Mailed a letter to aliens. Got some money in return.
Last week I found out I got second place for the little writing contest I had submitted to a while back.
It’s an eerie feeling, getting paid for my writing for the first time.
I sent it to my parents. My dad’s only remark was that my use of the term ‘village’ was incorrect, even though my great-grandfather’s patients were indeed peasants. I chuckled, because I mostly blame my mom – whenever she had talked about his upbringing, she joked that he’s basically a peasant. In contrast, she grew up in the bursting metropole of Shanghai, rubbing shoulders with all the worldliness of foreigners who had only very recently been colonizers. And yet my father had been the one to obsess over Tchaikovsky on BBC radio, dabble in writing poetry, and read the leftovers of contraband translated books from his father’s office.
In my defense, my memories of my dad’s hometown involved virtually everybody riding on rickshaws (and the occasional moped) and running around crumbling stone courtyards. My grandparents heated their house with coal in a giant stove that belched soot, and I remember seeing the hulking stacks of the stuff around the house every winter when I visited. Relative to where I lived for most of the year in China, in the province’s capital, my dad’s hometown had felt very rural to me.
My mom read it too, apparently. Instead of commenting on the writing, she just kept asking logistical questions such as: how many people were part of the contest (just a vague ‘hundreds’ according to the contest organizers), how many people got second place (one), what the prize amount was ($250). In my mind, this is the canonical Asian parent’s method of ascertaining the validity of bragging rights. But I dunno, maybe I’m just assuming. It comes after an entire childhood of watching my parents wordlessly convey a mild satisfaction about me that they couldn’t express directly to me, but could somehow say to everyone else when I wasn’t there.
Honestly, I was afraid to ask her what she truly thought of it, because in many ways she’s still deeply mourning her father, the one whose passing I wrote about.