- Mar 30
- 17 min read
The Dot That Counts
What did you bring with you?
My 11-year-old is interviewing me for a summer camp project. Perched at the foot of my bed with a Chromebook open, he is poised to take notes.
My brother was six years old and packed a gray vinyl shoulder bag with plastic green army men, a small box containing a memory game, and a few other toys. My mother shipped over a lacquered wooden trunk that was decorated with the raised forms of Chinese women wearing long robes, with a pagoda in the background and a mother-of-pearl moon gleaming above them. She called it a hope chest, and in it, she kept black and white photos of her family of origin, new clothes that she saved for birthday and Christmas gifts, and other keepsakes. My sister was eight years old and brought stationary and notebooks. My father shipped his most treasured books and work papers. I was on the verge of turning three, and I brought nothing.
“Can you imagine leaving almost everything behind?” I say, looking around the room. On my dresser are framed pictures of my family, potted succulents I propagated from leaf cuttings, and stacks of books. On the wall hangs a brooding painting by Marvin Moon of power lines shimmering at the horizon. From the arm of a desk lamp dangles a glass ornament painted with Chinese boys wearing quilted jackets and playing with bamboo sticks that I found at the Oakland Museum of California’s annual White Elephant sale. Against the corner of the room leans my hand-me-down guitar and in the closet is a stack of my journals. Beyond the bedroom door is a house full of furniture and record albums, a street of neighbors whom I trust to dog sit and bring mail into our house and water my houseplants, a city filled with restaurants and picnic spots and walks and hills, a golden state bursting with orange poppies and granite peaks and curling waves, and a nation of glorious and appalling history that I have made my own, across the breadth of which is scattered my birth and chosen family. This web of possessions, memories, and relationships composes my entire existence.
When we immigrated, I was too young to know what I was giving up; but my parents had been enmeshed in the gossamer strands of familiarity in their homeland, with multiple languages they could speak fluently and people who looked and felt like home to them. I wonder whether I’d ever be able to uproot my family to take a similar leap to a foreign land, knowing that I’d be relegating myself to a life in which the lure of opportunity would be in permanent tension with an ache for implicit belonging. A life in limbo, which one of my best friends in third grade described as a plain white room with no windows or doors, always lit, in which you floated like a ghost, alone forever. The eternal loneliness was the scariest part to me.
In addition to offering arts and crafts, movement, cooking projects, and music, my son’s camp asks the children to talk to a first generation immigrant, draw a picture of the person, and write a poem about the person’s experience. As a nonprofit founded over forty years ago by two Chinese-Americans from the San Francisco Bay Area, the camp’s curricular proximity to academics tracks.
It's a camp that kids tend to return to annually, reuniting with friends from disparate schools and looking forward to brush painting, playing the erhu and moon guitar, and building miniature dragon boats and lanterns from red envelopes. The first year I had a child enrolled there, when I learned that the camp pitted groups of kids against each other to generate the most book reports, with the top prize consisting solely of bragging rights, I felt an amalgam of pride, affection, and frustration towards a culture—my own—that cannot seem to extricate itself from an ethos of advancement and hierarchy.
It was the same feeling I once felt whenever I overheard my mother humble bragging to friends and relatives about her children’s accomplishments. Perhaps in many cultures, but certainly in Asian ones, children don’t merely exist in their own right. They are also evidence of their parents’ success. A proxy for the parents’ own worth. Thus, not even at summer camp are our kids allowed to just have fun, but rather must spend time scheming to redeem themselves from any embarrassing losses in the book report competition from the previous summer.
I get it though. When you lack the credibility that comes with a personal history that is generations deep in a place, when you look different, when you might speak with an accent or eat food—frilly black wood ear mushrooms, ham hocks thick with fat, and gelatinous soup with bits of scallion and tofu—that looks and smells unfamiliar to most people, you have to compensate for it somehow. It’s not rocket science, but if your kid becomes a rocket scientist, her brilliance reflects on you, and together, you become hard, shining things, impervious to whatever tries to chip away at you.
According to my son, though, his camp teacher says the kids can use ChatGPT to write the poem, a culturally inconsistent shortcut that surprises me. I tell him that writing is thinking, and if he is going to outsource that, he might as well not do the assignment at all—advice that I admit is also culturally inconsistent.
“What would be the point?” I ask.
Did you feel accepted?
