 So, I started planning this panel back in August before the election, obviously. Before the first travel ban, before the increased ICE raids, before the travel ban number two. You guys get where I'm going here. And every week, sometimes every day, something in the news makes me consider and reconsider what it means to be an immigrant in America. It makes me reconsider what it means to be a writer in America, an Asian American and immigrant writer, a writer of color. And all of the wonderful writers on this panel navigate a multitude of similar identities. And tonight, they're not only going to share their work, but they're also going to discuss the complications and opportunities that arise when their different identities mingle on the page. So to begin, each of us is going to read an excerpt from our work that reflects the theme of tonight's panel, and then following the reading, I'll start the discussion off with a couple questions, and then you guys will take over, because I'm sure you guys will have questions too. So, Juliana, will you start us off? Sorry, yeah. Call the boy who never cried for me. In this story, Miami is the Promised Land. The Promised Land's teaming with floating particles of piss, tanning lotion, my mama's rebel and dark-rooch lipstick mixed with my Thea's spit, propelled out of her mouth as she dragged her bags out into the airport parking lot, as she chew bubblegum while yelling, this is Miami, don't you see we've got a white band, Mira, Mira, see the white band, see it? Here in Miami we've got a band and air conditioning. Did you bring the bread? Mucha ver donde está el pan. How is the plane ride? Like shit, I suppose. Everything in Colombia is mierda, mierda, mierda. And why are you crying? Why is she crying? You see that? That's her white band. After three, this is a three hour plane ride. They greeted us with a prayer, and we greeted them with smashed bread, bought at eight in the morning that day at a local panadería, millions of kilometers away. This bread smells like Colombia. My Tia says that she beat on the pancito con huas pasas, and I cannot tell if it's a good or a bad thing. When I asked my sister what's the first thing she remembers of her arrival to Miami 12 years ago, she says, the smell, it smells like white people. Then she corrects herself. I thought it was the way gringos smell, but I realized now that it was just the air conditioning and this make-believe hollow walls. Did you cry? I asked her, do you remember crying? The, Juliana, why are you asking stupid questions again? She says, and she hands my mom the phone. Here's the deal. That day we had left Bogotá para siempre. And I remember asking my boyfriend to finger me one last time in the bathroom, airport. I stroke his beard, play with his greasy hair, asking me if he will go to visit me in Miami. Was he sad I was leaving, but was he real sad? Pablo, I said, we're never seeing each other again, never. Do you understand what that means? He gave me his dirty Casio watch, a baby blue digital thing that beat every hour and was way too big for my wrist. Biting on his pierced lip, he mumbled some communist shit about love. Of course, that's what Pablo would do. Quote some zapatista, motherfucker, while I was trying to get him to cry. Give me a history lesson about the Mexican Revolution, while I internally bit my lip, my tongue, my board as fuck hard, wanting him to touch me, wanting him to cry, wanting him to break into a song like Renée from Salserín and Drowned, every policía va chijeriendo this baraco airport. Ever since mommy informed that we were moving to Miami with artillas, I couldn't wait for that moment of sobbing at the airport, that moment when my boy's heart will rip, bounce into the tile floor, land on my hand so I could care for it like a dying bunny. All my girlfriends were there, 15 Catholic uniforms biting on happy meals. I knew this was my last moment to shine, that after lying about every single Camilo Diego Daniel Roberto, after writing myself love letters in ugly boy handwriting, after tricking my sister into talking on my neck and after sucking on mangoes and pineapples for hours to convince everyone, I was the mera mera queen of dick or whatever. Leaving the country forever was the perfect drama infused opportunity for a boy to declare its love to me. And this was a real bone flesh boyfriend I had broken up with all the imaginary. Everyone had to see this, that I could be loved, that someone could love me like this, that this 18 year old criollito kid was about to lose his shit over this 15 year old long gun pussy. I was invested in squeezing every bit of dramatic tension to my advantage out of the four hours spent at El Dorado, the airport. Invested in having my Daniel Arromo moment, I was Daniel Arromo, carajo, me. Because, carajo, this migration on the Avianca plain, carajo, our lives packed into two Samsonite bags, the merengue I will not hear again for two years flowing from nearby cafeteria. Caraco, mommy's blow dry hair, hiding our collective sadness and my sister's clueless, glossy eyes. And my other tiya chain smoking on that guy I've never met hugging mommy, kissing her neck. Que carajo de pieces of ourselves that refuse to leave, the pieces are never left and are still roaming at El Dorado. Whatever stuck drinking water down tintos. Que carajo, carajo, que clase de mis understanding. And the cleaning lady in the bathroom throwing a puta sarai, the fabuloso smell, the tintos are Juan Valdez, the roscón I barely ate because Nasha and the cordillera boy cutting my ass for leaving my patria, the bon bon bon sticking out of my back and the nuts in my stomach and my rib cage. Mamita, this was my Daniela Romo moment. I only wanted his tears. When we eat our happy meals, all the girls cry, all the girls but me, my 15 girlfriends, plus my sister's 15 girlfriends, all sobbing, snorting, snot, asking for napkins, and sobbing again, snorting, snot, asking for napkins. You get the picture. But yours truly, nanay, is no one drop of water. Some girls cried so intensely their entire faces covered by a thin, transparent film of snot. Like each and every single one of those girls was sitting pussy for five hours, and now he dripped, mixed with the happy meal, all back inside which started. Juli, they say, Juli, Marica, huevón, Juli, que mierda, Marica, que mierda. None of them finished their sentences. I stare at Pablo trying to figure out what his crying game is. He's focused on licking on Oreo McFlurry and handing out napkins to all the yoronas. My friends all think he's such a papacito, how lucky I am to have him. Look at that beard and those brown eyes, and mi