What Stories Teach Us

When I was younger, my family could not travel. Having immigrated to a new country, we were under heavy financial constraints. However, this desire to travel was instilled in me through the power of stories.

My love affair with stories started across the Pacific. I came to this country from China at the age of three, propelled by the turbines of a jumbo jet and the dreams of my parents, smuggling a backpack full of Bernstein Bears stories. Evenings were spent in the neon orange chairs of the university library and making a ruckus at Tam’s Chinese Restaurant. I did not know much back then except for the hardworking nature of my parents who were finishing their Master’s degrees while working late to sustain our family.

Growing up, I always had a voracious appetite for learning and as a World Literatures major I could piece together many rich histories. From his memoir, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” I can say that Jean-Dominique Bauby was a great man poised to take over the ephemeral fashion industry until December 1995 when tragedy struck. Fiction and delicious reality blur together in chef Donia Bijan’s “Maman’s Homesick Pie” as she recounts her family’s exile from Iran, her longing for identity and belonging, and finding her bearings through the medium of food.

But sometimes I wonder whether fiction or reality is more bombastic. My first trip overseas was during my sophomore summer of college. Going precariously up the serpentine backbone of the Central Andes to Huancayo, Peru, I absorbed the rich, untamable landscape which could not overshadow the scrawny kids who came to the clinic, intestines laden with parasites. I met a boy name Manuel there who did not have enough money for his surgery. And I was the guest of overwhelming generosity and warmth at our host mother Elsa’s house. It was heartbreaking and beautiful, a country full of these juxtapositions.

I have learned so much from them all and so much about myself. I have learned how you can have your feet set solidly in one country and still have your heart confusingly in another. I have learned that where you belong can change with each new experience. And I have so much yet to learn in every story, in every unfurling page, in every child’s curious stare, in every basket of chipati, in every proverbial clasp of my hand to their heart.

Which is how I’ve wound up here with a basket full of stories and an insatiable longing for every community I have yet to be a part of.