AN OPEN LETTER

Dear Lín Měi Líng,

by 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.

“Go back to China,” customers said to mama and baba in the tense weeks following the Olympics. They said, “You don’t belong here.”

Mama and baba laughed it all off, but you knew. At only eight years old, you knew that there was something bad about the fact that boys your age threw buckets of green apples at the windows of our family’s restaurant. The boys you tutored after school, the same boys that you saw every single morning before classes started. You knew those boys since preschool, growing up together in classrooms only a few feet away from each other. (The day after the buckets of green apples, you stood behind those laughing boys in the lunch line that ran along the cold walls of the hallway and wondered, “Why my family?”)

I wonder if you knew long ago just how different you were, if you knew that your skin color was a different shade than the other kids, if you knew that your almond eyes were too sharp.

I remember a long time ago, longer before the green apples on glass windows, how you hesitated when Mrs. B asked you how to say “Happy Chinese New Year” in Chinese. (Always Chinese. Never Cantonese or Mandarin. You were always asked, “How do you say this in Chinese?”)

“Gong hei fat choi,” you said, quietly, under your voice. You fiddled with the hem of the bright red shirt that mama had asked you to wear that day. For her, you would wear red, gold, the colors of a country that they left behind long ago. For her, you would endure being singled out during class by a teacher who had to prove that she knew your people better than you.

“What was that?” said Mrs. B, “Gong-hay-fatchoy? Did I say it right?” (No, no, you didn’t, you had thought, this doesn’t feel right, why don’t you ask the other kids how they celebrate their holidays, their traditions, their ancestors. Where are their questions, their printed coloring sheets of dragons and little Chinese kids with small eyes, hair buns, and qipaos?)

You kept your eyes glued on your untouched worksheet with a step-by-step guide on how to make paper lanterns, your red cardstock untouched on your desk.

“Yes,” you said to sweet, kind Mrs. B, “You said it just right.”

You grew up in a neighborhood filled with language, with big families who weren’t born here. You knew who was Italian and who was Polish by the accent that dripped from their English. You knew that there were kids who needed extra help learning English, that they needed other kids to help them with their school work.

You never needed help from anyone at school, but it was never your choice whether or not you got any. Your older sister had raised you to speak Cantonese without the accent that stained her English during her early years in school, the same accent that plagued your older brother. You escaped the English second language programs, the language counseling.

But, in the end, had you not escaped our language, too?

In high school, you wore the title of first-generation American without even knowing it. Your older sister went to college. Your older brother went to college. You were already three drafts into your college applications by the time your senior year had begun, miles ahead of your peers who struggled with even picking a topic. You were prepared to leave Chicago for a school far, far away. When Dr. M came in to do a college application workshop for your class, you decided that it wasn’t worth your time to listen to her tips and tricks.

Something she said, however, caught your attention.

“Did your parents go to college?” she had asked you, leaning over your shoulder to see the endless boxes that the Common Application had asked you to check.

“No,” you said.

“Well, honey, that means that you’re a first-generation student! Go, you!” She patted you on the back and moved on, rushing to check on another student’s progress. She left you there with a title you weren’t sure how to wear, an identity you were not aware of.

She patted you on the back and moved on, rushing to check on another student’s progress. She left you there with a title you weren’t sure how to wear, an identity you were not aware of.

You stared at the Common Application. You stared and stared, wondering how to understand the words first-generation.

Briefly, you thought back to the previous year when all of your friends were graduating. You thought about how you asked Daniela where she was going to college and how she smiled sadly at you.

“I don’t know if I can afford it,” she said, “I don’t have a social security number. I can’t get financial aid.” (A few months after you submitted your applications for early action, you saw a GoFundMe campaign set up by teachers to raise funds for Daniela. She had been caught by ICE on a Greyhound bus coming back from New York, a city she loved and dreamed of studying theatre in. She had been detained, and a court hearing date had been set for years later.)

