2025 Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Creative Writing Prize – Grand Prize Winner, Adult Category
From the judges: “Combining vivid physical descriptions with nostalgic reflections, this tale of an adult daughter returning to her deceased mother’s homeland is simultaneously tender and unsentimental. Intelligent and polished… a clear standout.”
I sit by my mother’s death bed and read about caecilians, worm-like creatures that survive by tearing off their mothers’ milky blue skin. The mother lies calmly in the dirt while her children flay her. Her skin is supposed to regrow, only for them to eat her alive again.
“What do you think?” I ask my mother, whose decaying body is blueish and mottled. But there’s only the rhythmic hissing and pumping of her ventilator in response. It used to be a kind of tradition for us. We would find the most exceptional animal facts to share as reasons to call. It was easier than talking about our own lives, something we did increasingly less of over the last decade.
Once, she sent me an article about octopuses after she stayed up all night worrying because I didn’t call her back, even after fifteen calls from her. Octopuses starve themselves for months while protecting their eggs. Their purple colors fade, their eyes cloud, their skins scar to mark their dedication, dying only when their eggs hatch. “Everything I do is to protect you.” This oppressive drive to protect often forced a wedge between my mother and me, until I saw very little of me in her, and her in me.
We were — are — so different. She’s always late, I’m always early; she screams her rage and I whisper mine; she would coax Traditional Chinese Medicine down my throat and I would march her to Western medicine doctors.
I wonder what she would say about the caecilian. My mother, who pretended to feed me formula in front of her relatives. “It’s more nutritious,” my grandmother and aunties pushed, repeating it to make the untruth true. But when she could hide it, my mother cradled me close to her breast, my stomach against her. Did I take her strength, selfhood, and future with the milk I drained from her body? Did I gnaw at her nipple until her skin broke and bled? How do children know when to stop before we take too much?
“Don’t worry,” I imagine my mother responding. “My skin will regrow.”
Today, my mother will be weaned off the ventilator. The nurse comes to check her vitals before the rest of the healthcare team arrives.
“Does your mother have a favorite flower?” the nurse asks as she writes on her chart. My throat catches because I don’t know this simple fact about my mother. I don’t know many facts about her.
“I’m not sure. Why?” It sounds more venomous than I intended.
“I just like to ask and bring flowers in case, you know, in case it helps.”
The nurse is trying to be nice, using her own money and time to probably brighten the spaces of the grieving, and here I am, being a jerk.
“I’m sorry. Thank you.” My words have disintegrated. “She’ll like any flower.” My mother never bought flowers, but I run through the flowers I’ve seen her admire on a walk, or at a store, or in someone else’s yards. She breathed in jasmine. Lilies. Chrysanthemums. I list the flowers to push away what’s to come.
When the time comes, I will not be strong enough to will myself to stay, to watch as she gasps for air.
—
The plane’s cabin lights dim to match the darkness outside.
“Have you been before?” my seat neighbor asks. She looks to be the age my mother was, in her fifties, though her English is comfortable, Californian.
“First time,” I respond. I had only heard about the food and the markets from my mother’s stories, and seen glimpses of tight living quarters on the few video calls she had with family in Taiwan. I’d seen some landmarks when I sorted through my mother’s things, lingering on the photographs cut from brochures and internet printouts. Behind each picture lived my mother’s handwriting in traditional Chinese, handwriting I couldn’t read, words I couldn’t access. Each stroke beamed with graceful certainty as it rose, fell, turned, hooked, and declared itself seen. Her English, in contrast, appeared in wispy, hesitant, and widely spaced scripts that she would often ask me to finish on tax documents and medical forms. I took the photos to a friend who could read them. They were places my mother wanted to visit.
“I go back and forth. Half the year here, half the year there,” my seat neighbor said. “My Ma thought about doing that. She was born there.”
“She should try it. This way I have two homes.”
I do not know how to tell her that my mother is dead.
“Is she not joining you on this trip?”
My pause is too long. She realizes before I need to say anything.
“Oh, I always say too much. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“Well, it’s good to see where your mother is from.”
Don’t you wonder where your blood is from? a friend once asked. She had just returned from her annual family trip to Vietnam. We were sitting atop Lone Mountain, the Las Vegas valley spreading below us in low grids of tan and brown. The Strip climbed high and unrestrained in the distance. Don’t you want to be surrounded, for once, by people who don’t make you feel like an outsider?
“Yeah, I wish I could see it with her.”
The woman is quiet the rest of the trip. Perhaps death is not a realm she wants to touch. She plays a few movies, but mostly dozes off.
I also close my eyes but am unable to sleep. I’ve been craving the closeness my mother and I had when I was a young child, when I attached myself to her leg for so long, and so often, that I committed the smell of her floral perfume to memory. I’ve been craving a knowing that I will never have—a more complete knowing of a person. This is a part of grieving I didn’t expect, this relentless unknowing, the piling of questions that may never be answered. Why did she move to the U.S.? What was her town like when she was young? Why did she never bring me to Taiwan? What was her favorite flower?
Hell Valley meets me with a thick cloud of rotten eggs and a heat so rich my sweat melds with the surrounding steam. Beitou, where the valley sits, is filled with old-fashioned inns and bath houses, lush hills brimming with cicadas, and the soothing sound of moving water— flowing, rising, finding its space. As the land my mother grew up in murmurs around me, I’m beginning to understand why she wanted to return.
