I read some of my father’s writing; I just found one of the Chinese novels he wrote in my bookshelf, covered in dust and knocked over at the very top, and it made me sentimental. And yeah, my dad wrote a book— I don’t think it was that successful, since he’s not famous and my family isn’t living in a huge mansion, but still pretty cool. Unfortunately, I don’t think you can find this book on Google anywhere; it’s relatively old and also not really… popular, so. Yeah. Sorry about that.

Also. This post is NOT a flex like “hey my dad wrote a whole book, get rekt, your careers are over, I have LEGACY on my side”… I don’t even know what half this book says. I took ten minutes getting through the first two pages, and from what I remember of my father telling me of its tales, it’s not a book that I think was written well. Plot holes, under-developed characters, weird plot-convenient events happening… yeah. There was probably a reason why this book is not the bane of my family’s fortune. 

This book in particular was actually published… five years ago? Yeah, five years ago, and it was based on me and my brother. It’s called “小痘痘小点点”, which are the names of the two characters; “小痘痘”, pronounced in pinyin as “xiao dou dou,” is based off my brother, and “小点点”, pronounced in pinyin as “xiao dian dian”, is based off of me. They look… kinda like us? I don’t know.

It’s weird. Just from the first page, I can already tell that this perception of me is terribly off from who I think I am now. In the book, I’m a rather naive little kid, constantly confusing things for the sake of comedic value and apologizing for it in a way that I think is supposed to be endearing. For example, on page 9, I confuse a huge turtle for a rock, and the text briefly breaks into English for me to say: “I’m sorry!” when I realize that the inanimate object is not inanimate, which I find rather interesting. It’s like the perception of me, a Chinese child who has learned English after being born from the womb of an immigrant, has transferred into my father’s (past) image of me.

It got me thinking; how does it feel for your child to be integrated into a culture so different from what you’re used to? Is it so apparent that my alternate, naive self, my childhood version of me in this novel about me and my brother, is the only character to break into another language throughout the whole book? I never really thought about how it probably feels for my parents to have to shift their minds a whole 7,000 miles across the Pacific just to communicate with me. With my brother. It’s probably one of the things they always have on their minds when they even speak to me.

(I mean, I am bilingual, but the thing I’ve discovered about coming from different places with very different lives is that things as big as your moral compass can be shifted. Sometimes my mother and I talk in the same language but have completely separate ideas, and then talking it out gets difficult because I only understand and speak so much Chinese and she only understands so many SSAT Deck English Vocabulary words. That’s not a flex, btw. SSAT words are relatively easy, but the sheer number of syllables in things like “superficial” confuses my mother, who was born into a language of singular syllable characters and ideas.)

I wonder if this perception of me- Dian Dian – is an accurate portrait of who I was as a child. I don’t remember what I was like five years ago. I didn’t keep any diaries either; as a matter of fact, at that time, no one in my family was big on keeping records. We would keep pictures, sure, but my brother hadn’t jumped into his “I will write many poetic memoirs because literature is the bane of my existence and purpose” phase yet, and my mother never was big on writing, and I was busy with being a child with no cares of the world. My father was the only one writing his own thoughts into novels, keeping huge diaries, writing writing writing writing. And thus, it scares me that this book is the only link I will ever have to my childhood through words.

Then again. I am still a child. I talk like I know everything, that it’s been so terribly long since I had the innocence of a child, but I’m rather certain that’s not true. After all, I haven’t faced the nightmare of what adults lovingly call “taxes”, nor have I driven a car before. I guess I should start writing now, huh? Just to keep track of things— so that the only record I have of my current life isn’t in a language that is present only in my blood.