My Life This Last Week

I will remember being 30 forever.

Excuse my language, but this has been one of the most fucked up years of my life, yet it has also one filled with great opportunities, friendships, and revelations.

For the last several months, I've been thinking of attending the National Asian American Theater Festival in New York. I thought it would be a great opportunity to see what national Asian American artists are doing as well as network. Only one problem: I was broke.

Then in a chance meeting last week, someone said to me, "If you want to go, make it happen." So I wrote an email to friends and acquaintences and within 24 hours, I'd fundraised 90% of my goal. Since then, I've met my fundraising goal and am still amazed at how much people support me. I feel incredibly loved, blessed, and taken care of by the people aorund me.

Just yesterday, I got an email (which might have been accidentally deleted because it went into my junkmail folder) that I'd won one of seven artist residencies through the Midwestern Voices and Visions Program, which supports the creation of work by artists of color in the Midwest. 1 of 7 in the Midwest! That was exciting, amazing, and validating.

But now onto the bad things:

This has been a tough year for me personally. I hate it when people are all cryptic but here goes anyway. I feel as if nothing negative has happened to me in years. Yet this whole summer has been filled with nothing more than one mental slap to my face after another.



On top of that, my mother has been sick. This past Sunday, I received a call that she was having trouble breathing and had been rushed to the hospital. I was fortunate to see her alive for one hour before she died.

One of the things that angers me so much about my mother's death is that she worked so hard, even until the end. I'm naive in thinking that my mother would live until she was as old as my grandmother spending her days chilling by the window, sewing paj ntaub, and watching little children. Maybe she'd tend to a garden in Rosemount and meet up with old friends at the casino for fun.

But the truth is that she's always worked. She worked overtime and had no health insurance. She had no time to sew paj ntaub or tend to a garden as a hobby.

After my mother's body was taken away, my oldest sister, Pa, said to me, "You know how to write. Write a story about her life."

What I didn't tell Pa was that I had been writing about my mother for years.

And now her stories and lessons are all I have left to hold on to.