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Dear Inklings,

Allow me to introduce you to one of the best people: Sam. We met when I was running the now-defunct Periphery, and I was at once struck by his honest and gifted writing. Since then, I’ve gotten to know him a bit better, and found in him a true kindred spirit. He’s someone who is genuine, loving and giving, and passionate about making the world a better place. “My Grandmother’s Daughter” was Sam’s essay published on Periphery and the first and only one I’ve ever nominated for the Pushcart Prize. I’m so excited to share it here with you. Subscribe to Sam’s publication, A YEAR WITHOUT WATER, for more of his writing. I’m sure you’ll fall in love with him, just as I have.

With Love,

It’s a nondescript Sunday when my grandmother calls me, as she does every week. When I pick up, I pause to check if she’s dialed me by accident. I know that she occasionally sits around with her smartphone open to my contact page, frequently accidentally clicking the call button; it cheers me to know that she’s always thinking about me.

She claims to call because she misses the sound of my voice. Each time, it’s the same set of questions, a ritualistic dance of words choreographed for us two. She inquires if I’ve already eaten, if I’ve not been neglecting my nutrition. Even if I’m famished, I’ll invent the meals that I say I’ve had in response, and I always reply that I’m fine—I never want her to worry about me. She notices the noises underlying my voice, the whirring of vehicles passing by or the chatter from my television, and asks if I’m outside, perhaps with my friends. To keep things simple, I confirm. I don’t like to explain why I’m at home alone.

Sometimes, she updates me on the latest family gossip. She wants to know if I’m happy, living by myself on the other side of the country. She reminds me to take care and to work hard so that one day I can afford a home big enough for her to live with me. In response, I say, yes, of course. I miss you. I’ll talk to you again soon.

Almost ninety years old, she does not know how to end calls on a smartphone; I have to do it. It doesn’t exactly break my heart to hang up on her in this way, but I hesitate for a moment before I do, listening to and parsing the background sounds from her end, wondering whether she’s in her bedroom or elsewhere, hoping that she isn’t solitary. Through the phone, I try to glimpse her life from afar.

Of my four grandparents, she’s the only one with whom I have a relationship. I grew up with my hands held in hers, learning Hunan-style mahjong from her before I could recite the English alphabet. She raised me, and—since we’re no longer in physical proximity—calling is all she can manage now so as to continue looking after me. She does so because nowadays it is only her calls that I will take. She avoids mentioning her daughter, my mother, to me altogether.

I was twenty-nine when I came out to my mother. I had, as a pre-teen, opted to delay this confrontation for a future date, for when I was no longer dependent upon my parents, because I did not trust them to understand. My mother, for example, supported politicians and laws alike that would imperil my ability to exist; I remember vividly when she voted in favor of California’s infamous Proposition 8, causing to be enshrined into legality the exclusion of same-sex marriage—it is a recollection that has forever colored my perception of her. So, when I finally left my closet, I did so only because I had nothing left to lose. I was going through the worst breakup of my life, and I no longer cared what anybody could, should, would think about me. I decided to give her a chance, for the first time, to be there for me as a parent should do.

My mother was born in Changsha, the capital city of China’s Hunan province. It is a region known for being the home of Chinese cultural behemoths, including the Zhangjiajie National Forest Park and blisteringly spicy cuisine (one of China’s great eights; I much prefer our stinky tofu to Taiwan’s, where one of my grandfathers was born in Hualien), and its people are passionate, resourceful, and multifaceted. I think that would aptly describe her as well.

She grew up in a post-Cultural Revolution climate, one of five daughters in a lower middle-class family. As the second-eldest, she often forwent meals to ensure that the youngest had enough to eat. I was told by multiple people throughout my upbringing that there were many instances of her resorting to eating weeds when there was nothing else to consume. Her father, who I never met but shared my Chinese zodiac, was the sole breadwinner. (Extended relatives say that he would have adored me, the first male born to the family in two generations; I sometimes wonder, wryly, whether his son preference would have withstood my coming out.) Her mother, my beloved grandmother, stayed at home to raise their children. My grandfather longed for but never had a son—my mother, as obdurate as any boy could be, was his favorite.