Mostly, yes. These days though, when I visit certain parts of the country I wonder if people are looking at me funny. My voice catches as I tell my son that the current discourse about immigration devalues and, in many cases, completely ignores the positive contributions that immigrants made to American culture and society, at no small cost to themselves. That the folly of a government that misunderstands the drive and heartbreaking commitment of people willing to sacrifice everything and throw in their lot with a new nation makes me burn.
If it sounds like I’m taking it personally, it’s because I am. In my family of origin alone, we have two educators who taught business and creative writing at the collegiate level, a man who volunteered as a Boy Scout leader, an engineer who developed energy efficiency and renewable energy projects, a woman who led a volunteer fundraising effort that brought in over $100,000 to her neighborhood’s public elementary school, an Army officer and veteran who served in the sands of Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and three health care professionals who counseled and cared for patients for decades. All of this in the service of U.S. residents.
This may seem like too many societally beneficial pursuits to attribute to five individuals, but immigrants are no slouches. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2015 musical Hamilton acknowledges this, and he and I are not alone in this belief, for a line to that effect from “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)” never fails to elicit cheers and applause from the live audience. Why would a nation close the door to people like this?
It's with a mixture of shame and disgust that I’m compelled to enumerate the contributions of my immigrant family, for in the past, I’ve rarely felt the need to justify our presence here. Until recently, I believed that most people in the U.S. understood the relationship between our society and those who chose to join it was symbiotic: immigrants got jobs, and the nation got the Transcontinental Railroad, the Central Pacific Railroad, and the Union Pacific Railroad, among many other things. I was under the impression that people knew almost everyone on U.S. soil was an immigrant or a descendent of one, whether or not they came here willingly and with or without the proper paperwork and permissions. I thought that we were proud of our identity as a nation of immigrants.
I don’t know who planted this belief in me—which children’s book author, columnist, journalist, teacher, or parent. Maybe I learned it from movies and Hollywood producers, or the inspirational narration on the audio tour at the National Immigration Museum at Ellis Island, or JFK before I learned that he was a womanizer. Perhaps I invented it—a simplistic fairytale that I wanted to think was true.
At any rate, the truth is that the vanishing few who aren’t newcomers belong to tribes and bands listed on the rolls maintained by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, and I’m not aware that anyone from the current administration has asked for their opinion on the matter.
Who knows your story?
Almost no one. Not completely anyway. Not even myself, for what I recollect at any given moment depends on the state of my heart, who is occupying space in my head, and a hundred other variables. Certainly not A.I., because if my siblings who grew up in the same household have different memories than I do—my sister can’t recall the kitten named Cupid that we adopted after our first kitten Skipper got run over in front of our house on Ramshorn Drive—how could ChatGPT get me right?
Nonetheless, the world seems hell bent on shoving A.I. down my throat. Without asking for it, I receive A.I. customer support when I have questions about my cell phone data plan, an A.I.-generated video of an attractive couple recreating the Standing Bird lift at the end of Dirty Dancing on social media, and A.I.-generated visual art in the feed of my online watercolor beginners community. Even at the wooden desk that I made for myself out of reclaimed wood and hairpin legs—an analog haven of mechanical timers, Bic highlighters, books, and paper journals—whenever I open a new document on my laptop, Microsoft Word encourages me to use A.I. to draft my words.
Describe what you’d like to write, the software asks me each time I open a new file. It suggests prompts. Write an article about 3 outdoor activities in Seattle in July. Create a list of gift ideas and activities for my mother’s 50th birthday. Write a poem to wish Happy Birthday to my five-year-old sister.
If I understand correctly, an A.I. engine’s training base that underlies its answers to these prompts consists of what has been posted or published in the past about outdoor activities in Seattle, birthday gifts for middle-aged mothers, and poems for little girls. Thus, it primarily reflects the voices and experiences of those who have dominated the written word throughout history—people unlike me, an immigrant woman of color who grew up in the Midwest, made my own migration to the East Coast for college and tweed jackets and city life, then came to the West Coast for graduate school and foggy mornings and the Sierra.
So how can A.I. speak for me? How can it speak for any of us, each with our singular experiences whispering in our ears and shaping our thoughts everywhere we go, a lens that scatters our vision like the prism on the album cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Pausing to take in a view on an autumn hike, one person sees the red beating heart of fall leaves, another notices the silver shimmer of a rippling lake, and a third is lost in the blue tinge of an overcast sky. A different poem, song, and painting emerges from each.
