Tyger Dreams

I am my mother’s daughter. Do you ever look at your life and marvel at the frightful symmetry?

I come from a long line of tiger people, people like my mom that seem to bend the world around them. I am my grandma’s black and white portrait of home, I am my grandpa’s pantheon of dusty old gods and the faces of saints stacked like base-ball cards. In our family there are medicine women, healers and dreamers. When I close my eyes, I can still picture the ferocity of their love - long nights bent over a foreign language, gutting fish after fish to carve out life in this haunted land. When I sit really still, I can hear them all drumming in my blood. 

The word “Diaspora” always cuts me - each time a thin, almost translucent piece, shaved from my insides. Wrapped in the cool comfort of academia it's been a doorway to celebrate the resilience of the human spirit. Yet there is always a part of me that is tethered to those early days I wandered through a fog searching for a sense of home. For years I looked for the woman that sold fresh egg waffles on the street. My fingers searched amongst look-alikes for the “shy grass” of my homeland - upward reaching green fingers that would gently close at my touch. Seeing the familiar sparrows that dotted the side-walk gave me hope I too could learn to survive off crumbs in this new world. 

But what does it mean when the black hair, wheat-coloured skin and almond eyes that once made me unremarkable in crowds of hundreds now made me the local representative to field questions about fortune cookies, chow mein, and eating dog? 

Flying back to Hong Kong for the first time when I was 10 I remember remembering I had spent half my life in Hong Kong and half my life in Canada. With Kanye’s “Homecoming” in one earbud and the roar of the plane in the other, I had a vague hope of finally landing where I belong. Two things happened that I will never forget. Meeting the aunties and uncles from my parents' stories was like touching living history. I saw the liver-spots on the uncle that gave my dad his first drink, and tasted my grandma’s famous tofu. Like a Sherlock Holms flashback, my own memories mapped onto the world around me - I saw the light filtering in between the park bamboo I once walked through with my dad to lick stamps at the post office. I heard the long ago wrinkly old men in tank tops who spent the afternoon with their legs spread wide, glued to the neat row of cement chess tables. Each memory was a precious memento my body held for me. 

In the same breath, it was not my world anymore. Pushing from stall to stall in the bustling heat with my grandma, market vendors would holler their guesses of my ethnicity. In Hong Kong there’s a term “oy gwok yun'' translating roughly as “outside of country person”, in the hot flat my ye-mas offered “Maybe it’s your nose”, “no I think it's your mannerism”, “it's definitely your eyebrows''. 

It made me wonder if I’m “Chinese enough” with my tongue-tied mother tongue and my made-up Western idiosyncrasy. If you cut open my veins will the sounds of erhu pour out or would it be maple syrup? Am I some sort of Frankenstein interloper exiled from my ancestors?  I used to feel insecure about the imaginings that seem to stand as placeholders for relationships that never began or were allowed to deepen. Every airport scene and movie goodbye still leave me sobbing. At funerals I mourn the story of the person I knew and the chance to know them I will never have again. 

But today, as a spirited little thing that grew into a spirited big thing, I know I was always made of stories. I am the utility of choice, the sense-maker, the alchemist. The rivers that once ravaged my grounding have also carved out an aching desire to be seen and see others tenderly.  I am my mother’s gossamer child, spun from morning dew and questions.