The anecdotes that my grandmother favors about her daughter are those about her being stubborn and clever. When the neighborhood boys were bullies, it was my mother who stood up to them. She was the one who excelled in school, and she displayed natural intelligence early on, despite later confiding in me that she didn’t love to study (I take after her in this regard, among others) but had to do it to try escaping what would otherwise be an impoverished existence. In her teens, she braved arduous commutes to Beijing Normal University, where she took her place as one of the few hard-won spots allocated to Hunan. Upon graduation, she accepted an instructor position at a college in Fujian. It is there that she was briefly married before breaking it off to follow an American man to his family in Oregon, in pursuit of the American Dream as many immigrants were wont to do in the 1980s. But, the Americans wanted her to be a stay-at-home wife, contrary to her disposition, so she left behind the promise of an easy, prescribed life to make her way to Los Angeles, where she ultimately met my father and gave birth to me.

I do not think fondly of him. To label him an absent father would be a bit of a misnomer—he worked hard to make ends meet, driving for so long on his commutes that he once fell asleep at the wheel and totaled his car in traffic—and I do not begrudge him for his efforts to provide for us, but he was an ineffectual parent, both before and after their divorce; I consider myself to have been raised by women. Primogeniture bestowed upon me all the hopes and dreams—and fears and failures—of my immigrant parents, and LGBTQ first-generation firstborns have long reported the fissures that erupt between our progenitors and us; I am sorry to say that my experience has been no different. I was the wayward child, physically beaten by both father and mother because they equally disdained what they perceived to be my constant disobedience. When my grandmother stayed with us, when she intervened, she was shouted down. At least she tried.

I longed for normalcy. When—or, because—my grandmother did not live with us, I wanted parents who did not seem to hate me without reason. I understood that first-time parents make mistakes with their firstborn that they do not repeat for their subsequent children. I could forgive the extreme stress under which lower middle-class immigrants operate, but I needed parents who loved me. It was true that they had each braved harrowing journeys across the Pacific to give me an American life, that they placed food on the table and a roof over my head—what more could, should, I want from them? Did it really matter if I just wanted them to stop telling me they would kick me out of the house as soon as legally permissible, to quit lording over my head that I had no personal agency because I lived in their home, to end their ceaseless refrain that I was never good enough? All my material needs were met—was that not love? Was that not sufficient? Growing up, I almost never cried. It was moot.

I struggled to process their words. I already knew, from when I was as young as ten, that I couldn’t tell them I liked boys—it would risk accelerating their plainly stated desire to evict me—and I intuitively felt that they were not right to call me a good-for-nothing loser, but a void from deep within the center of my being began to grow. If I knew it was moot, if I had enough fortitude to know what they said was wrong, why did that black hole inside me continue to expand? Why couldn’t my nascent dignity diminish that angst? Icy tendrils reached out from my core to touch the far ends of my every limb until I was fully numb and, between twelve and eighteen, my sense of self-worth plummeted. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t good enough—it was that my very existence was an aberration. I ran away from home. I fantasized about killing myself. I spirited kitchen blades away to my bedroom, testing their mettle against my skin, dreaming of my mother chancing upon my corpse and watching from the afterlife her mourning her loss, but that would imply I was valued, perhaps even loved. I was severely depressed.

I attempted past-life regression hypnotherapy in the first half of 2024. My therapist instructed me to sink my consciousness back in time to my happiest childhood memory, at which point I had a complete breakdown, choking back tears to try to explain to her that I could pick out satisfaction, I could locate laughter, but I could not for the life of me find true happiness. All I had were remembrances of my mother chasing me with a long wooden baton, the one I wielded during my performance routines at figure skating competitions, competing with herself to count how many bruises she could inflict upon my skin. As a teenager with nonexistent self-esteem, I did her one better: I took a knife to the flesh of my inner left arm and carved the letters L-O-S-E-R.

In 2022, when I came out to my mother at last, she was quiet. She had called to ask me something inconsequential, but I had just gotten off the phone after decompressing to a close friend about my debilitating breakup and I couldn’t keep up the pretense anymore. At that point, I was hardly alive, and I didn’t have any energy left to continue living a lie. I interrupted whatever she was saying with three words: “Mom? I’m gay.”

She listened to me explain that I had known since I was in elementary school, that I had had a decade of un-coerced experience to know for certain, that I was doing so because I thought I had finally found the one, someone for whom I was ready to risk everything to introduce to her because I felt he would pass her muster, and that I was so irrevocably shattered by his departure I was willing to turn to her for support. I had wanted to marry him, to buy a home and settle down with him, to spend the rest of my life with him, a man she didn’t even know was real until I spoke him into existence right then. She took a moment to digest my words, and then reverted with a sincere question: “Was it the ice skating [that made me gay]?”

