When I was young, I dreamed every night about being on a raft in the middle of the ocean. My family sat beside me, my father freckled and mustached, my mother with her belly curved and pregnant, my baby sister bald and bug-eyed. The wind pushed the raft to and fro in the water, from America’s beaches down to the Pacific Islands, up through the Arctic floes and all the way around to the Ivory Coast. As we drifted over each border, our faces would change. Near China, my sister suddenly had narrow, brown eyes. In Scandinavia, my mother’s hair went sleek and blond. Along the coast of Africa, my father’s mustache dwindled away as his skin burned dark. They were unrecognizable. They spoke in characters and clicks; they forgot how to pronounce my name.
I have lived in over twenty houses in seven countries and five states. Though my nightmares were nothing but dreams, crossing so many borders does change a person’s spirit. I spent almost every day in kindergarten exiled in a corner, braiding strips of cloth, because it was simpler to isolate me than to teach me Chinese. My nanny rewarded me not with chocolates, but with eel eyeballs, soy bean ice cream, and pickled bird feet. I never had a dog, but I did have two chicks dyed magenta and green. Getting ready to go on a hike didn’t mean packing a lunch, but rather finding a stick to ward off monkeys. From age six onward, I spent eight months of each year thousands of miles away from my family. As a child, I was often followed by crowds wherever I went, all whispering and pointing, the bravest rushing up to rub my cheeks or pull my hair. They thought I was a bewitched doll, with my white skin and pale blue eyes. For years, I was the only one of my friends legally permitted to have brothers and sisters. My childhood heroes included a 13th century Albanian who fought against the Ottomans, Daniel (of the lion’s den), the tank man from Tiananmen Square, one of my dorm dads who had biceps so big he couldn’t touch his shoulders, and the United Nations. I bake in Fahrenheit and dress by Celsius. Boys from five different countries have talked of marrying me and I refused them all. For years, we only watched the news in the winter because in the summer the peach trees grew up around the satellite dish. I’ve lived in houses with bullets in the walls and the marks of Serbian military cleats in the floor, in houses near Mother Teresa’s and Goethe’s and Napoleon’s and Jay-Z’s, in houses with frost on the insides of the windows, in houses that almost never had electricity or water, in houses next to castles, minefields, and brothels.
There are things I want to say. I have stories to tell and poems to pen. One day my mind and I will die, but I want my words to be immortal. Of the things we hear on the radio and in books and on the television, it sometimes seems that only about 10% of them are true things. I don’t necessarily mean that they are lies, but I mean that they are not real, beautiful, meaningful truths. I have true things to say, things that are 100% true, mindblowingly true—the type of truth that comes straight from the core of living, like the dream about the raft.
Even more, I have more truths than just my own. I have things to say for hundreds of people and places that can’t speak for themselves. I write for Hope, my brightest Kenyan student, a quadriplegic whose parents neglected her to the point of refusing a free operation that would have given her the use of her legs. I write for the Black Forest and its suspendered villagers. I write for he Rwandan boy whose mother died before naming him, leaving him alone and anonymous in an orphanage where I worked. I write for Edip’s grandma, who taught me to garden and lived through the Kosovo massacres to emerge not unscathed, but strong and full of joy and for the raging red poppy fields along the road to Macedonia. I write for the egg vendor on my street who wore the same sweat-stained shirt every day and survived on little more than fifty cents a day, for my little friend Mi who saved sparrows and had no future ahead of her but the factories, for the open-air markets with entire halved pigs spilling their intestines at the feet of old women croaking out the prices of their persimmons, and for a thousand more.
I want to write it all down, keep writing everything down as long as I live, and I want to teach other people to write themselves down as well. Expression is the right of every human, and so many of us have been kept voiceless for far too long. I pledge my pen to speaking for those who can’t speak for themselves and my hands to reaching those who are searching for words. Together we can record what we’ve seen and make it heard—the terrible, the beautiful, and the true.
