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Last weekend, walking home after taking my toddler to the water sprinkler at one of the playgrounds along Riverside Park, I saw, almost in disbelief at first, one firefly near a bench, but soon realized that there were many flickering their green and orange taillights, conversing and moving in groups from one grassy patch to another. We stood in the park and watched them for a long time.

It will be our first summer in New York this year, after the first winter, and first spring. But first summer is really the very first, since when I was in graduate school in the US eight, nine years ago, I always returned to Asia for the summer. My husband said that fireflies reminded him of his childhood in DC, and he hadn’t seen them for many years. I didn’t have memories of fireflies from my childhood – perhaps the inner city of Shanghai was already polluted in the 1980s? Nonetheless, fireflies evoke a cultural memory even for a city child of my generation who read in Chinese: “淺草時雙起，深叢忽獨明” (two rise from the shallow grass, and one shines in the deep meadow), “逢君拾光彩，不吝此生輕” (as you pick up my flicker, I wouldn’t mind offering you the lightness of this life), “銀燭秋光冷畫屏，輕羅小扇撲流螢” (the painted screen is chilled in the candlelight; she uses a fan to catch passing fireflies)…During a summer trip in Taiwan nine years ago, we joined a small evening tour when staying in Alishan and walked along a trail filled with fireflies dancing in the pitch dark – a sight hard to forget. And it has become one of my dearest memories of Taiwan. Now in the middle of Manhattan, perhaps after the pandemic years, and with the city’s conservation efforts, these ephemeral creatures have returned. My child might be too young to remember her first firefly viewing experience in a few years. But I hope this first-hand experience will continue, and it will leave some traces of memories, before she conceptualizes it culturally.

June is the rainy season in Jiangnan, and in Shanghai. For more than a decade when I lived in Hong Kong, seeing morning glories on the trail on summer days always brought up a warm feeling, reminding me of the purple and blue blooms near the lane houses where I grew up. Of course, the backdrop where the flowers were was different. Early summer in Hong Kong also means that it starts as early as April. And even though there was the Dragon Boat Festival in June and zhongzi (glutinous rice dumplings in reed leaves), Hong Kong doesn’t really have meiyuji, the same quintessential Jiangnan-style rainy season that precedes the heat of summer, making both the lingering rain welcome at times to delay the heat yet meanwhile the heat almost a relief at first (in Hong Kong, typhoon season falls at the end of summer, which doesn’t provide the same ambiguity). After living with displacement in the subtropical weather for so long, the four seasons are now finally more or less of the same length in New York, like back in Shanghai. A double displacement has made an element in my life resemble the experience of the beginning. (Raising a toddler has certainly taught me how stubbornly attached we can be to our very first experiences of everything. “NO,” she says if the second time I dare to put her bunny friend on the right window sill instead of the left side near the dining table, to watch her eat.)

So, it is pleasantly dry here in June. Not many mosquitoes. Too pleasant almost. In Riverside Park, hydrangea bushes are in peak bloom. One can argue that the hydrangeas lose their veiled elegance and poetry without the rain, if you want to be Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, or toddler about it. On some days, nonetheless, I thought about the mistiness, the mosquito incense and the humongous spiders on Hong Kong Trail, and felt the “homesickness” for both my first and second homes. And the fireflies on our evening walks back from the playgrounds have already made me nostalgic, too, while I’m still living in it, on the day of our first summer solstice in New York.

My daughter will turn one soon. Lately, she has been taking her first wobbly steps, holding both her arms up while walking, or clapping, or carrying whatever is in sight with her. It is an exciting time for my little warrior. No wonder she has been in a sunny mood most of the time.

My husband and I have been going to the playroom almost every evening with her for a couple of months during the harsh Hong Kong summer. Today however, as another typhoon receded, I went back to the trails in the morning, hiked to the Discovery Bay Reservoir, and did a half-hour run near the water. It felt as lovely as what I remembered – I still hiked over the past year, but running has been a distant memory (a memory of ten years ago, those loops around The Morning Trail on The Peak or six years ago, in Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C.).

What I realized today was that this must be what my daughter feels every day recently, and hopefully what she will continue to feel throughout her toddler years. These new steps are confidence builders, just as exercises are for adults. Yet most of us adults don’t exercise nearly enough, certainly not in the way toddlers challenge themselves every day. There is no surprise that a sunny disposition is not a default among adults.

