Richness, shadows of an immigrant family

In 1929, my paternal grandfather set sail for the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, England, where he would study for three years as an attache. After his return to China, he married my grandmother, a poet and English teacher. During World War II, they moved frequently, caught up in the Chinese strategy of trading space for time — the home front retreating west from the Japanese advance. At the close of the civil war against the Communists, they fled to the island of Taiwan.

In the 1960s, my father landed a graduate school fellowship in the Midwest, where he met my mother, who was also studying abroad — both far from home, learning how to survive with a new language, new customs, new foods, new weather.

They married and started a family. In time, their brothers and sisters would follow, and my grandparents settled in Texas. They both died when I was young. In my memories, my grandfather was a tall, elegant man who took me to the park across the street and bought me a Mylar balloon that I kept as a deflated souvenir. My grandmother was a tiny woman with tiny feet.

I didn’t know my grandparents had once spoken English; they might have forgotten how in the years since. Later on in college, after I pieced together a few bits of their history, I felt a sense of loss. I walked along the Thames River, walking where my grandfather had once walked, and ached for the connection that might have been, yearning for what I’d never know.

I decided to probe the mystery of my mother’s family, determined not to let that history slip from my fingers. I knew almost nothing about my maternal grandmother’s past, even though the cheerful, loving woman helped raise me.

Over dim sum, I asked her if she had any siblings. As carts clanked by, piloted by ladies hawking their wares, my aunt and my mother leaned in, apprehensive but curious. Maybe they didn’t know, either, or maybe they’d believed such grief should remain on the other side of the ocean. Immigrants leave behind everything familiar to make a new life in their adopted homelands.

“A brother and sister,” my grandmother said. Lost in the war.

She didn’t volunteer more, and we returned to eating our shrimp dumplings. So much left unsaid, so much that seemed impossible to translate.

I’ve been thinking about how my writing emerges out of my desire to narrow the vast spaces between us. By reading fiction, I learned how to interpret life outside my own immigrant family. From books, I learned about habits and family dynamics unlike my own. Studies suggest that literary fiction — narratives that focus on in-depth portrayals of a character’s thoughts and feelings — can foster empathy and understanding among readers (the sort of empathy and understanding we could all use more of in these turbulent times).

By writing fiction, I’m still trying to make sense of the world. On Friday, Sept. 30, “Deceit and Other Possibilities,” a collection of short stories I spent more than a decade writing, will be published. The stories are not autobiographical, not in the way you might think — I never faked my way into Stanford, never got caught in a campground battle, never fled from a Hong Kong scandal — but they reflect my interest in writing about immigration and identity. Again and again, I revisit strangers in a strange land, making their way in the world. It’s the most American of stories.

My parents had practical careers — my father a structural engineer, my mother a scientist — yet they never questioned my dreams of becoming a journalist, then a writer. Their determination has long inspired me.

Edwidge Danticat, a novelist born in Haiti who moved to the United States when she was 12 years old, wrote about how an immigrant’s reinvention is on par with the greatest works of literature. Her words resonate:

“That experience of touching down in a totally foreign place is like having a blank canvas: You begin with nothing, but stroke by stroke you build a life. This process requires everything great art requires — risk-taking, hope, a great deal of imagination, all the qualities that are the building blocks of art. You must be able to dream something nearly impossible and toil to bring it into existence. … It makes me honor, through the prism of art, the way other immigrants have lived their lives, all the difficult choices they have made. … It makes me look at my work differently, and I see my parents in a different way.”

I knew almost nothing about my maternal grandmother’s past, even though the cheerful, loving woman helped raise me.