Over the course of almost a year, our relationship normalized. When I returned to California to visit her, I found she had decorated the bedroom reserved for my use in gaudy live-laugh-love decor, plastered with the vacant sort of platitudes that would be marketed to devoutly Christian parents of gay children. (It’s okay to be gay!) Still, I recognized an olive branch for what it was, and I lowered my guard. When she later dropped me off at a female friend’s home on my way back to New York, she reminded me to take care of myself and said that I should find a wife as competent as that friend; I laughingly retorted that I was looking for a husband. For a brief period, we had an amicable rapport. It was nice while it lasted.

Months afterward, when she asked me to accompany her on a trip back to her hometown, I agreed, rationalizing that it would be meaningful to return as an adult to her—and my—childhood stomping grounds. On the way there, we stopped in Taiwan, where decades of friction came to a head.

Our initial few days in Taipei were chilly, and I shivered everywhere we went because I had forgotten to pack a coat. I like to assume that she felt bad for me because, on the third day, she led me to a generic clothing store and instructed me to pick out a jacket. She watched me sift through the clothes, suggesting that I pick the cheapest one. But, I disagreed: the least expensive option was also the one I was most unlikely to wear and offered the littlest insulation, thus rendering such a purchase functionally pointless. Instead, I had my eyes set on a down jacket for just twenty dollars more. Yet, she sniped at my choice, making comments under her breath about my spendthrift tendencies that spiraled into full-blown insults about my apparent stupidity for incorrectly packing my clothing. Having had a lifetime of experience with her propensity for nastiness and with the understanding that this was a proxy fight about something deeper, something latent, I refused to tolerate her attitude. I retorted that she was overreacting, being ridiculous and even miserly over such an immaterial price difference for a jacket I wasn’t asking her to buy. She didn’t love my snark. I had provoked her, and she began to scream at me in public, castigating me for my every wrong—my failure to get into an Ivy League college, my supposed mediocre career, my sexual deviance. I was wholly unappreciative of all that she had ever done for me, and I was a colossal screwup for not living my life exactly as she demanded I did, building up to the final sentence she ever spoke to me. To this day, her words haunt me still: “你就不是我要的儿子.” You’re not the son I wanted.

Harris, Chinese Canadian and one of my best friends, says his parental trauma stems from “having a crazed mother who yells at [him] for any small thing that could go wrong.” Thus, he has become “a pushover afraid of making any mistakes because [he] doesn’t want to argue” with his mother, with anyone; forced perfectionism births paralysis. I am the same and yet the diametrical opposite—I spent too many years being obsequious, so I am now always confrontational to a fault—no longer will I accept deliberate malice, and certainly not from anyone who has had decades of maturity to learn, to be, better. When my mother’s facade broke, despite the pure frivolity of the disagreement, I accepted her words verbatim: after thirty years of being shown that I am not the child she envisioned, knowing full well that she had terminated a pregnancy years before choosing to conceive me, that she had gone through all the heart-wrenching effort of having me only to decide she abhorred me, I encouraged her, egging her on. I wanted to hear her speak the truth. When it came, it wasn’t a surprise—it was a culmination of a lifetime of disdain. The next day, I went straight to the airport, leaving Taiwan. My mother no longer has a son.

My grandmother always told me that her daughter had lived a rough life. She had given up lucrative opportunities in China to start from scratch in America, emigrating with less than twenty dollars to her name. As I grew up, I watched her accept a series of odd jobs to make ends meet, from selling avocados to being a substitute Chinese tutor to hawking bamboo. Even as a child, I dutifully edited the written English in her work because I hated knowing that her colleagues discriminated against her for her non-native fluency. At length, I listened to her explain her inability to withstand hunger because it reminded her of her famished childhood years, and I felt those acute stomach pangs too when my own eating was drastically disordered in secret. I was there when life wasn’t easy, and I understood without question that she was doing her best, that nobody was perfect. Nonetheless, despite my every attempt, that knowledge does not, can not, will not help me absolve her harm. Equally, I recall all the moments when I wanted to come out to her, fantasizing about getting the same kind of acceptance I only ever saw other people receive, and stopping myself because I feared her reaction. I still remember trembling because I wanted her approval, not her reproaches, verbal and physical. I can not forget all the nights wherein I longed to disappear far, far away, cursing the fact that I was born to her because I thought it tied me to terror, to her, forever.

Can there be an end to filial piety? Am I allowed to step away? When I spurn my maker, do I hack off my nose to spite my face? If I know that some differences are simply too great to be bridged, what right do I have to remain aggrieved? I confess that I blame myself. These were not isolated events: I had endured similar incidents—public haranguing and private abuses—a million times, yet still I forgave because I wanted to be a part of the family to which I was born, blood being thicker than water and so on. I had spent my life vacillating between acquitting her mistakes and retaining enough self-worth to know that I am not one of those mistakes, but I felt guilty for resenting her implacability, for wishing that I had a “better” mother, for wanting a different life when life itself is so rare a gift. I felt wrong for hating the person who created me. It was the evergreen comparison between the illusion I desired against what was materially real; I knew that grass is always greenest where it is watered, but the greens I tried to nurture in my family’s plot had long ago expired.

