花花 🌸

小時候，我覺得下雨是全世界上最漂亮的東西。我看了下雨讓花放開。花讓世界變得更美麗。

My Chinese name is hua hua (花花). Many native speakers would call my name “很特別,” or very special. Mostly because it is not very common, if at all. It is composed of the double character that means flower. Having them side by side connotes a blooming notion, of vibrancy and of brightness. This name carries deep roots within my journey, but I wasn’t always aware of this. It’s seeds planted in my early childhood, as I emerged out of my tactile existence to interacting with the spectral pieces of myself.

There was a tree I used to sit in afterschool everyday when I was in middle school. It was not too tall, but it had wide branches and it was easy to climb and you could still feel above everything on the ground. It was a flowering tree, and when the flowers would bloom, they were an iridescent color of white that’s changing qualities and shades could only be seen with the eye. I would watch them change color and when they would fall to the ground they were heavy, sticky and filled with seeds. It was a magnolia tree, and overtime once the flowers would bloom, it would again lie dormant and its leaves would fall. 

In middle school I sat in this tree and would listen to music, read and stare at the sky and feel the wood scratch on my legs. I always admired this tree and felt a kinship to it. On the stormiest of days where the air was chill, and the clearest of days where the sky gleamed, it was always going through the cycles of changes. Yet, it stood still rooted in place.

When it would become dark out, I would stay in the tree. I would wait until I could no longer and descend slowly, while taking in the quietness that came with the enveloping of darkness. I would watch the little words on my pages becoming further and further away until it was a smudged mess on the backdrop of the branches, leaves and sky that still sharply contrasted against each other despite the lack of light.

I didn’t know it back then, but there was a seed within me. Buried deeply and cocooning within my small heart. It was buried because back then I didn’t know yet why I felt so sad, why I felt so lost or why I felt like I did not belong anywhere. I would sit in that tree for hours, discovering new music, discovering new stories; disappearing into those stories. There was a portal that I thought existed in that tree, but it was really within myself. That portal that I would go to had it’s own branches. it’s own leaves and its own thickening roots that recoiled in cold moments to lie dormant, and emerged with strength into a vibrant, new spring. I was going through changes of my own, and sitting within spaces where I could disappear, the seed within me would struggle against the soil that had built up over time trying to protect me; that had tried to cover the vulnerable parts that swayed with the wind when exposed.

Because I have struggled, because sometimes I am ashamed of where I have come from, because I have not always liked myself, because I have felt empty not knowing my mother tongue completely, because I have always chased the validation that I get to be who I am rather than taking that power back, because I felt small in a school where not many people were like me or looked like me, because I felt like I could not fit in with the people who did look like me, because I kept falling down and down until I didn’t know that the hole was different from the ground,,, because of all those things I have gotten to know myself better. I learn about what I truly want in life–and keep on learning. Who I truly want to be and what values I want to carry within my seed. I used to think that maybe, the seed within me was not beautiful. That from the beginning it wasn’t meant to bloom. That maybe, it didn’t deserve to bloom. I sat within my magnolia tree in adolescence and felt the transitive stages of the tree through winter, spring, summer, fall and again and felt like I stayed the same. I now know that I was germinating, I was curled into the pocket of life that only needed to carry the essence of what I was in that moment, little, small, but not without soundness.

花花 is important to me because I am on my journey to find out what it means to me to bloom, to become vibrant, unafraid, unapologetic, proud, and any adjective that captures that feeling of freedom. Nina Simone said, “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear, I mean really, no fear!” those small lines that make up 花花 holds the essence of that sentiment. huaaaahuaaaaa!!!! that’s me. I want to be 花花。

I never forgot about the magnolia tree, even when we moved away from it. I know I carry it within me now, no matter where I go.