Summarize this personal statement in a few sentences: I am unsure when, but at some point, I began to dream in English. When asked how and why, I am often at a loss for words, as if I’m stunned by the transformation myself. 

If language had a border, I’ve been crossing it for as long as I remember. I was read English children’s books as a baby and was introduced to Americans sitcoms and young adult sagas as a teenager. By middle school, I was already a resident in this dream-like dimension. I cracked jokes with my Friends and lived as a Dunphy with my Modern Family. I spoke the secret lingo of Manhattan boutiques and Californian suburbs, the banter of LA drag queens and D.C. politicians. This was a world I could step in and out of, as easily as slipping in and out of sleep. 

More than anything, there was something intensely exhilarating about a second language. It had linguistic and cultural traditions that I did not inherit, and so was not preoccupied with. I was alone and anonymous in this world, so I was free. I became more open to playing around with words, inventing new forms, seeking new grammars. I began to write about feelings and events I never had the vocabulary or the guts to verbalize. In poems, I confronted my sexuality, disentangled long-standing riffs with my family. From a linguistic remove, I ventured into the most treacherous emotional territories and mapped their landscape with disarming clarity – when you dance with masks on, you dance like no one’s watching. 

But masks only offer an illusion of safety. I took refuge in the unfamiliar because the familiar had grown too precarious, but what I had confronted with pen and paper, I still needed to eventually confront in real life, in Mandarin. Yet, the more comfortable I became writing in English, the less it seemed possible. I sank into a schizophrenic in-between-ness: caught in the middle of two worlds, not fully inhabiting either.

It was at Iowa City that I was forced to face this fissure. In a translation workshop, I was asked to read something in my native language. With nothing to offer, I scrambled to translate my proudest and most vulnerable poem, one of love and forgiveness. 

Each word had to be teased out, words I so comfortably uttered in English but would never dare say out loud in Mandarin. “I love you” was easy on paper; “wo ai ni” in front of dozens felt like lightning. The poem had, of course, lost much of its music and lyricism in translation. Without the twist and turns and the usual semantics, perhaps it wasn’t a poem at all, but a raw declaration of my emotions as I felt them. Though I doubt my American classmates understood a single word of my translated poem, I had never felt closer to the closure I had been seeking all along. There was different weight to my words in Mandarin, an electric texture. Said in English, my meditations were vision. Said in my mother tongue, they were fact. 

The poem had taken its mask off, and so should I. The truth is, my crossing into a second (and later, a third) language was not a departure. I had simply been adding more plots to the cartography of me, unlocking pieces of me I never knew were there. In English, I am playful and clever. In Mandarin, I am cool and precise. In Spanish, I am passionate and bold. I have learned to weave together these languages, combine vision and fact, to access a wider spectrum of me, to find some truth somewhere in this beautiful mess, somewhere in between.