our family’s history in Texas; they had only been late to accept it.

The more we pulled, the more we saw it – an amorphous black patch, about the size of a double bed, in the centre of the room. Some of the boards appeared chewed up and peppered by flecks of white and grey where there had obviously been some kind of fire. My homebuyer’s survey had mentioned nothing of this. 

When we talk about our hometowns, we’re likely also talking about the rocky geography of adolescence: its intractable grip on our throats, which we might conflate with the landscape in which we were almost, but not quite, free. Adolescence is an age marked by deficit— what we don’t have, or don’t have yet.

My desk faces the wall; I don’t want to see the horizon when I write. As a kid, I was constantly looking beyond myself, beyond my world. What’s out there to see? To write about? Now, I just want one more hour, thirty minutes even, to work from within.

To me, back then, that brownstone stood for everything I wanted: solidity and urbanity, possibility and permanence. I could see it, stand inside it, even sleep there. But it wasn’t mine, and I had no idea who or where or what I was.

For so long I was so sure that the right boy and the right brownstone would give me the right life, just as my parents believed that success required leaving the city and living in houses, even if—even after— those houses cost everything they had.

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By Cheri Lucas Rowlands

As I gathered stories for my recent reading list on the power of names, Vesna Jaksic Lowe’s newsletter, Immigrant Strong, came to mind. In each issue, Jaksic Lowe recommends excellent writing by and about immigrant writers, and creates a space for stories on identity, belonging, multicultural life, and even the complexities of returning home. 

Since 2009, reading and recommending stories we love has been at the core of Longreads. We also remain inspired by the work of fellow curators, like Jaksic Lowe, who read widely, explore their interests and obsessions, and make it easier for people to find something to read.

After consistently enjoying Jaksic Lowe’s reading recommendations, I asked if she’d be willing to discuss her work and perspective. In this short Q&A, we talk about her newsletter and curation process, a few of her favorite reads, and her recent trip back home to Croatia — a journey that always stirs up emotions.

* * *

In a 2019 interview, you explained why you launched your newsletter: to support and elevate immigrant writers and their narratives, and to explore themes of identity, belonging, and multiculturalism. So much in the world has changed since then — from the pandemic to the change in administration. Has its focus changed at all? 

Voting out a president and an administration that was steeped in racism, hatred, and anti-immigrant vitriol was critical, but it doesn’t negate the need to share immigrants’ stories. Immigrants and refugees and their families still face horrific discrimination and appalling injustices, and their voices are often silenced or reduced to discussions about politics, laws, or some statistic. And not only is that wrong and narrow-minded, but it diminishes our stories — stories about lives that are full of struggle and resilience, love and loss, failure and success, and humor and joy, just like other people’s.

The world is confronting global crises that don’t stop at any country’s borders, like climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, and that actually highlights the need for more storytelling by immigrants. They bring knowledge and experience from multiple countries, cultures, and languages. Their writing is not only beautiful, but raises critical perspectives and valuable information. So my focus has stayed the same — in every newsletter, I share a book and a few essays about immigrant life by immigrants, because we should be the ones telling stories about our lives and experiences.

What, ultimately, do you hope to share in each newsletter?

Literature has the power to inform, to educate, and to create empathy and understanding, so the more people reading these essays, the better. A lot of discourse about immigration and immigrants is based on false information and delivered by people who are not knowledgeable about these subjects, but hold very strong opinions. That needs to end, and I want to get at least a small slice of immigrants’ rich writing out into the world.

I also want to help people diversify their bookshelves. If the only authors you read are white men who were born here, you are limiting yourself. So I focus on sharing writing by women of color — a group that has long been marginalized but consistently produces some of the best writing on the themes I cover.

Tell us about your curation process. What stands out to you, and how do you select the stories that appear in each issue? 

I want to make my newsletter as accessible as possible, so I mostly link to essays that are free. I focus on nonfiction because that’s what I read the most, and that’s the medium I’ve published in and am most familiar with. I’m endlessly fascinated by immigrants and children of immigrants’ storytelling about what it means to straddle multiple cultures; how we define home and belonging when we are connected to more than one place; and how this influences the way we identify ourselves and move through the world.

Do you have a favorite essay you’ve featured?

It’s hard to pick one essay — I loved the ones you mentioned, and vividly remember reading them and being moved by them. A few months ago, I read Madhushree Ghosh’s Longreads essay “The State We Are In: Neither Here, There, nor in Heaven,” and light bulbs kept going off in my head when she discussed how immigrants face this in-between world, filled with love, longing, and guilt. Sulaiman Addonia’s LitHub excerpt on multilingualism awed me with its striking writing on language and loss. And I got goose bumps reading Elif Shafak compare motherlands to “castles made of glass” that can leave you with deep cuts. There is just so much breadth and beauty in writing by immigrants, and they often navigate topics that are ripe for deep reflection.

You share writing from publications we love, like Catapult, Guernica, and Electric Literature. We also get excited when we feature a publication, particularly smaller outlets, for the first time. Do you see more spaces today for immigrant voices?

I think there are more spaces for immigrant writers now in part because the publishing world is addressing a long overdue need to include more diverse voices. And hopefully that’s motivating more of us who are immigrants to exercise our agency and claim our narratives.

What emerging publication have you discovered this year that you’re really excited about? 

