No Such Thing

ongoing writing project by Felisa Nguyen and Ching-Wei Wang (Way)

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.