reina, he knows how to dress. But the papacito doesn't shed a tear. The papacito and I have been dating for two months, which in teenage years is a lifetime full of passionate love, mixed dates, slimy kisses, unfulfilled promises, and in fabulous case, too many ideological rants. He smiles at me, grabs my hand, draws circles inside my palm, kisses my neck. He writes Te amo with his index finger on my jeans in all caps. He swears whole visit, swears he will get married in freaking Villa de Leyva, papa. Swears in whispers and slimy kisses that I don't return because I'm fucking furious, because there's only 20 minutes left before lining up for customs. Pablo, mi amor, don't this down to stairs, I wanna take them with me. When I asked mommy about that day at the airport, she says she remembers they made you a nice taste of the Big Mac and the ugly green sweater your boyfriend gave you, nena. And your tía Dominique, who wasn't there, she couldn't make it to the airport. She had to be hospitalized that morning because of heartbreak. Le rompí el corazón, it was too much for her. And your amigas por Dios crying, como si se estuviera acabando el mundo. But the world was ending, ma, no? Más o menos, she says. But I like, did you cry, ma? It takes her a second to answer. I can hear my sister yelling in the background, the fridge in my mom's house, opening and closing, Christian music making its way to the phone. I didn't cry, she says proudly. I was keeping it together for you. I know it's time to go into customs because mommy's face changes to a nervous smile and she gathers her purse, her coat, the passports, one last bite into that Colombian Big Mac. Her jacked black hair, one wave of sadness. She doesn't say anything, but she doesn't have to. The waves of her perfected straightened hair pull us into action. That hair straightened that same morning in a house that is not our house by a window with no view. Straightened flawless at six in the morning while mommy thought nobody but the hairdresser saw her scribbling invisible notes to my father. Invisible notes to herself. While she beat adios the damn city, the damn city in este país de mierda from a window with no views. Este país de mierda that we will never miss because cachaco nos vamos pal norte a la promes land. And this country that is shit that we will never leave that we're living right now as we kiss goodbye the rows of onlookers that are alive. Este país de mierda will be nothing but a shadow, nothing but a ghost que baila pegadito. My fucking boyfriend now only is chuckling of course and I'm toda putada, toda gira, toda que te mato, Pablo, for killing my dreams because you're supposed to be just water right now, Pablo, just a well of sadness begging and pulling me to you. You're supposed to give me five reasons to stay. You're supposed to rip that passport in two supposed to heal mommy's heart with big baperu, clean her mouth and palms so she never joins my tears under white van. You're supposed to lick the ice cream as it drips and bring it back to me. Pero mi reina, we never really leave. We cross the charco with a bag full of feelings, a somber look and jars of big baperu to heal mommy's heart. We never leave. We don't really know how to. We climb into that plane like a herd of sheep after swearing to the customs guide. This is a trip to Disney World, señor. Ain't nobody gonna stay in some muggy as well full of rednecks and crocodiles. Mommy had my sister and I practiced saying, hola, señor de la duana, we're going to Disney World. Again, she'll say to us in front of the bathroom mirror, hola, señor de la duana, we're staying in unison. We're going to Disney World. No, señor, we don't plan on overstaying. We have a life back home. We have a house back home. I have a boyfriend back home who cries for me. We never really leave because I don't understand what living means. I don't know that it takes months, years, decades to leave that I'll always be stuck in that airport. That we will fly on a plane, land in a swamp, grow mold on our eyes from the humidity, scales on our chest from the air conditioning. That even when we landed, even when outside the Florida sun dared us to die fried, lonely and wearing $3 Walmart leggings, even when the TV promised inglesing barreras, the barrera was already there, the barrera never moves, never softens. When we're on the plane, my sister cries, mommy holds her hands in prayer and I look out at the cordillera and think about Pablo's dried motherfucking eyes as mine water. All I do is imagine Daniela Romo. I call the goddess to sit with me and hold me, wrap me in the thick gorgeous mane of hers and rock me until I'm a Platano Maduro, until I ripen into something more, something beautiful. So I'm gonna read you from an essay that I wrote. And one of the complicated things about having two cultures and writing from that point of views that you come across a problem with audience and writing for which audience. So this is what this essay is about. As a foreigner, you adopt many ways of speaking. Sometimes you adopt the voice of silence, hiding your difference. Other times you sound like an encyclopedia. Columbia is the northernmost country in South America with coastlines on both the Pacific and the Atlantic and a population of 45 million. Then you can be in the middle of explaining the most trivial cultural detail. For example, the tidbit that people from Bogota are known as Rolos, and you roll your R extravagantly because you can. And in the wake of it, you wonder, why are you performing this and for whom? I once thought that the language that arises from these quotidian corners of power and powerlessness were never to come into my writing. Instead they are like crows, descending on a feast. Some days I find myself writing and rewriting the beginning of a story, flinging the birds off my material left and right. To further complicate the matter, I am writing a story I used to keep segregated to the Spanish. It's a family memoir about temporary amnesia, inheritance, and the thin tribal memory that somehow survives from the times of the conquest, which my grandfather embodied as a curandero, who it was said had the power to move clouds. Dragging the story from its natural habitat to the cool temperatures of English is difficult, but I find beauty in the displacement because I am an immigrant. When you inhabit a foreign language, whether you want to or not, you inhabit that cultures ethos and traditions which come nestled like sleeping dragons inside the phrasing, sayings, grammar. Ideally Spanish is the language of my mind, and English is a language that lives on my fingertips. I like to leave no