And why would I delegate the most important reason I have for writing: to explore questions about how to be human in this world and to journey, in my incremental, meandering way, towards clarity. Shortcuts allow us to reach a destination faster, but who you are when you arrive depends on the route you took to get there.
Driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles, do you notice the ice plants blanketing the cliffs above Route 1? Does your heart catch on the serpentine curves that flirt with the Pacific Ocean, and when your stomach turns, do you crack the window and inhale the briny air? Or do you take the more direct inland route on Highway 5, nodding off in the passenger seat as you pass the endless cattle feed lot of Harris Ranch, where the bovine kick up black dust under the shade of inky solar panels and there is nary a blade of green in sight? Does the driver turn off the ventilation as the pungent odor of manure permeates the car? What thoughts and memories do you carry from your travels?
Did people make assumptions about you?
Probably. And sometimes we validated them. Collectively, we played the piano, the flute, and the clarinet (although the latter, for me, was half-hearted). Mama’s eggrolls. The math. The glasses. The good grades. How we respected our elders, which is a nice way of saying that we were expert butt kissers.
But in more ways than we fit the stereotype, we didn’t. The theater productions. The ceramics and paintings and pen and ink drawings. The sports. The orange Gatorade in the refrigerator and the SpaghettiOs in the cupboard. The loss of fluency in our native languages. My eventual abandonment of engineering for the arts. Plus a laundry list of other departures from the expected, none of which embarrass me, but I will refrain from divulging because Mama thinks oversharing is undignified.
I suspect that no one really matches a stereotype. The farmer isn’t just a farmer, the southerner isn’t just a southerner, and the Deadhead isn’t just a Deadhead any more than there’s a singular definition of an American. A stereotype is a flattened cut-out of a person, stripped of their dimensional past and future. It is for this paper doll that A.I. suggests vacation activities, lists birthday presents, and writes poems.
Years ago, my daughter mistook the saying, “It’s the thought that counts,” for “It’s the dot that counts.” Now, I sometimes write DOT on her gift tags and swirl a circle like a bindi, an unmarked ladybug, or a sale sticker next to the word. She knows what it means. My son sometimes does this on his handmade cards too. Wouldn’t our friends and families want our dots, informed by our unique and personal experiences and knowledge of whether they can swim, what they hold dear, and whether farts or boogers make them laugh?
Three outdoor activities in Seattle in July
A.I.: Recommends kayaking on Lake Union, hiking in Mt. Ranier National Park, visiting the Seattle Japanese Tea Garden. Describes fees, accessibility, and other tips.
Me: Obtain a license to harvest oysters from a Fred Meyer store with your boyfriend and his roommates. When the clerk asks for your stats for the application, if you first say 120 lbs and then modify to 115 lbs, you probably deserve the amused grins of the boyfriend and roommates. Take a ferry to Whidbey Island and comb the beach, bending to pick up craggy oyster shells from the rocky shore until your harvest reaches the allowed volume. Twenty-five years later, you won’t remember cracking open the mollusks to savor their ocean tang, but you’ll still feel the heat of embarrassment when you lied about your weight to a stranger at that retail counter. Drive to the Hoh Rainforest, which is damp and dripping, where moss grows like ancient fur on the trunks and branches of the trees, and elves and fairies are more likely than not. Attend at least one day of the open-air Bumbershoot arts festival at the Seattle Center, where the overlapping schedule of music, film, dance, and literary panels will compel you to rush from one venue to the other to watch film shorts of road trips and aliens and inventors and sway to the gravel voice of Macy Gray, puzzle at the musical noodling of Cibo Matto, and sing along with dulcet harmonies of the Indigo Girls. From a vendor in a long row of canvas covered booths, you may buy dangly earrings of sea glass and silver that will tarnish and never again glow as they did in the rash light of the Pacific Northwestern sun.
Gifts and activities for my mother’s 50th birthday
A.I.: Provides a list of gifts including personalized jewelry, a spa day gift package, and tech gadgets; and bulleted activities including wine tasting, a crafting workshop, and a charity event.
