The first memorable compliment I received was from my sixth grade English teacher. Smiling, she caught the class’s attention and read from my messily scrawled looseleaf. She told the class I’d written a nice story. Before that, I’d never been considered to be good at anything; maybe, I thought, I was finally good at something. That day, I told myself I’d go from a nothing to a writer. As soon as I got home, I fumbled over my words as I told my parents about the praise. That month, I wrote five more stories in fervor.
I realized early on writing allowed me to let go of problems—frustration, sadness, and swallowed words. Everything washed away when I picked up the pen. I wrote about fights with my friends and family. I saw comedy in the absurd time some lady tripped me in the mall and wrote. I recorded picnics and festivals that had made me smile that afternoon. Eventually, I wrote about an Asian-American girl who fought zombies, since there weren’t any Asian-American girls fighting zombies. I wrote about an immigrant mother flying to a foreign planet on a spaceship. I wrote about cowboy gun duels that left a town empty of men, full of ghosts. By my teens, I’d amassed a vault of stories—stories that never felt complete as no one had read them.
I desired to be a writer who could help others and inspire empathy, but my fear of being judged was greater than my dream. In one story, I wrote, “People should be allowed to feel comfortable in their own skins.” Embarrassingly, my hands actually trembled before the “submit” button—I couldn’t publish it. So the zombie-fighting Asian-American girl died for nothing. The immigrant mother got lost in space—never to be heard from again—and no one knew. More cowboys became ghosts and more towns vanished, to no effect. No one heard their stories. I never completed a writer’s job: to write for their readers.
I can’t recall why I finally took a shot one day. I barely breathed as the first chapter of my story loaded on the glowing screen: I was publishing a story on a website with thousands of readers. Titled after a cheesy Shakespeare line I loved, it was about superheroes who were a homosexual couple and fought monsters and discrimination. It ended with their thick blood running down the cold cement street, their bodies graffitied over in marker, contaminated with slurs. In the monsters’ eyes, it hadn’t mattered what heroic acts they’d accomplished.
That weird story went up on the internet for all to ridicule. Yet what I received—criticism about grammar, structure, and plot—was far better than I’d feared. Those gradually improved, and I even received some love from other writers and readers.
The best was an email from Russia: “...Thank you for inspiring me not only as a writer, but also for understanding and representing what the main characters experience due to their sexual orientations. Thank you for creating my heroes...”
Art can be powerful, sometimes more so than a politician’s speech. Writing as an art reaches hearts, inspiring emotion and action. Through my writing, I will help others empathize with the Asian-American heroes who thought they were alone or immigrant mothers who venture dangerous journeys to other worlds. I can put people in the shoes of a gunned-down cowboy or a gay superhero drawing their final breath. I’ve realized the world is more important than my fears; my purpose is to transform people through telling the stories of the unheard. I’d thought my writing contained invisible worlds, a lonely fantasy. I wish I’d known earlier the only thing making it invisible was myself, that there will always be people empathizing with or even learning from my characters. Through writing, I want to venture far in this universe, now unafraid of the meteors, attempting to connect all the disparate worlds within.