I have never questioned my “Asianness”. This revelation came to me while driving down Olympic Boulevard with my mom. It was around 5pm, maybe on a weekend or maybe not. Days and other technicalities seem to not matter whenever I come home for breaks. We had been talking about a friend of mine at college who was Asian and lived in a small rural town. Meeting her was the first time I had interacted with another Asian person who was not like me. She was only starting to understand her Asianness, her culture, and what it may mean to her now. To me, my “Asianness” has always been an undeniable and unproblematic part of my identity. 

Growing up, I never questioned whether or not my customs or traditions were “normal”. I went to Chinese Sunday school (despite much protest). I ate a diverse variety of food at home: soy marinated cod, beef and veggie stir fry, pasta with meat sauce, and more. Every Lunar New Year I would do sebae (Traditional Korean bows) for my parents to earn my little red envelope  sometimes filled with money but other times lip glosses, hair barettes, or jewelry. Also on Lunar New Year my mom along with the one other Asian girl’s mom came to my classroom and taught my peers about the various traditions of the holiday. She always walked in armed with a roll of bubble wrap (to mimic the sound of firecrackers), sumo oranges, and little candies. I was always so proud to stand in front of my classmates with her and explain how we always clean the day before and rest the day after, how we wear red for good luck, and eat noodles for a long life. I say this not to brag about the ease and innate pride that runs through my body over my Asianness because my comfort is mostly attributed to the meticulous care my parents took into making sure I felt proud of my culture in ways they never did when they were my age.

My father was sort of like my mother: kind and sensible but with a strong sense of dry humor and overflowing charisma. He was only 5’8 but had the aura of someone at least 6’2. Unlike my mom, I’ve known him only as my dad. I knew how he used to get up early to pack my lunch – usually a thermos of pasta with mini chicken sausage cut up into it. I knew how he and my mom would dance in the kitchen to Barry White, The Beatles, or Patti Smith while cooking. 

Both my parents grew up deep into what is stereotypically the “Asian American Experience”. They lived in predominantly white areas, acted like translators for their parents, strived for American success. They both struggled with being Asian, only addressing and developing a relationship with their identities as adults. My mom is a lawyer while my dad was a writer and professor. Interestingly enough, he wrote and taught Asian American literature. I guess because of that I assumed that being Asian (socially?) was something natural to him, something he didn’t have to work for to feel okay with. Finding out that it's something that he only came to later in life was the first time I saw him as an individual instead of my dad.

After my dad passed we held both a memorial and an academic memorial. The academic memorial was at some hall at UCLA. Professors, family members, friends all showed up to honor and remember my dad’s work. As a thirteen-year-old, I had very little investment in my dad’s work. When I was younger, my mom would tell me how he was in the first generation of Asian American writers, that his writing was important. This meant very little to a girl who was deep in the world of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. I doubted Pangs of Love and Catching Fire had much to do with one another. But listening to so many different people talk about my dad in a way that was about his mind and intellect and work, rather than about his heart and family opened my eyes to life he lived before and outside of me. 

So now there is Baba (dad) and David Wong Louie. There is also Baba before he died, and Baba that is slowly being built after he died piece by piece, conversation by conversation. Is that something I needed? Something fundamental to someone like me? 

I am now a junior in college. Out of a sense of obligation (“You need to take an Asian American class before you graduate”), I registered for the “Asian American Literature” course. Honestly I had been avoiding it for a long time, not wanting to step into the spaces my dad was in. I think it was fear. I feared opening the syllabus and confronting what that may or may not mean to me. I didn’t know what mentally compiling what I had been uncovering about my dad’s life before me, and putting it into the context of the history of Asian America would do to my understanding of myself and my perception of my dad. To me, he was the man that drew chalk on the sidewalk with me, and took me on walks even when his mobility was limited due to illness. Confronting who he was outside of me, and confronting the work he left behind was uncomfortable.These were unopened doors that I thought were better left unopened. To my surprise, talking to the professor and taking the class made me think about my grief differently.

Every now and then in high school I would wonder what my life would be like if he were still in it. Sometimes I would imagine what it would be like for him to be at my graduation or my dance shows, but honestly it didn’t strike a lot of emotion in me. I avoided writing or thinking about him for too long like the plague. Sometimes I would see him in my dreams. I skillfully avoided reading his work, with the exception of his piece in Harper’s: Eat, Memory. What are apparently my copies of Pangs of Love and The Barbarians are Coming have sat on my shelf cramped to the side. Sometimes when I was trying to go to sleep I would stare at them from my bed and I could feel them staring back, daring me to crack open the first page.

After an interaction with this professor who knew who my dad was and his work, I remember thinking I wanted to tell my dad about this interaction. As I left class, I called my mom, her voice full of care. Whenever I talk about my dad to her she has this tone that is a mix of caution and excitement, like she doesn’t want to scare me out of whatever thought I had. Later I went back to my dorm and cried. It was the first time I had thought about him genuinely, without feeling like it was what I “should be” thinking about.

As I read the last words of Eat, Memory I felt myself dreading the ending. I didn’t want to read the last word, for my dad to leave again. In the last words of the essay he talks to our dog, scarfing down her food: “Breathe, I would tell her, if I could. Sniff. Relish the chicken-and-liver recipe. Chew.” In a way, I felt like his words were to me: to not rush through my life, to savor everything like I did his words. For the first time, maybe since his passing, I felt a real heavy sense of loss: I wanted him to know who I was now, I wanted to tell him about my class readings or about the sudden influx of deer spottings on campus. 

I wonder if one day I will read one of his other books. I feel like they’re precious, last bits of him for me to uncover. Once I have read them, what is there left for me to find? Realistically, I know there is much about him I do not know and may never know. Reflecting on my dad brought me to the revelation that I may not have the kind of comfort or resolution in my identity that I thought I had.