Going Off Script: Finding My Story


Ah-ma and Me, on our back porch in Chinatown, San Francisco

It’s been said, “Life is a blank page. You must put something on it.”

But, what if you found yourself a minor character in someone else’s story?

Because of my mother’s fate, the script for my life was already written.

Believing that I had my own story to write – and breaking free to live it – that is my story. 

A Mail Order Bride

It’s true, stories don’t happen by accident. They are planned.

Mine was planned by my mother — Ah-ma, a tender, fresh-faced seventeen year-old beauty who brought me into the world. 

Ah-ma was a mail-order bride from Hong Kong, to a bus boy in San Francisco Chinatown. Ah-ma was the second of eight children back in Hong Kong. Because she was the second daughter, she was chosen by her parents to marry a stranger 10 years older.

Her parents sacrificed her happiness, for the greater good — to bring her family out of poverty and emigrate them to the land of opportunity.

They divorced when I was five.

The pressures she carried were then placed on me.

She constantly reminded me that I was all she had, that I was the one to take care and provide for her.

Ah-ma wanted me to live the same life she was given, to work hard for the greater good– to provide a life that was worry-free and make up for her sacrificed youth.

Who would want to break their mother’s heart and crush her dreams for a better life? …