There are writers who have drawn book-length analogies between running and writing. I’m wondering a lot about this these days surrounded by one-year-olds. The early walkers are often late talkers, and the early talkers are often late walkers. Toddlers simply don’t have the capacity to focus on both tremendous tasks at the same time. Therefore, the first struggles between independent exploration and social communication have already started at this delicate age. Some even say that we can already tell toddlers’ budding personalities based on where they are on the spectrum at this stage.

Later in life, does the physical instinct subside more than the verbal one, when we become more used to it and more “civilized”? Which instinctual achievement of the two builds more reassuring confidence? I think it is important to keep reminding ourselves of those trials and joys in the beginning of life. And for certain people, the untamed physical spirit, especially. I remember years ago, when I was still reading Haruki Murakami’s books, that his description of running every day to get rid of the toxic energy from writing left an impression. Now as I think about running (walking) and writing (speaking) in the context of the tug-of-war among toddlers, I feel that I have finally come to touch the crux of the matter.

Writers are usually wary about words. A good and ethical writer certainly is. But not many voice their concerns out much or discuss much openly, like fruit sellers do not mention the fruits’ expiration dates or talk about their glucose levels. In Murakami’s case, he only alluded to it briefly before halting, just enough for the writer’s conscience and not too much to harm the writer’s creditability. I used to work in investments, where financial products had disclaimers for prospective investors. For products of words, on the other hand, prospective readers just plunge in without necessary warnings from a young age. And what a thing for a new mother to think about today!

Well, I’m certainly going back to the trails very soon, with the age-old wisdom – increasing exposure to one thing will help keep the indulgence in another in check. And like my daughter, I know that I reveal the new possibilities within the body. One important question is still left though: as one reluctantly moves towards middle age, what if instead of keeping up as we so desperately want to, our bodies start to fail us? What if as we all know, but do not want to admit, we are essentially Benjamin Buttons returning to jerky movements and all cries before the oblivion? That’s something more to think about on the trails, I guess. At this very moment, I know that I will only do the best I can.

One of the lines I thought of often during my pregnancy this year was in the thirteenth chapter of Tao Te Ching, where Lao Tzu said “吾所以有大患者，為吾有身 (We only know calamity because we have these bodies/selves)”. As someone still in her thirties with the relative good fortune of not paying such close attention to the body before, the changes brought by the journey of motherhood and the regular monitoring of the body at home and in the doctor’s office have been unnerving. I started to think more seriously about something that I have always known like everyone else, but not felt deeply from within: a youthful contentment coming from an unawareness of the body’s fragility, or at least the willful denial of it with little immediate consequence. Our bodies have always been working for us, catering to most of our needs when we were younger, without us noticing their mere existence in the best scenarios. Even though some of us may still suffer the emotional woes from an appetite for life bigger than our gifts or power, at least for most happy-go-luckies, our bodies have not been a physical hindrance.

One can immerse in an intellectual life more easily when one does not have the constant reminder of the body. When I read Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections during my third trimester, I found the psychologist’s childhood experience relatable: the early memories, discontents, isolation and early meditations. For a moment, living in Jung’s world, I felt like my old self, not subject to the physical clumsiness typical during late pregnancy and motivated to work towards the perspicuity of the mind. In recent years, the need to understand my formative years’ experiences became more urgent once there was a question of becoming a parent (finishing my novel helped in that regard). Besides, I sought comfort in Jung’s recall of the “fallow period” during the First World War and having parted ways with Freud, when his loneliness bore the fruits of his later prolific career. “The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important in my life – in them everything essential was decided. It all began then; the later details are only supplements and clarifications of the material that burst forth from the unconscious, and at first swamped me. It was the prima materia for a lifetime’s work,” he reflected. And I found, of course, that the intellectual echoing between a writer and a reader, even with decades apart and great difference in circumstances, has no gender.

