Building Belonging

By Allison Liu

Note: This creative nonfiction narrative is based on real
events. Names have been altered for privacy.

Part I. Ruo-Lan

Ruo-Lan was just an infant when the Japanese army attacked Nantong. She lay
face-up in her stroller, fascinated by the perfect blue of the cloudless sky, when screams
broke out across the bustling city streets. A flood of uniformed men raced towards her,
silver bayonets flashing in the sunlight. A gunshot split the air as Ruo-Lan’s nanny,
Su-Yin, scooped the babe into her arms and ran.

Su-Yin screamed when a hand seized her arm and pulled her to the ground. The
soldier tore Ruo-Lan from her grasp, sending the child tumbling to the cobblestones.
Time seemed to slow as the man lifted his gun and laid its shining bayonet against
Ruo-Lan’s chest. The press of the polished blade against her skin, cold steel so unlike her
soft baby’s flesh, chilled her to her core. It was as if that alien metal were leaching into
her blood, poisoning her with its foreignness. With its wrongness.

Ruo-Lan began to wail.

“Spare her, please! She can do you no harm,” Su-Yin begged, tears in her eyes.
“I—take me instead!”

Su-Yin’s desperate plea rose above Ruo-Lan’s cries, above the shots and the
screams. Something within the soldier’s hard gaze seemed to shift at Su-Yin’s words. The
weight at Ruo-Lan’s chest suddenly abated, but the phantom feeling of the bayonet
remained, cold as ice.

Ruo-Lan lay on the dusty street, staring up at that now-painfully bright sky, for
several long moments before Su-Yin took her back into her shaking arms.
It was years before Ruo-Lan understood what Su-Yin had sacrificed on that day.
How while her nanny still held her head high and loved Ruo-Lan with the same
fierceness she always had, she bore scars that would never fully heal. Sometimes when
she would read the newspaper, Ruo-Lan sitting on her lap, and learn that yet another city had been brutalized by the Japanese, her eyes would turn distant and she would hug the
child to her chest as if to protect her from the invaders across the sea.

But only nine years later, an even greater threat came from within China itself. It
was 1949: the Guomindang had fallen, and the Communists swept across the nation in an
unrelenting wave of red. When Ruo-Lan demanded to know why her family had to flee
the land she loved—why, for the second time, she was being told that she didn’t belong in
the place she called home—her mother pulled her close. “The Communists do not like
scholars. Our family—your baba—will be in great danger if we stay.” But even her
mother’s embrace could not stop a familiar chill from creeping up Ruo-Lan’s spine. It
filled her chest and seemed to press against her heart, as cold and heavy as steel.

Despite Ruo-Lan’s protests, her family packed their things and boarded a crowded
ship to Taiwan. It was among the last to leave the mainland before the borders closed.
Ruo-Lan cried for the entire voyage, face buried in her mother’s shirt as the boat rocked
beneath them. She longed for the comfort of her elder sister, who lived deep inland and
couldn’t make it to the coast in time.

And so Ruo-Lan came of age in a land that she could not entirely call her own, in
a family that was not entirely complete. On the outside, she was a diligent and passionate
student who excelled in school—she studied physics and graduated National Taiwan
University at the top of her class—but on the inside, she felt unwhole. Taiwan was not
truly her home. It was a refuge, not a final resting place. Every night, her dreams were
filled with visions of the beloved city that she had fled long ago: soldiers swarming its
cobbled streets, lifting their silver-pointed rifles high into the air. She would awaken
feeling as cold as ice, both hands clutching at her chest, the ghost of a heavy blade and a
heavier sacrifice weighing against her heart.

When Ruo-Lan received her letter of acceptance to the graduate program at the
University of California, Los Angeles, she dared to hope that she could at last find a place
where she belonged. She boarded a plane for the first time in 1960, just seventeen years
after the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act. For her entire life, the world had told her
that she did not belong—be it the Japanese invaders, the Communist revolutionaries, or
her Taiwanese peers who thought it was not a woman’s place to study physics. Standing
now before the sunlit brick towers of Royce Hall, surrounded by unfamiliar faces in all
shades of pink and brown, she wondered if UCLA could finally give her what Nantong
and Taiwan never could, or if the resentment of a nation that hated people with her skin
and eyes would ensure that the bayonet stayed with her forever, a reminder that she
would never truly belong.

A polite voice shook her from her thoughts. A young man with slightly disheveled
black hair and kind eyes had approached her from behind. He said, a little breathlessly,
“Excuse me, miss, do you know where the Physics and Astronomy Building is?”
Ruo-Lan realized with surprise that the man was speaking Mandarin. A shy smile
tugged at her lips, and a warm feeling began to spread through her chest. “I’m finding my
way there, too,” she said. “Let’s figure it out together.”