As I write this, the calendar in the top right corner of my computer screen alerts me to today being her date of birth.

In the years past, it was customary for me to send her a bouquet at least twice a year: on Mother’s Day and on her birthday. As soon as I had my own discretionary income, I put in a standing order at a florist near her home to recur biannually because it was the right thing to do. Despite—or, resultant of—everything, all the good and the bad, it was important to me that she understood I did not take her for granted. I had wanted her to know that I loved her.

My grandmother’s daughter taught me that water is done boiling when it is quiet. She scrimped and saved to send me to figure skating classes, to chaperone me as I entered competitions across Southern California, to be there for me as the lone pair of eyes supporting me amidst a crowd of strangers’ watching me perform, because it had once been her dream.

The dark circles underneath my eyes are hers. The contours of my lips and the shape of my eyes are hers. My love for music, for travel and adventure, is hers. My disarming charm and natural curiosity, my instinct for self-preservation, my refusal to accept unfairness, my drive to go after what I want despite the countervailing odds, the voice in my head telling me that it’s not enough, that I will never be good enough, they are all hers—and yet they have become mine as well. The more I describe her, the more I describe myself.

My grandmother phoned me when she learned of our estrangement. She asked me to show her daughter grace, but I refused. I declined to mend a bond thirty years in the unmaking. Not once in my lifetime have I ever heard a single word of apology or even acknowledgement from her daughter, and still I am wracked with doubt about whether I should reconsider my decision to withdraw, whether waiting to hear the words that I know will not come is a Sisyphean exercise, but I am no longer forgiving enough to let it go. Forgiveness is a gift given to one’s self, I am well aware, but it is something that I simply can not muster. Ergo, I have selfishly chosen to sever relations, thereby preserving at least a modicum of my own peace.

I’ve been preparing myself for this irrevocable goodbye, knowing full well that time eventually returns us all to the earth, preemptively eulogizing her despite an omnipresent, nagging fear that I will miss her more than anything in the world when she is truly gone. I still have the nightmares, horrible dreams wherein she screams at me for my shortcomings; I still wake up with tears in my eyes.

So, instead, my grandmother calls me every week to ask if I am well.

I always say yes.

About Sam: Born a Chinese American and raised between Los Angeles and Changsha, Sam is currently a resident of New York City. He is a creative nonfiction writer and the author of A YEAR WITHOUT WATER. In his free time, he is a stinky tofu enthusiast and welcomes all inside information on the whereabouts of the world’s best, most pungently delicious treat.

The short story collection I wrote with my late son, Ren, is launching on September 15, 2026. We wrote it for the marginalised, the broken, the ones who have felt like they don’t belong. Sign up here to be notified when it launches.

First, I want to thank all of you for sticking with me through this brief hiatus. So many of you reached out with kind messages after my depressing announcement, and I was so incredibly touched. You really showed up for me as a fellowship. Thank you.

Anyways, before I get too sentimental, some changes to The Untangling. To my great sadness, the newsletter is back on Substack because I am, alas, too poor to keep it on Ghost. However, my website will continue to live on Ghost, and I’ll still have most of my writing and other content there, including random thoughts I’d otherwise post on social media if I cared about social media. Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll make enough to go back. I really do love it but paying for each head was killing me. 😭

The next two months will be heavily focused on my book launch for The Constellation of Forgotten Things, which will be live on Kickstarter from September 15 to October 1. I highly recommend signing up on the prelaunch page so you don’t miss out. There are a lot of extras that are only going to be included in the Kickstarter campaign. The special edition hardcover, especially, is unlikely to be sold anywhere again.

That said, once the campaign is over, things will return to the slower pace y’all (and I) are used to. Do bear with me until then.

I have plans.

For example, I’ve been mulling over the idea of sending an extra letter a month as snail mail for patrons. Founding members (Fellows) would also get a handwritten letter from me, as per usual. I’m thoroughly sick of the digital life, y’all. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to throw out my phone and laptop this past year and live in the woods where nobody can find me. Buut..anyways..

The other thing I would like to start up is a letter writing system. More details to come as I try to work out logistics.

All that to say, I’m trying to align my writing life with my personal life—getting offline more and taking you with me for the journey.