trace of the original language. I like it to disappear but leave a skin of itself, like the discarded skin of a snake. When I use English this way, it can be an isolating agent for meaning, self, and identity, and this is what I love most, and this is also what I love most about being an immigrant, that the majority culture can act like a combustible that burns and clarifies who you really are. With the crows that descend on my stories, I have only some to do with language, but everything to do with audience. Ideally I am addressing Colombians and South Americans, and everyone else happens to be listening in. This is the only way to do it, and I'll tell you why. When I first arrived to the US, a Midwestern woman picked me up from the Richmond airport to take me to her friends in Williamsburg, Virginia. I only remember the woman's eyes now, green and shrewd, trained on me as we drove by the impossibly clean rural landscape between Richmond and Williamsburg. I had never seen so much widespread wealth. Statue-esque houses with tall steeples sat in ample land, hemmed in by perfect rectangular hedges. I wanted to express awe, but I was aware of the woman's eyes on me, straining, waiting to discover something on my face. I was 17, so I did the opposite of what I felt. I glanced at each passing luxury with disinterest, the twin lions, the bubbling fountains, the manicured gardens, as if I had belonged in this luxury, this safety, this ordered landscape all my life. The woman seemed satisfied, and she reclined in her seat and said, just last week I picked up a girl who was coming from El Salvador, and this girl you can't imagine, she just couldn't stop ogling at the houses. She thought there were mansions, and I thought, you think these are mansions? These are just our regular houses. I mean, where did this girl come from? I inhaled, ready to respond, then I kept my words. I turned to my window. The story of where the Salvadorian girl came from, of where I came from, was not a story meant for this woman. This woman with her duration, the great sweep of her ignorance, the obliviousness of her privilege, because that story, when told to her, would only turn into accusation. This was a story meant for foreigners, immigrants, and the scores of people marked as other. And when I told it, I would be sure to include the woman with green eyes. The woman with green eyes was now an integral part of the story. She was a quintessential part of experiencing the border, of crossing and being caught between states of becoming. So I imagine I am telling the memoir to my people and people like me, because that's the only space where the story thrives, is free and unafraid. However, since I am writing in English, every day I slip and lose sight of my audience, it all starts when I begin to sound too much like an encyclopedia. Suddenly, there's too many things to explain, the details, the beliefs, the culture, and then I find myself lost, trying to please that northern desire to pin everything down with bouts of anesthetics and empirical logic. And then the writing takes the form of that unnecessary slant, foreign. It's always difficult to bring myself back to delete everything, but it's worth it when I imagine the face of my grandfather and I write speaking only to him and for him, I tell the story again. I'm gonna read a short excerpt from my novel, Soy Sauce for Beginners. And the book is set in Singapore. And in this particular chapter, the narrator is remembering something that happened to her when she was a young child. The American visiting professor was named Colin Clark. He had come from the University of Chicago to give a seminar at my mother's university. To welcome him and his wife, the humanities chair hosted a dinner at a seafood restaurant on the eastern coast of the island that was famous for its chili crab. At first, my father tried to get out of attending the dinner. It was no secret that he found Ma's colleagues exhausting. They sat around discussing books he hadn't read, and when he tried to bring up something he'd seen in the paper or on TV, they humored him for a minute or two before taking up the previous topic of conversation. But Ma insisted she could not show up alone. All the other spouses would be there. Eventually, Ba relented, but on the night of the dinner, he announced that I was coming too. Ma was not pleased. I had just turned 10 and my opinion of these gatherings fell in line with my father's if it hadn't been for the chili crab I would have refused to attend. In between lectures by various faculty members on the history of Singapore cuisine for the benefit of the foreign visitors, Ma and her colleagues discussed their research and their classes. Ba and the other spouses quickly ran out of ways to participate in the conversation and spent the rest of the dinner nodding and smiling politely. Every once in a while, a grownup asked me what my favorite subject was in school or whether I was enjoying the food. But other than that, I was left alone. Colin Clark's face has faded from my memory, but I can still picture his wife, a frightfully thin woman with poofy hair the color of pomegranates who complained about the humidity and the spiciness of the food. She finally agreed to taste a single morsel of crab then pointedly wiped off her sauce-stained fingers on a disposable towelette. Only one other aspect of that dinner stuck with me. Near the end of the meal, I noticed Ma and Colin Clark discussing some writer or philosopher they both admired. Something about the tilt of their shoulders or the angles of their heads caught my attention and when I glanced back a while later, it was clear from the way they neglected their bowls of honeydew sago that their conversation was far from over. Before I could ponder the heaviness that settled in my limbs, Ba threw back the last of his beer and cleared his throat. He leaned over, looped an arm over Ma's shoulder and questioned them in a loud, strident voice about this philosopher of theirs. What startled me was neither his aggressive manner nor the questions themselves, but the way he spoke. By peppering his speech with phrases like, no kidding and sure thing and you don't say, my father was mimicking an American accent. His eyes glittered feverishly, his face and neck burned bright red. Another colleague tried to engage him in a different discussion, but he would not turn his attention from Ma and the American. After that, someone, probably the humanities chair, signaled for the check. The academics and their spouses reached for their purses and rose from the table. In the parking lot, Ma walked briskly to the car, ignoring Ba's comments