I plunged into writing like a person who dives without remembering that he or she doesn’t know how to swim, except that I didn’t dive into a swimming pool, but the Pacific Ocean off a cliff. With only an introductory English class in my training, my concept towards writing was limited. Concise argument, support development, and cohesive organization - Oh, these technical jargons. However, I had a strong desire to express and I knew a golden rule in writing often mumbled by my Chinese teacher back in high school: if one wants to be a good writer, one first needs to be a good reader. Therefore, I spent a summer reading intensely and in great bulk. After I finished Marina Keegan’s The Opposite of Loneliness, I thought to myself naively, “She was twenty-two, I’m going to turn twenty-two. If she could do write in such beautiful language, why couldn’t I?” I was oblivious towards the immense hard work and experiences behind her works. Impulsively, I wrote a twenty-four page short story. As you can imagine anything with impulse, it was a hot mess. Still, I am grateful of that period. It was a time of great joy as I lived everyday with a single purpose in mind – read. It was not until my Creative Nonfiction course that I began to acquire the necessary language of writing and discover my voice.

The third writing assignment in my Creative Nonfiction class was an investigation, one that my instructor said should embody an investigative voice, a driving question, a research process through either immersion or analysis, and most of all, a balance of in-scene writing and reflections to demonstrate an insight larger than the obvious. With Thanksgiving around the corner, I wrote a piece about the American culture of returning gifts during post-holiday seasons. Research. Research. Research. Write. Write. Write. That was my approach. Of course, the first draft was chaotic. It was boring and repetitive. It sounded like some scholarly article instead of a curious and critical investigation. Where is the “creative” part? Where is the “nonfiction” part? I reversed back to my default academic writing. “Well, if I want to build an authentic human voice, I should start with sharing some authentic experiences I had”, I thought. Actively calculating the ratio of scenes to reflections and scenes to arguments, the final product was a combination of my shopping experiences in Hong Kong and a criticism towards the illusion behind the pursuit of “having” as the pursuit of happiness. I considered The Things They Carried as my first proof to myself that I am learning to write, for real.

When many people first swim, they need to let go of fear. Now, it was probably a dangerous idea if I were to dive into the Pacific Ocean. In fact, rather than fear, I was driven by oblivion. I was oblivious towards my ability compared with my peers’. I was oblivious that I was improving, always labeling my work as a work in progress and spending countless hours striving towards an essay with higher quality. I was oblivious that my multicultural backgrounds played a large role in many of my essays. I guess it’s fair to say that I was oblivious to fear. However, I had a clear vision – I wanted to write a piece of writing that could resonate with the audience as well as Dr. King’s or Marina Keegan’s.

It was in this oblivious state that I later passionately approached a social topic close to home, foreign domestic helpers’ human rights in Hong Kong. This time, I paid close attention to building my credibility as a writer and strategically placing my rational and emotional appeals. Should I tell the audience that I grew up in Hong Kong? Should I tell the audience that when I was a baby, my family had hired a foreign domestic helper as well? With the hedging and dodging techniques we learned in class, I saw that my credibility was built on the sentence level but not holistically because I introduced my background in an immature timing. Should I simply omit those details? Yet, omitting details like those felt like a dishonest act towards the readers. At the end, I decided to include my association in the introduction of a testimonial in hope that vulnerability itself would create trust and connection. From then on, I began to practice writing prose asides from poetry and journal. Articulation of grief was a constant struggle and the language of writing was the toolbox I relied on. I regained clarity slowly.

Grief was a monster that takes no form or shape. Grief was also an annoying child who kept asking you existentialist questions without definite answers: Why does he have to be gone? What does love mean? What is the purpose of life? After a while, grief advanced and moved into personal attacks: Who are you relative to him? Who is he relative to you? What are your could-haves, should-haves, and would-haves? I guess when we lose someone dear to us, we could negate love and the past to rationalize the current situation. It’s in our natural instinct to take flight. However, through writing, I was able to give shapes and forms to abstract ideas like grief that seems indescribable and too elusive to catch but nonetheless part of humanity. Therefore, facing death and grief, I guess we could also decide that we need to love harder and be more expressive in our love, remembering that the most valuable asset we own is time. In hindsight, it seemed that my most vivid and conscious memories during the past two years were those moments when I wrote. Writing provided consciousness.