We Were Dreamers

• 清弥

  2023-09-14
  My biggest breakthrough came with the realization that in life, we often go to extreme length to hide how we fell. We go through life putting on different masks, only breaking our composure when something truly challenges us.
• 清弥

  2023-09-14
  My union knowledge served me well when I was cast as a paramedic on a CW show called Beauty and the Beast later that year. According to the rulebook, characters who spoke less than five lines of dialogue were deemed less important and therefore paid significantly less. My paramedic character had exactly five scripted lines, which meant that I was right on the edge of a huge pay raise (and a principal acting credit, which was far more prestigious). On set I made sure to improvise as much as I could at the beginning and end of the scenes, adding some background chatter in the hopes that the director would like my work in the editing room. I waited eagerly for the episode to come out a few months later and, as luck would have it, the director did end up using a bunch of my unscripted lines! I...
• 清弥

  2023-09-14
  Shelley and I would ultimately grow in separate directions, but I remain endlessly grateful for our time together and for all the times she shouldered the baggage I carried.
• 清弥

  2023-09-14
  She was very adamant that we keep things under wraps, and so I became something of a guilty secret. It was kind of like an affair, except I was literally competing with no one - and losing.
• 清弥

  2023-09-14
  My dad absolutely adored Mary, but he would find that her kindness was more of the exception rather than the rule.
• 清弥

  2023-09-14
  My parents never thought of themselves as heroic or courageous, and they certainly never believed that anything they did would be worthy of being written into a book. But their determination and quiet resilience are a part of the canon of every starry-eyed immigrant family who has ever dared to journey across an infinite ocean in search of a better life. As the beneficiaries of their courage, we in the next generation are responsible for keeping their stories alive so that our great-great-grandchildren will know their roots and, in the face of adversity, will remember that they are descended from wide-eyed dreamers who never gave up on their goal.
• 清弥

  2023-09-14
  In the end, knowing that they were asking the impossible, Laolao and Laoye left the decision to my mother, who had already spent her whole life doing everything she could to make her parents happy, including giving up her whole childhood. This was the daughter who would rather bear the embarrassment of wearing tattered shoes to school than ask for money to buy new ones, who stared longingly at her classmates who played the violin or the piano but never dared ask to take lessons of her own. My mother had never made a selfish decision her entire life; of course she agreed to volunteer herself as tribute to go away to the countryside. Of course she chose to protect her younger siblings. Of course she sacrificed her own aspirations for the good of the family. What else was she supposed to do?
• 清弥

  2023-09-14
  There was no shame in doing what you had to in order to make ends meet; it was just life.
• Insider J.D.

  2022-08-08
  I was an astronaut, after all, whose only home was the eternal vastness of space through which I floated, untethered and unencumbered by any familial attachments.