about the evening. All the way home, Ba continued to speak in that strange voice. And when Ma told him to drop it, he widened his eyes and said, he had no idea what she was talking about. One evening, about a month after Colin Clark's arrival, Ba didn't come home for dinner. The following evening, it happened again. Hours later, when he finally returned, Ma hurried down the stairs, the door to the study swung shut, and the arguing started. I lay awake in bed listening. I was old enough to know something was seriously wrong. At first, my parents' voices were too soft for me to hear, but then I heard the American's name spoken by Ba in that hideous accent, and my Ma's voice rose in a shriek. Images from that night came back to me, the way Ma had laughed wildly at Colin Clark's jokes, how at the end of the night, his wife had refrained from taking Ma's hand, instead raising her palm in a half-hearted wave. My parents' voices grew steadily louder, and when I could listen no longer, I got out of bed and ran the faucet in the tub at full blast. There in the warm bath, I lay watching my fingers and toes shrivel, as if from old age. My parents' argument stretched through the week. On day four, Ba peeked into my room after midnight, walked through the half-open door of the en suite bathroom, and found me asleep in a tub of tepid water. He wrapped me in a large, fluffy towel and carried me to bed. The next morning, the two of us drove to Uncle Robert's house, where I was to stay while he and Ma took care of grown-up business. I didn't point out I was too old to be spoken to like that. The drive-over was the first time we'd been alone together in days, and I was both furious at him and comforted. Unable to put my conflicting emotions into words, I simply asked, when can I come home? Soon, my father said, in a few days, your Ma or I will come get you. Divorce was still rare in Singapore, but I worried all the same. What would it take to drive my mother back to her beloved America? In front of my uncle's house, Ba stretched his lips into a tired smile, and I tried to smile back. As much as I longed to ask questions, I sensed this wasn't the time and that he might not even have the answers. Up until this point, I was still deciding which part to read. Every piece of writing is about being an immigrant and a displaced person, so it's hard to choose since they all seem pro pro today. All right, so I'm gonna read from my first perfume dreams. On April 28, 1975, two days before Saigon fell to the Communist army and the Vietnam War ended, my family and I boarded a cargo plane full of panic refugees and headed for Guam. I remember watching Vietnam recede into the cloudy horizon from the plane's window, a green mass of land giving way to a hazy green sea. I was 11 years old. I was confused, frightened, and from all available evidence, the khaki army tents in the Guam refugee camp, the scorching heat, the long lines for food rations, the fetid odor of the communal latrines. I was also homeless. Places and times when they can no longer be retrieved tend to turn sacrosanth, home for ever losses for ever base in a certain twilight glow. Even after many years in America, my mother still longed for the ancestral altar on which grandpas faded black and white photos stared out into our abandoned home. She missed the Carve Rosewood cabinet in which she kept the enamel cover family albums and my father's special French wine, some Bordeaux. And she yearned for the antique porcelain dining set covered by faded blue silk. She fretted over the small farm we owned near the Ben-Loy Bridge on the outskirt of Saigon and where the chickens roamed freely and the mangosteen and guava trees were heavy with fruits when we last visited and where the river dotted with water hyacinths ran swift and strong. This is the time of year when the guavas back home are ripened. Mother would tell the family at dinner time. So far from home mother, nevertheless took her reference points in autumn to her favorite season. Autumn, the dark season came in the form of letters she received from relatives and friends left behind. Brown and flimsy thin like dead leaves recycled who knows how many times the lettuce threatens to dissolve with a single tear. They unanimously told of tragic lives. Auntie and her family barely survived. Her cousin is caught for the umpteen time trying to escape. Uncle has died from heart failure while being interrogated by the Viet Cong. Yet another uncle is indefinitely incarcerated in a malaria-infested re-education camp and no news yet of cousin and family who disappeared in the South China Sea. The letters went on to inquires to our health and then to timidly ask for money for antibiotics, for a bicycle and if possible for sponsorship to America. The letters confirmed what my mother who had lived through two wars had always known. Life is a sea of suffering and sorrow gives meaning to life. Then as if to anchor me in old world tragedy as if to bind me to that shared narrative of loss and misery. Mother insisted that I too read those letters. What did I do? I skimmed. I skipped. I shrugged. I put on a poker face and rigged autumn in a pile and pushed it all back to her. That country I slowly announced in English as if to wound is cursed. That country, mind you, no longer minor. Vietnam was now so far away in abstraction and America was now so near outside the window blaring on TV written in the science fiction books by devourer like mad a seduction. Besides what could a scrawny refugee teenager living in America do to save uncle from that malaria infested re-education camp? What could he do for cousin and her family lost somewhere in the vast South China Sea? He could on the other hand pretend amnesia to save himself from grief. My mother made the clucking sounds of disapproval with her tongue as she shook her head. She looked into my eyes and called me the worst thing she could muster. You become a little American now, haven't you? A cowboy. Vietnamese appropriated the word cowboy from the movies to imply selfishness. A cowboy in Vietnamese estimation is a rebel who as in the spaghetti Westerns leaves town the communal life to ride alone into the sunset. Mother's comments martyred, but she wasn't far from the truth. Her grievances against America had little to do with the war and the United States involvement in it. Her complaint against America was that it had stolen her children, especially her youngest and one's most filial son. America seduced him with its optimism, twisted his thinking, bent his tongue and dulled his tropic memories. America gave him freeways and fast food and silly sitcoms and