What else? What else? My brain’s still not quite there, so there we are. I’m sure something will come to me as soon as I send this. As for personal updates, I’m still wading through some muck. It’s involved a lot specialist appointments. Not enjoyable, but helpful in the long-term? I’m pessimistic, but trying not to be.

At any rate, school is starting up again, which will force me back into some semblance of routine. September always feels like a new new year. I’m hoping to get it together enough to function.

Thank you, again, for being here with me. So much love to you all.

With Love,

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About Me: Tiffany Chu is a Taiwanese American writer based in San Diego. Her essays and short stories have been published by Open Secrets Magazine, San Diego Writers Ink, and Chicago Story Press. She writes about evergreen themes of grief, belonging, and what it means to be human. She’s been writing this publication, The Untangling, since 2023. Order her books here.

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Dear Inklings,

Subscribe for free to read this post. For those sensitive to these topics, this essay is about suicide, so if you need to protect yourself, feel free to skip this one, and I’ll see you next time.

Support this essay with a tip 🩵

If you’re struggling, the U.S. suicide hotline is available: call 988 or go to https://988lifeline.org/

About Me: Tiffany Chu is a Taiwanese American writer based in San Diego. Her essays and short stories have been published by Open Secrets Magazine, San Diego Writers Ink, and Chicago Story Press. She writes about evergreen themes of grief, belonging, and what it means to be human. She’s been writing this publication, The Untangling, since 2023. Order my books here.

I laughed.

She screamed.

I was unharmed, but not for long after my mother beat me for the stunt. I say “stunt,” but it was an honest mistake. You see, I’d been trying to fix the window screen, which had somehow popped out of place. My dumbass thought this would be better achieved from outside the house than in. When I’d affixed the screen, my hands blackened with the dust and dirt, an untimely wind slammed my bedroom door shut, and I also had not thought through how to get back in, now the window screen was back in place.

Of course, the only way back into the house was off the roof.

And though my mother’s scream echoed in my ears as I jumped, for a moment I felt like I was flying.

The myth of Mazu is one I learned only recently. The goddess Mazu 媽祖 is one of Taiwan’s most popular deities. Unlike others, Mazu is said to have been a real human girl named Lin Mo—a prophetess and healer who could read the weather and moods of the sea.

One fateful day, a typhoon swept in while Lin Mo’s father and brothers were fishing off the coast. The storm capsized their boat. Fearful for their lives, the girl ran to the beach and fell into a trance that allowed her to project her spirit over the waters to find her family. She was able to guide her brothers safely to shore, but because Lin Mo’s mother didn’t realise what Lin Mo was trying to do, she shook her daughter awake before Lin Mo could find her father.

Grief overwhelmed Lin Mo at her father’s death until she climbed to the top of a cliff and leapt into the ocean. But for her selflessness, she did not hit the water; she transformed into a beam of light and ascended to heaven. There, she became the goddess Mazu, ending the storm. She would be worshiped from then on for her protection of seafaring folk.

Jumping has been a pervasive thread in my life ever since my aunt—my mom’s youngest sister—killed herself by leaping off a building when I was perhaps five or six years old. She herself left behind a son younger than I was. She did it while my grandmother watched. Sometimes, I can imagine my grandma screaming for her daughter, watching the trajectory of her fall, and wonder at the horror of witnessing its conclusion.

My aunt was the specter haunting my mother’s family my entire life. Growing up, I was given snippets here and there, but she was spoken of with a hush and a fear.

And we all know that’s the worst way to handle a secret around curious children.

A little less well known about Mazu is her proclivity for rescuing those in need, thus also earning her the name, 靈惠夫人, meaning “Lady of Light and Kindness,” or even, 阿媽: “Mother” or “Grandmother”—a goddess of mercy. Some believe that even after achieving divinity, Mazu did not ascend to heaven, but chose to remain on earth until all created beings achieved enlightenment. She wished to help all beings escape the cycle of suffering, protecting them, soothing them.

I came across Mazu’s story while searching for Taiwanese myths and folklore. Grief and despair are long-standing companions of mine. They’ve been part of my family for generations, you might say. Yet Mazu’s informal name of “Mother,” tugged at an ever-present ache I don’t like to acknowledge.

For a mother that might protect me.

Yet if she was such a mother, why is my aunt dead and my cousin motherless?

As I write this, I recall sitting on the sofa, my mom and dad on either side of me—the space of a body between us—and my mother randomly saying, “I’m so depressed I could jump off a roof.”

And there it was: the specter.

