“I love you. Forgive me for all the times I yelled at you. Listen to your new mother. Be strong. Be courageous.”

Leaving China at eight years old and losing every single person in my life

April 18th, 2025

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Another day filled with an overwhelming amount of news. The regime’s counterterrorism czar said on live TV that anyone who supports due process for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the innocent man wrongfully trafficked to El Salvador, will be charged with aiding and abetting terrorists. There goes the first and fourteenth amendments. Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski was filmed saying, "I'm oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real.” A US citizen was detained by ICE in Florida, even after providing his birth certificate which shows he was born in the United States. The escalations continue. Another school shooting happened at Florida State University where a student took his police mother’s service weapon and killed two.

It really speaks to the state of the country that the school shooting news gave me a strange sense of comfort. Because it felt like a return to “normal” times. Normal times where we have a new school shooting every week and people send their thoughts and prayers and we just all move on with our lives and ignore the children that were just slaughtered and the families that were shattered.

The mood in this country is apocalyptic. I scrolled my instagram feed this morning after waking up, you know I want to give myself a nice boost of fear and anxiety to really start my day off right. As I scrolled I came across post after post calling for trump’s impeachment. Calling for the military to intervene. Calling for outright armed uprising. Post after post questioned why aren’t we using the 2nd amendment. Why are we not doing anything?

This country is ready to explode. All we need is one spark. I thought that spark might come from the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. The internet along with myself have been speculating that he is most likely dead and that’s why both the US and El Salvador refuse to free him from the prison. But we were wrong and thank goodness. Garcia met with Maryland Sen Van Hollen today and there are photos of the two of them speaking together. I think Garcia might still be that spark if he is released and speaks on his experience. I hope he will be released immediately and be reunited with his family. Garcia is a father and his case makes me think of my father who was sent to prison by the CCP without due process because he spoke up for freedom and human rights.

At least my father did something to be thrown in prison. He knew full well the risks he was undertaking when he gave his speech in front of protesting students. He spoke out after the CCP murdered thousands of Chinese citizens in Tiananmen square. Garcia was trafficked to El Salvador not because of any action he took, but because he fit the profile of people that this regime has decided to scapegoat. His skin was brown, he was Hispanic, and he wasn’t a citizen. That was enough for ICE to round him up and send him away. Without ever being charged of any crime and without ever being convicted of any crime.

Garcia is father to a five year old child. That child is now traumatized for life. Garcia’s wife is now traumatized for life. Garcia is now traumatized for life. The day that I left China in 1995 my father sat with me while I waited to board the plane that would take me to the United States. He sat me on his lap and told me that he loved me. He asked me to forgive him for all the times that he’d been angry and yelled at me, and he told me to be good and listen to my new adopted mother. He told me to be strong. To be courageous.

Leaving China

Me, in China. Age ~6

This was a memory that I’d suppressed from that day until I was 29, hiking through the Grayson Highlands in Virginia on the Appalachian Trail. The Grayson Highlands is a highlight for hikers on the trail. While most of the AT keeps you hiking through dense forests, aka the “green tunnel”, this section in southwest Virginia opens into lush mountain balds. If you’re lucky to have a clear day you can get spectacular 360 degree panoramic views of stunning rolling green hills that make me think of Scotland even though I’ve never been to Scotland or even really know what Scotland looks like. Still, I think they must look exactly like the Scottish highlands.

I had the absolute perfect day in the highlands. The morning was filled with a mystical fog which gave the entire park an etheric vibe, especially as the rising sun broke through the clouds and sent shafts of golden light onto the landscape. I met some wild ponies which licked my legs and tried to eat my backpack straps in their constant quest for salt. Despite standing only four to five feet tall at the shoulder the ponies are strikingly majestic. They have long flowing blonde and brown manes and I swear they toss their manes like a model at a photoshoot when hikers walk past. The most famous pony there is named Buttercup and she has a distinctive golden blonde mane.

