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  • Previous BAAFN Events
    • 2017 >
      • 2017 Lunar New Year Event
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    • 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

2021 BAAFN Award


Picture
Jacqueline Gu - click on picture to access recording of event reading
Picture


 Water and Ink
by Jacqueline Gu

                         Guwei stared out of the frosted airplane window, her breath ever so slightly fogging it.
                The little carts and airport workers glided silently in the fading dusk. The lights of the city grew
                brighter against the darkened night sky and were soon accompanied by stars.
​                            The crinkle of static preceding the pre-flight announcement brought her out of her
                reverie.
                            Ladies and gentlemen, welcome onboard Flight 4B7 with service from Chicago to
                            Shanghai.
                            Nushengmen, xiangshengmen, huanying cong zhijiage dao shanghai de 4B7 hangban
                           deng ji.


                          “Guwei, if the announcements were only in mandarin, would you be able to understand
                 them?”
                          Her father knew the answer. He asked anyway.
                          ​She shook her head. No, no she would not.
                          She was not who she once was.
                                                                                        〜
                          Tugging her suitcase along, Guwei followed her father through the airport. She took three
                 steps for every two of his. The air was muggy, and she felt the weight of the air press down on her
                 head and shoulders. The monotony of the architecture closed in around her, shouting through the
                 grayness that she was an outsider.
                          She passed face after face, stranger after stranger. She saw everybody and nobody. They
                 all looked like her – sometimes she would see a glimmer of her eyes or a shadow of her jaw in
                 the crowd. But she held no recognition for them, and they held none for her.
                          She saw a familiar sign amidst the illegible. Her name, Guwei, written with dainty
                 brushstrokes and in ink black as her hair, more gracefully than she had ever been able to with the
                 Chinese calligraphy brushes her mother used at home. She recognized the familiar swishes and
                 crossed lines of the two characters that represented her. She remembered her grandmother’s
                 gentle touch guiding her through each stroke of her name, when her hands were barely able to fit
                 themselves around a bamboo brush, and her chin barely rose over the edge of the table that
                 allowed her to see the rice paper she was imprinting. Staining it, unforgivingly and irreversibly
                 with herself.                  
                          She didn’t recognize the face behind the sign. Her father made loud greetings and shared
                 hugs while she stood awkwardly to the side.
                          “Guwei, acknowledge your auntie. The last time she saw you was when you were just a
                 toddler.”
                          “Ni hao, ayi,” she mumbled, not knowing why she was calling a woman she did not
                 recognize and did not know her “aunt,” her “ayi.”
                          “Do you remember me?” her ayi asked.
                          She knew the answer. She asked anyway.
                          No, no she did not.
                          She was not who she once was.
                                                                                          〜
                          She was once like them. Back then, she ate lychee fruit for her afternoon snack, and each
                 time her fingers would shrivel up and turn sticky with nectarine juice. She’d pick fresh
                 cucumbers from her grandfather’s garden, marvelling at their size and tenderness. She didn’t yet
                 have American cucumbers to compare them to, with their thick dark skin and hard crispness, but
                 as she grew older she came to miss her grandfather’s cucumbers. Ripe with labor and love.
                          She’d play made up games with dried lima beans with her father’s sisters, her true ayis.
                 She’d paint her cousin’s nails and rouge her cheeks with a three-year-old’s imprecision and
                 heavy hand. Her grandfather would tell her stories about his childhood in his regional
                 dialect. A dialect she used to understand and speak.
                           But, like water in ink, it evaporated.
                           Inevitably, back to America she would go. Armed only with fluency in mandarin, she
                 was thrown into a whole new world. A world of “mommy” and “daddy” instead of “mama” and
                 “baba,” of pancakes instead of red bean juk, of twenty-six letters instead of thousands of artfully
                 designed characters.
                           As she assimilated, her dark ink became dilute in the Great American Melting Pot. Just
                 like that, a year and a half of immersion in Chinese culture evaporated. Like water in ink.
                           Now, she can barely greet her ayi in her native tongue.
                                                                                           〜
                           Though ink evaporates, pigment itself cannot so easily disappear. It continues to run
                 through her hair and eyes, coursing through her blood and every molecule of every cell. Ink has
                 memory; it leaves a trail of where it has been. It may evaporate, but it will never turn colorless.
                           Little by little, water rehydrates the dried pigments. As the ink courses through my veins,
​                 I know it will never allow me to forget the strokes of my name or the place I am from​.

 


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