In my family, the threat of suicide showed itself in slammed garage doors and cars speeding off into the night, shrieks of, “I’ll just die in front of you (and then you’ll be sorry),” used to keep me in line. Terror compelled me to apologise for things I didn’t understand, offenses I didn’t know I’d made, slights that were never explained.

Now I know those statements were part of a pattern of speech—learned behaviour, because my grandmother often said the same things to her children.

It makes me wonder: did my aunt also?

The question lingers unspoken, makes me think of the way our mother tongue is not always language, but also the words we inherit, gestures that pass from hand to hand like heirlooms no one asked for.

What if there is a certain silence in repetitious cries for help until no one hears them anymore? And what if, by the time I entered my own Dark Night of the Soul, my mother had already learned not to listen too carefully to a daughter who sounded like a ghost she already knew?

I know so little about my dead aunt, I hesitate to write anything at all. Two of my aunts don’t speak of her to me at all. My grandma rarely did. My mom talked about the time my aunt turned the volume of the TV all the way up. When my mom asked her to lower it so she could study, my aunt broke a mug and scratched my mom’s face with the shard.

My favourite aunt—my dead aunt’s twin—told me the most about her: her desperate need for love, the way she manipulated others to gain it, the many, many threats to kill herself, until the family both feared it and somehow stopped taking it so seriously. She told me about her twin calling her out of important work meetings with these threats—which turned out to be tests of the extent of her loyalty; and of watching her twin take her boyfriends to stores and picking out the most expensive items—to test whether they loved her enough to pay for them. My favourite aunt told me that her own boyfriend’s family forced him to break up with her after her twin’s suicide—because they could not be associated with such stain.

I see only the aftermath: my grandmother who neglected all her other daughters who still lived for the sake of the one who died…the resentment and jealousy that lingered for decades because of it.

At times, when I was in my worst depressive states, my mom would look at me with a strange expression. I always wondered if she thought of her sister in those moments, wondered if she feared me, wondered if she heard me.

Lifelong depression made me wary of motherhood for myself. Yet when my husband became passionate about orphan care and launched us into the foster-adoption world, I couldn’t turn away, and we adopted our first son when I was 29. The following year, we would begin the process of adopting our second son, Renley.

Choosing motherhood was a leap of faith not unlike the one I took off the roof in eighth grade. What kind of mother would I be? I took every step I could think of to break the pattern I’d grown up witnessing: extensive therapy being one, but also a fierce desire for openness and honesty in our own household. Sometimes, people will comment that my children are too young to be told about certain things, yet I remember being more aware than adults believed me to be when I was even younger than my eight-year-old is.

When she was still the human girl, Lin Mo, Mazu was said to be mute. Thus, she was known as “Silent Girl.” Perhaps her birth into poverty, inability to speak, and experience with grief gave her unusual compassion. It reminded me about Ren’s muteness, yes. But I also thought of my aunt, spoken of only in hushed fragments, her whole self reduced to a silence my family maintained for decades. Perhaps that is its own kind of muteness: not the absence of words, but the absence of anyone willing to hold them.

The night my son, Ren, died, I drove to Coronado bridge in the middle of the night and stood against the rail. I listened to the black waters swirl and crash beneath me, the sound all the more deafening for the quietness of the hour. It would have been nothing to step over the ledge, to jump. No one was there at such a late hour. No one could have stopped me.

But I was still a mother, and to my son, I had made certain promises.

“Publish our anthology and my memoir,” he’d written, but most of all, “Live, please live.”

And Mazu, called “Mother” and “Grandmother,” a protector of life, showed compassion toward me as I stood above her domain that night, stepped back into my car, and drove home to my husband and child who still lived.

With Love,

Some sources:

• Mythopedia

• Timeless Myths

• World Mazu Cultural Alliance

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My upcoming short story collection features stories about motherhood and mental health struggles. Sign up here to be notified when it launches.

About Me: Tiffany Chu is a Taiwanese American writer based in San Diego. Her essays and short stories have been published by San Diego Writers Ink, Chicago Story Press, and Renewal Missions. She writes about evergreen themes of grief, belonging, and what it means to be human. She’s been writing this publication, The Untangling, since 2023. Order my books here or here.

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Dear Inklings,

This is an old trend begun by Jennae Cecelia, but one I wanted to try anyway. I suppose I also wrote this for my present self.

(For those sensitive to these topics, there are allusions to sexual assault and suicidal ideation, so if you need to protect yourself, feel free to skip this one, and I’ll see you next time.) This post is free for all subscribers.

