I have always been a dream collector–someone who pays attention to dreams, writes them down, looks them up, and tries to interpret their messages. When you live far away from the people and places you love, dreams are not random, they are a necessity: a way to overcome distance, to reunite with kin, to visit past lives, to weave yourself into the story. A dream is a vessel for time travel, a way to return to comfort and wholeness before separation, before the heavy curtain of grief.
In 2014, a month after my mom’s funeral in Taipei, I dreamed about my parents. My mom is in the foreground, her hair still black, wearing a dark blue skirt and blazer and a silk bowtie blouse, with her black leather purse draped on her arm. This is how she looked in her professor days. She crosses a wide street and walks toward where I am standing on the sidewalk. My dad waits on the other side of the street in a dark blue taxi.
I am immediately seized by anxiety—she shouldn’t be crossing the street by herself. The dream is situated in the early years of my mom’s dementia when she still looked like herself but was disoriented and prone to getting lost. She always had to be chaperoned lest she wander off or forget who had the right of way, stepping into intersections unaware of the danger.
The second feeling I have is relief. She is walking unchaperoned in the middle of the road, but she’s walking towards ME, which means she recognises me. In her tangled mind, she can still put together that my face represents someone safe and familiar. She still knows me.
I don’t know where we are or even what country we are in. There are no clues in this empty landscape—no other cars on the road, no other people walking around, no buildings or street signs or noise or heat or smells. Everything is strangely flattened as though we are cardboard cutouts in a diorama. We could be anywhere. All I can see is a smooth grey road, my dad in the taxi on the far side, and my mom halfway between us, walking towards me.
In the next scene, I am in a narrow bookstore examining books and maps. I see materials in English and French and another language I don’t know, which makes me think I am somewhere in Europe. One of the books I open has Chinese characters in it too, and I spend a long time looking at it. I feel the presence of my dad, even though I don’t see him. This makes sense—apart from our own homes, there is probably nowhere else in the world where we both feel more at ease than in a bookstore. We’ve always had this in common. He asks me, Where are you going? I’m opening maps, looking for a place with the initials MRA or MAR, someplace near the water. I feel confident that I can navigate my way, so I say, Don’t worry, I can find it.
My mom crossing the street. The taxi. My dad’s voice. The map. I commit these images to memory as I drift into consciousness. I am in my bed in California, head on the pillow, facing the window. My cat is nestled into my chest and her whiskers are tickling my chin. My husband sighs and shifts next to me, spooning me from behind. I hear little footsteps running towards us, then feel my son clambering on top of us for a lazy Sunday morning cuddle. As sweet as this is, I am not quite ready to leave my dream world.
I have to do one more thing.
I have to go back and escort my mom to safety. I take her by the hand, and we cross the street together, back to the other side. I help her get into the taxi with my dad.
Will you be OK? He asks me.
I’ll be fine, I tell him. I don’t bother saying the rest because he already knows: Take care of Mom, she needs you more than me.
I wave as the taxi pulls away, and I watch the taillights fade into the distance.
In 2017, seven years after he left us, I dreamed that I saw my brother, Ted. In the dream, he is youthful and smiling, although he needs a haircut. I don’t remember our conversation, but we hug at the end. Although it is unspoken, I know it’s the last time I’ll see him. We both know he is going to die.
And yet it was beautiful. It’s the goodbye we should have had.
In real life, we did not have a beautiful goodbye. Ted was critically ill for the last months of his life, his liver wracked by cancer that had spread to his other organs. I made an emergency trip to Bangkok to see him, and my dad flew in from Taipei. But my timing was off; Ted passed away while my airplane was somewhere over the Pacific. I arrived too late. He left behind three children enrolled in a private school they could not afford, and a widow who had no reliable source of income. Instead of a farewell, what awaited us was the funeral and the crisis of what came next.
Despite this, my dream about my brother was suffused with love and happiness. It felt so peaceful. Perhaps my dream was trying to compensate for the way things actually unfolded, for the pain of how he left us.
There are many theories about the meaning and purpose of dreams. Some say dreams are the nocturnal residue of one’s waking life, the brain’s way of sorting through mundane experiences like the paper receipts that accumulate in my purse, bits of meaning that are no longer relevant and can be discarded. But a purse is never just a purse, and I rarely dream about my everyday conscious life. I almost never dream about my husband and son. I used to find this troubling until I realised that my dreams serve an entirely different purpose. For me, dreams are how I navigate the conflicts and contradictions I can’t solve in the physical world, a way to mend—symbolically—what in real life cannot be fixed.
