Since moving to Canada when I was eight, I’ve forgotten a lot about how to write in Chinese. I was never good at writing it anyways. In elementary school, they give you notebooks with squares to write in. As you get to higher grades, the squares get smaller and smaller; the intention is to make you write smaller and smaller.

I decided to “draw” out one of the characters of my Chinese name in typefaces I could find on the internet. As soon as I started this exercise, I realized how disconnected I felt with the language. The characters looked foreign to me! There’s a lot of symmetry involved in writing Chinese. I admire people who have beautiful chinese handwriting (like my dad). My cousin Carmen in HK is really good at Chinese calligraphy. There’s something soothing about looking at Chinese calligraphy. It must be the flow of the strokes.