Som-Mai
I grew up in northwest Houston, Texas, attended university in California, then moved to Berlin in 2017.
I generally feel most comfortable in the essayistic mode of inquiry, if anything, and started writing fiction only shortly before I came to Germany. My stories have tended to examine a particular moment or hour, a day at the longest, so lately, I’ve been trying out zooming out, both emotionally/temporally.
I could say that studying linguistics with a computational/semantics bent furthered a fascination with register/power/the relationships between spoken and written language, and Now That's What I Call A Reason To Write!, and this would be true but tangential.
Much of Why I Write™️ reduces to having acquired English in elementary school, after Vietnamese and mostly from public-broadcast TV. I had teachers who never stopped expressing surprise when I used it competently, whatever the bars for linguistic competence are for six-year-olds. This surprise hurt, deeply. I hated—and loved inducing—it. I worked until I could read/speak/write more surely/clearly/cheekily than monolingual-anglophone peers, and I relished (", foolishly," perhaps, though I doubt that's an adverb fit for lonely children, even those vengefully overperformant) the control and company language brought me.
I hope and strive, as I always have, to one day write
a) well—well, and
b) like I don't have anything to prove.
