By Jennie Lin

When I wrote my first legal memo, I felt as though I had bludgeoned a small creature to death. I did not know who or what this creature was—my reader? the English language? the art of writing?—but I knew that it was small and vulnerable, and that I had murdered it. I had strung together a massive, bulky chain of prepositional phrases and subordinate clauses, twisted it in my hands, and used it to strangle something very small and good.

Before I came to law school, I spent a year writing stories in San Francisco. I read a book a day and nearly went broke buying all of those books. I lived on a street where trolleys rolled by, bells chiming, and aspiring writers without day jobs congregated at the corner coffee shop to scribble intently into black leather-bound notebooks. I lived in an old apartment with a rooftop I could reach only by endangering my life on a set of rickety, rotting stairs. From the roof I could see the misted ocean. It was an uncomplicated existence.

The following summer, I went to Taiwan to write. In the countryside of Tsaotun I wandered through burning rice fields, a lost, sooty soul followed and half-devoured by a band of ragtag mosquitoes. By day I picked bushels upon bushels of wine-colored lychees on a fruit farm nestled in the mountains. Every few hours I perched on the edge of a concrete irrigation ditch and jotted happily and nonsensically into a notebook. At night I slept on a straw mat on a wooden floor. I had never slept so well.

When I was little, my crazy mother used to tell me bedtime stories about girls who got lost in rural Taiwan when she was my age: they were kidnapped, had their tongues cut out, and were sold as sex slaves. To be sure, this was not a pretty tale, but what really made me shiver at night was the fact that, without tongues, they could not tell a single person who they were. At first they must have wanted to grab the nearest person, shake him without mercy, and shriek their names in his horrified face. But as the years went by, and none of them could assert who they were, did these unidentifiable girls themselves forget?