I am a fourth-generation Taiwanese Presbyterian, born and raised in greater Boston. My great-grandmother was a convert of Canadian medical missionaries in the 1880s on the island of Formosa, now the nation of Taiwan. As the story goes in my family, my great-grandmother also served as the first Presbyterian woman elder in Taiwan. Her church was located in northern Taiwan by the Tamshui River which runs to the sea. I am the namesake of her daughter, my beloved grandmother, whose name included the Chinese character, “hui” or “hwei.” My parents added flower radicals to this character, which created the special “hwei” in my middle name. In Mandarin Chinese, my name is An-hwei, or “peace fragrant-orchid.” Coincidentally, the “hwei” of my grandmother’s name is also the first character in the Chinese name of Wheaton College.
I spent some of my girlhood summers in Taipei, where many relatives still live, and rode the train throughout Taiwan. One of my favorite places to visit was the beautiful marble gorge in Hualien, called the Taroko Gorge, where I’d gather smooth marble pebbles and put them in my pocket to take home to New England. While in Taiwan, I’d also pick up fragments of the colorful Taiwanese dialect, full of jokes and the rhythms of joyful laughter at family festivities. Over the clatter of teacups and porcelain bowls, I loved eating xiaolongbao dumplings at the first small Din Tai Fung restaurant. It was long before this little dumpling shop became known as the famous Din Tai Fung with locations in Singapore, Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle, and throughout the world.
Because of my family heritage, global language studies holds a special place in my heart. I spoke Mandarin Chinese with my parents at home and dutifully attended Chinese school on weekends. I embarked on doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where Chinese served as one of my foreign languages to satisfy a proficiency requirement. The language exam, one of the toughest I ever had to complete, required a translation of Chinese literary criticism. To this day, I am so grateful that I was permitted to use a dictionary!
I’m delighted to share two poems, “On the Beauty of Insignificance 渺小的美麗,” which I wrote when I lived in southern California. I wrote the original in English, then translated it into Chinese. Although the poems were written in this chronological sequence, I think of them as “sisters” or “twins” who exist side by side. They are parallel texts, almost a double set of originals, rather than a translation and an original. They were first published in Poetry Sky, a bilingual Chinese-English literary journal edited and published by the poet, Yidan Han, who lives in New Hampshire. When I wrote these poems, I was reflecting upon a winter heat wave and its effect upon the rose blossoms, which often bloom from June through January in southern California.
渺小的美麗 教給我們貧困的美感。 山東絲綢在臉上， 拐杖鑽黃蜂誰下蛋 是的，玫瑰手杖 在熱浪， | ON THE BEAUTY OF INSIGNIFICANCE Teach us the beauty of paltriness. shantung silk on the face, a cane-boring wasp who lays eggs Yes, rose-canes in the heat wave, |