Suitcase
by Kathy Liao
Transcript:
Suitcase: A Memory
Whenever my dad visited the United States from Taiwan, he always brought so much stuff with him. The content in those luggages were a kaleidoscope of everchanging collection of knicknacks, but what was constant over the years, were the containers that accompanied my dad when he showed up, always filled to the brink of bursting. When I was young, my siblings and I would all excitedly gather around the bulging suitcase in the middle of the living room. That gliding gesture of unzipping, the big stretch that led his entire body around the perimeter of the suitcase, held so much anticipation for us kids. Then magical things would come out of the suitcases: my favorite taro pastry, a large pack of wan wan hsian bei (rice crackers dotted with white petals of icing), Taiwanese wafers and candies… it’s the memory, the taste, and the smell of Taiwan that I grew up with, transported to our home in America, brought to us by my dad.
My dad continued to haul his love and affection across the Pacific Ocean to us. That was the constant. But I changed. As I got older, I took his visits for granted. I paid no attention to suitcases anymore. And my dad unpacked them on his own. During my visits home from college, my dad would pull me aside to give me things I could take with me, that I could use on my own journey. I remembered saying, “I don’t need it, that is not the right size for me, I don’t like that style, stop buying useless things.”
To me, Home is not a location or a place. Home is an intention.
An intention of “I will make this place work for my family”
An intention of rooting: to intentionally allocate energy to reach, to connect, to seek water and nutrient and light, to spread and to sprout
An intention to survive, to thrive - toward a dream, a vision, even if the root has be to rerouted, to be transplanted, to be cut for new growth.
I am here because of the immense accumulation of intentions that went into the act of packing luggages. I can see him now, my dad, alone in the Taiwan apartment, deliberately selecting and placing each individual object into the suitcase. Some pieces were what he needed for the journey, some held memory he wanted to carry with him. And others, they are building blocks in shaping a future in America he’d like to see, with and for his family…. Each item he chose to bring with him, he saw it in his vision of a life in America. Every item, a seed.
Recently, I was reading a collection of Letters from Asian Americans in the Arts, and I lingered over a passage from Ajay Kurian in his letter to V.
Ajay was remembering the plots of scaffolded orchids in front of his grandfather’s house in India. And he wrote, “They grew out of coconut shells and husks, their roots shakily wrapped around wooden stakes and coconut parts looking only partially certain in their search for moisture. In America, orchids were considered difficult to cultivate, hard to manage and maintain, exoticized constantly, and prized when they blossomed. Here (in India) they felt ordinary. They weren’t expected to perform, only to exist and thrive. And they did.
What was even more fascinating to me was that they didn’t need to be in the ground. They could hang, float, and find odd homes outside of any conventional soil or earth. This felt constitutive of the diasporic experience to me, to be rooted without ground.”
What a thought, to be rooted without ground. I have these childhood memories of squatting by trickling streams, cupping tadpols below me, and looking up to the towering ancient bamboo forest that had been there for generations, in my grandfather’s backyard in Miao Li, Taiwan. Maybe instead of orchid, I am a transplanted Bamboo.
This is a memory of packing and unpacking suitcases. The last time I saw my dad was in 2013, during his final visit to my home in California. After unpacking all the items he brought, he handed me this empty suitcases. He said to me then, “take this with you, you need it for your travels. I can always bring another one.”
My dad would’ve never guessed how much I’ve used this suitcase and the places I’ve been. I’m thankful to my dad for passing it on to me. And I continue to carry my messy but resilient roots with me, wherever I go.
Written and read by Kathy Liao 2022