Part II. Mia

Mia threw the suitcase onto the bedroom floor with a satisfying thud and heaved a
deep sigh. After hours of travel, she was finally here: Los Angeles, California. It had
been over three years since she’d last set foot in her aunt and uncle’s house. Each room
evoked a different memory from her childhood: racing toy cars across the smooth
hardwood in the foyer, crouching in her cousin’s stuffy closet during games of
hide-and-seek, and tearing open presents beneath the sparkling Christmas tree in the
family room.

Mia set her 3-1-1 bag on the edge of the bathroom sink and looked in the mirror.
Her hair was a frizzy, brown mess and her eyes were red with fatigue—she was in no
shape to see her grandparents for the first time in years.

She filled her spray bottle with water, pulled out a tube of gel, and set about
wrangling her curls into something presentable. The tedious routine reminded her just
how much she hated having curly hair. It hadn’t always been this way—her misfortune
began in seventh grade, when her rebellious scalp decided to produce unruly waves
instead of the straight hair she had taken for granted since childhood. She’d tried to
pretend that nothing had changed—she brushed it into a frizz, tried to burn the strands
into submission, endured a blowout with tears in her eyes—but to no avail.

Truthfully, Mia hated her hair not just because of how high effort it was, but
because it was the most glaringly un-Asian thing about her. Born to a Chinese father and
a white mother, she always felt like she was too much of one half and too little of the
other. Her eyes were just a little too round, skin a little too pink, hair a little too light and
a lot too curly. In middle school, her insecurities had been proven devastatingly true when
one of her classmates had exclaimed with disbelief, “Wait, you’re Asian?” His words had
cut her like a blade and left her feeling inexplicably cold inside, like something icy was
weighing against her chest and pushing her down, down, down. She knew from that
moment on that she didn’t belong among her Asian peers with tan skin and smooth,
ink-dark hair.

She wouldn’t have minded as much how she looked if it weren’t for how distant
she felt from Chinese culture. She didn’t know any traditional family recipes passed
through generations, didn’t celebrate Chinese holidays, couldn’t speak a word of
Mandarin, and didn’t even know how to write her Chinese name. She felt like a fraud.

Her one consolation came in the form of the red envelopes that her grandparents
would send on her birthday. She hated to admit it, but they were like a lifeline, an annual
reminder of her heritage. She used to collect them when she was little, hoarding the
colorful papers like a dragon would its jewels. She had no idea what the gold-embossed
characters meant, but she was a kid, and shiny was shiny. Mia wished things were still
that simple now.

The bathroom door swung open, jolting her back to the present. Her mother let
out an exasperated huff. “Mia, you look fine. Come downstairs and talk to your family.”
Mia sighed and toweled off her hair, then followed her mother out of the room.

***

Mia sat in the study beside her grandmother, watching the small woman write
elaborate characters on a sheet of white paper. Her soft, wrinkled hand guided the black
marker gracefully. Mia Wu. Wu Li-Mei. 吴丽梅.

“Now you try,” she said.

Mia took the marker and tried to copy the flowing lines of her grandmother’s
script. Her hand shook. Wasn’t there supposed to be an order to the strokes? And what
about proportion? Balance? She felt like a fool.

The strange chill returned. It pressed against her chest, pushing her down and
away as if to say, This is not for you. Little by little, the cold spread into her fingers.
You will never belong here.

The marker slipped from her grasp and clattered to the desk. Mia closed her eyes
and sighed.

“What’s wrong?” Ruo-Lan asked with concern.

“I just… I don’t belong here, doing this. I feel so fake. You wouldn’t understand.”

Her grandmother gave her a curious look. She thought for a moment before
speaking. “You’re right, I may not understand exactly how you feel. But I do know
something of unbelonging. When I first moved to America, surrounded by people who
saw me for how I looked instead of for who I was, I thought I would never belong. But
then I met your yeh-yeh on the very first day of graduate school, and I realized that
belonging is something that can be built. Surround yourself with friends and
family—people who see you for you—and then you will start to care less what strangers
think.”

Ruo-Lan squeezed Mia’s hand and smiled. Her eyes crinkled into half-moons.
The warmth of her soft palm bled into Mia’s own, slowly thawing her frozen fingers.

“You will always belong here, my baobei. This is who you are, no matter what other
people tell you.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “No matter what you tell yourself.”

Ruo-Lan picked up the black marker from the desk. She held it out in front of her,
waiting.

Mia—Wu Li-Mei—took a deep breath and reached for it.