I love these outlets you mentioned and there are many more. For example, The Bare Life Review solely publishes immigrant and refugee writers. Khôra magazine is fairly new and while it doesn’t focus on immigrants, I have come across beautiful essays there. And The Rumpus often features interviews with authors who are immigrants and members of marginalized groups.

You returned home to Croatia in August and described it in your August 2021 issue as “a liminal space, where my past self merges with my present self.” Can you reflect a bit more on that journey?

I’m privileged and lucky to have the documents and resources to travel back home, which so many immigrants can’t do. My aunt, uncle, cousins, and other relatives and friends live in Croatia, so it’s a time to reconnect with many people I’ve known my whole life. It’s more than a vacation — it’s the only time of the year I get to visit my beautiful hometown of Dubrovnik and my home country. As a parent of a young child, I try to squeeze so much in those few weeks because it’s my main opportunity to immerse her in Croatian food, language, and culture.

Traveling back home is always so emotionally charged. It deeply saddens me that I live an ocean away from home and so many people I love. I have moments there when I feel like I never left, and others when I feel like the perpetual foreigner who doesn’t fit in anywhere. For many immigrants, these trips are so psychologically fraught because they amplify our thoughts about belonging, home, and identity. I always wonder who I would have become had my family not left, and how my immigrant experience has shaped me.

In first grade, I had a conversation with two classmates, Beth and Jenn, about our names. Being identical twins, they often came to school in matching outfits. I remember their knit sweaters, green and red, with their full names stitched over their chests: Elizabeth and Jennifer. I liked these names: pretty and all-American. They said their middle names were Marie and Lynn, which were just as common, easy, and palatable.

“My middle name is Ann,” I said reluctantly. “It’s kind of short for another name.” Luckily, they didn’t ask about the other name and moved on to something else. I was relieved. 

I continued to tell people, throughout most of high school, that my middle name was Ann, even though that wasn’t true. It was Anongos — my mother’s maiden name — which was embarrassing to me. I didn’t go by my full first name either. My friends called me Cheri, but my name is Cherilynn: a name that, to this day, is both mine and not mine, and one that I write only on important forms and legal documents.

From an early age, I understood the power of a name: It can shape and define you, reveal who you are, and feel like a part of your skin — or a foreign layer your body rejects. In my 20s, I had grown more comfortable in my skin to be able to say: My middle name is Anongos. But by then, as Rebecca Delacruz-Gunderson explains in her essay on being Filipino American, I also knew how American I was — how detached I was from my cultural heritage — and was glad to at least have a connection to my family’s culture through this name.

When I got married in 2012, I wanted to take my husband’s last name as my own and to continue the family tradition of keeping my maiden name as my middle name. When filling out the form before our ceremony, I wrote in Rowlands, which pushed Lucas into the middle and dropped Anongos from my name forever. I was sad to let this part of me go — one I had finally embraced, yet never fully inhabited — but was also open to what a new name would bring. 

* * *

I got the idea for this reading list a few weeks ago, when the flood of 20th-anniversary coverage of 9/11 led me to revisit Osama Shehzad’s essay on getting shit for his name. These essays dive deep into questions of identity, belonging, and the power of names — and shine a light on the immigrant experience in America.

1) Error Messages (Rebecca Delacruz-Gunderson, Entropy, July 2021)

In a series of vignettes, Rebecca Delacruz-Gunderson writes about growing up half-Filipino and half-white. (The title of the essay refers to the error messages you might receive from an online form when checking multiple boxes about your race.) She loves her name, and felt a sense of belonging as a child: “The hyphen is a bond between the two people who made me, a stitch between the two cultures that hold my halves together.” But the older she got, the less certain she felt about her racial identity, “as if the levels of White and Asian” within her were constantly recalibrating.

Empire is written in my name. A Spanish name inherited from the colonization of the Philippines joined with a Norwegian name carried over from my paternal European ancestors. I have the blood of the colonized and the colonizer, but my name echoes the colonizer more than the colonized.

2) To Protect Me From America, My Parents Changed My Name Without Telling Me (Leslie Nguyen-Okwu, Harper’s Bazaar, May 2021)

Leslie Okwu’s parents changed her name when she was 18, without her permission, by adding six more letters and a hyphen. The Vietnamese Nigerian American writer expresses her ongoing struggle to “balance on that hyphen” and take up more space as both Black and Asian in a country that marginalizes both.

A decade later, I still struggle to balance on that hyphen—teetering on a tightrope between Asian America and Black America. My mother is from Bà Rịa. My father is from Umuhu. I am from Dallas. I am living proof of the country’s fast-changing face and a counterweight to white supremacy. As racial violence embroils the country once again, I finally understand the power of what my parents did—to not only honor the nuance of who I am, but also to hedge against the color of my dark skin.

3) America Ruined My Name For Me (Beth Nguyen, The New Yorker, April 2021)

Growing up in the 1980s in Michigan, where her family settled after fleeing Vietnam, Beth Nguyen didn’t go by Beth — she went by Bich, a common Vietnamese name. She tried to embrace the name as a child, but from her earliest moments of awareness, she felt and knew the name was “steeped in shame.” In this piece, Nguyen describes how she eventually gave herself permission to change her name to escape from the American gaze.

Beth is a social experiment, a hypothesis that life in America is easier with a name that no one ever gets wrong. And it’s true. I am seen as less Asian and more American with the name Beth.