Motherhood, on the other hand, has been such a gendered and primal experience. It is especially so in the early months, since women are, both self-driven and nowadays under social pressure to breastfeed. Even though Jung fathered five children and spoke fondly of the ground base of family life, I doubt that he could empathize with the feeling of milk leaking from the breasts when hearing the baby’s cries in the morning. Motherhood not only makes a woman less “uprooted and hovered above the earth” (as Jung describes Nietzsche), it can knock a woman to the ground all too quickly almost to the extent of doubting the thin line between our human existence and that of the animals. I find that the blow can be even harder for women who have a rich inner life.

Can it be a blessing in disguise, however, to be humbled in regards to our body prematurely before old age? I have found myself asking this lately, at the risk of sounding opposed to feminism since misogynists are known to “humble” women’s bodies while denying their own vulnerability. But does motherhood essentially contribute to women’s strength and resilience precisely because of our sharp awareness of the body and its connection to the mind? After all, the primal joy has also been intense – is it really so bad to be an animal and a human at the same time, and to love in multiple ways? We have often separated the two in our narratives, creating hierarchies and the Tower of Babel – we are all different humans but not the same animal. But is it one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves since the invention of words?

Perhaps our babies bring us back to our own beginnings, before we fooled ourselves with “history” (men’s words), the beginnings with memories mostly locked in our subconsciousness, and to the place where we joyously or bitterly crossed the threshold between animals and humans. As I hear my three-month old’s daily coos with “ow-wee” and “ah-woo” while I’m typing, I wonder whether the inevitable event of teaching her a language (any language) would only benefit adults by allowing us to communicate with her better, but essentially reduce her much more colorful experience to ready-made tools. At the moment, I feel reluctant to think about giving her simple words such as “happy” if “ah-woo” would express the emotions better. However, when the time comes, I know that I will give in, because as original as I would like to be, I don’t want to be that wildly odd parent. Being multi-lingual might help a little.

In Chinese mythology, when 倉頡 created the written words, it was said that “天雨粟鬼夜哭” (heaven to rain down grain and ghosts to wail at night) – I have always wondered whether the ghosts were crying not out of fear but sympathy for the living. How I often feel that I am a writer who in fact doesn’t like words that much (music and images are better in my opinion). And how I wish sometimes that we could learn more from our babies, these bright-eyed beings still untinted in their lenses and unlearned in their manners, and not the other way around.

“Between a good hell and a counterfeit paradise – which one would you choose?”, the Shanghai-born Hong Kong writer Chan Koonchung asks in his novel The Fat Years, published in 2009. Although one should always be wary when given only two stark opposite choices, I imagine many who grew up in or are familiar with the fabric of a Leninist state will feel the chill of the willing collective amnesia as depicted in his fiction. In the universe Chan observed, those who stubbornly hold on to their painful memories not only gain little sympathy from the public, but are swiftly labeled and treated as “minorities” to encourage further marginalization. One of the protagonists in the novel, however, opts for the “good hell” because at least in there, “everyone is fully aware that they are living in hell.”

Nearly a century ago, Lu Xun painted a similar dilemma in his famed “windowless iron house” metaphor: should you wake up the lighter sleepers and turn their complacency into agony in the face of an inevitable suffocation, or just let them be? The writer concluded that even just a few awoken fighters might stand a chance to break through the stifling and walled construction. Therefore, as part of the then chattering classes, he would not acquiesce to the existing condition.

The chattering classes in the mainland, nonetheless, have suffered the most violent political persecution and intimidation over the past decades since Lu Xun’s time. Many of my peers are no strangers to the stories in our own families. As a result, instead of the outcry, surviving intellectuals learned to murmur over time, limited their influence, or talked around issues while leaving institutional problems unscathed. To me, it has been a great tragedy for three generations. And even decades after the Cultural Revolution, fueled by the state-approved rhetoric, the public has still been led to use the term “intellectual” with contempt, triumphing over the latter’s past privileges during times of a more rigid class system.

I feel the loss in Hong Kong every day these days, for I have known the freedom of chattering without restraints. Yet for people who never enjoyed this freedom, what has caused their dismay and anger towards those on the other side of the border? Do some blame the lack of imagination, concern or empathy from those who were once more fortunate so much that they have forgotten who has real power over their lives? Or is mass amnesia in fact something everyone practices to a certain extent? After all, humanity shares the same inevitable destination on earth, if not literarily an iron house – we will eventually give back all we have, whether or not we have been aware of our personal and universal circumstances. So why spend our years on rumination? Why not simply focus on enjoying our days?

