As soon as possible, get out of Taiwan with a scholarship to North America: Vancouver, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto… or, heck, even Columbus, Ohio, would do. Race toward a Ph.D., J.D., or M.D., an academic best-in-show of any kind. Even though one reason for your flight from your birthplace is the narrow runway of your parents’ acceptance, you can’t help chasing after the prize you are conditioned to chase.

Befriend mainly white people. Marry one with citizenship. An advanced degree no longer guarantees residency in this anti-immigration time. Settle down in a job with stock options and a path to fail upward, even if it doesn’t fulfill you, because who knows what does?

Call your parents only as often as necessary to silence your relatives’ condemnations that you are an unfilial child. Be patient while you listen to your father’s perennial account of his striving. You can marvel at (just not out loud) how everything he touches turns to gold—a Tamagotchi factory, a Portuguese egg tart bakery, origami picnic chairs, watermelons shaped like cubes—before it turns to rubbish when a business craze inevitably passes over the island like a typhoon. Master that non-committal grunt to placate your mother, who offers unsolicited remedies for anything from bowel movement to career meandering to your childlessness that she assumes to be infertility. Don’t tell her what you are learning to articulate in therapy, which you will start years after getting used to dragging your depressed self out of bed each morning and only after having a therapist has become an honor badge of vulnerability. But not to your mother. Try telling her that you don’t want kids because you don’t feel the simple, unconditional love between parent and child, and she’d become defensive and threaten to commit suicide for all the wrongs she’d done to you on your weekly, then monthly, then yearly calls.

Except on those calls, speak only English until you dream in it. It’ll take at least ten years before you no longer need to pretend-laugh at jokes at parties.

On Christmas, when an in-law’s in-law asks when you last returned to Thailand, don’t judge. It’s not as if you know how to spell Mississipi(?) or locate Newfoundland.

If someone asks what the deal is between Taiwan and China—and someone always asks—give this monologue (after you drink sufficient eggnog)…

(Continued…in upcoming short story collection “Someone Dies in Every Story”)