Daniela’s words echoed in the heartache you felt after staying up on the night of the 2016 Presidential elections, how you wondered anxiously why there were so many red states when Hillary was projected to win. You didn’t go to school the next day; half of your school didn’t go to school the next day. You felt fear, and you didn’t want to. You didn’t want to know why you suddenly felt so unsafe on the trains you rode every day on the way to school, why you were weary of every stare you got when you went outside. You didn’t want to know why you felt uncomfortable whenever you saw a red hat with the words “Make America Great Again” emblazoned across the front, why those words hurt more than the boys who threw green apples at our family’s restaurant.

Lín Měi Líng, I am sorry.

I am sorry that you live in a country where you no longer know who you are and who you stand for. You stood in the classrooms of your elementary school pledging allegiance and justice for all, but there is no justice in detaining those with dreams. If mama and baba hadn’t been naturalized a few years before your oldest sister was born, would you be in Daniela’s shoes? Would you be another nameless face in the families of immigrants being disappeared in favor of a “clean” American image? Would you be another name drowned out in the news by talk of immature tweets by a President who can’t get his own facts straight? Would you be denied the education that your parents had desperately wanted for themselves?

Was that the American dream that mama and baba left their families for?

I don’t know what it means to be the child of immigrants, what it means to be a start of a new legacy for our family. I don’t know why speaking

Lín Měi Líng, I am sorry.

I am sorry that you live in a country where you no longer know who you are and who you stand for. You stood in the classrooms of your elementary school pledging allegiance and justice for all, but there is no justice in detaining those with dreams.

Cantonese to mama and baba on the phone still makes me feel like I should be wary of those who can hear me. It doesn’t make sense being a first-generation student when the immigrants you had grown up around are not the same type of immigrants in the news. Those immigrants are not your popo, the type of immigrant who had to cross oceans to bring only two of her children over at a time. Those immigrants are not the kind janitor that Daniela had interviewed her senior year, the type of immigrant who doesn’t know where most of his family is right now. The immigrants you had grown up around are not the ones I have decided to fight for, but they are immigrants nonetheless; they are people with dreams of crafting a new foundation to their legacy from the roots of their American dream, and they are still dreaming of a day where they no longer have to fight for the right to remain here.

I know there are immigrants who are not like mama and baba, that there are Chinese immigrants who hide behind the guise of being line cooks and nail technicians. I know that they fear the day that ICE knocks on their doors asking for their proof of citizenship, that they can no longer be in this country anymore. There are immigrants who must do whatever they can to survive, even at the expense of their own morals and ethics.

To say that immigrants are not being taken care of in a country founded by immigrants is an overgeneralization; it does not even begin to scratch the surface of the complexity of living with immigrant blood in our veins.

In America, there is a dream of a wall that stands tall before trenches filled with snakes and alligators, of a wall charged with electricity to keep us away. In America, the dream is no longer a dream, and children like us have been placed behind those walls where no one can hear their cries. No one can hear how they comfort each other in soiled clothing, how they are just children taking care of children like it’s just another day of playing house.

No one hears about how they suddenly disappear, how 1,500 children just vanish without a trace. In another life, would that have been you, a ghost lost among concentration camps disguised as a justified means to an end? Would mama and baba have forgotten your name as they clung onto distant memories of you?

I know that with talk of the 2020 census coming up in the spring, there will be immigrants too afraid to fill out their household information. I hear of the fear that spreads in communities from their friends who hide them, the ones who act as if I don’t know what it means to live with immigrants. There is fear that they will be sent back to a home that might no longer feel like home to them, and I hate that there is so much fear in this country for trying to survive. That this fear is not unlike

the one that you felt long ago in your room late at night, waiting for the results of the election. That this fear is echoed in the hearts of those who are just children of immigrants, the ones who are born here.

