BY ANGELICA LAI
An island
I was born on an island that never asked me where I was from. Guam, formed by the union of two volcanoes, was wide at both ends and narrow in the middle like a footprint. I used to stomp in the yard of my childhood home, pretending I was a giant creating little Guams in the mud. The shape comforted me. It was a mark of existence.
My idea of home was absolute. Home was a one-story house sitting at the end of the road across from the boonies, a house my mother painted hot pink just because she could. Home was a revolving door for extended family members, all of us crammed into three bedrooms. Home was where I went after grade school and Chinese school, where we fanned ourselves with newspapers as we ate dinner around the TV.
Home was a place where I didn’t question my safety. Despite regular typhoons and earthquakes, there were always candles during power outages and tables for cover. The island itself protected us, its surrounding coral reefs shielding us from storms. When a deadly tsunami smashed into Japan, my middle school teacher said to the class, “Mother Mary protects our island.” At home, my mom said, “Ask your grandfather for protection,” handing me long, glowing joss sticks to place in a bowl of ashes. I slept with a rosary hanging on one side of my bed and a Buddhist string bracelet on the other. I was raised by both my family culture and the island culture, two collectives that melded together within me.
Home was a place of belonging, where most of my friends and classmates were Asian and Pacific Islanders, where I didn’t think about my skin. At school we would laugh at the same jokes told on our local radio station and memorize Catholic prayers in English and Chamorro, the language of the indigenous people. For fiestas, my mother made aiyu bing, a Taiwanese jelly drink mixed with limes and honey, while my friends and their families filled the tables with red rice and chicken kelaguen, shrimp patties and fina’denne’, pancit and lumpia—Chamorro and Filipino food that celebrated togetherness.
It wasn’t until I left the island in my teens that my definition of home wavered. I realized I had rarely heard the sounds of birds. My childhood was dominated by silence peppered with the barks of stray dogs, the clucks of chickens, and the clicking of geckos marking their homes.
I didn’t realize the brown tree snakes, an ever-present part of my life, were invasive. Each year, I found a larger shed snakeskin hanging from one of our coconut trees. Sometimes snakes hid in our kitchen or coiled around the telephone booth at school. They decimated the birds, which decimated the plants, whose seeds could only fall beneath the parent trees because there were no wings to carry them further.
When I used to think about my family’s existence on Guam, I thought of us standing waist-deep in the warm ocean, an expanse of calm turquoise water on one side and soft, white sand on the other. My parents hovered over me and they existed as facts, without histories, without questions of belonging. They weren’t an ethnically Chinese refugee from Vietnam and a Taiwanese-Indonesian immigrant. They weren’t people who struggled to communicate in English, who had to find and build their own Chinese and Vietnamese communities around them to feel at home. They weren’t seeds that were carried far from their parent trees. These understandings all came later, following me each time I moved and wondered, Will we belong here? Can we stay?
A desert
Sticky heat was replaced by the dry kind that cracked our roads and skin. “You have to use lotion here,” my aunt said in a mix of Mandarin and English, squeezing a cool, creamy glob to alleviate my palms’ powdery creases. During our first year in Las Vegas, we lived in her and my uncle’s three-bedroom house, eight of us under a roof. Vegas represented new possibilities, a railroad town and watering stop in the desert turned into a glittering mirage.
One Saturday, we piled into two cars for a long drive around the valley, like we often did to escape the hundred-degree heat. Sometimes we would cruise to the outskirts, down wide, dusty roads to find open desert, where creosote bushes dotted the landscape, as they had for thousands of years.
On this day, though, we were going to drive down the Strip. I stuck my face between the front seats, relieved to feel the AC. We pulled out of our neighborhood, marked by a gas station, Walmart, and a casino where locals hung out. We passed my high school, Asian strip malls and restaurants along Spring Mountain Road, billboards promising cheap buffets. One-story buildings in beiges and tans gave way to Roman palaces with Corinthian columns, an Egyptian pyramid made of metal and glass, and a replica of the Eiffel Tower.
At the end of the drive, we stopped by a grocery store. I loved wandering the aisles, pointing out to my cousins the foods we did or didn’t have on Guam. We helped the adults pick from piles of fruits, squeezing them lightly like we knew what we were doing, and debated ice cream flavors. Our voices, a mixture of Mandarin, Taiwanese, and English, filled the aisles. As we loaded the conveyor belt at the register, my mom left the line to grab an ingredient she forgot.
“We don’t do that here,” the man behind us in line said. “I don’t know where you’re from, but we just don’t do that here.”
We were all silent—my whole family, the cashier, the other customers—letting his words land. I wasn’t sure what to do with it or why his words angered me. My mom was back in no more than half a minute. We left, loaded the cars, and drove back home in silence.
