Blossom to blossom
Last year, I watched my father pick the remaining blossoms from his apple tree. Some promised fruit, others did not. “You need two trees to cross-pollinate,” he explained. “It’s difficult with one tree.”
Writing too is a form of cross-pollination, a conversation between not only a writer and her reader but everyone they have read and met. As Alexander Chee reflects in How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, “All of this meets along the edge of a sentence like this one, as if the sentence is a fence, with you on one side and me on the other.”
This sense of possibility keeps me writing. I write towards knowing myself and the world. I write towards connection. I write because I want to share the works I love. I write because I care. I write because I am scared, confused or uncertain. I write into gaps.
Most importantly, I write in the hope of making one person feel less alone. I still remember the moment, over a decade ago, when I read Alice Pung’s memoir Unpolished Gem and thought, “Someone like me—at last!” Like Alice, I grew up in the western suburbs of Melbourne; her family is Cambodian-Chinese, mine Malaysian-Chinese. The similarities ran deeper than that though. I felt seen and wanted to pass on that “oh-my-god-me-too” feeling.
Over the years, friends and strangers have responded to my work, making me feel less alone. You never know who might be listening, waiting for that flash of recognition. Sometimes, someone replies.