Toward the afternoon, as I walked past the Old Orchard Shelter, the suppressed memory from leaving China suddenly surfaced. With it came a rush of emotion. It felt like an elephant was sitting on my chest. The sadness was a physical weight and it arose from the thought of leaving my mom, whom I’d never spent a single day apart from in my whole life. I felt the fear that numbed my entire body. I was going to a new country, with a language I didn’t speak and leaving every single person that I’d ever known. I felt the prickling heat of anxiety crawl down my spine. Anxiety and worry that I’d done something wrong. Worry that my parents were giving me away because they didn’t want me anymore. Maybe I hadn’t been a good enough child. Were they giving me away because life would be easier without a child to raise?

I knew I wasn’t a good child. I’d repeatedly stolen money from my parents in the years leading up to my adoption. I would sneak 10 or 20 yuan out of my mom’s purse and then go play at the video game arcade right outside of our college campus. Because my parents taught at the university they got housing on the university campus. This was a gated campus and considered very safe so spent my days roaming the campus with my friends. We were strictly forbidden to leave the campus gates because “out there” was dangerous. But I’d routinely steal money and then go out the gates against orders to play the video games in the arcade.

The year before I was adopted my parents had finally had enough and started spanking me as punishment for my thievery and for leaving the safety of the campus. They didn’t have the heart to put any real force behind the spankings. I pretended to cry and pretended that it hurt. I continued to steal money to feed my gaming addiction.

Kids are so weird. My memories of that time include ripping the heads off of these giant wood beetles in a lumberyard and sticking their heads to the logs while their pincers still moved. We must’ve lined up a row of heads 20 long and marveled at how their jaws continued to open and close even when their heads were no longer attached to their bodies. I remember squishing caterpillars with my shoes as they climbed up the side of a wall. I remember stealing a little buddha fortune telling knick-knack from the home of one of the international students that my parents were friends with and then discarding it into a storm drain when I was worried I’d be discovered. I remember we made a game of jumping off of ledges onto a pile of cardboard boxes and we worked our way up to some impressive heights. At least 30ft in my child’s mind. It was probably closer to 6ft in reality.

One day my friends and I had a rock fight, as you do. We were in a field overlooked by apartment buildings gleefully chucking rocks at each other. I remember seeing a kid that I didn’t like running across the field and I KNEW with profound clarity and certainty that I was going to hit him right in the head with my rock. I just knew it. It was the most strange and surreal feeling. I felt like I wasn’t even in control of my body when I threw that rock. And before the rock even left my hand I just KNEW that it was going to beam him right in the head. And it did. I got a direct headshot from 30ft away and he crumpled as if my rock was a gunshot. Then he started wailing.

Let me be clear I’m not great at throwing things. I never have been and I’m still not to this day. One of the tasks of earning your Expert Infantryman’s Badge in the Army involves throwing a dummy grenade and making it land within a 8ft diameter circle that’s only 15 or 20ft away. That was the only task in my EIB test that I failed. So yeah it was very strange that I hit him with such certainty.

He lived in one of the apartments overlooking our rock battlefield and his mom started yelling hysterically. “What happened! Are you ok? Who hit you! Who threw that rock!!” No one saw that I had thrown the rock. I did not confess. I did not go to check if he was OK. I quietly walked away because I didn’t want to get in trouble. Just a super strange memory that has stuck with me all these years. I don’t know what to make of it. Apparently it was fate/destiny that I smash him in the head with a rock? So strange.

In the months before I left China I finally learned how to ride a bicycle. I begged my parents for a bike but we couldn’t afford one. My first real clear memory of being in the US was going to my aunt and uncle’s house in Springfield, MO. They fed me Chinese takeout(Springfield is famous for Chinese buffets and cashew chicken) and gave me my first bike. I remember riding that thing in circles for hours on their drive-way that day and being so excited to finally have my own bike.

What I don’t remember is being afraid. Or missing anyone. I don’t remember feeling sad. You’d think I’d stay up at night feeling lonely and missing all of my family and friends. Nope. I never cried once. I didn’t miss my parents. I didn’t miss my friends. In-fact I didn’t even think about my family or friends. I didn’t think about my life in China at all.