4) A Brief History of Name Fuckery (Larissa Pham, Full Stop, September 2015)

In 2015, a poem by white male poet Michael Derrick Hudson was included in that year’s Best American Poetry anthology. The problem? Hudson, in an act of “Orientalist profiteering,” submitted his work under a Chinese woman’s name, Yi-Fen Chou. In this essay for Full Stop, Larissa Pham contemplates the powerful act of naming oneself in light of this controversy.

By taking a name, an identity that was not his, and flippantly — so flippantly — explaining his reasoning for it, MDH committed an act of violence. He stole. He lied. He took something, something he could use and discard and twist to meet his own ends.

5) “Do You Get Shit for Your Name?” (Osama Shehzad, Longreads, August 2020)

You think women named “Karen” have it bad? In a series of smart and funny anecdotes, Karachi-born writer Osama Shehzad recounts conversations with friends and encounters with strangers about his name in a post-9/11 America. 

My parents tell me that I shouldn’t feel ashamed if I want to go by another name when I’m in America.

I can tell they feel responsible for giving me a once-beautiful, now-wretched name.

They even make suggestions: maybe a condensed Sam? Or a Western-sounding Sammy?

6) My Year of Writing Anonymously (Stacey D’Erasmo, Literary Hub, December 2018)

What happens when you publish with no byline? Stacey D’Erasmo found the world much more interesting and vivid when she wrote an anonymous column for Catapult. D’Erasmo’s essay isn’t about names — or the lack thereof — through an immigrant lens, but I’ve included her essay as an honorable mention because of how she examines the freedom of the in-between: a liminal space through which she explores an alternate self, a different sort of journey to a new place. I love how she describes the time when she asked her students not to put their names on an assignment. Their writing surprised her: It was emotional, visceral, and alive. 

Again and again, I found that when students wrote without their names, much that was awkward, dull, strained, and frankly boring fell away. It was like watching people who thought they couldn’t dance dancing beautifully in the dark.

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Dear Reader,

This month’s books newsletter has one foot out the door. It exists somewhere in the uneasy space between deciding to get as far away from home as you possibly can, or barricading yourself inside. “Refuge is always a temporary construction,” Ryan Chapman writes in a review of two recent novels centered around surreal home invasion scenarios, in which outsiders come crashing into tranquil domestic spheres bearing strange tidings from the outside world. As an urbanite-turned-smalltown-homeowner, Chapman is on edge about his new isolation, aware of how easy it would be for an outsider to break the perimeter, and the two novels, Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World and Willem Frederik Hermans’ An Untouched House, are so unsettling that they have him “convinced barbarians would arrive at any moment and burn it to the ground.” But in the end “the house is just a house,” and Chapman identifies his newfound “ease with naked uncertainty” as more of a wisdom gained with age than a symptom of home ownership.

“Domestic spaces are often perceived as spaces of familiarity and intimacy,” Chia-Chia Lin says in an interview with Alex Madison about her debut novel The Unpassing, “but in my experience, the domestic space also contains unknown depths. The home is a place as wild as any in the world.” Lin talks about how home and wilderness tend to bleed into each other — the boundary between the two is not so clear cut. Moreover, it’s not easy for Lin’s immigrant characters to feel grounded by the easy dichotomy of home vs. everywhere else, or to take for granted their home’s permanence:

Throughout the entire novel, the mother keeps saying she wants to go back to Taiwan. I don’t think of her as a very self-aware character, and at some point I realized that she wouldn’t actually go back. She would leave Anchorage, but maybe not know where else to go. So she ends up in Seattle, a place that is ironically not so far from the place she wanted to leave. The mother has retreated, but she hasn’t returned home. It’s possible she realizes she doesn’t really have a home.

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The distinction between here and there, between outside and inside, collapses utterly in the worldview of the conspiracy theorists whom Anna Merlan writes about in Republic of Lies. In an interview with Rebecca McCarthy, Merlan says,

One thing that happened a lot within conspiracy communities that I was talking to was this belief that people were out there by themselves trying to investigate this great wrongdoing or that only a small group of people really cared. I saw a lot of conspiracy communities that got kind of torn apart by internal controversies and rivalries and accusations of being a plant and a shill and a government agent.

They feel isolated, but also infiltrated; alone yet attacked by something undetectable from far away. Altogether, a fairly accurate take on the modern condition. In a review of two recent books and an HBO show about the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, Linda Kinstler writes, “How does one recognize catastrophe, when it comes? … If it is an invisible catastrophe, how can you know when you are near it, and when you are far away?” Historian Kate Brown, author of Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, says we can only prepare for future calamity by cutting through the propaganda that is still hiding the calamities of the past. As Kinstler puts it, “we must understand that we are already living with our mistakes” if we are to avoid making new ones.

I started off talking about how this month’s books newsletter has one foot out the door, and I’ve ended up talking about Chernobyl? You can arrive just about anywhere, after you take that first step. For example, Lara Prior-Palmer’s casual google search for outdoor adventure led to her becoming the first female and youngest ever winner of the world’s longest, most dangerous horse race. Prior-Palmer tries to understand how it happened, what drove her to search out something so far away from home:

Why do humans put so much thought into some decisions yet plunge into others like penguins into freezing ocean? Are we met with a sudden urge to avoid the direct path to middle age and subsequent visions of growing old in a lonely world of cats? I certainly have a fear of falling into the routines of my elders — their eggshell worlds of dangers and do-nots. But maybe I had a simpler desire to settle something unsaid, away from home. Or a longing to be wild and snort about like a horse.