I am suspicious of anyone who says they don’t dream; to me, it’s as shocking as not having a passport. I can’t imagine living in only one dimension, having my entire community contained and close by without the complications of borders, languages, and time zones. What is it like to live so effortlessly, to communicate without struggle, to belong without trying? What is it like to never have to answer the question, Where are you from? It’s taken me a lifetime to embrace the complexity of living in two timelines—here and there, conscious and unconscious.
In my twenties, I had a recurring dream that I kept receiving letters I could not read. I used to rent a mailbox at the student union at U.C. Berkeley which served as my permanent address while I was in college. No bigger than a carton of eggs, this locked box was my only source of stability as I switched apartments and roommates almost every semester. Unlike my classmates, I had no other home base in the States since my family had moved abroad when I was nine. After spending my early childhood in New Jersey, my family moved to Hong Kong where I graduated from high school. When I was halfway through university, my parents moved back to Taiwan–their permanent home and the place where I was born.
In my recurring dream, I am walking down the hallway of the student union toward a wall of tiny mailboxes. I turn the key in the lock and pull out letters in thin airmail envelopes with red-and-blue dashed borders, the kind my parents used to send me. But when I open the letters, the text is faded and illegible, the messages lost.
Later in life, my anxiety dream changed to one where I was travelling and pleasantly immersed in a different landscape—admiring the architecture of a European city or sitting on a magnificent beach. But the trip takes a dark turn when I realise that I’ve lost my purse with my wallet and passport in it. It’s never clear how it happens; I just suddenly don’t have my purse and begin to panic that I am alone in a foreign country with no money or identification; I can’t prove who I am, and I can’t go home.
In more recent dreams, I still have my cell phone, but I am unable to text or email my parents. I press “send” and nothing happens, or I keep searching but can’t find my dad’s number. No matter what I do, the technology fails and my message doesn’t go through. I am stranded and feel as though I’ve crossed a threshold where I can’t be found. My body is tense with dread, fear, and sadness… and then I wake up.
It’s not hard to guess what this recurring dream means. Ever since I was young, I’ve loved the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, “The Little Mermaid.” I identified with the mermaid, of course, and with the feeling of being shipwrecked—lost and unaccompanied in a foreign place, beyond the reach of my family and with no way to return. It’s bizarre and embarrassing to say it out loud, that in my dreams I’m like a foundling in a fairy tale, a child with no parents and no history. My parents did not abandon me… but they did not follow me either. I have always been the one to go to them. My hero’s journey has been a quest for reunion, pushing through obstacles to find my way back.
After my brother and my parents passed away, I felt adrift and unmoored from Taiwanese heritage, language, and culture—the very things I had spent years trying to build my connection with. An abstract longing—the basic condition of diaspora—was replaced by a visceral grief and loneliness that I wasn’t sure anyone else would understand, so I did my best to put it into words. One essay at a time, I tried to answer the question: Who am I without my parents to connect me to my origins?
Over time, my writing grew and evolved into what would become The Translator’s Daughter, my memoir about language, loss, and displacement, and finding my way forward as a daughter of diaspora. Reckoning with my complicated identity and the circumstances that led to my family’s dispersal helped me come to terms with my decision to stay in California, raise my son here, and cultivate a different kind of belonging
In 2021, when I was getting ready to submit the book, I had the travel dream again but it ended differently. It started with me walking down a cobblestone street in a foreign city, trying to decide which bakery to visit for an afternoon snack when I realised my purse was missing. My enjoyment gave way to panic, and I quickly retraced my steps and ended up in a book and stationery store. I talked to the shopkeeper, a kind Asian woman close to my age, and described my bag to her—a black nylon backpack with a white floral pattern. She went into a back room, found my purse, and set it on the counter between us. “Is this what you are looking for?”
My eyes met hers and I could feel my heart pounding, but before I could say anything, I woke up. I was so surprised and excited that I couldn’t fall back asleep.
I couldn’t believe it. After all these years of trying to reconnect and find my way back, I managed to change the narrative of a recurring nightmare. My dreams made it possible for me to rewrite my ending.