People in China are rightly paranoid of the surveillance state. Because of this paranoia my parents didn’t let me say good-bye to any of my friends. I wasn’t to breathe a word of the adoption to a single soul. I don’t even remember saying goodbye to my grandparents, aunts and uncles, or cousins either. I just left one day. I wonder what that was like for them, their friend and their relative just one day up and vanished. 30 years later I’ve still not spoken with most of my family. My oldest cousin reached out to me via email in college. He was attending a university in New York. I never responded. Last I heard he’s produced some really big Chinese movies.

It didn’t strike me as strange that I never cried. Never missed anyone. That I never felt sad. That I never felt emotions really. I think what must have happened is that all the pieces of me that connect to other humans completely shut down after I left China. I don’t know that I would have been able to survive if I’d truly felt the full emotional impact of leaving every single person I knew in the world at eight years old.

Imagine if every single person you knew suddenly died when you were eight. Because that’s essentially what happened to me. I couldn’t even talk to my parents on the phone because international calls to China in 1995 were too expensive. They would send a box once a month with letters, Mandarin tapes, and snacks from China. I read the letters, ignored the tapes, and ate the snacks. I was fluent in Mandarin and could read and write when I left China. Today I know as much Mandarin as your average American, which is to say none at all. And oddly enough as I’ve gotten older I’ve developed a bit of a southern accent. You’d never guess I wasn’t a native English speaker.

A few months after I arrived in the US I received my last box. The letter said that it was too expensive to keep sending the boxes. I’d get an occasional letter from my parents after that but that was the extent of my connection to China.

Heartbreaking. I’m holding back tears as I write about this, thinking about the suffering that eight year old me had to face. But I didn’t feel any of those emotions at the time. I suppressed them all. The emotional parts of me completely shut down. I killed the part of me that maintains connections with others.

The part of us that maintains connections with others might be the most human part of us. Empathy, compassion, love. These are the traits that define human beings. Without them we’re just survival robots. Find food, find shelter, procreate, ensure the survival of your genetics.

I lived for most of my life in this robotic fashion. No wonder I went through three to six months of crippling depression each year from the age of 15 onward. Of course I wasn’t able to maintain a romantic relationship until my late 20s. Who would want to date a person completely devoid of emotion or the ability to form a human connection?

I didn’t know what love felt like until I was 34 years old. I still struggle to access my emotions. These days the emotions I feel the most are anger and a white-hot rage at the injustice being perpetrated by America’s fascist regime. I sit in meditation daily and practice metta, loving kindness meditation. Vipassana meditation has no doubt saved my life. I will write more on this later. But the metta practice has been instrumental in helping me to reconnect with my heart, feel emotions, and bring back to life the part of me that can form real connections with other humans.

I was never politically engaged when I was younger. I read the stories of oppression written by black Americans and indigenous Americans. I ignored their pleas. I watched the videos of US planes dropping JDAMs which killed scores of Iraqi and Afghan civilians. I felt nothing but a morbid curiosity at the ability to watch war unfold in real time. I watched genocides unfold in Sudan, Rwanda, Bosnia, Myanmar, Ukraine, and Gaza and I stayed silent.

I believe my closed off heart and inability to connect and feel empathy and emotions was responsible for my cold indifference to the atrocities happening in the US and around the globe. And because of the deep work I’ve done through practices like Vipassana and loving kindness meditation I am finally able to empathize and feel connection and strong emotion toward the plight of humans suffering across the globe. I’m finally able to stand up and fight for the human rights of all humans.

I feel a sense of deep shame at how long it took for me to wake up. But even more strongly I feel pride that I am standing up now. That I am not staying silent. That I am using my platform to speak out and affect change.

I’ll end today’s writing with this poignant poem, written in 1946. A post-war confessional prose piece by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller. It is often misquoted as “first they came for the socialists.” The original poem says “first they came for the communists.”

First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me