No single reason seems satisfactory. I want to hand myself over to something, but I can’t tell what creates that need to leap nor what decides its timing.

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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Grace Loh Prasad | Longreads | March 2019 | 16 minutes (4,021 words)

In early October, I noticed my Taiwanese and Chinese American friends posting photos of large family gatherings and moon cakes. Others posted photos of visiting the graves of family members. I felt a wave of panic and guilt. Had I missed Tomb Sweeping Day, when I should have been honoring my deceased parents? On the other hand, I remembered and looked forward to Dia de los Muertos, a holiday I hadn’t grown up with but learned about over more than 20 years of living in California. How could I feel such a strong affinity for a Mexican cultural tradition, while being so ignorant of the holidays observed by the Taiwanese and Chinese diaspora?

A quick Wikipedia search revealed that I had gotten my holidays mixed up. Mid-Autumn Festival celebrates the full moon at harvest time, with families reuniting for a traditional feast and moon cakes. Tomb Sweeping Day (Qing Ming) is one of several holidays to remember your ancestors, but it’s observed in spring. I could not remember which was which because my family did not really celebrate these holidays. Although I was born in Taiwan, I spent my early childhood in New Jersey, and then from fourth grade through high school graduation, we lived in Hong Kong.

We were a curious cultural hybrid: a family of Taiwanese origin living as American expatriates in a British territory where we resembled the local Chinese population, but did not speak the same language and had little in common with them. I attended an American school full of American and international students. One of the advantages of attending Hong Kong International School was that we got American, British and Chinese holidays off: Thanksgiving, the Queen’s Birthday and Lunar New Year.

I’m sure we learned about Mid-Autumn Festival and Qing Ming, but they weren’t as memorable as Lunar New Year, the biggest holiday of the year when everyone got a week off from school or work. Children and younger relatives received lai see (hong bao), red envelopes filled with spending money, and employees received their annual bonuses. I remember going with my parents to join the enormous crowds down in Causeway Bay, pushing for a spot close to the harbor to get the best view of the spectacular fireworks. Stores and restaurants tried to outdo each other with elaborate “Kung Hei Fat Choy” decorations and special menus and promotions. Everywhere you went, people were in a festive good mood.

Since we did not have any relatives in Hong Kong, there were no family obligations during Lunar New Year. It was only the four of us — my mom, dad, brother Ted and me — so at most we would go out for a fancy restaurant meal. We did not go from house to house with bottles of Johnny Walker or baskets of tangerines. We did not make hundreds of homemade dumplings or go to the bank to request a wad of crisp new bills to stuff into red envelopes for my younger cousins, nieces and nephews. My parents might have hung up modest decorations outside our apartment door, but I think it was just for show, so we would not appear strange to our neighbors.

Once I asked my parents why we didn’t do more to celebrate the Taiwanese and Chinese holidays. “Well,” my dad said, “it’s because we are Christian. From when we were little, we only celebrated Christmas and Easter. Your grandpa was very strict. We were forbidden from observing any of the non-Christian, Taiwanese traditions because that was considered superstitious.”

I was relieved that my ignorance was not my fault. But I still felt a void.

***

When we moved from New Jersey to Hong Kong in the summer of 1978, we visited Taiwan for the first time in seven years. I was only two years old when we left Taiwan in 1971, so I had no real memories of my birthplace. Everything was strange and new — the crowds, the unfamiliar food, the damp heat and smells of Taipei, and the sudden immersion in a language I barely knew, like being neck-deep in water without knowing how to swim. My relatives were shocked that I could not speak Taiwanese, though I understood a little, so they spoke in the loud, exaggerated tone reserved for preschoolers. How old are you? Are you hungry? Do you like Taiwan?

The summer went by in a blur of family visits. I spent a lot of time sitting quietly beside my parents, eating from trays of mango and guava, and reading comic books while they talked for hours with my aunts and uncles, catching up on everything they had missed during their years abroad. My cousins made half-hearted attempts to play with me, but quickly gave up; I was too weird, too alien. In the late 70s there were hardly any “foreign ghosts” in Taiwan, so I was seen as an aberration — not as someone who spoke another language, but someone who could not speak at all. I looked like everyone else but suffered from an invisible defect that made me incomplete, as though I were missing a chromosome.

While I wrestled with culture shock, my parents were relieved to finally be home after seven years. More than anything, my mom regretted not returning for her father’s funeral when he passed away in 1975. It was too expensive, and all but impossible with two young children to raise while my dad worked. I did not realize until I was much older that the real reason my mom didn’t go back was much more complicated.

In the late 1960s, my parents became close friends with an American missionary couple, Milo and Judy Thornberry, who also taught at Taiwan Theological Seminary. Their daughter, Elizabeth, was my brother, Ted’s, earliest playmate. The Thornberrys were an unremarkable family except for one thing: they were friends with Peng Ming-min, a prominent Taiwanese political activist who was critical of the Kuomintang, the authoritarian government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. Taiwan was under martial law at the time, which meant the KMT had unlimited power to threaten and harass perceived political enemies.