On the way home, I kept thinking back to what I should have said. Should I have asked him why he thought we weren’t from here? Did he feel uncomfortable with us taking up space? It was my first real moment of understanding we didn’t belong, that our languages and appearances marked us as outsiders. Small moments from the past began to click—my classmates were surprised my English was so good, they wondered if Guam had electricity, the school didn’t place me in an English honors course despite getting an A in one on Guam. People assumed I wasn’t from “here” and didn’t want to understand where I was from.
We arrived home without saying anything about the man’s words. Once we were within our walls again, the TV and fans turned on, our chatter continued, ingredients were prepped for dinner. “Come help,” my mother said. I rinsed off leafy greens, wishing for rain so creosote bushes could fill the air with their earthy smell.
A coastal basin
In my first week in Los Angeles, I took the bus to Santa Monica so I could see the Pacific Ocean. The shore was packed with people who lazed or played on the well-maintained sand, trucked in to form an artificially flat, wide beach lined by iconic, non-native palm trees.
At the other side of the Pacific, across the expanse of blues and frothy whites, was home. I wondered if the currents that reached this coast had once touched the edges of Guam. I stepped into the water, hoping to meet the same warmth but found a crisp chill.
For the following eight years, I returned often. Each time, I braced for the cold. Each time, I thought of Guam less and Los Angeles more. I felt the collective pain of inching along freeways, learned the neighborhood names that made up the sprawling, global city, strengthened friendships over creamy tsukemen or juicy tacos al pastor. Los Angeles was where I learned to embrace my Asian American identity and stopped whitewashing my writing voice. When I missed my family, I drove to San Gabriel Valley, where communities are filled with signs in Chinese and foods my parents talked of, where no one asked me where I was from. I had aunts and uncles who moved there and invited me for Thanksgiving when I couldn’t return to Vegas. This could be home, I found myself thinking.
But when I left those comforting spaces, there was always the threat of a question from people of different backgrounds and with different intentions.
At college orientations and dinners, the question was more benign, a way to form community among transplants. “Where are you from?” people asked, and I learned to string together the places I lived. “Mar Vista, but Vegas, but Guam before that.”
Sometimes, when I waited for the bus, strangers jumped right to how I look: “What are you?” as if my physical features were a guessing game. Or when I walked to my apartment in silence, people spoke to me in a succession of cutting single syllables they thought sounded Asian enough. Ni hao, they started. Ching. Chong. Chang. “You are saying nothing,” I responded in the Californian-like accent I grew up with.
Once, when I walked into the elevator at a mall, a man followed.
“Where are you from?” he asked. The door closed. The space felt tighter.
“I live here.” Could two floors take this long? I thought.
“But where are you really from?” he asked. I stared at the metal doors, willing them to open.
“I said I live here.” I wanted to give him nothing. I had been here before, when my answers weren’t satisfactory because I didn’t mention an Asian country.
“Okay, but like, where are your parents from?” The door slid open, a moment of relief. “Taiwan, Vietnam,” I said. He followed me into the food court.
“My grandma was part Chinese,” he said. “I dated some Chinese girls before.” What did he want me to do with that information? Give him a sticker for knowing Chinese people? Ask him if he had a fetish? It took a while to shake him off, but I couldn’t shake off the feeling that even in one of the most multicultural cities in the world, there would always be people who didn’t think I belonged.
I often wondered what belonging meant to my dad, whose life was in constant motion—having escaped Vietnam, he stayed in a refugee camp on Bidong Island, found sanctuary on Guam, often traveled internationally for work, and only resided in Vegas when he knew he was going to die. When he passed, my mom wanted to inter his ashes in L.A. County, even though he never lived there. If you drove up Rose Hills Memorial Park, passing miles of chapels, gardens, and lush plots dotted with offerings for the deceased, you’d reach a Buddhist columbarium standing 1,000 feet up in the hills. My mom wanted him to rest with the mountains at his back and with a view of the water. There, at least, he could stay in a peaceful place.
When I stood outside the columbarium, I drew my eyes to the Chinese imperial roofs, their upturned eaves pointing to the sky. I scanned the horizon, following the curves of the Hacienda Hills, and beyond them, a cluster of skyscrapers that marked downtown. But I couldn’t see the ocean. It was too smoggy, maybe too far.
A straight horizontal divide cut through the atmosphere with gray, polluted air below and clear blue sky above. L.A. sat in a basin, where the mountains and weather patterns created an invisible ceiling that trapped the air. Living in the city, I was numb to the surrounding smog. But standing above it for the first time in a while, I remembered, This is what it’s like to breathe.
A fen
Blackberry bushes and open green fields accompanied me most of the way to the Cambridge city center. It was a path I walked every day, where my mind could wander to the whizzing of cyclists or the calls of pheasants foraging in what used to be fens full of wildlife.
