A N OPEN L E T T ER
by
Dear Lín Měi Líng,
Noire Lin WRIT 1122: Rhetoric & Academic Writing | Professor Pauline Reid
IN THE MANY YEARS THAT I HAVE WRITTEN LETTERS TO you, I have never thought of writing this one. I have tried to start this letter many times, yet the words that I want to say to you are as lost to me as the stroke order of the characters to your name. I am clumsy when I try to curl my tongue around the intonations of your name. Our name. The name that our family cherished, but that you and I never knew how to. I write this letter to you, Lín Měi Líng, to offer you my words, my thoughts, my heart. To you, I write this letter to tell you that you belong in this country, that no one can tell you to go back to a home that you never knew. You never knew the village like mama and baba did; you never walked the dirt roads that weaved through homes packed to the brim with laughing children and tipsy parents. Your home is in Chicago, a city along the coast of Lake Michigan. Chicago is cold and busy, everything that Guangdong never was, but your popo brought your mama here with her sisters and brothers for a reason. I wonder, sometimes, if mama and baba ever miss the way the ocean breeze would blow into the village at night, if they miss the stars that blanketed them. I wonder if mama and baba ever regret pursuing a broken dream of prosperity in a country that was so quick to tell them to leave after China brought home gold medals in the Summer Olympics of 2008. 14
WRIT LARGE: 2021
