This essay was originally published on Our Patreon in February 2025. Here it is again for AAPI Heritage Month ❤️
For me, the question of “why I wrote this book” is perhaps better answered by “why I wrote anything at all.” In fact, I had spent my entire life resisting the temptation to write.
My father was the one in the family who went to school to study literature, who had a real shot to become a professional writer. I remember him dedicating years to crafting stories. He’d take long walks and compose tales in his head. He’d return to his writing desk hollow-eyed and in a trance, pouring the brewing sentences out onto the page. He tried submitting his stories too, but quickly learned that whatever pieces he thought worthy could never pass the censors. By the time I was nearing graduation from high school, my father had all but abandoned his writerly dream. He’d box up his manuscripts and murmur to himself: Xia Bei Zi Ba. Wait until the next life.
Dad had a heavy hand in choosing my area of study at the university, steering me clear from writing-related fields. Instead, I entered a sensible STEM field, which landed me on a straight and narrow path that pleased my parents. It even offered me a ticket out to North America. Caught in the fast-paced daily grind, I was put on autopilot, life’s unceasing demands extinguishing my once-burning itch to write.
But several incidents jolted me in my quotidian immigrant life. Shortly after I became a Canadian citizen, I was invited to a focus group by a non-profit with a mission to engage naturalized Canadians in the political system. I was told naturalized Chinese Canadians had one of the lowest voting rates compared to other ethnic groups. During focus group meetings, participants explained why they didn’t want to vote. Other than the usual suspects (a busy work life, raising kids, caring for elders), I was struck by their pervading sense of fear. You don’t want to be seen as political in any way – puts a target on your back, they said. Politics can get ugly so fast. Best keep our heads down.
The months that followed seemed to prove them right. The geopolitics was veering into treacherous, Cold War-like waters. The anti-China sentiment, as well as the infighting among ethnic groups, among nationalist “mainlanders” and Hong Kong protesters, among different interest groups within the Chinese diaspora, became regular news items and rattled me ceaselessly. Around the same time, I enrolled in a part-time humanities graduate program to immerse myself in Franz Fanon, colonialism, multiculturalism, and above all, Chinese history and politics. Growing up in Shanghai in the 80s and 90s, I was often puzzled by the adults around me, by their hidden ire and pain, their daily debates that unveiled old grudges from a tumultuous time barely traceable in my history books. Now at last, I had access to the tabooed past of my birth country, but it wasn’t easy to understand. In Chinese politics class, the avuncular white professor struggled to piece together a cogent narrative about a country full of contradictions. During office hours, he confided that he was barred from conducting fieldwork in mainland China. His attempts at remote research faltered too, as friends in China grew silent. In those days, I often heard my father’s voice in my ears, traveling from my youth. Xia Bei Zi Ba.
I developed a depression whose intensity ebbed and flowed. I tried psychotherapy but only made my roster of therapists sigh and shake their heads. But one beneficial outcome emerged: I began to journal. Later, reviewing my entries, I saw the incongruence, the prevailing fears, the lack of a coherent narrative of who I am and where I came from. Humans possess an innate drive to make sense of their history and experiences. The ongoing collective amnesia had, piece by piece, taken away my humanity. On the cross-pacific calls, my father’s raspy voice scraped my insides. I imagined the blank look on his grooved face, the aged man who once taught me the importance of free speech, who had wasted his writerly talents and waited in vain for the tides to shift. I often heard defeat and resignation in his voice, and knew I could not wait until the next life. That was why I went to work, to peel back the curtain of my hometown – now an ultramodern metropolis – and confront the bygone days, the voices lost and found, and the origins of unresolved trauma still lingering in the blood of my generation. It was a matter of reclaiming my humanity.
…
SU CHANG is a Chinese-Canadian writer. Born and raised in Shanghai, she is the daughter of a former (reluctant) Red Guard leader. Her fiction has been recognized in Prairie Fire’s Short Fiction Contest, Canadian Authors’ Association (Toronto) National Writing Contest, ILS/Fence Fiction Contest, the Masters Review‘s Novel Excerpt Contest, among others.
