When my mother boarded the plane for the first time, / For the first time in her life she saw clearly the stars in the sky, / Scintillating, encompassing the vast expanse of the deep black. / Never had she ever been so close to these stars, amidst the clouds.

She never imagined that she would leave her mother country, / Uproot her former life in Chengdu, the southwestern part of China, / She never imagined that she would be gone for more than 20 years — / How could she? She was only twenty six years old.

Somehow, she found her way to my father, / Who patiently waited for her on the soil of the United States, / Then a graduate student, he worked under the table to make the ends meet.

There, in the sleepy town of Boston, Massachusetts, I was born.

My name is Jessie, and I am the daughter of two proud immigrants / Who uproot their own lives to move to America / In search of a better education and a better future, / In pursuit of the classic American Dream.

My name is Jessie, and I am the daughter of a resilient mother, / Who for more than 18 years raised me and my sister all by herself, / While my father worked tirelessly to build his business, / Waiting for the moment that he would bring home the bacon.

My name is Jessie, and I am the second born child / In the only generation of only children and only daughters, / Though my family line was supposed to die out with my generation, / My grandfather added our names to the family tree, in defiance of the patriarchy.

My name is Jessie, and I am the only American in my family by birth, / Eligible to run for the President of the United States of America, / And the only person who does not know Chinese, let alone Sichuanese. / You see, my parents wanted me to be able to listen and speak in English.

And yet, English cannot save me from the tortuous cafeteria, as every deaf person knows.

One day, as I chewed down scrambled eggs, a friend broke away from the table / And asked me about something, expecting me to understand the joke right away. / I — I had never been so insulted, angered, saddened, and frustrated all at once. / They knew that I couldn’t hear; and yet they expected me to understand. / I let it spill, all of my feelings about silence, about noise, about sound.

Every time I try to hold a conversation, I feel like I’m playing a competitive game of ping pong. / One moment it’s smooth sailing, and then the next thing I know, there’s more balls in the play. / I try sometimes, but sometimes it’s so much easier — and freeing — to not even try. / Why should I try when people tell me “Oh, I’ll tell you later” when I ask?

People think that being deaf is a tragedy. But you know what? / The greater tragedy is not being able to speak the language of your people. / Because — When you do not know the language, / You lose access to your culture.

I remember when my grandmother died, / I was in fifth grade. My mother and I came back from a grocery shopping trip, / I will never forget the stone-cold faces and the silence of my father and my sister / That greeted us, as they passed on the phone to my mother, saying nothing.

It was the worst silence I had endured, and I’ve had many silences in my life.

After my grandmother passed away, our rare trips to China took on a new sense of urgency: / After all, grandpas don’t get to live forever. We can only go to China once every seven years because / To go otherwise is too expensive.

Every time we leave, I fear It may be the last time that I see my grandpa alive. / We may not be able to communicate, / But the love through my mother’s blood persists, / No matter how painful it is to not be able to speak the same language.

Silence is palpable, inescapable, a tool of communication.

Silence persisted in conversations with my family and friends, / It was an unspoken taboo to talk about the Tiananmen Square, / The Cultural Revolution, Mao’s year, and the entire generation of / Unborn children because their mothers could not afford them.

She related this story to me when I interviewed her for a class project, / Hesitant to dig up her past during the time of political turmoil and uncertainty, / The sounding repercussions of “Mao’s year” that would haunt every adult in my family / And family friends and Chinese adults I met, who grew up in China.

Silence persisted amidst a smattering of Mandarin, because not only could I not hear them, / But also because I do not understand the language, no matter how many times I try. / And yet, somehow, in my mother’s homemade food and cultural traditions, / Mahjong and hongbao, the red envelopes, I have found comfort.

Deafness is not a tragedy. What is tragic is the lack of communication. / And so, in between the Deaf and hearing worlds, / in between the Chinese and American cultures, / I dream of a world where I can make peace with silence.