My parents

My mother was an avid reader, my father a patient teacher. Together, they invested time and energy into nurturing my literary skills, instilling in me a love for reading and writing that persists today. 

Beginning when I was six years old, my mother drove me to our local library every Saturday and set me loose among its shelves. I flitted between rows and rows of books of all different sizes, colors, and thickness that stretched to the ceiling and in either direction – books that beckoned to me softly from their lofty shelves, whispering, “Take your time… we’re in no hurry.” 

Inhaling the sweet, musky smell of wood that lingered in the aisles, I quite literally discovered the world. After an hour, I emerged from the shelves, breathless, my arms straining under the weight of a stack of books pinned down by my chin. When it came to books, I knew no moderation. I loved their comforting weight in my backpack at school, a reminder that I was carrying around a whole world that I could step into whenever I wanted. I loved the unique, sharp smell of the pages and the way colors, sounds, and feeling came bursting vividly from lines of text. 

With my mother’s passionate support, reading and listening to books became a near addiction. My father once quipped that he felt like he was having dinner with Jane Eyre or Frankenstein instead of his daughter, for that was all he could see from across the dinner table. But my mother, who had read anything she could get her hands on in China as a means of travelling beyond the hometown she didn’t leave until she went to college, was the mainstay of my early foray into literature. She made me book lists based on everything from our local library’s summer reading challenges to Bill Gates’ reading blog, handing me more and more difficult books because she was confident that I could read them. She encouraged me to write down words and their definitions that I didn’t know in “Words Books,” and well-written quotes in “Quotes Books,” black-and-white composition notebooks I still have. 

When I listened to Jim Dale’s rendering of Harry Potter so much that one day I found that I could recite the final chapter of The Sorcerer’s Stone from memory, she listened patiently as I did so on the car, smiling at my low rumble for Dumbledore, my high-pitched squeal for Neville. When I reread books like Gone With the Wind so much that I practically lived within their pages for months and we ran out of renewals at the library, she bought that same book at Barnes and Nobles instead of telling me to move on to new ones, giving space to my imagination and my curiosity. Even when she was busy working long hours, she never failed to bring me to the library on Saturday, never disappointed me by removing what she knew to be the highlight of my week. As a child, I took her support for granted, but now I realize how world-changing a parent’s encouragement can be, even and especially when it is ubiquitous yet unannounced, persistent yet flexible.

If my mother was the cornerstone of my early love for reading, my father placed the tools in my hand to write, in the form of an iPad mini and a wireless Apple keyboard for Christmas when I was ten years old. A hard-working but easygoing man who never picked a fight if he could help it, he had a seemingly bottomless reserve of patience, especially when it came to his children. Through long hours of petulant resistance on my part, he tore down my habits of typing with my thumb and index finger (a strategy I stubbornly adhered to despite suffering through typing classes at school) and taught me to type with all ten fingers. 

After about two weeks, I finally conceded my old typing habits and began to learn. (For months afterwards, however, I caught him stealing glances at my keyboard, surreptitiously making sure I was typing correctly.) Through the QWERTY keyboard, I discovered that I, too, could take the world I lived in and put it on the page. The incessant clicking of the keyboard became a staple sound of my existence. Perched on boxes of cereal in our pantry, a location I chose for the fact that no one ever thought to enter it and I could let my ideas flow freely, I wrote tens of short stories (almost all of which went unfinished) and kept a diary every single day, trying to imitate the dialogue and the magic of the stories I read, drawing on my small corner of the world, telling a story that was garbled and unintelligible, but thoroughly my own. My father bought me my own flash drive, backed up all my writing on his Windows computer, and told me my first poems were awesome (they weren’t). Against the backbone of his support, my love for writing grew. 

Marina Keegan

Soon after I learned to type, my grandpa bought me Marina Keegan’s The Opposite of Loneliness. Keegan’s essays and short stories, which she wrote in college, were my kryptonite; her words were like darts, flying off the page to steal my breath away. A line from one of her poems reads, “Do you wanna leave soon? No, I want enough time to be in love with everything… And I cry because everything is so beautiful and so short.” Keegan was so young, so full of unconditional hope and belief in the potential of herself and her generation. She was also certain that nothing was certain and that was okay, because she believed that we had time. I felt connected to her like I had never felt connected to any author before. She inspired many of my fictional stories, which, like hers, often had a female protagonist both flawed and fiercely ambitious, whom I could relate to. 

A few years later, I met my eighth grade language teacher, Mrs. Kulik. Teaching was her second job after journalism, and with a blonde pixie cut and a sharp yet soothing reading voice, she was full of wisdom and character. Throughout the year, she invested herself into each of her students’ literary futures; in one instance, she read each of our literary analysis essays three times at separate stages of drafting, commenting, encouraging, and criticizing, before handing us a grade. Yet the most powerful lesson I took away from her classroom was that writing matters; that even as 13- and 14-year-olds, our words were tools and weapons that must be chosen carefully. This simple but invaluable belief stayed with me throughout high school, as Mrs. Skopec helped me overcome some performance anxiety and express my ideas verbally, Mrs. Rauen and Mrs. Mazzaferro lended structure and a clear line of reasoning to the word vomit I often handed in, and Mr. Smith showed me the careful deliberation that must go into a single sentence. Finally, in a life-changing semester-long journey that transcended literacy and merits an essay of its own, Mrs. Parato helped me find my voice and discover the understanding and equal humanity that can arise from listening to others.

I still go to the library every three weeks, although now I drive myself. I still stand still amid the shelves every now and then, inhaling that sweet, musky smell of wood which brings a rush of emotions and memories to the forefront of my mind. Although I come with a book list, I often can’t help extending my index finger to the top of the spine of an unfamiliar book, giving it a little nudge forward and feeling the weight of another unfamiliar story, another eye-opening adventure, fall into my hand. At home, there is a perpetual stack of books on my working desk – The Splendid and the Vile, If Beale Street Could Talk, Dead Man Walking – and on my computer, I still keep documents with curious book quotes. On the notes app on my phone, I write lists of interesting things in my life, lists of people’s names that I’ve met and things they’ve said to me that I want to remember, lists of conversations I want to have with people and questions I want to ask them but haven’t gotten the chance to yet, poems and lyrics and story ideas, my thumbs skittering across the narrow keyboard on my phone. And I know that the tools of literacy, which my parents gave me, the authors I encountered broadened, and my teachers steadily sharpened, will stay with me for a lifetime.