Dear Professor Diaz,
I’m writing to say sorry that I dropped out of your creative writing class after the first session twelve years ago.
It had nothing to do with your teaching. I quite enjoyed your class. I wrote about my first home phone number in response to your “important numbers” writing prompt. I was four years old, living in an old apartment in 90s China. Our phone was bright red, installed next to my bed, just within reach. My father always called before he headed home, and fifteen minutes later, I could hear the crisp bell on his bicycle, a Phoenix made in Shanghai that cost him three months’ salary. He’d bought the bike to take me on rides around the city. He put me in a bamboo basket in front of him. “I didn’t want to have you in the back,” he said. “What if you fell off and I kept going?”
I read my story to the class in a low voice, hoping that any grammar or pronunciation mistake would escape notice. I was the only one whose native language was not English, and even though that was expected, it was still nerve-wracking.
After the class, I stayed to chat with you about the poems you shared, although I didn’t understand them. Those unexpected but delightful breaks in sentences, beautiful like all broken things. I was both fascinated and intimidated. I didn’t even know how to rhyme; how would I know how to write poems? Silly thought really, for much later I realized that you didn’t need to know how to rhyme; you only needed to know how to feel.
But I didn’t know a lot of things then. I’d only arrived in the Midwestern town two weeks before from across the Pacific Ocean.
The international student orientation started earlier than the regular one, so I had the luxury of exploring the campus when it was empty, absent of other students I was as eager to befriend as afraid to approach. When the American students poured in on the first day of school, I watched the SUVs and pick-up trucks rolling in from my dorm window. Parents and siblings carried microwaves, mini-fridges, and bean bags up to the rooms. I was glad that my roommate brought a fridge, for all I had were two suitcases half-filled with pads and instant noodles because my mother thought it’d be hard to find them in the US.
My mother started packing months before I left. Little by little, she filled the luggage with stuff I didn’t even know I owned and never ended up using. My parents flew with me to Shanghai from our hometown to see me off. I went through customs hours before departure because I couldn’t bear the drag of farewells. The remember-to-calls, the be-careful-with-your-stuffs, the would-you-eat-another-orange-before-you-gos. I hurried in without looking at them straight in the eye, as their smiling and crying faces faded from the fogged glass walls.
No time to be homesick.
In my first week of college, I put on my shortest skirt to go to a party. It was a tennis skirt I’d bought from the campus bookstore, not the height of hotness as I thought. The house was dark, slashed by white shooting lights, each time illuminating the sea of people dancing, their bodies sticking together like dumplings in a pot. The smell of alcohol filled the air, sweet like something rotten.
Everything was new. I was blinded by my ignorance of a culture with which I shared so little. I had much to learn, to catch on.
So I didn’t go back to your class, Professor Diaz, afraid that I’d be an outsider to a place I didn’t belong, and I couldn’t find the courage to tell you all the things that I feared.
Yours regretfully,
Yunya Yang
Yunya Yang was born and raised in Central China and moved to the US when she was eighteen. She is much more “Americanized” now. She lives in Chicago with her husband Chris and cat Ichiro. Find her on Twitter @YangYunya.