"Be regular and orderly in your life, that you may be violent and original in your work."
If you told me to spin a globe and stop it with a finger on the place where I'm from, I think the globe would just keep on spinning while I tried to decide on which place and which life. Perhaps I could stop it on Guiyang, Guizhou Province, China. That's where I was born, only son to Sun Qui, and his wife Yun, both from the same small village. Do you remember it? We went there, the first summer we were able to return to China from Laos. It was just a husk then, but you loved it so much, picking your way through the ruins of buildings and fishing for catfish in the stream, seeing only the beauty of the place, as a child tends to do. I am saddened that you never had a chance to see what it once was, that you could not have been born in the same home as I, as my father, and his father before him. No, you were born into the country that had offered us shelter from The Cultural Revolution. So, perhaps I could stop it on the country that was not the place where I was born, but, rather, the place where my life truly began, with you and your mother. The journey from China to Laos was hard, and not even half of us who ran, trying to escape the tightening grip of Mao's communist regime, survived the journey to Vientiane. But this was the early 60s, and I was just barely a more than a child myself, when we settled, and so was your mother. She had not come with our village group, but her family had also escaped China, and we grew up together in the same refugee community. We had escaped such horrors, but if there was any consolation, it was that I met your mother, Jiang, and then, when we had almost lost hope of ever having a child…we had you. And we had a good life, in Vientiane. You never had to want for friends or family, though these were family born of shared experience, and not, in most cases, blood. And you were a happy child, quick and smart, and always so curious. I remember you running through the streets, following along with the other refugee children, running from school to play and finally, in the late hours of the evening, back home, to sit and do your studies. Your mother always said that you took after me, with your quick mind and love for numbers, but you had her charm, her way of seeing the best in the world and finding a way to bring it out of the people around you. So was it Laos then, that I called home? Or was it Bangkok? Where your mother and I moved when you were finally old enough to enter into a real grade school?
You were growing so fast, becoming a new person every day. I had found work as an accountant at one of the shipping firms that used Bangkok as a port, and we were happy there, no longer refugees, according to the government, though we still carried China in our hearts. It was from Bangkok that we traveled back to China. You were ten, the first time we went back. Perhaps you will call us selfish, that we took you back so often, when you were just barely growing from a child to a young woman. And perhaps we were. We wanted you to carry something of China in your heart as well, so that you would always know the beauty of the place where our blood had been born. It seems almost strange, or funny now, that I think that it was just before we were leaving China, and not as we were living in it, that you had your first change. You were our gift, and I have always prayed that you saw what we gave you, your second nature, as our gift to you, and that you did not hate us for what we did to you, for the choice that we made, when your mother and I chose to try to have a child. I can still remember seeing you for the first time when you shifted, your face redder, darker than mine, your tail lacking the stripes of your mother. You were both of us, and you were something new and unique. Do you hate us for that? For shifting where you could see us? For using ourselves as your template? You never indicated it to me, but I have always wondered. I wondered when we returned to Bangkok, when you returned to school, now knowing that the gift we had always told you stories about was inside of you. I wondered when we were finally fortunate enough to gain visas to travel to America through my company. I wondered when we finally settled in San Francisco, where you went to High School and where you became what we had always dreamed that you could be. We pushed you so hard there, but you never complained. English lessons, speech therapy, voice coaching, until to listen to you was to be unable to distinguish you from any of the other children in your new homeland. So perhaps I should stop there, at the city where you became an American.
But you were different, at least in our eyes. Especially when you told us that you were going off to Stanford for college. Majoring in Mathematics, still your father's daughter, but leaving the nest behind, striking out on your own, away from your mother and I. But, ever the good daughter, still close enough to drive home some weekends. Those were good years, those eight. We saw you more often than most parents with children in college are probably fortunate enough to. We met your friends, happy that you had so many, that you had settled in so well. I always wished that you would find someone to love you, as I loved your mother while you were there, but you never did. It is hard for us, the two-natured to find the one that speaks to our soul. But I have no doubt that you will find them, that they are waiting for you, as your mother was waiting for me. But there is time for that still in the future. For now, I write this to celebrate your graduation, to share with you the pride I felt when I saw you walking across that stage. A Doctor of Mathematics. My beautiful girl, now grown into a woman. I write this so that you can carry me with you, carry your mother with you, as you prepare to travel, finally, away from us entirely. To a new state, a new life, no longer truly ours, but only your own. And so, I think I will not stop the globe at all, but allow it to spin, because every place has left its mark on us, and we are of every place. And I send you my love, as you go off to find your own new place.
Your Loving Father, Sun Huang