ongoing collaborative writing by Felisa Nguyen and Ching-Wei Wang (Way)
I. Sagittarius
My father, born and raised in Nanmen, is an anesthesiologist, and a Sagittarius. While he leaves the impression of a strong and stable head-of-household, he is impulsive, social, and loves fast driving — traits that echo loudly in my elder brother. This left me with an understanding of him as juvenile, often forgetting that even death ages.When the schoolteacher handed out our yearly personal information forms, with unfilled checkboxes, columns, and blanks, the boys and girls of the classroom would start to whisper. Filling out the form was a silent task, but such investigation into our background made each question a necessary discovery to be read aloud. It was an age when anything could stir up a commotion, and while I often found it dull, at times I wasn’t able to escape becoming a target. Adults always say children are innocent — perhaps they’re forgetful, or simply don’t want to see that their children often wield the purest form of malice.I no longer remember how I learned my parents' names. As far as I recall, I never struggled to memorize the shapes of each of the six characters. The strokes in my own name, however, were repeated thousands of times before my hand grew confident. I practiced each stroke one after the other, until I stopped tripping over myself.
II. Plum Blossom
She was born in 1979 in Hải Phòng, Vietnam. In 1984, her family—ông ngoại, bà ngoại, two older brothers, and two younger brothers — left the North of Vietnam for Hong Kong, and later moved to Finland, settling in a town about twenty kilometers from Helsinki. In 2000, she moves to Canada, marries, and has her first child.
I was born in Kitchener–Waterloo, Canada, in a house too large for newlyweds and a newborn. This first home is absent from my memory, but my mother says it was a single-story house with little furniture besides our mattress on a loft. Sunlight poured in through large windows, revealing a backyard that stretched into a dense forest and creek, like a gate separating us from the closest neighbors kilometres away. What I imagine as beautiful yet desolate, she recalls like a horror film.
My mother spoke Vietnamese and Finnish, but not a word of English during those early years. In fact, she barely spoke at all; her husband treated the house as little more than a place to sleep after work, and their first landline wouldn’t arrive until years later. I guess when you know nothing, when your only company is an infant who knows even less, what need is there for language?
In my mind, Finland was a mysterious place where my mother’s childhood—her family and friends, adolescence, and aspirations—remained sealed in ice on the far side of the Atlantic, and across the Baltic Sea. I always imagined her hands, following another little girl’s instructions, folding the base corners of a paper triangle up toward its tip. As I followed the same steps—first with stacks of office stationery, then with sheets patterned with blossoms, and finally against a cold, resisting steel—our hands, across time, seemed to overlap.