Home in the Spaces Between

Who Am I?

Hello and welcome to Notes from the Town Hermit, a Fellowship for over-thinkers and deep-feelers who want a nuanced perspective on what it means to be human through personal essays and fiction. Subscribe to read most new articles for free, or if you have the means and want to support my writing, upgrade to unlock all my content.

---

Dear Inklings,

Today’s letter is a reflection on the intersection between my cultural and religious upbringing, how much of my values and personality are inherently mine and which are a product of my background. It’s an exploration of the complexities of identity, faith, and love, as I navigate the threads of my Taiwanese-American heritage and the challenges of finding belonging.

Thank you so much,

Annette Young

,

Luisa Skinner

, and

Joel Wisniewski

for recommending Notes from the Town Hermit to your readers! It means the world to me.

I kept wanting something the world showed me I couldn't have. I wanted someone who'd look at my scars and not look away but call me beautiful. I wanted someone to loosen the knots around my thoughts and know what sort of tapestry they made. I wanted someone to call my own.

When I was born, my father could hold me with one hand, he said. That's how small I was. Too early and too small, I lived my first weeks in the NICU and spent most of my first year wailing.

Now that I think about it, my introduction to the world was a fitting precursor for how I’d move through life.

When I was sick, which was frequent, my mother held me crying in the hospital waiting rooms. Sick first baby. Sick husband. What a cruel twist of fate. They were far from home, in a country that didn't welcome them, struggling to speak a tongue they barely knew.

They came from a land of thick green mountains where buzzing insects and sounds of bustling city life filled the muggy air so hot, the heat would seep into your skin. We joke that in Taiwan, stepping outside produces an immediate sheen of sweat. Street vendors shouted their wares, their voices intersecting like the honking cars and buses. Any stranger you met could become a friend. Taiwan has the lowest crime rate in the world and some of the friendliest people.

San Diego was quiet, everything a little bit too far apart. Sounds of life died down with the sun. My grandma often complained of how eerie the silence was, how much it terrified her. Instead of green mountains, they saw brown, dusty, and clumsy hills littered with houses and brambles. Wildfires raged through the dry brush every few years, a destructive kind of heat—a far cry from humid Taiwan.

When I try to make sense of my history, I tease apart woven threads of east and west, but also of a Christian faith that is taking me a lifetime to untangle. Many traditional Taiwanese values intertwine and shake hands with fundamentalist Christian ones, after all. How do I separate what is mine and what was grafted onto me, and does that even matter in the end? When someone asks me to tell them about myself, my words stumble over one another like a series of ellipses and awkward pauses without an ending punctuation mark.

In high school, I had this annoying habit of asking people to give me their analyses of me. I thought, if I could gather enough pieces from what they told me, maybe, maybe I could paint myself into a full picture. Maybe I'd know myself then. Maybe I'd understand who I was.

People say you must choose your own path; you must choose your fate. But I have lived a life of silence, restrained by a culture I did not choose, by a world I could not comprehend, by those who brought me into that world, who would not hear my voice.

My husband, M, told me once that there are wells running so deep, no one can find where they end. “That is what you are,” he said. “You shouldn’t work so hard to hide.”

On a cold night as we listened to the waves crashing upon the shore, and we could do nothing but hold onto each other, he turned to me and whispered, “So there you are.” And it seemed like redemption to be seen, truly.

For the first time, I learned how speaking truths into existence can heal.

For so long, I have been "too much" for most people. I met M at the point in my life when I'd decided I was better off alone. He tells everyone I didn't even like him when we first started dating. Indeed, he was not what I was looking for even when I did think of a potential partner. He's quiet—unobtrusive. He's the sort of man who easily fades into the background. But when we talked, he listened. What I said, he heard—without judgment, without accusation.

What began in timidity, with me stumbling over words rusty from long-held silence, turned into a cascade. I told him things I'd never told anyone. I told him things I thought would be boring to anybody but me.  He said he loved talking and listening to me. He said my thoughts were interesting. "Why?" I ask him way too many times. He always looks at me incredulously. "Because I love you!"

My whole life, I’d felt like someone who was difficult to love. I quieted and hid parts of myself so I could earn acceptance. It didn’t matter if it was for an incomplete version of me.

With him, for the first time, I felt like someone easy to love.

In the end, perhaps it doesn't really matter which parts of me are mine and which were given by circumstances of my birth and upbringing. These threads, woven with the colours of Taiwan, faith, the feeling of unbelonging, and a million others, have shaped me in ways I write to unravel, hold them up to the light—seek to understand.

But in quiet moments like this one, when I'm curled up right here in my favourite corner of the sofa while M sits beside me, our bodies touching in the subtle yet familiar ways we've formed over the years, I want to rest instead in the transformational power of being fully seen and completely accepted.

It's been over ten years, and he's still listening.

Related:

Roots and Wings

With Love,