Brookline Asian American Family Network
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  • Previous BAAFN Events
    • 2017 >
      • 2017 Lunar New Year Event
      • AAPI May 24th, 2017 event
    • 2016 >
      • February 2016 - Lunar New Year Event
      • December 2016-Let's Talk Event
    • 2015 >
      • February 2015 - Pan Asian Lunar New Year Event
      • May 2015 - Author of "Eurasian"
      • September 20th, 2015 - Brookline Day
      • October 24th, 2015 - BAAFN Open House with Assoc.Dean Brian Poon
    • 2014 >
      • February 2014 - Pan Asian Lunar Event
      • May 2014 - A Day In the Life of Asian Pacific America, Workshop
      • AAPI Brookline Library Display
      • October 2014 - BAAFN Open House
    • 2013 >
      • February 2013 - BAAFN Lunar New Year
      • May 2013 - Asian Americans Speak, Adoptee & Multiracial students, panel discussion
      • July 2013 - BAAFN Potluck Picnic at Larz Anderson Park
      • September 2013 - Brookline Teen Center and Brookline Day
    • 2012 >
      • October 14th, 2012 - BAAFN Open House
    • 2011
    • 2010
    • 2009
  • Letter to School Committee
  • Letter to Select Board
  • Pictures from Vigil
  • Vigil Introduction - Ashley Eng, BHS '19
  • Vigil Statement - Yuki Hoshi, BHS '22
  • GASP statement March 2021
  • Resources of Interest
    • Town of Brookline
    • U.S. Census Report 2010 (issued March 2012)
    • Understanding Brookline
    • Bibliography for Adoptees and Multiracial
    • Brookline Reads Books
  • Rachel Lee - 2018 BAAFN Award -
  • Jocelyn Zhou - 2018 Creativity Award
  • Yiming Fu - 2018 Creativity Award
  • Lana Chang - 2018 Content Award
  • Maiya Whalen - 2019 BAAFN Award -
  • Iris Yang - 2019 Content Award
  • Nina Bingham - 2019 Creativity Award
  • Elena Su - 2020 BAAFN Award -
  • Sellina Yoo - 2020 Creativity Award
  • Adrian Seeger - 2020 Content Award
  • Rani Balakrishna - 2020 New Voice Award
  • Jacqueline Gu - 2021 BAAFN Award
  • Tina Li - 2021 Activist Award
  • Lilia Burtonpatel - 2021 Creativity Award
  • Claire Choi - 2021 Content Award
  • Audrey Seeger - 2021 Content Award
  • Joon Lee - Keynote address 5/5/21
  • Driscoll School - 2021 AAPI Project
  • Pierce School - 2021 AAPI Project
  • Eun-Jae M. Norris - 2022 BAAFN Award
  • Emerson Lin - 2022 BAAFN Award
  • Ellie Hyde - 2022 Content Award
  • Kayla Chen - 2022 Creativity Award
  • 2022 Essay Contest Rules

2022 BAAFN Content Award


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Emerson Lin - click on picture to access recording of event reading
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 Memories of Summer
by Emerson Lin

               Summers in Beijing are blazing. Sunlight boils off the sidewalk and seeps through my hair until the strands are sticky against my neck. The airport parking lot is a nightmare after a thirteen-hour flight; my legs are numb from disuse, and nausea still threatens to trickle up my throat. The temperature reads forty-one degrees on a screen beside a line of honking taxis, and the walk to our car feels endless.

               But Beijing nights are filled with steady chatter and city lights, and the warm breeze carries smoke and nostalgia. Memories here nest in yogurt jars from street carts and the empty meeting rooms of my father’s office. They travel around the city in quiet subways and blue-striped yellow taxis before coming to rest in my father’s apartment. Eventually, the strangely familiar scents of the city lull me to sleep beneath the hum of the air conditioner.
 
              Summers in Fujian are smothering. The air is humid and heavy, each day drowning in reminders of last night's rain. It pours every night for a week, and when it finally stops the mosquitoes venture out, marking my skin with countless tiny bites and eventually scars that take half a year to fade. This is my father’s hometown province; visits here are a welcoming but only occasional occurrence, and the years that stretch between them are a distance far greater than the ocean. I still feel like an intruder at times, a child from half the world away, barely able to speak. I still get scared that the words will twist as they cross my tongue, the language a half-stranger since I was thirteen.

            Yet the night air by the nearby river is warm, and children laugh as paper lanterns float across the sky. My grandmother smiles when she hands me a freshly-steamed rice dumpling. As I sit in a living room crowded with faces familiar yet strange, my baby cousin, barely four months old, wraps her small fingers around my pinky. In these moments, all I feel is wonder.

            Summers in America are a jumble.
In Mountain View, California, it was jelly sandals, plastic seesaws, and playgrounds where children would come to laugh and play, only to find that the metal bars burned too hot for their tender hands.
In Portland, Oregon, the memories are hazy, glimpses of shadows strung across dirt paths and slugs trailing after rain.
In Brighton, Massachusetts, it was the wide lawn that spread before our front door, picnics held right on the grass before the sidewalk, colored in with slices of strawberry shortcake.
And in Brookline, the memories are fond, filled with trips to convenience stores dragged out a little too long so as to avoid the heat waiting outside the sliding doors, before sitting and talking past sunset on wooden park benches.

           My eighteen summers have been spent scattered over seven houses, six cities, and one village sitting up in the mountains. Each one has been its own season of discovery, wonder, and reconnection, and altogether they collect into a crucial part of who I am.

           At times, I have wondered: What is it that defines me? Is it the number of words I can speak? My ability to read strokes on a page? Yet with every year and every summer that has passed me by, I’ve increasingly realized that it takes far more than just language to define such a huge part of my identity. Even if I were to lose the language altogether, that wouldn’t change the foods I find comfort in or the smile on my grandpa’s face. It wouldn’t make me forget the stories my dad told me about his childhood as we walked through the mountain village where he was raised. He spoke of the weight of his siblings, my aunts, then babies, on his back, as he worked beside his parents in the fields. I would still remember the bamboo forest and the roads that twist, from the aging archway crumbling paint over the entrance of the village down to the buildings crowded into the city far below.

           This history, these experiences, are all things I carry, and become part of who I am. My father’s hard work has carried me to where I am now. Nights and conversations spent with my grandparents have raised me. As time passes, my memories will continue to collect and redefine who I am; while language is something I can reclaim, history is something I will never lose.

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