I believe it is the nature of some people to hold dear their memories, even when they find few companions, and even when these memories bring pain. And I believe that a political and social structure that attempts to wipe clean or martyrize suffering will have no growth. We all want a happy medium between counting our blessings and aspiring for change. However, as a recipient of government-sponsored “gratitude education” from an early, spirited age, it is disheartening to witness the imposed complacency on a new generation of children and adolescents here in Hong Kong, as if in exchange for the euphoric, harmonious stability as described in The Fat Years.

I re-read a few chapters from Theodore Zeldin’s 2015 book The Hidden Pleasures of Life this summer and was reminded of why I started to write fiction eight years ago. Looking back, apart from living up to a childhood dream, it was also my very own protest at the time against a social shift towards the political dichotomy that started to plague Hong Kong, the city of immigrants that I had migrated to in 2007, from Shanghai.

I decided to give up a career in Hong Kong’s financial industry and take up writing seriously because I was extremely unhappy during those years. The “Mainland versus Hong Kong” conflicts were seen in the local news frequently throughout the 2010s, often targeting individuals and underdogs. But what had hurt more was the feeling of misunderstanding and reduction in the personal sphere. I was young and single at the time, sensitive, and harboring natural inhibition. I felt that I was put into a box that I didn’t belong to, through the treatment and micro-aggressions from some of my close contacts. When even good-willed people would unknowingly glance at me in a large group when they mentioned “China” as if this would remain in their eyes as my primary identity, I felt helplessly chained to the country I had left behind (for the same reasons older generations had come to Hong Kong, and younger generations were prepared to leave), and to the “passport” I supposedly had. And for a long time, I would rather not speak since I did not want to speak defensively, and I worried that defensive speech would only reinforce categories and stereotypes by playing on other people’s terms. Moreover, I worried that if I engaged in the conversation too much, I would compromise the life I wanted to live.

The dilemma of feeling marginalized often puts people between a rock and a hard place: keep your silence and continue to live without the benefit of the doubt that you deserve, or come forward with the potential trade off of politicizing and reducing your individuality. Those who have battled with it know how difficult it is to strike that fine balance.

Zeldin asked the question in his book: “We are all obliged to have a portrait of ourselves in a passport or identity card in which our government describes what it thinks is important about us. Why is it not possible for us to create our own passports, saying what we want others to understand or appreciate about us?…Of course we may mislead or lie, or be misunderstood. But why cannot our self-portrait passport be accepted as our own original work of art, which says something about our illusions and our dreams and what is not normally obvious?” In 2020, identity politics have become more profound. For some, even having a “good passport” in the traditional passport pecking order can’t save us anymore. People have suffered simply for their physical appearances, their ancestral links or their current locations.

Writing can be a way to create our own unique passports. It is a protest against political narratives and systematic ill-constructions undermining our personal struggles, interests and contributions. Writing frees ourselves from the small circles that we sometimes stay in through habits or circumstances, and allows us to speak with those in time and space with our own handmade travel documents. Imagination nurtures fluidity in life. And sometimes, only through imagination, are we able to confront our hidden fears and desires, and hear the voices before they are shaped by the custom of our languages, from our hearts. It was refreshing to be reminded, eight years later, after an MFA and four years living abroad, of where I started, now that I am back in Hong Kong.

However, it was through these eight years that I came to believe more and more that writing should also look at life directly, however paradoxical it might sound. It does require discipline as it is often tempting to turn our heads, and settle for a daydream. A fiction writer could take up the perspective of any individual on the planet to stay away from the identity politics of our times, and live in scenarios that bring the most comfort, yet it wouldn’t be a story if it didn’t cast light on the current and unresolved conflicts of our human nature. At least, this is the courage I have hoped to nurture a little every day at my writing desk for the past few years. In the same vein, it wouldn’t be my novel if I didn’t write about growing up in China, my history with Hong Kong or my experience as part of the Chinese diaspora. The freedom of fiction would allow us eventually to map the journey we individually undertake in search of our own worth and happiness, as well as reflect our original, impossible-to-hide restraints.