cartoons, impugning him with sappy happy ending incitements. Yet it could not be helped. For the refugee child in America, the world splits perversely into two yet reconcilable parts. Inside and outside. Inside at home in the crowded apartment shared by two refugee families. Nostalgia ruled. Inside the world remained dedicated to what was. Remember the house we used to live in with the red-boogered valiant wavering over the iron gate? Remember when we went to Hoi and sailed down the perfume river for the night markets and that night the sky was full of stars? Remember that when uncle showed us that trick with the cards? Inside, the smell of fish sauce wafed it along with the smell of incense from the newly built altar that housed photos of the dead. A complex smell of loss. Inside, the refugee father told and retold wartime stories to his increasingly disaffected children. Reliving the battles he had fought in one, he stirred his whiskey and soda on ice then stared blankly at the TV. Inside, the refugee mother grieved for lost relatives, lost home and hearth, lost ways of life. A whole cherished world of intimate connections scattered and uprooted, gone, gone, all gone. And so inside, I, the refugee child, felt the collected weight of history on my shoulders and felt silent. Outside, however, what do you want to be when you grow up, Mr. K, the English teacher in eighth grade asked. I had never thought of the question before. Such an American question. But it intrigued me. I did not hesitate. A movie star, I answered, laughing. Outside, I was ready to believe, to swear, that the Vietnamese child who grew up in that terrible war and who saw many strange, tragic and marvelous things was someone else, not me, that it had happened in another age centuries ago. That Vietnamese boy never grew up. He wanders still in the garden of my childhood memory who has I, I had gone on, hadn't I? It was a feeling that I could not help. I came to America at a peculiar age, bubassin and not fully formed, old enough to remember Vietnam. I was also young enough to embrace America and to be shaped by it. Outside in school among new friends, I spoke English freely and deliberately. I whisper sweet compliments to Chinese and Filipino girls and made them blush. I cussed and joked with friends and made them laugh. I bantered and cavorted with teachers and made myself their pet. Speaking English, I had a markedly different personality than when speaking Vietnamese. In English, I was a sunny, upbeat, silly and sometimes wickedly sharp-tongued kid. No sorrow, no sadness, no cataclysmic grief clung to my new language. But while river full of possibilities flow effortlessly from my tongue connecting me to the new world and I enamored by the discovery of a newly invented self, I sell its iridescent waters towards spring. Start with a pretty broad question for our panelists. Do you identify as an immigrant writer? Do you consider your work to be immigrant writing? What do these terms mean to you? I can start. I mean, I thought a little bit about that question I was thinking about today and I never, I feel like it's the first time that I'm like, oh, I guess this is immigrant writing. Like I don't, I've never seen it like that, you know? I do, I mean, I'm an immigrant because that's like irrefutable. Like it's just, it just is, you know? It's like something that like, you know, split my life into and I came here 13 years ago. So in a way, I mean, I am writing from like an immigrant body which makes the work that comes out immigrant. I don't think that then there's necessarily an aesthetic, you know, like a literary aesthetic to like immigrant writing if that's it, you know? Like I wouldn't want to do that. But just like thinking about it, I've never thought of myself as an immigrant writer. It would just be one of the other identities to like add to everything else. To the list of things is like, check, check, check, check. But I don't, I just, I feel like, I feel like in probably in the tradition of like, I mean, there's, I didn't even know how to approach this because it is, it is immigrant writing because it's coming from a neighboring immigrant body. But there's so much multiplicity and so much such a wide spectrum of immigrant writing that I sometimes, I'm scared of labeling as such because it's just gonna be sort of like corner just one thing and it has to look a certain way, you know? So yes and no, basically. It comes from my body, so it is immigrant because it's me, I'm an immigrant writing in this country. So it is immigrant writing, but also I didn't, I don't want my writing to be cornered and to, yeah, I'll stop there. For me, yes, I think I actually started writing when the year that my family and I left Columbia and I'd been doing like, we left when I was 14 and I started writing in English because it was my parents couldn't speak it. So I knew I could write it and then nobody in the house would know what I was saying at all. And so my writing was born from a moment of immigration and I wasn't writing before that. And it was also just finding yourself in this new place, having no connections to the landscape, to the people, to the culture there. Even though this is West Venezuelan, it's like right next to Columbia and the culture is very similar. I had this moment of the first time that I was speaking to myself and I think that writing is speaking to yourself in a way. So for me, because that was kind of like the birth of my writing, I do identify very strongly with that. So I would say yes, like I am, yes to both. Yeah, I like yes and it's like an improv. You always have to do yes and yesterday I was on a panel of travel writers in San Jose and I was telling them that today, tomorrow, I would be a immigrant writer, but today I'm a travel writer. Since I write about traveling when I'm in some other country in somebody else's country. But I think it's one of those things where when you live in a pluralistic society and subject matters are complicated, it's easy to say you are this, but in fact, you're always this and that. And maybe Rushdy was right and every kind of writing is an immigrant writing. Just the same way as Adam and Eve were refugees and so were people on the Mayflower, were both people. So we can go back far enough, everyone costs some kind of border or another. So it's yes and because the subject matter can expand and it should never be sort of shrunk, but add on instead. I have a lot of other questions, but I want to give you guys a chance to ask if anybody has, oh, please. I was really interested when you were describing me. Yeah, yeah. I wish I could say yes, but I don't know. I also speak