On March 2, 1971, the Thornberrys and their two young children were surrounded by KMT police at their house and detained against their will. Two days later, they were deported back to the U.S. for unspecified activities “unfriendly to the Republic of China.” Their expulsion was a major international incident covered by newspapers around the world.

In the months that followed, my parents knew they were being watched. Their friendship with the Thornberrys meant they were a potential target, so when my dad got a job offer to join the United Bible Societies in New York, he immediately said yes.

My parents didn’t dare return to Taiwan until after we had naturalized as U.S. citizens and had the protection of our crisp, dark blue, eagle-embossed American passports.

***

One of my earliest memories is of being taken to the main library at Princeton. I must have been three or four years old. I felt very small, dwarfed by the floor-to-ceiling bookcases of rare and unusual books. My dad led me to a corner of the library where there was a large standing globe. It was taller than I was. He spun it around, located a small, sweet-potato shaped island off the southeastern coast of China, and said to me: That’s where you were born. The speck on the globe was labeled Formosa — “the beautiful island.” Taiwan was no more than an idea to me at the time, so he did his best to make it tangible.

At that age, I didn’t distinguish between the many countries in Asia, and felt a sort of compulsory kinship with anyone who looked like me, even if they weren’t Taiwanese. One summer, a Chinese kid named Herman was the driver of our neighborhood ice cream truck. He was probably 16 or 17 years old, with an overgrown bowl cut and glasses; he looked like an older version of my brother Ted. I used to tell people Herman was my cousin; it seemed plausible back then that anyone who looked Asian could be related to us.

I remember clearly my few instances of exposure to Asian cultures in New Jersey, which I can fit into one paragraph. In New York’s Chinatown we used to buy sweet noodle cakes, dried cuttlefish, pastel colored shrimp chips, and other exotic snacks. Once or twice a year we’d have dinner at a fancy Japanese restaurant where the grownups ate raw fish, fried food and weird pickles while I refused everything except a steaming bowl of udon. I remember my mom obsessively watching TV news about the trial of the Gang of Four after the flameout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and our whole family gathering in front of our black-and-white TV to watch a lengthy film adaptation of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado starring Caucasian actors in yellowface, a memory that now makes me cringe.

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It took me a long time to realize my family didn’t fit the typical immigrant narrative. We didn’t settle down permanently in the U.S. nor did we sponsor and bring over a large clan of relatives. But we weren’t alone either. We were part of a tight-knit Taiwanese American community that went to church, barbecues and birthday parties together.

All that changed when we moved to Hong Kong. There we were surrounded by Chinese and Asian cultures, although we experienced it inside of an expat bubble. My dad’s colleagues were Korean, Indonesian, Australian, Indian and British, in addition to locals from Hong Kong. We did not know any other Taiwanese families in Hong Kong, but visited our own relatives in Taiwan at least once a year. We had the illusion of proximity: Taipei and Hong Kong are only 1.5 hours apart by plane. Our cities lit up simultaneously with Lunar New Year celebrations and suffered damage and destruction from the same typhoons. But in retrospect, I think my parents were lonely. Although geographically close, we were further isolated from Taiwan.

Moving to Hong Kong flipped my identity to its inverse, like a film negative: I went from being a racial outsider and linguistic insider in New Jersey, to being a racial insider and linguistic outsider in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Either way, I was a misfit; I was always disappointing someone, always falling short.

***

My first close encounter with death was when I was 12 years old.

When we lived in Hong Kong, every Sunday we took two forms of public transportation — a minibus and the brand-new MTR subway system — across the harbor to attend Kowloon Union Church. KUC had an international congregation of people from all over the world attending worship services in English.

Like Hong Kong itself, KUC was a revolving door of expats who came and went, rarely staying for more than a few years at a time. But I looked forward to Sundays because I got to see my best friend. Frances was from Switzerland. Although we were the same age, we attended different schools. Her father was a chef at a high-end hotel and her mother was an artist. I remember being very impressed that Frances was fluent in French and English. She had gorgeous wavy brown hair and a mole above her lip; she was obviously destined to be a beautiful young woman.

Frances and I used to hang out after church and go shopping, just the two of us, along the busy shopping district on Nathan Road known as the Golden Mile. We’d go to gift and stationery stores and buy Hello Kitty trinkets, or the Yue Hwa China Products store and buy black cloth Mary Janes or embroidered satin pouches. At age 12 we didn’t have a lot to spend but we had ample time to explore and enjoy our first taste of freedom away from our parents. They trusted us as long as we stuck together and came home by 4 or 5 in the afternoon.

In Hong Kong, we had to get used to using a gas burner for cooking and heating water. My parents taught me how to turn on the pilot light on the stove and how to turn on the gas water heater in the bathroom. They instructed me to always remember to prop open the narrow bathroom window whenever I took a bath or a shower.

One evening after dinner, my dad received a phone call from Frances’s father. I was doing homework in my bedroom so I did not hear what they were talking about. After he hung up, my dad asked me to come into the living room. I sat down across from him on the sofa and he delivered the bad news: Frances had suffocated while taking a bath because she forgot to open the window for ventilation. Her funeral would be the following Sunday at Kowloon Union Church.

I don’t remember anything about the funeral itself. What I do remember is going shopping the day before at Lane Crawford, Hong Kong’s fanciest department store, where I used all my allowance to purchase a small vial of Tea Rose eau de cologne and a Snoopy figurine, things that we had admired together on one of our outings. Even though I knew these items served no practical purpose, I wanted to buy Frances one last present to honor our friendship. I gave the gifts to her mother and said, “Please bury these with Frances.”

