My mother was 30 years old when she came to the United States from Changchun, China. This was 1992. She spent her first year alone, enrolling in the University of Mississippi in Oxford with a graduate student visa and working a babysitting job on the side that paid $2 an hour. Her plan was to establish a life for our family, then bring me and my father over.
During that year, my parents communicated via an unreliable email system, handwritten letters, and the occasional phone call. My mother tells me of nights when she would dream she was with us, only to wake up crying at the reality of her loneliness. A new mother, so separated from her husband and 2-year-old child. The price one pays for the American Dream, she and so many others believed at the time, amounted to the heartbreak of letting go.
A year later, my father joined her in the States, leaving me with my grandparents. My parents were together again, but this time without me. I remember speaking with them over the phone, the sound of their voices growing more unfamiliar with each call. They were gaining new inflections, the echoes of a new language mixing with the old. I was different, too, growing quickly under the fastidious care of my grandparents. Soon, very soon, I would forget my parents.
When I eventually immigrated to the States two years later, at 5, I did not recognize them. In the airport I stood, pigeon-toed, three sweaters on my back, not looking my parents in the eyes. They had been gone for so long that they felt like strangers. When they picked me up for