About Me: Tiffany Chu is a Taiwanese American writer based in San Diego. Her essays and short stories have been published by Open Secrets Magazine, San Diego Writers Ink, and Chicago Story Press. She writes about evergreen themes of grief, belonging, and what it means to be human. She’s been writing this publication, The Untangling, since 2023. Order my books here.

Hello, I’m Tiffany, your resident town hermit. Welcome to my fellowship—a haven where you’re free to talk about taboo subjects you can’t anywhere else. Learn more about The Untangling here, or subscribe to never miss a post.

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This essay was first posted on tiffanychu.org in March 2026.

What are you nostalgic for?

Nostalgia: that strange, elusive emotion caught between a mixture of sadness and not-quite-happiness, rather an undertone of restrained bliss. There is a longing and wistfulness for what once was, a smile for the delights of childhood, for the past versions of yourself that led you to where you now stand, but also a subdued mingled sorrow for times that will never again be lived.
(unknown source)

It’s been many years since I’ve been able to return to my homeland of Taiwan, but reading Taiwan Travelogue transported me there for a little while with its vivid descriptions of Taiwanese food, mountains, and history.

The most compelling aspect of this novel is that it’s presented as a rediscovered translated nonfiction travel memoir by a young Japanese writer who traveled to colonised Taiwan in 1938.

Aoyama Chizuko wants to experience the real Taiwan, not Japan-style Taiwan, especially authentic Taiwanese cuisine. She’s not interested in Japan’s imperialist agenda, despite having been invited by the government to travel to write about Japan’s presence in Taiwan.

To satisfy her monstrous appetite, a young Taiwanese woman is soon hired as Chizuko’s translator. Ong Tshian-hoh proves to be an accomplished, charismatic, yet reserved woman, as well as a great cook. Tshian-hoh becomes someone who exceeds the role of a translator, acting more as a personal assistant.

Chizuko is understandably charmed by this good-natured young woman, who presents an amiable disposition and seems to anticipate Chizuko’s whims before she does. When Chizuko discovers in Tshian-hoh an appetite to match her own, she feels a kindred spirit. And yet, Chizuko notes a distance between them, despite her effusive overtures of friendship. She describes what she calls Tshian-hoh’s “Noh mask”—a mask of pleasant politeness that keeps Chizuko at arm’s length. And she can’t understand why!

The book hinges on this relationship between Chizuko and Tshian-hoh—between coloniser and colonised—and begs the question, “Can two people with such stark power differentials be true friends?”

This is one of those slow, subtle books that you have to take time getting to know. It covers multiple layers of colonialism, identity, history, and friendship. Once you sit with it, though, it’s well worth it.

Outright hatred is easy to spot. Oppression hidden behind ignorant kindness is much harder to see, and fight against.

“There is nothing in the world more difficult to refuse than self-righteous goodwill.”

On the surface, Chizuko is not a cruel person. She’s a single woman in the 1930s making her own way in the world, so she’s also a strong woman. She has a strong sense of justice, in that when she witnesses racism against Tshian-hoh, she responds with righteous outrage and flies to Tshian-hoh’s defense. Chizuko showers Tshian-hoh with gifts—expensive gifts, some intended to help her life on a colonised island “easier.”

Chizuko thinks she is helpful to Tshian-hoh, but in a way that asserts her own sense of superiority and “I know better,” despite the reality that Tshian-hoh is an extremely capable woman in her own right.

This reminded me of the book, When Helping Hurts, by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert. The entire premise of the book can be summed up in this quote: “Until we embrace our mutual brokenness, our work with low-income people is likely to do more harm than good. I sometimes unintentionally reduce poor people to objects that I use to fulfill my own need to accomplish something. I am not okay, and you are not okay. But Jesus can fix us both.”

The irony, of course, is that throughout the book, Chizuko does not acknowledge Tshian-hoh as someone of equal standing as herself. She exoticises her (even using that exact term to describe her in one incident in a desire to write about Tshian-hoh in a novel; Tshian-hoh, of course, does not even respond), shields her from racists, clothes her in luxurious Japanese kimonos, and demands she not give in to family expectations by marrying but live an independent life like herself—simultaneously stripping Tshian-hoh of her agency and failing to realise that the system that allows Chizuko to live her life is the same system that prevents Tshian-hoh from living that same life.

While Chizuko is able to pat herself on the back for being a good person by doing all this, Tshian-hoh does not have the luxury of refusing these gifts or acts of goodwill. Tshian-hoh is paid to be accommodating, and to reject Chizuko’s offerings would be to welcome possible termination, cessation of a relatively pleasant working relationship.

The kindness, then, is a double-edged sword.