Me: When my mother turned fifty, her two younger children were still in the house—a senior and freshman in high school. She was an immigrant who’d been separated from her homeland, parents, language, and social mores for eleven years, which felt like an entire lifetime for the children but for her felt probably more like a short’ish stint in purgatory. She had been a naturalized citizen for over half that time, but she was already looking forward to her retirement, when she anticipated returning home, a place where she could laugh loudly, give instructions to the help, and always understand what was expected. For her birthday, make fresh lumpia from her mother’s special recipe, the wrapper slightly doughy, the red sauce tangy, and the ground pork and vegetables dripping juice from the end of the roll with every bite. Bring her to an open-air market where she can haggle over the price of pork knuckles and oxtail and everyone knows nothing has a set price. Take her visiting to the homes of friends and relatives who know her parents and sisters and brothers and in-laws, who see her not as a singular brown woman with a heavy accent to be approached with a combination of sympathy and curiosity, but rather as a daughter, wife, and mother situated in an intricate weaving of history, place, fortune, and hard work that was generations in the making.
A birthday poem for my five-year old sister
A.I.: Suggests a poem about birthday candles, bubbles, pink and blue skies, and tight hugs.
Me: I wasn’t yet born when my sister turned five. If my father’s journals are to be believed, she was a child who woke on her own to sit on the front steps at dawn, was so eager to go to class that she patted him awake in the mornings to remind him it was a school day, and tried to corral her younger brother when he stole my father’s hairbrush and dipped the bristles in his soup. She spoke Fujianese and Cebuano and English, so this poem might hit better if translated trilingually: Sister, one day you will speak perfect English and scuff your boots through snow heavier and whiter than anything you can imagine / You will stand on glaciers and stare up at cathedral domes and listen to mortar fire in the desert and read clues encoded in human cells / But that is in the future, far from where and when you wait for the morning to ripen / Today, I wish for you a quiet sunrise and books and rolling on the cool floor of the sala before bed.
My friend’s daughter, Poinciana Hung-Haas, sewed a series of quilted cloth portraits for her senior project at the Oakland School of the Arts. The subjects are young artists of Cambodian, Philippine, Japanese, and Chinese descent whom she knew personally. As a biracial woman of Asian and European descent, Poinciana’s objective was to “shine light on Asian Americans and break down the model minority myth” that Asian Americans were only talented in academic subjects.
Looking at a portrait from a distance, I notice the colors that form the contours of the subject’s face and body; but up close, I discover the variation in each fabric’s texture and pattern, individual stitches, and frayed edges. I realize that each completed work is made of a hundred creative choices, from the originating idea to the individual subjects to the shape of the cloth to the color of the thread to the method it was laid down.
Poinciana wouldn’t have conceived of the project if her parents hadn’t brought her to an exhibit of Faith Ringgold’s narrative quilts in San Francisco the summer before, if she hadn’t chosen the fashion design pathway in high school, and if she hadn’t been grappling with the idea of being Asian in an arts community. And she couldn’t have turned the concept into reality if she hadn’t finished her academic work early every day to sew, if she hadn’t sewn during her lunch periods, if a team of underclassmen hadn’t helped her just as she had helped seniors bring their ideas to fruition once upon a time. If, if, if.
So the quilts’ subjects are not the only story on display. Also depicted is the artist behind the scenes—a young woman whose intent and dedication, whose layers, give the work depth. This is the way I see every performance, painting, and poem, and it’s how I want to see other people: as a creation of a lived experience, random and inimitable.
What did you gain by coming?
Winter, for one. Sledding, ice skating, and glasses that fogged up when I came in from the cold. Waxy water lilies, stick forts in a pine forest, and the glittering Great Lakes. A belief that my story could continue anywhere.
It eventually came here, to a place crisscrossed with bridges, dotted with dim sum restaurants, and bursting with art and politics and weed and drum circles. To a home with a scrappy palm tree in the corner of the backyard and a towering coast redwood that drops cones onto the patio, a spouse who treads so lightly that he regularly startles me in the kitchen with his presence, and biracial children who straddle a multicultural existence better than I ever could. To a son who I anticipated would be quiet in the face of an older sister who dominated the airspace with her songs, stories, complaints, and demands, but instead learned to talk like a fast-moving river and now eschews A.I. to write the immigration poem in his own words.
My Mother, Ann Guy
by Lincoln Chase
(I didn’t use chatGPT)
At just merely three,
She traveled 7,696 miles across the Sea
She flew by a Pan Am Plane,
Going from the Philippines to America,
There was much to lose, much to gain.