I have no idea what they did with the gifts, whether they respected my wish or dismissed it as a silly idea from a grief-stricken young friend. That was the last time I saw her parents. They soon moved back to Switzerland to avoid the painful memories of their time in Hong Kong and the loss of their only child. I imagine they must have brought Frances back with them, to be buried in their homeland.

***

My grandfather is buried at a cemetery on a low mountain ridge southeast of Taipei, not far from the Taipei Zoo and the Maokong tea plantations. When we visited in the summer of 1978, my mom’s side of the family had a small reunion at his tomb with my grandmother and all of their descendants — my mom and her three younger brothers, their spouses and children.

It was the first time I had ever been to a cemetery, but every year after that we repeated the same ritual: a caravan of taxis winding up the steep green hill; a short service of hymns and prayers I did not understand; and countless family photos. We never smiled.

I lived in three countries growing up. Less than three of those years were in Taiwan, yet it’s the only place where I’ve ever spent considerable time in cemeteries and around the rituals of the dead. Even after my parents and I had spent decades living abroad, there was never any question that this was the only ground that mattered.

My grandfather died the same month as Chiang Kai-shek, in April 1975. It’s well known that Chiang’s final wish was to be buried in his native Fenghua in Zhejiang Province, once China and Taiwan were reunified. His wish never came true, and his remains have been kept at a series of temporary mausoleums, most recently at Cihu in Daxi District, awaiting a future that may never come. His son and successor as president of Taiwan, Chiang Ching-kuo, passed away in 1988, and his remains are kept at a different mausoleum in the same area, with the same unfulfilled wish.

Both of their wives outlived them by many years and also died far from home. Soong Mei-ling, better known as Madame Chiang Kai-shek, left Taiwan after the Generalissimo died and emigrated to the United States. She enjoyed a quiet retirement in upstate New York and lived her final years in an apartment overlooking Central Park, where she passed away in 2003 at the age of 105. By custom she should have had the same resting place as her husband, but she too is in limbo at Ferncliff Cemetery in Westchester, New York. Chiang Fang-liang, the Chinese name for Faina Vakhreva, was a young Russian worker when she met Chiang Ching-kuo at a machinery plant in Siberia. After marrying Chiang she went with him to China, learned the Ningbo dialect, bore four children, and then followed him to Taiwan where she was the daughter-in-law of the president, and then the first lady. She never again set foot in Russia and died in 2004 at the age of 89.

Politically, I have no sympathy for the Chiang family. And yet there is an indescribable sadness in being denied that final journey, when the soul is unable to return to its ancestral home.

***

The first time I experienced Dia de los Muertos was more than a decade ago, when someone invited me to the procession in San Francisco’s Mission District. Our mutual friend, Tim, had died in a terrible car accident not long before, and a couple dozen of his friends and co-workers gathered at the parade to share memories, drink beer, and take turns riding an elaborately decorated bike covered with flowers, flashing lights and smiling photos of Tim whirling around on the wheels. I found the painted skeleton faces, colorful flouncy attire, abundant candles and marigolds, beautifully decorated altars and photos of loved ones deeply affecting. It never occurred to me that mourning could be so vivid and joyful, that one could focus on remembrance, not just grief.

Years went by, and then the losses struck closer to home.

In 2010, I visited Taiwan with my husband and son in early January. My brother, Ted, was supposed to join us from Bangkok, where he had been living for more than a decade. But the night of my 41st birthday, just after we had eaten a meal of long-life noodles and cake, he called my dad’s cell phone to say he wouldn’t be coming after all. He explained he’d been feeling ill and went to the doctor for the first time in many years. The doctor discovered a tumor in his liver the size of a large mango. It was malignant.

Ted began radiation soon after, and was ordered to quit smoking and change his diet to give the treatment a chance to work. He would have several normal weeks where he could do his job and all regular activities, but they alternated with periods of pain and lethargy that sent him to the hospital. He took a turn for the worse in September, so I bought a plane ticket to Bangkok in case that was the last time I’d be able to see my brother. My dad agreed to meet me there. By the time my plane touched down, it was too late. What started out as a farewell visit to my brother turned into a funeral.

We cremated him immediately after the memorial service, then went with his widow and three kids to scatter his ashes in Pattaya Bay the next day. We never talked about taking his ashes anywhere else — Bangkok had been his home for 16 years and it was where he intended to stay.

A month after I came home to California from Bangkok, I went to a Halloween party. The hostess and her mother made a Dia de los Muertos ofrenda and invited me to bring a photo of Ted to add to the altar, a gesture that touched me deeply. Even though my brother had lived for so long in Thailand, he had gone to university in California and was still American to his core. It felt strange to not have a place to visit and remember him in this country.

Four years later, on the evening of July 4, 2014, I flew to Taipei for my mom’s funeral. I remember sitting numbly in the airport while the smoke cleared from backyard barbecues and Fourth of July fireworks. The plane left after midnight, propelling me into the twilight zone between darkness and light, between the life I knew and the shadow world, suspended in time and air.