French. And so it's a very weird thing to be aware of when you shift language, because when you shift language, it's also you shift a little bit of your personality and the people who are bilingual or trilingual or multilingual will know this. For instance, with my French cousin, my hand started to move because, and your shoulders start to shrug a little bit and you're without thinking, but that's part of the language in Vietnam. The way one speaks Vietnamese, one falls into a sense of family hierarchical narrative because Vietnamese don't have impersonal pronouns. So everyone is uncle, aunt, and I'm always brother or younger, brother or uncle to someone. And so you fall into this kind of weird hierarchical connection in its intimate language so that even when I'm asking a vendor how much is this apple or something, I would say, granny, how much is this apple? Grandson wants to buy it, right? And so it's a very different language and then you fall into kind of like a communal familial narrative among yourselves. So I'm quite aware of that when I speak another language. And so when you venture into the term of literary life in another language, I imagine if I were to write in Vietnamese, which I don't, I can write email, but I would have to bring all that complexity to bear because I would not just simply return to that language but I'm bringing this multi-layer self to it, which is a challenge for a writer to write in another language in that sense. Great and Juliana, do you guys want to talk about being multilingual and how that affects either the way you write in English or the way you write in your other languages that you speak? I would say, every once in a while, when I am in Colombia for a longer term, I will start writing in Spanish just because that's the language that I'm around in. But there's so many things that you learn about language every time that you sit down to write. And every day that you show up to your writing, it's like you're in a lab and you make discoveries about what the language can do. And I don't have that knowledge in Spanish because I don't show up every day to write in Spanish. And I do like, one of the things that really bothers me about Spanish is how easily things rhyme, just drives me crazy. When I write in Spanish, it's almost like too pretty and I just don't, I can't, I don't like it. And I like English for that reason. And even in English, I will make endless alliterations because I think I do miss the rhyming, so I have like a. That's so funny. I mean, I, as you guys saw, I write in Spanish. Like, it's impossible for me to not make both languages. When I started writing, and I started writing in English because I felt like I was writing poetry and I was like, this sounds too pretty and it's something raw and grotesque and English was giving me access to not this pretty language. And I also wanted to prove myself that I could do it when I moved here and I moved here when I was 15. We come from the same country and we move like almost the same. It's like really cute. It's amazing. We've been to her like so many different things. But anyway, that's not the point. The point is that I mix both of them and to me, voice and rhythm are huge and I think that that comes from Spanish and that comes from listening to music in Spanish. So I cannot, I never separate them. I read in both languages a lot. I made, when I moved to this country, I did not want to move here. I hated it with all my life. So all I did, I made a decision that I wanted to keep my life in Colombia alive. And I did and I dated people from there and I've been reading and I have a life there. So when I go back to Colombia, I have my friends, I have my life, I have, you know, like I've made an effort, like an intentional effort to keep that because it's so important to me to have it. But it's always something interesting. I've been trying to write about it. The moment I get, so when I go to Colombia, I get on the plane and I start listening to Colombian Spanish and the way that it starts like reaching my body, I'm like, oh, and it's just like, I just start smiling because there's these gestures like, you know, like the senora, the old lady's doing that and like, they just start saying all this shit and I'm just like, it just starts coming at me and I start seeing how it feels in my body differently, you know, how I started, when I, then I arrived at the airport and I started being like taken on by the language and by this, you know, I started noticing little things that I would never notice before about the way the things are written and I'm very much about vernacular and dialect is how I write and I'm really just interested in just the way that people speak daily and like most of my work is just like dialect. And so, but I noticed it when I go to Colombia and then I just feel how the language just starts like coming into my body differently, how I feel sometimes like there's an aggression of it, you know, just comes at me and I recognize it as such but there's still this like hesitation because I haven't heard so many people speak Colombian-Spanish in so long and all of a sudden everybody's around you and they're just yelling at you. So, and then, you know, after the third day, I'm not just like, I'm just, I'm just on it and I ride the wave and then I come here and I can barely speak a word of English, you know, like I come back and then I have to be like, okay, let me navigate this. I also, if I only speak like English for the entire day, my tongue gets really, really tired and I, and it's hard for me. So like, I usually also like, date people who speak Spanish is something that I'm like, I just, I have to, I'm sorry, all the wives by the end of the day can't even talk to you. But yeah, but in terms of the writing, like I have to incorporate Spanish, like, and I've gotten a lot of shit for it too, you know, like, because people, they feel like I'm, there's a lot of people that I cannot relate to the language and there's a lot of people that I've taken out of the language and I'm like, yeah, Queen, like that's what I have to do everything when I'm reading all this stuff, you know, like I have to do so much work daily to just understand what's happening in front of me, you know, sometimes, because I'm just like in La La Land. And so I do a lot of work internally to translate the world for myself, you know, to make it anything just, just, I'm like, okay, this is what it means. Just a text message, I don't work with abbreviations. You all abbreviate everything, I don't. And it's like, that will work for me. And I just mean everybody in this country abbreviates so many things. And I just feel