The other passengers were women, children, babies screaming, “Mom!”
Many of them refugees coming from Vietnam
She learned English from Sesame Street,
And there were many new things to cook and eat!
But on the bad side of her new life,
Other kids spoke fake Chinese to her, causing strife*.
Now, in 2025,
Our house is her home, like a Bee in a hive.
But hopefully racism that is causing America to change,
Wont make Immigrants hurt, like a dog with Mange**.
*I’m not sure if it was really strife so to speak, but it did annoy her, and it did cause problems.
**Mange is a skin disease some dogs get, which in extreme cases makes them look similar to a Chupacabra.
Several times during the writing, my son asks, “Do you want to hear what I’ve got so far?” He is particularly proud of his rhymes, and he gauges my reaction to each couplet. I snort at his change/mange pairing and again at his reference to a chupacabra. ChatGPT couldn’t have written that poem even if it combed the Internet with a lice pick, because unlike my son, A.I. hasn’t cultivated a lifelong fascination with rural legends and folklore; and what would this poem be without the personality and odd charm of the footnotes?
His lines contain the erratic capitalization and absent apostrophes that are as particular to his writing style as a fingerprint. Even though these quirks are grammatically incorrect, I’m secretly fond of them, solely because they are his.
What do you hope for?
My ultimate goal in life is to be a better human. Can A.I. teach me this? Can it help me be more honest? More loving and more open? After all, since I first read Ray Bradbury’s “I Sing the Body Electric” in elementary school, the wise, patient love of the Fantoccini Electrical Grandmother has stuck with me, close as a shadow. Then again, she is a fictional character imagined by a human twentieth century writer.
I accept applications for A.I. that are impersonal: my husband asked it to draft a cell phone use policy for our daughter when she received her first device as a seventh grader. Like most contracts, it was dry, dry, dry, like being lectured by a Texas Instruments graphing calculator. I went through the document and deleted many redundancies, a process that reminded me of editing technical reports of fellow engineers at my old job. Verbal winks about how much time each day she would be allowed to watch YouTube videos about eyebrow-grooming or waking up to perfectly wavy hair were absent from the document, because A.I. doesn’t know my daughter. There was neither encouragement nor sarcasm in the policy. There was nothing fun about it, and I guess that’s appropriate, because digital discipline is a serious business.
I’m also a fan of the ship computer from the Star Trek franchise that promptly locates Tuvok when intruders have transported on board or melodiously counts down the self-destruct command. A human, awash in emotion, would hyperventilate his way down to zero and screw up the timing, which would be a total bummer for crew members who thought they still had a few seconds to get situated in their escape pods before pressing the release button. There they are, docked at the ship’s perimeter, securing their seatbelts low and tight across their laps, supposedly with ten seconds to spare when…kaboom!
But maybe when it comes to being a better human—an inherently personal endeavor—A.I. isn’t the place to look. Despite the zettabytes of data on the Internet, it is ignorant of my mistakes and heartbreaks, isn’t navigating my preoccupations and emotional landscape, and doesn’t lie awake at night wondering about my father’s last thoughts or if I will ever again hear the lyrics of Neil Diamond’s America without being overwhelmed with grief.
I would have to tell A.I. everything I know, in order for it to know what I still have to learn. Even if this were possible, what would be the purpose? For A.I. to figure it all out for me? To replace my own learning? Why would I want that?
As to whether there’s value to others in A.I. becoming more human, the jury is out. Companies that create A.I. avatars of the dearly departed are hard at work. Ultimately, though, isn’t a substitute still a substitute? I hope A.I. cannot replace me in any of the ways that I matter most, any more than it could replace a boy who has a shelf of books on mythology and monsters—for even a thousand disembodied ideas sliced and diced, rearranged, and regurgitated are unlikely to evoke a chupacabra in the context of this immigrant’s life.
ANN GUY was born in the Philippines, grew up in Western Michigan, and now lives in Oakland, CA. She received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction and her MA in English with Creative Writing in Fiction from San Francisco State University, where she received a Distinguished Graduate Award from both programs. Her words appear in River Teeth, Hippocampus, Craft Literary, Sweet Lit, Entropy, MUTHA, Ekphrastic Review, Literary Mama, Motherwell, and elsewhere. She is at work on a historical and speculative fiction novel about
migration, loss, and kinship. Find her
at www.ann-guy.com.