When I was eight years old, my dad moved back overseas to China, his home country, in pursuit of a better job opportunity. Too young to think much of it, I tumbled through my elementary and middle school years in apathy, accepting of my dad’s absence, curt with him on phone calls, agreeable during his visits home. Not questioning the distance between us until it came to my attention in early adulthood that our lives had become islands, only hazily cognizant of the roads, rivers, and contours of the other. When a global pandemic rendered international travel – particularly to and from China – all but impossible, I felt, over the course of the last two years, that stretch of blue, blue sea expanding, all the faults and misunderstandings between us sedimenting without fresh discoveries to wash them anew.

More pressingly, in the span of my dad’s physical absence I have been metamorphosing. I started college, I acted on ambitions, I reckoned with failure and mental health, I learned intentionality, I broke into a self separate from my twin sister and the expectations of an insular Chinese American hometown community. In this blur of change, one dormant thread: who I am on the phone with my dad. The wire connecting us rewinding time until I am eight years old again, a broken record reciting my grades, my leadership roles, and my plans for the future before a reproving coach, whistle around his neck, stopwatch perpetually running. The cognitive dissonance is sharp and often overwhelming, a hole that only seems to widen the more I try to fill it in, to fill him in on my life as it inconsiderately races ahead, unaware of who is left behind.

One relief, though: Late night walks, the ability to dissect our conversations, to contextualize. In the span of my dad’s physical absence I have been carving. Soft clay peeling until the outline of a man, his childhood on a farm in the rurals of Hunan Province, fingers stained with ink, throat clutching songs of grasslands and gods he’s never seen. A snake forced to shed and shed until only one stick-straight spine, one linear lifeline, remained. Clay hardening.

The following pieces are an attempt to impede latency. To keep the stories that form my conscience, the Daoist philosophies and the displaced laborers and most importantly, the tangibility of a father, from fraying with the passage of time. With the eclipsing of Chinese and American cultures. They are a healing that starts not with the body, but with the world entering the body. An odyssey that, like Homer’s, seeks for its protagonists not an end but a beginning. How the way he started led to the way I am now. Biding identity, searching back and back and back for reconciliation, while the path forward – reuniting with my dad – remains suspended.