It is 1970. My grandmother wraps her daughter in her arms. She walks one hundred miles barefoot through the remains of the Jiangsu countryside, escaping her hometown of Nanjing, where Chairman Mao’s paramilitary forces rupture the streets. Upturned dirt and artillery shells carve rivers of blood on the soles of her feet. Her daughter, blue and sick, cries endlessly as the pangs of hunger consume her. Two days earlier, my grandmother gave birth to ill-omened twins: a stillborn son and a living daughter. She begged her husband to forgive her, but he beat her senseless and bloody and left without a word. Hours later, when the soldiers descended upon Nanjing with gun-smoked fingers, my grandmother put her dead son in a cotton bag and grabbed her sleeping daughter. She fled the war-torn city, bullets sailing toward their fading bodies like hail. Now, my grandmother presses onward against the luster of dusk. The sun is an orb of fire burning into the horizon, staining the sky scarlet. Tears sting my grandmother’s eyes as a feral fear cuts through her, consumes her, becomes her. Wo de tianshi, she whispers to her daughter, caressing her like a glass doll. My angel. Sweat drips from her forehead, and she wipes it out of her windswept hair. Her bones ache, and as the light unclasps itself slowly from her eyes, my grandmother tells herself to keep breathing, keep breathing, if nothing else for the baby cradled in her arms, this miracle daughter who has become the pulse of her life, carrying her forward through the pain. Her feet, raw and blistered, kiss the cracked earth. Eventually, a mountain ridge creeps into view, a pyramid of rock and dust roaming with desert bandits. On the other side of the mountain is my grandmother’s hometown, a lacking village strung along the Yangtze River. She must scale the mountain before sunrise, when the bandits start to plague the land. For the first time, my grandmother feels God’s hand guide her through the mist of darkness. She clutches onto hope the way she held her son: purple and miscarried but with a blind devotion that cannot be quelled. She creates makeshift sandals from terracotta tiles and scraps of bamboo found on the road. Ascends the foothills. Under the veil of moonlight, she is a hovering ghost, skin beautifully cool, eyes sharp and cut as obsidian. When the air becomes too frigid and thin to breathe, when her legs are too numb to move anymore, my grandmother thinks of the faint heartbeat of the infant nestled in her arms. She presses onward. Soon, a thousand sweltering stars paint the canvas of the sky. My grandmother stands at the mountain’s crest. Below, the shadows of clay cottages sweep the vista, illuminated by the cosmic infinitude. Wo de tianshi. She repeats it like a heartbeat. My angel, my angel, my angel. With her daughter bundled against her chest, my grandmother sinks down the gorgeous dip in the earth toward the place where the sun will rise. By the time they reach the village, her daughter is weak with hypothermia yet still breathing. Between brewing herbs and preparing medicine, the apothecary bombards my grandmother with questions. She answers only in silence, for there are only so many words she can say without crying. The apothecary’s wife will call it a swollen wonder that my grandmother’s daughter is alive. A dream. My grandmother will work back-breaking hours on a tea plantation to scrape by. She will bury her son under a wide patch of earth and sky. When the Revolution is over and my grandmother saves enough money to move back to the city, she will meet my grandfather. They will own a small apartment and send their daughter to school. My grandmother will birth a second daughter. The ice packed around her heart will start to melt. Decades later, the eldest daughter, the child of swollen wonders, will become my mother.

It is 2018. My mother and I sit at the kitchen table, kneading dough for pork dumplings, our American radio crackling with words that don’t fit in our mouths, in a language that does not belong to us. She is practicing her English, which, even after all these years, is infested with an immigrant’s broken cadence. Her eyes are bruised and weary with exhaustion–exhaustion from the grueling hours spent at work, or perhaps from the disintegration of her marriage, or maybe from the unbearable weight of not being heard, of never being enough. When my mother moved to America, a graduate student with hopes of becoming a doctor, she was wide-eyed and eager, brimming with the insatiable curiosity of youth. But as she crossed an ocean for more opportunity and power, my mother soon realized that what she found here wasn’t what she was looking for. Besides the exoticism of her raven hair and unfolded eyelids, there was a cultural barrier that divided my mother from her peers. My mother remembers an incident: she sees a water fountain and mistakenly thinks it is a place to wash her hands. Only when the snickers and whispers escalate into full-blown laughter does my mother realize the plight of her mistake. Her cheeks blush flame-red and she casts her eyes downward. Another incident: after finishing a chemistry lab, my mother overhears a conversation between her professor and the teaching assistant. There are enough people like her, the professor remarks indignantly. I don’t want to endorse another Asian student. Why can’t they just stay in their own country? If there’s anything my mother learned from graduate school, it is the toxicity of feeling like an alien in her own skin, of being seen as construct rather than human. One day, I ask my mother why she came here. She looks at me with a far-away gaze. I did it for you, she says. You are the reason I endure. I wonder what it is she’s enduring–this country, or the loneliness of being the perpetual foreigner, or maybe the impossible burden of being, of living. I imagine her as a student: twenty-three and packed with ambition, stripping away her whole identity to come here, only to meet nothing that wanted her. To step into a room and apologize for existing, to be simultaneously a ghost and the most visible person around. My mother never got the PhD she wanted. She never became a doctor. Instead, she spent her days cleaning dishes at a seafood restaurant. At night, she searched through the local newspaper for job offerings. Eventually, she found a lowly position at an accounting firm, her old ambitions crumpled and disposed of like pieces of chewing gum. On the days my mother looks lost and small, I wonder if she regrets coming to America, if she misses the pieces of herself she left behind in China. I realize there are things I am too afraid to admit to her, like how it feels to hear the desperation in her voice when she asks me to translate something for her, knowing that no matter what she does, she will never truly belong here. Or how the only time she is genuinely happy is when talking on the phone with her relatives, my mother slipping into her native tongue like a rush of water in a season of drought. Tonight, my mother and I will sit in front of the couch and watch a Chinese drama together–her favorite. Through the bright blue flicker of the TV screen, she will be reminded of the future she sacrificed in order to give me a better one. She will wrap her arm around mine, wishing life wasn’t so bittersweet. That she could somehow make it all better. But there’s still hope, I want to tell her. There’s still time.

Wo de tianshi, you’re still breathing.