My mom had been sick for a long time — she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2000 — but her death still came as a shock. After a period of steady, slow decline, she wound up in the hospital one night with a fever, vomiting and high blood pressure. Unbeknownst to anyone she had been suffering from colon cancer, and by the time it was detected, it was Stage 4 and incurable.

After a few days, my mom was allowed to leave the hospital in San Hsia to go to the bigger hospital in Taipei to get a second opinion. She never made it out of the second hospital. Less than a week after the original diagnosis, she was gone.

***

My dad had chosen, in advance, the place where he wanted my mom’s ashes (and eventually his) to be

stored: a columbarium south of Taipei called Tienpin. For a year he kept my mom’s ashes in a light pink urn in his living room, and then on the first anniversary of her passing, he arranged for a memorial service at Tienpin.

We were transported there on a chartered minibus, which drove into a mostly unpopulated area of dense trees and vegetation. We descended down a narrow, steep driveway into a clearing where all the trees had been replaced by a manicured green lawn. The unusual building was tall and thin, with a pointy tower topped with a cross, and decorated with long painted panels shaped like skis. On the lawn was what appeared to be a flock of perfectly white sheep, which upon closer inspection we realized were actually sculptures. It gave the location a pastoral, peaceful look while subtly advertising its Christian affiliation. The landscape felt otherworldly, as though some unseen force had cleared the jungle and placed a mysterious monument there.

After my mom passed away, I returned home to all my usual routines. I did my best to appear normal but I was on autopilot, simply going through the motions while struggling with the enormity of the loss. Even though my mom and I had not lived in the same country for more than two decades and my memories of her were from another time and place, I was unhinged by grief. There was no grave to visit here, no church that would say prayers for her soul, no community of the also-bereaved. Everyone who was close to my mom lived in Taiwan. I came “home” to California where no one experienced her absence profoundly, where no one had to deal with canceling her prescriptions, washing her laundry, throwing away her unopened mail or staring at her empty chair.

My grief was overwhelming because there was no context or container for it. Its free-floating shapelessness terrified me because that meant it could strike anytime, anywhere, without warning.

One year later I went back to Tienpin to place my dad’s ashes next to my mom’s, and complete the engraving on the plaque that marked their final resting place. The day of my mom’s service, it had been bright and sunny. The day we brought my dad’s ashes to Tienpin, there was a violent thunderstorm. I was happy they were reunited, but my own grief multiplied.

In Chinese folklore, wandering ghosts cause the most trouble. Now I understand it’s because they want what we want – to be grounded, to be claimed. Grief works the same way. The more restless it is, the more damage it does. It too needs a home.

When I came home to California, I cleared two bookshelves and made an ofrenda with photos of my parents, paper flowers, candles, and objects that held meaning for them — a fountain pen, a water buffalo sculpture, origami cranes. Instead of an annual tomb sweeping, I visited the altar daily and kept adding decorations. Slowly I started to feel better.

***

I don’t know when I’ll go back to Taiwan. I haven’t figured out what will happen to me after I die. My husband and son are in California, but some part of me will always belong to Taiwan. This eternal ache is what it means to live in diaspora. Home, for me, is not an answer but a question.

* * *

Grace Loh Prasad writes essays and nonfiction about memory, language and loss, and her constantly shifting relationship to home and belonging. Her writing has appeared in Catapult, Ninth Letter, Jellyfish Review, Memoir Mixtapes and elsewhere, and she is currently at work on a memoir-in-essays entitled The Translator’s Daughter.

Editor: Sari Botton

From second grade to eighth grade, cereal was my portal to the United States. Whenever my dad flew from where we lived in Indonesia to the U.S. on business, he’d bring a near-empty suitcase so he could fill it with Lucky Charms, Froot Loops, Captain Crunch, and whatever other colorful boxes caught his eye. When he came home, my brother and I would deliberate over which to open first, rationing ourselves. I treasured each bowl enough that once, when a gecko flung out of the box along with a kaleidoscopic pour of fruity pebbles, I simply brought the creature outside before dipping my spoon into the bowl.

The longer I lived in Indonesia, the less I remembered about life in the United States, even though others reminded me that the U.S. was “home.” Whenever I ate cereal, I imagined an alternate version of myself. The girl I envisioned lived at the end of a cul-de-sac in a brick house like that of my cousins. She wore outfits from Limited Too, a store I’d visited once during summer vacation. She somehow didn’t have braces or wear glasses. In imagining what I might be like if I lived in the U.S., I began to construct my own version of the country based on summer visits and foggy memories of early childhood. As a result, the U.S. became more artifice than reality, a place I imagined might absolve me of my complicated feelings about identity.

But my illusions about the U.S. were as sugary and insubstantial as the cereal I associated with the country; they dissolved as soon as I moved to Texas during my freshman year of high school. Once there, I realized that even though I spoke the language and looked the part, I felt different from my peers. As much as I wanted to feel at ease in the U.S., I found myself torn between the reality of the place where I lived – all cookie-cutter homes and gleaming aisles of grocery stores – and where I’d grown up. I felt homesick for Indonesia, a place I could never truly call home, privilege making thorny my presence there.