“Her Japanese was so fluid, so elegant, that if I closed my eyes, I could almost forget I was in a colony at all. It was a testament to our education system that a girl from the islands could speak with the grace of a Tokyo aristocrat,” Chizuko says of Tshian-hoh, giving the empire sole credit for Tshian-hoh’s accomplishments.

Chizuko consumes traditional Taiwanese food and history with fascination but without true appreciation.

A major aspect of the book is Chizuko’s gluttony. The metaphor is rather on-the-nose, but colorful, as Chizuko literally eats her way through Taiwan. As she does so, she marvels at the different ethnic groups and dishes, then mourns their impending erasure. “For the greater good,” would the phrase she might use, because in her eyes, Japan was improving the island. If some aspects of various cultures must be sacrificed, it was a worthy one.

However, what does it mean that Tshian-hoh shares the same gluttony? Perhaps it is reflected in this quote:

How do I explain myself so that I don’t seem like an unreasonable child who covets your equal treatment yet paradoxically defies your kindness?

Tshian-hoh has her own personality, desires, and hopes for the future. She has a voracious appetite reflected in the way she consumes food, books, languages, history, and even human behaviour. Yet, she consumes so she can survive in a harsh world under a tyrannical government.

Today, one cannot travel through Taiwan without bearing witness to the effects of Japanese and Chinese occupation. There are Japanese-style buildings—so many that Taiwan remains a popular tourist attraction for the Japanese. My Wáipo still spoke Japanese that she learned growing up during the occupation.

Meanwhile, the largest monument in Taiwan is Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, whose plaza is ironically called Liberty Square. Chiang Kai-shek was the Chinese general who fled to Taiwan after losing to Mao Zedong, and who then took over the island—and who later massacred thousands of Taiwanese during the period now known as the White Terror. During that period, the government did not allow anyone to speak Taiwanese, or any other language except Mandarin.

However, while rage is present as part of learning about my country’s history, I know there must also be self-examination. While I am mostly Taiwanese and 1/4 Hakka, one of my grandfathers came to Taiwan with the conquering army during World War II. He was part of the military response against civilians during the 228 Incident that sparked the White Terror. That is part of my own personal history, two sides of my family I have to reckon with.

I bring to Taiwan another layer as someone who was born and raised in the United States. Up until recent years, America was highly regarded in Taiwan. Even now, those who are bilingual are viewed with more respect. I felt this even as a young child, and was never shy about flouting my bi-national status.

It took me until my twenties to realise I had exoticised my own country, the same way Aoyama Chizuko did. I loved going to Taiwan, eating the food, walking the streets, but I had only a shallow understanding of what it meant to be Taiwanese, only a limited knowledge of Taiwan’s history. I, like Chizuko, enjoy Taiwan for a short time, then leave its people to their struggles when I return to the U.S.

The truth that I have come to learn is that I am both the colonised and coloniser—that I am shaped by the merged histories of multiple nationalities that I did not choose. So are most of us, besides the indigenous people, but if we go back far enough, every race has colonised someone. It is not something to be ashamed of, but to be aware of—to be better.

Nostalgia, for me, is complicated. Taiwan feels like home to me when I go there, but I have never lived there, and never will. Each generation loses a little bit more of our heritage, despite our best efforts to retain it. The past is a tapestry of memories in my grandparents’ house and setting off firecrackers for Lunar New Year, heat that sticks to my skin, and tiny street stalls that most certainly no longer exist. They whisper of days gone by, of fighting mosquitos, street sounds that never stopped, even late into the night, and flashing lights from the city.

I hope this love for my homeland is one I am succeeding at cultivating in my children—with a truer understanding of it than I had.

(I read this as a buddy read with @danisreadinglit. Follow her for diverse book recommendations and thought-provoking posts.)

P.S. Apparently, I’m supposed to tell you how to feel about this book and whether it’s worth reading, according to my husband. I don’t do that with my book reviews. However, I will say that if you enjoy Kazuo Ishiguro’s style of writing (restraint, subtlety), clever framing, a slow-paced read that takes its time unfolding, and a book that forces you to examine your beliefs, you will likely enjoy this book.

With Love,

In my short story collection, “Beneath the Hawthorn Tree” is a story about fighting against a corrupt government. Sign up here to be notified when it launches.

About Me: Tiffany Chu is a Taiwanese American writer based in San Diego. Her essays and short stories have been published by Open Secrets Magazine, Chicago Story Press, and A Year in Ink. She writes about evergreen themes of grief, belonging, and what it means to be human. She’s been writing this publication, The Untangling, since 2023. Order her books here or here.