Essays

On Learning Silence from My Grandmother

She spoke four languages and chose none of them to say what mattered most. I used to think that was a tragedy. Now I think it was a kind of devotion.

My grandmother came to Taiwan from Shanghai in 1949, which is to say she arrived carrying everything and left everything behind, which is to say she arrived with nothing but the particular weight of having once had everything.

What she did not speak, in any language, was the thing that had happened to her family in the crossing. This was not unusual. The silence was collective, which made it harder to locate.