For years, I buried the feelings of loss that came along with leaving Indonesia and instead tried to forge different lives in the states I’ve lived since then. But, like the bowls of cereal of my past that once brought me back to a country I’d left behind, I was given a piece of Kopiko after a meal a couple years ago, and the even the sight of the wrapper was enough to transport me to my old house, one shaded by a rainbow eucalyptus trees and robust flower blooms. Food can be nostalgia embodied, a means of traveling to a place you wish you could return to, a way of bringing to life a memory. Candy in hand, I remembered wandering aisles of the outdoor market, where sounds became a kind of song: vendors chattering, pans clanging, someone calling nasi goreng! nasi goreng!, live birds chirruping from a small cage, knives whisking over metal sharpeners, chickens scuttling around table legs looking for scraps, and motorcycles chortling to life before whining down the road. For sale were tables of produce – spiky round rambutan, bundles of greens, starfruit stacked in precarious piles, shrink-wrapped mango, mounds of durian – slick bodies of fish gutted and chickens plucked clean of their feathers. Nothing went to waste. Blood was boiled down until it congealed, and intestines were arranged on plates like long tendrils of spaghetti.

Perhaps food isn’t a permanent means of returning to anywhere, but a taste can be enough to bring you home. In the following essays, writers interrogate the complicated pasts of place through food, express nostalgia for long-gone homes, and find belonging by sharing meals. As for me, when I put the Kopiko on my tongue, thousands of miles away, the blend of coffee and sugar resonated bittersweet, as it always had, before melting away.

1. I Want Crab. Pure Maryland Crab. (Bill Addison, September 15, 2016, Eater)

I moved away from Maryland over 25 years ago, but if I don’t make it back to the state at least once a year for steamed crabs, I’m like a bird whose migration pattern has been disrupted. I’m unsettled in the world.

Back in Maryland after time away, Bill Addison digs into a pile of local crab while ruminating on the history, preparation techniques, best places to eat, and future of crab in Baltimore.

2. NASA is learning the best way to grow food in space (Sarah Scoles, June 6, 2018, Popular Science)

Sure, astronauts can gaze down at Earth and see its most beautiful spots—literally all of them—every 90 minutes. But those places are always out of reach, reminders of how far away sea level is. Having something nearby that photosynthesizes might cheer the crew.

A complex set of factors such as humidity, mold, and a host of other ecosystem variants makes growing plants in space a challenge. But far away from the comforts of home, astronauts have begun cultivating zinnias and lettuce on board, thanks to the work of scientist Gioia Massa and her team, who are part of an experiment called Veggie.

3. Say It with Noodles: On Learning to Speak the Language of Food (Shing Yin Khor, February 27, 2018, Catapult)

In this beautiful illustrated essay, Shing Yin Khor expresses how difficult it is for her to communicate emotions verbally. She instead uses food as a means to share feelings of disappointment, love towards others and, eventually, love toward herself as well.

4. Eating to America (Naz Riahi, November 2018, Longreads)

Two years after the Iran-Iraq war ended, and six months after her father, a political prisoner, was executed, Naz Riahi and her mother, Shee Shee, move to the U.S. There, homesick and grieving, Riahi finds happiness and hope through food.

The food sat inside me, taking over spaces that had been full of worry just minutes before and making the worry go away.

5. An Adopted Obsession with Soondubu Jjigae, Korean Silken-Tofu Stew (Bryan Washington, February 20, 2019, The New Yorker)

I first tasted gochujang because of a boy. We were in a busted strip mall, just west of Houston’s I-610 loop. A lot of things were changing in my life, and I hadn’t been home—home home—in a minute, and we were too broke to go most places.

Though he ends up splitting up with his partner, Bryan Washington’s love for soondubu jjigae remains strong. Washington recounts his efforts to figure out how to make the stew on his own, and eventually brings the recipe home.

6. The Food of My Youth (Melissa Chadburn, July 9, 2018, The New York Review)

In search of a better future, Melissa Chadburn’s mother brings her family to northern California, where they “lived on saltines with peanut butter and beans from a can.” At fifteen, Chadburn is taken to a group home where her hunger is satiated, but she is treated as a case number rather than a child.

Only, for us, the explosions had already happened. The places we’d called home had been lit up and burned to the ground, with nothing left save for the blackened foundations of our past. We kids were screaming for love, for touch, for home.

7. Chop Suey Nation (Ann Hui, June 21, 2016, The Globe and Mail)

After a blogger wrote a post called “I can’t believe there’s a Chinese restaurant in Fogo,” Ann Hui, influenced by her family, for whom “food was an obsession,” sets out to drive across Canada to figure out how the restaurant owners decided to open shop in such an isolated location and why there’s a Chinese restaurant in nearly every Canadian town. Hui wrote a book, Chop Suey Nation, based on her article.

The name “chop suey” translates more or less into “assorted mix,” and refers to a repertoire of dishes mostly developed in North America in the mid-20th century. A mix of ideas both East and West and, to my eyes, frozen in time.

8. Farm to Table (Laura Reiley, April 13, 2016, Tampa Bay Times)

This is a story we are all being fed. A story about overalls, rich soil and John Deere tractors scattering broods of busy chickens. A story about healthy animals living happy lives, heirloom tomatoes hanging heavy and earnest artisans rolling wheels of cheese into aging caves nearby.

Skeptical of the chalkboard menus touting local, organic ingredients in front of nearly every restaurant in Tampa, Laura Reiley stops at farms, contacts vendors, and “for fish claims that seemed suspicious, I kept zip-top baggies in my purse and tucked away samples” in order to determine the extent to which restaurant owners lie about obtaining ingredients from sources close to home.

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.