There are children of immigrants who are not born here, the ones who are immigrants themselves. I often dream of a day where they are no longer sent to court to speak a language they never had the chance of keeping. I dream of children growing up in this country to no longer be just immigrants, that these children can brand themselves with new identities. These children are different from you and me, but at the end of the day, we are all still children, and we are all still wondering where exactly we can call home.

Lín Měi Líng, I still have so much more to learn from you. For mama, for baba, for you, I will learn how to take back the pride of being the child of immigrants that you should have known. I will continue to chase the language that we lost long ago, and I promise you that I will speak it once more, with or without the accent. There will be no more discomfort, no more reluctance.

Our language is a symbol of honor to our mama and baba, to our popo, to our ancestors who had carved out the name Lín and named us as people of the forest. Our language is on the verge of being forgotten by children like you and me, of being nothing more than loose prayers said at ceremonies that we never learned how to perform. Our

For mama, for baba, for you, I will learn how to take back the pride of being the child of immigrants that you should have known. I will continue to chase the language that we lost long ago, and I promise you that I will speak it once more, with or without the accent. There will be no more discomfort, no more reluctance.

language is our roots, our almond eyes, our yellow skin.

Our language is our heart; it is how we love and are loved.

I refuse to be silent any longer. Our bloodline is not the punchline of anyone’s joke, it’s not to be some novelty that can be exploited and tokenized. It is our blood, our parents’ blood. It is the blood that they sacrificed so much to bring to a country built on blood and bones. It is the blood that we can no longer take for granted.

It is our legacy.

Love,

Noire

P.S. To mama and baba,

I wish I could tell you that I love you with the language that you love. I wish that there was a way to remove the “American-born” from my Chinese identity, that I could understand the longing in your voice when you talk about visiting Guangdong. I wish that I could remove the barrier that is between us because of how I handle your language, that I could take away the years of words left unspoken.

But, the fact of the matter is, I can’t. I can’t give you a child who can translate government documents perfectly, a child who can stop pretending to be you to set up doctor’s appointments or settle documents. I have gone too long without speaking Cantonese, and I am afraid that I can’t prove to you that I can still understand the words that you mean to say to me without interlacing English in your sentences.

I wish I could tell you that I still love your language, that it is my language, too.

I know it must hurt to see me hurting without knowing how to express that you’re here for me. I know; I know that you both love me in your own ways, even if that love gets lost in translation. There are words you don’t have to say to me, but I wish for a day where you can choose to say them to me instead of exchanging them for broken sentences. English isn’t your second language the way it is for me, and I know. As much as you think that I don’t, I know.

Mama, baba, I promise to be better for you, for me, for Lín Měi Líng.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Noire Lin is currently a third-year Molecular Biology major pursuing two minors in Chemistry and Medical Physics. Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois to immigrant parents, Noire is the youngest of three. They hope to pursue a career in biomedical engineering research, specifically with the focus of using nanotechnology to create alternative, accessible treatment and diagnosis options for marginalized communities. One day, they also hope to adopt the chubbiest cats and to take care of a thriving succulent garden.

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

In high school, I majored in Creative Writing with a concentration in Creative Nonfiction, and I never stopped loving the art of writing. In the fall of my sophomore year, I had the pleasure of taking WRIT 1122: Rhetoric in Politics with Dr. Pauline Reid. As someone who holds multiple marginalized identities, I always struggled with trying to write my thoughts on how they all intersect and interact with each other. Through Dr. Reid’s class, I was able to use my foundational knowledge of creative nonfiction to properly express the relationship between American politics and my own personal identities.

“An Open Letter” is a memoir that focuses on the idea of losing touch with language and how that loss contributed to my connection with a first-generation Chinese American identity. My memoir is written as an open letter to my younger self, and I decided to address myself with my Chinese name in order to create some distance. This memoir holds my current grief for many past regrets, and I had given my heart to my younger self in an attempt to reclaim our loss of self.

image provided by author