Since moving to England, my daily ritual had included the long walk, then hunkering down at a café or at the library to write. On this day, though, I was on my way to a poetry talk, held for visiting scholars and their families. Maybe here, I hoped, I could find community.
I crossed the Green Belt, a ring of land to prevent development and protect the rural heritage of the city, and over the River Cam. Having never lived near a river before, I often paused to take in the view of the calm waters, the graceful bow of willow giants. Groups lined up on the banks for punting tours. The punts, or flat-bottomed boats, glided on the ancient waterway alongside geese and swans, steered by uniformed punters spinning tales about the colleges.
Walking down cobblestone alleys between centuries-old buildings was also awe-inspiring. I was excited to finally spend some time on the other side of the walls. Until then, I had rare glimpses of the university: manicured lawns with signs asking people to keep off; lines of students dressed in gowns to enter grand dining halls; some colleges, I heard, had private Fellows’ gardens.
After walking through King’s Parade and turning down several punt touts who mistook me daily for being a tourist, I got to the talk. It was held in the University Centre, a newer building built in the ‘60s in the Brutalist style. Stone. Concrete. Exposed stainless steel. Minimal, the exact opposite of the iconic buildings five million visitors came to see every year. In here, the building seemed to say, we are modern and different and bare.
The first thing the poet asked, because the group was so international, was for people to name where they were from. After a few minutes, I realized the U.S. had not been named yet, so I said, “The U.S.”
The poet, without pausing, asked, “Where in China?”
“The U.S.,” I replied. I couldn’t pay attention during the whole talk. As he read from his collection, I repeated the interaction, trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe “the U.S.” sounded like a Chinese city, though I couldn’t think of any. Maybe most Asian people he met were from China.
I swallowed the moment. His words sat deep in my belly. In the following two short years, I would swallow more moments, more assumptions of where I was from. They appeared in the shocked looks of people who realized I was the wife of my white-passing husband, the stares at pubs outside the city center where I would usually be the only Asian person, the disgruntled comments about Chinese tourists even though I was near enough to hear them. Even Chinese tourists would assume I was a student from China, asking me in Mandarin if I could let them into one of the university bathrooms even though I too had no access. After the talk, instead of going to a café, I retraced my path back to our flat, away from a city keen on protecting its heritage.
A forest
“It’s so green and blue here,” I said on a call to my mom after moving to Seattle. The city sits on an isthmus bounded by Elliot Bay and Puget Sound on one side and Lake Washington on the other. Lush forests surround the area, and Seattle itself is an urban forest with maples, alders, oaks, and other trees I don’t know the names of.
The word I used a lot to describe our new surroundings was qing 青, a color that’s unnamed in the English language. In Mandarin, it’s the color of nature, a medley anywhere on the green-blue continuum, sometimes with tones of black. It’s the color of a mountain, of the sky, of water. It’s the color of growth, of spring, of birth.
“How long will you live there?” my mom asked. I wondered if she saw me as restless, if my continual uprooting was sparked by my grandparents on both sides. For three generations we were always running from or to something.
“Hopefully, this is where we’ll stay.”
We haven’t been in Seattle for very long, and already there are cracks. My name has been mixed up a few times with the only other Asian American in the room. My first writing group meeting was dominated by a white man trying to prove to me he could read Han characters. Since COVID-19, there has been a rise in incidents targeting Asian Americans in Seattle, peppered by “It’s all your fault,” “Get out, China!,” spitting, and slurs that make me not want to walk outside alone. But still, I try to remain hopeful. I can find many of the foods I grew up with. I have childhood friends from Guam who now live here. I’ve found work and volunteer communities that continue to practice kindness and inclusion. And I’m learning to accept that my answer to “Where are you from?” lies in all of the places I’ve lived, to transform the question into, “Where is home for you?”
I used to identify home geographically. I took pride in remembering Guam as being 13.4 degrees north, 144.7 degrees east, with an area code of 671. But now I understand home is that safe feeling we get when we’ve found our space, where we can affirm our identities and build connectedness with others.
Throughout the day in my new home, the air is filled with bird song and calls from the 185 different species living around me. When I hear the tchurs of woodpeckers or the warbling of finches, I think of how I’ve been carried along, further from my ancestors. But here, I hope, I can find soft ground to land and take root.
Angelica Lai is a writer based in Seattle. Her works have appeared in the book collection Six Words Fresh Off the Boat, Columbia Journal, Paper Darts, Firewords, and Literature for Life. She is also an associate editor for Slant’d and a reader for Moss, a journal of Pacific Northwest writing.
Process Note: My writing process tends to start with collecting small moments and then finding the connections between them. In this piece, I chose moments from the places I lived—standing waist-deep in a tropical ocean, a silent car ride in the desert, walking between centuries-old buildings, for instance. While capturing them on paper, what emerged was a search for belonging.