like it's that will work. But yeah, so I incorporated it and I'm really interested with like rhythm and the way that, because to me, that's the linguistic reality of so many people in this country, you know, not only like Latinos, but everybody who mixes their languages. I think like in Spanish, Spanish and English work really well together for me. And there's also a history already of immigrants who have done this work since, you know, the late 19th century. So I have a history to grab onto in Spanish, you know, that I can work with and that's where I'm coming from. But I don't separate them. We're just talking about this, about translation. And I was like, I don't even know if I can translate my work because it's so based on dialect that I don't know if I could do that, you know? I'm 28, I've been here for 13 years. And I'm 31. I'm really old. I grew up here in most of my life. Before I got here, it was a French school in Vietnam. So English is actually my third language. It's kind of bizarre making a living out of that. Do you think all languages equal English? Well, it depends. I mean, I feel like English is my preferred language because I live here the longest for 40 years now, so. But if I go back to any of those other sphere, it returns. Like if I go to Paris for a month, you know, then I just fall into that rhythm. In Vietnam, it's the same thing. But, yeah. Go ahead. So my question is for all of you first, all of you have come to this idea that you dream. What language do you dream in? I'm not sure if it's Vietnamese or French. I have dreams where if it's, if, so the people that I dream about, they speak the language that they would speak in real life. So my mother doesn't speak English, so she's always speaking to me in Spanish in my dreams. Although I did have one where she was speaking English and it just took me out of the dream completely and I was like, oh, I am dreaming. It became like a waking dream. Oh, wow, cool. But yeah, it's, yeah, it always follows like the logical what each person speaks. I think I have a mix of both. I think I think a lot in Spanish all the time and I talk to myself out loud, which in the city is like whatever because everybody's talking to themselves out loud. It's great. I was in the bus coming here just reading this and I was like, oh, nobody cares. I like the bus, I was like, nobody cares. So I think in Spanish and I talk to myself all the time in it and it's my little secret to myself. Also when I just came from the store where I spent 15 days in a van with eight artists and one of them spoke Spanish, it was great. I could just talk and talk and talk to myself. I think that is also my way of just pulling in my own culture. I feel like such an incredible nostalgia all the time. I feel like I have to carry this thing constantly inside me and I feel like I make an effort every day to activate it as much as I can just so I get to feel connected. I know there are people who are able to create that distance and run with it. I haven't and I've been here for 13 years and it's still like, I see things online in Latin America or videos and it's just so much for me. So anything that I can do intentionally, but these are things that I've worked on myself because I want them in my life. I make an effort to read Colombian newspapers every single day. I make an effort to read in Spanish. I make an effort to look and see what's happening in the literary world in Latin America but it's something to make me feel connected. So I try to activate it as much as I can and I try to think as much as I can in Spanish because every time I don't know a word, it pains me. I do not know a word in Spanish. I'm like, but I'm from there. How do I not know that word? It pains me that I feel like I'm losing it. It pains me that I'm writing it in a language that it's not mine and still English gives me so much but I feel like I have to call on my Spanish as much as I can because it's just such a connection to who I am. You can feel it. That's why I like this. Well, okay, I'll just make it quick. I mean, I was in Vietnam for three weeks just recently and by the second week, then the dream started to become more Vietnamese. But same thing in France. Although I'm most comfortable with people who are trilingual like me because then when you lose a word you can always shift to another country to find the other word. My best friend is trilingual and so we keep floundering around until we come to the right word in different language and I think that's the fun part about kind of being displaced. I wanna say something on that just quickly. Like for instance, like when we both meet I can just speak to Ingrid like, I don't have to stop. Also no reference to anything because she's Colombian, she speaks both languages and she speaks Colombian Spanish. So it's like, right, like we can just flow. There's no stopping. My best friend actually said that he dreams in English but would Vietnamese subtitle. Yeah. One in the back end then we'll do the. Another question for Ingrid. Yeah, go ahead. One more, one more question for Ingrid. So you said, you stated earlier that when you came to the United States and you started writing, you started writing in English and first off your English is impeccable. Thank you. But I'm wondering like why, obviously it gave you a sense of, I'm assuming it gave you a sense of kind of Ingrid from what you kind of separated you from your culture. How did, you know my question, how did you learn English? Because your parents didn't speak English. Right. How did you get such a good foundation on it? I went to a bilingual school in Columbia and I was really good at it. It was, you know, I was bad at math, really good at English. And it was, I remember the first things that really, that were an attraction for me in the language was, we had this, to buy this dictionary and the one that I bought had this middle section with all the sayings in English. And I remember just my mind was blown by on the other hand. And then I just became intrigued with how these sayings that we have and we have different ones in Spanish, how they carry so much of our culture and so much of what we believe and interact with each other is built into the language. And so I discovered that when I was very little and it was such an exciting discovery for me to realize that the sayings in English, that there's some sayings in Spanish that we have that feel very raw and then there's no equivalent in English. And one of the ones that I, that has just really striking for me that we have in Spanish is when somebody gets pregnant, we say her belly was filled with bones. And it's this very just