Memoir by Hua Hsu
A beautiful piece of writing on the immigrant experience, friendship, time, the role of writing to process grief and loss.
The immigrant experience
- “the children picked up the basics of English, this bizarre, new language, which they might use to speak a new future into being”
- “Immigrants are often discussed in terms of a push-and-pull dynamic: something pushes you from home; something else pulls you far away. Opportunities dry up one place and emerge somewhere else, and you follow the promise toward a seemingly better future. Versions of these journeys stretch back hundreds of years in all different directions.”
- “The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories. I often try to spin the details and small effects of my parents’ lives into a narrative.”
- “But one day you realize that your parents speak with a mild accent, and that they have no idea what passive voice is. The next generation would acquire a skill on their behalf — one that we could also use against them. Commanding the language seemed like our only way of surpassing them. Home life on a kind of casual litigiousness. The calm and composed children, a jaunty bounce to our sentences, laying traps with our line of questioning. The parents, tired and irritated, defaulting to the native tongue.”
- Two part letter from Dad:
- “Don’t take this as a negative comment. Only we love you and know your weakness, so we like to guide you. Your goodness and strong points are always in our hearts although we are not always saying them.”
- “Last Friday, I overemphasized the toughness. Don’t be scared. The life is full of excitement and surprises. Handle it and enjoy it. Just like you said that you like the cross country exercise. After climbing the hill, looking downward, you feel good. That is the point I would like to make. Don’t feel frustrate climbing climbing, also don’t pick a too high mountain to climb in begin with. You need drill the small hill first. Learn from the exercise. Even a tumble can teach you how to climb next time. It’s sweating, but enjoy the process. Mom and I have been proud of you. Not only in your accomplishment but more on your happy personality. We’ll support you whatever you choose (most time! Ha!). Don’t feel bad if sometimes we are too nervous. We just hope to give you all guidance and help to make your decisions simpler. We might put too much pressure on you but that’s not what we mean. Be relax but arrange your time to handle priorities. I feel sorry that I cannot be around all the time to support you whenever you need. But I feel comfortable since mom can do good job and you are quite mature. But if there is any thoughts or problem, call me or fax to me. If it’s class work and you cannot get my timely help, please tell us. We can arrange some tutoring. 10th and 11th grade take more sweat but I hope you enjoy them. Love, Dad”
- Another excerpt of letter from Dad:
- “Thats the dilemma of life: you have to find meaning, but by the same time, you have to accept the reality. How to handle the contradiction to everyone of us. What do you think?”
Self-expression
- “Making my zine was a way of sketching the outlines of a new self, writing a new personality into being. I was convinced that I could rearrange these piles of photocopied images, short essays, and bits of cut-up paper into a version of myself that felt real and true.”
- “We spent so much of our time in this mode — sifting through culture as evidence, projecting different versions of ourselves based on our allegiances and enthusiasms. We weren’t in search of answers. These weren’t debates to be won: certainty as boring. We were in search of patterns that would bring the world into focus.”
- In response to Charles Taylor thinking about how people throughout history have thought about the question of individual identity:
- “Or maybe there was nothing innate [about the natural order of things], and we were always in the process of self-discovery, self-creation, and revision. For some, this manifested as a kind of endless drifting and searching; others found the possibility of claiming one’s own identity empowering. But we were all in search of the same thing, that quality that made you yourself.”
- “Taylor called this authenticity, and it became the unreachable horizon of modern life. It’s a concept that makes sense only in its absence; we recognize inauthenticity, phoniness, when someone’s clearly being a poseur. Yet the struggle to feel authentic — this is very real even if we know better. In Taylor’s telling, everyone becomes a kind of artist, creatively wrestling with the parameters of our own being. He describe the outlook as one where ‘being true to myself is being true to my own originality, and that is something that only I can articulate and discovery. In articulating it, I am defining it’. Even though all this sounds very navel-gazing, being true to yourself cannot happen in a vacuum. Constructing your personality is a game, one that requires you to joust with the expectations of others. Authenticity, Taylor explained, presumes dialogue, and it is born out of engaging with those around us.”
- See also: iconic space
Friendship
- “You repeat a gesture enough times until you’re actually friends.”
- Jacques Derrida on friendship (The Politics of Friendship)
- “Derrida wanted to disrupt our drive to generate meaning through dichotomies — speech versus writing, reason versus passion, masculinity versus femininity. These seeming opposites were mutually constitutive. Just because one concept prevailed over the other didn’t mean that either was stable or self-defined; straightness exists only by continually marginalizing queerness, for instance. His methods required a closer examination of what was being lost of suppressed: in doing so, he and his acolytes argued, we would come to recognize that concepts that seem natural to us are full of contradictions. Perhaps accepting this messiness would lead us to a more conscious and intelligent way of living.”
- “The intimacy of friendship, he wrote, lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another. We continue to know our friend, even after they are no longer present to look back at us. From that very first encounter, we are always preparing for the eventuality that we might outlive them, or they us. We are already imagining how we may someday remember them. This isn’t meant to be sad. To love friendship, he writes, ‘one must love the future.’ Writing in the wake of his colleague Jean-François Lyotard’s death, Derrida wonders, ‘How to leave him alone without abandoning him?’ Maybe taking seriously the ideas of our departed friends represents the ultimate expression of friendship, signaling the possibility of a eulogy that doesn’t simply focus the attention back on the survivor and their grief.”
- Marcel Mauss on gift and debt in friendship in Essay on the Gift: “Mauss introduced the idea of delayed reciprocity. You give expecting to receive. Yet we often give and receive according to intermittent, sometimes random intervals. That time lag is where a relationship emerges. Perhaps gifts service political ends. But Mauss also believed that they strengthened the bonds between people and communities. You obligation isn’t just to repay the gift according to a one-to-one ratio. You’re beholden to the ‘spirit of the gift’, a kind of shared faith. Every gesture carries a desire for connection, expanding one’s ring of associations.”
- “When you’re nineteen or twenty, your life is governed by debts and favors, promises to pick up the check or drive next time around. We build our lives into a set of mutual agreements, a string of small gifts lobbed back and forth. Life happened within that delay.”
Writing to process the past
- “Writing offered a way to live outside the present, skipping over its textures and slowness, converting the present into language, thinking about language rather than being present at all.”
- E. H. Carr: “Only the future can provide the key to the interpretation of the past; and the it is only in this sense that we can speak of an ultimate objectivity in history. It is at once the justification and the explanation of history that the past throws light on the future, and the future throws light on the past”