raw way of saying that someone is got pregnant. And there's no, and it's very Colombian and there's no equivalent in English for that. So for me, just, and I love doing that in my writing too, is just providing the transliteration of sayings that are not available. But I think that's how I started to learn English was that driving interest into that. And then it's all I wanted to do. Every book that we were assigned, I read it twice and was just like really just very into it, annoyingly into it probably. Rich, do we have time for a couple more questions or? I want to ask them. Oh, okay, so can we? Obviously if you're telling us we're running out of time. So do you want to ask your question and then we'll go to Rich's. Everybody, if you care to change, according to the language like Columbia, you go there and meet the store, or me, I'm more, me, I'm not here with some really silly, you know. So do you become more kind of cold and reserved here? Yeah, yeah. You do? I do. I notice when I go to Columbia, I instantly become just super friendly. I'm like calling people off in the street. I'm, yeah. But we're really aggressive people. Yeah, we're super aggressive people. I think for me, I think it depends on who I interact with here really. Like, I mean, I'm just loud everywhere I go. And when I'm in Columbia, I mean, I behave a little bit different because I'm constantly in Spanish, you know. But I've incorporated that into my life, you know. Like I feel like if I cannot be my authentic self here or there, it's just like, I just don't even bother. Like I just have to be me because it's just too much, you know. So, I mean, of course like you changed your behavior depending on who you were with. You know, when I'm with my mother and my aunt, it's like it changes and I use different language, but I feel like that's everyone. And then when I'm in Columbia, I just like that I get to see all these things and like everybody understands them, you know. And like, I remember once I was, every time I'm there, when I'm in some party, I look around and I say, oh my God, everybody has color, man. Everybody knows how to dance, you know. I just have these ah-ha moments of like everybody's talking about, you know. Like things that, if you're not an immigrant, you're never gonna feel because the language comes at you so differently. But I don't, I personally think that I just, I navigated the way that generally people just do. We just behave differently depending on who we're with. Yes. Yeah. I would just say that the first time I realized that I was able to express myself politically was when I spoke English because my father was very domineering in the household and he was always the one that gives speeches. But at the dining table one night, it was like 13 or 14 and I said in English, I disagree with you dad. And the whole, you know, table kind of turned and looked at me, I'm the youngest in the family. And I realized, I couldn't have to say that in Vietnamese at all because in Vietnamese it would sound so disrespectful because like I said, the hierarchy is such that the young cannot disagree with the old, say part of the Confucianist idea and then to tie it now with Vietnam being a communist country would suppress freedom of expression. So then the language itself become kind of stagnant in many ways, right? Whereas in English, the I stands alone. It's me with my point of view, you know? And so in a strange way, of course I became a writer writing in English because it allows me to kind of be standing outside the community to look in, you know? So I prefer English in that sense. Last question. Yes. Oh. Remind me the question, again, I was already focused on the next one. Oh, yes, it does change. And actually I was thinking about that as the other people were talking about, I too speak French in addition to Mandarin and where I see the biggest change is when I'm in Paris and my husband can attest to this because I'm generally a pretty introverted keep-to-myself kind of person. And when I get to France, I'm so excited to speak French that I start talking to waiters and cab drivers and people at the museum and I'm always making small talk and he doesn't speak French. So he's always like, who are you talking to? Why are you going around talking to strangers? So in a very clear way, yes. Rich, the last question, yes. I've reacted when Ingrid said something about I started talking like an encyclopedia. Oh, yes. That's very observant. If you had that experience then, you had a stress were you under or who were you trying to please or what kind of mood were you in? Wow, you're a close listener. So he's referring to Ingrid's essay when she talked about how you have to find a balance depending on who your audience is, right? And sometimes you find yourself talking like an encyclopedia. And the reason I had such a strong reaction was because that was something I dealt with when I was publishing my first book. So the book is set in Singapore. There's been a couple novels set in Singapore that have come out in the last two or three years and this came out right around that time. And I think Singapore was sort of seen as this like fresh new place for publishing to explore. And when I was talking to a couple of editors before I eventually found the one that I ended up working with, that was something that I got a lot of. Not pushback necessarily, but I felt like I was being pushed to exoticize my country in a way that I wasn't always comfortable with. And I think that what was interesting about, what's always been interesting about Singapore to me is that it's a really, if any of you have been there, it's a very cosmopolitan place. It was a British colony, so everybody speaks English. Everyone calls it like the most modern city in Asia. It's where all the expats go because it's so easy to adjust to. And that was kind of what I was interested is the fact that everyone describes it as this really westernized place, but obviously there are layers and layers beneath that. And that was kind of what I wanted to capture in my book. And so I eventually did find an editor who was very supportive of what I wanted to do. But that was the reason why I have such a visceral reaction to that sort of not wanting to have to be a tour guide for my country, because that would be a really boring and not well written story. So please stick around to chat with our writers. Please grab a drink, grab a snack. And several of our writers have books and they'll be happy to sign them for you if you wanna buy a copy. And do remember to check out the Word Week Facebook page again, because there are a bunch of upcoming events. Thank you so much.