I lean forward on the rail, my face hovering over the jade-colored pool of boiling water. I imagine my mother doing the same, her body lingering close to the crater as the bubbles rise and pop, one sphere replacing the other. “Boil eggs in the water” was all she noted on her printout.
Among the billow and ripples, I can see my mother’s shadow—our similar build, our long neck and angular shoulders, but I can’t make out the details people used to remark on: our high cheekbones, freckles, the unmanageable thickness of our hair, the double eyelid embracing our right eye.
Around fifty people led by a guide enter the path. They fill it with gasps and squeals, cramming in front of the rails to take pictures. My first instinct is to leave, like I often did in Las Vegas when Chinese tourists arrived by the busload. My mother organized many of those tours. “I’ll wait in the car,” I would say when I had to pick her up from the Strip. I had homogenized the tourists, villainized them, seen them through the eyes of the place I lived. I didn’t want anyone to confuse me as one of the guests. I didn’t run into people without apologizing. I didn’t spit on the sidewalk or cut lines. “Why don’t you stay?” My mother would say. “You can learn from me.”
The Hell Valley tourist group shuffles down the curved walkway, enveloping me in bodies with no path out.
“The history of this district is an interesting one,” the tour guide says in Mandarin. Amid the whirlwind of picture-taking, he outlines the changing flows of the area—the first myths of sorceresses living in the cauldron of haze and gurgling waters, the centuries of sulfur mining for gun powder, the building of bath houses during the Japanese occupation a hundred years ago. No one in the group reacts to the violence embedded in this paradise. The original name, Kipatauw, the home of witches, gets warped, made easier for unfamiliar tongues. Beitou. Hokuto. Beitou again. It was once a red-light district where Kamikaze pilots, surrounded by Japanese Romanesque-Victorian hybrid architecture, enjoyed their last pleasures, forcing themselves on local comfort women before plunging into enemy vessels. I think of the times my mother scolded me for frequenting Japanese restaurants.
“Did the schools not teach you what was done to us?” my mother would bring up. “Do you not know our history? You inherit those generations in your bones.” She fixated on my bones, feeding me slow-cooked bone broths and buying marrow for me to suck, so my blood would flow and my bones would stay strong. “Rats gnaw on other animals’ bones for minerals,” she would say. “Eat.”
“Did the schools not teach you what was done to us?” my mother would bring up. “Do you not know our history? You inherit those generations in your bones.”
My schools never described the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. What I did learn, American history, didn’t feel like my history. Even here, where I hoped to find my mother, none of it is mine. It all mixes together—the dangerous and the beautiful, the violent and the peaceful, the people who come to take and reshape the land to fit their desires.
“This is also where we can eat hot spring eggs,” the guide says. “We’ll try some soon.” What gets the group’s attention though is the water’s healing properties.
“It is said that the hot springs can heal all sorts of ailments—eczema, arthritis, athlete’s foot, fatigue,” the tour guide says. More people perk up and gather closer. “People have soaked in the waters around here for generations. Their aches and pains disappear. Their minds clear. Their skins look younger. That’s because the water contains radium, a healing element.”
Isn’t it radioactive? I want to ask, but I don’t know how to say “radioactive” in Mandarin.
“This is true,” an older woman says. She plays with the edge of her polka dot sun hat, which covers most of her patchy hair. “I soaked in hot springs every day for a month, and it helped cure my cancer.” The people around her pat her back and give her hugs.
“My sister has arthritis, maybe I should bring her here,” another tourist says. One by one, they mention sick loved ones they should bring to the area, as if voicing their names would start the healing process.
“My brother has sleep apnea.”
“My cousin has asthma.”
“My friend has heart disease.”
“My mother,” I say out loud without meaning to.
Everyone is silent, waiting for me to continue, but my mother’s pulverized bones get stuck in my throat. My cheeks flush at the thought of ruining the mood, their collective moment. “She has cancer, too.” I couldn’t state the fact.
“Every day,” the woman whose cancer is gone says. “Tell her to soak in the hot springs every day.”
“Be with your mother,” another man says, unearthing my guilt.
Maybe if I had been with her more. If I went to all her appointments to translate. If I asked for more time off work. If I brought her here.
No matter how illogical, no matter how much it went against the science that I know, I wish I had brought her here. I could sit with her in a public hot spring as she sweated out toxins and carcinogens. We could relax in the warmth, the steam enveloping our faces, and step out changed, newer, healed.
“We should move on,” the tour guide says. Maybe he realizes I’m not part of the group. “The hot spring eggs are waiting.”
The crowd follows him out. “You and your mother take care,” the woman whose cancer is gone says, keeping her hand on my arm for a second longer. Her bones push against her skin, asking for more space. She’s almost as thin as my mother was, but her eyes are still bright and open, still quick to smile.
They all shuffle through, cameras at the ready, voices pooling together once more.
I stay a little longer, taking in the quiet bubbling one last time, and head in the direction of the group in search of hot spring eggs. On my way out of the park, a stray dog stops twenty feet away from me to study me as I study him. He’s medium sized, has a short earthy yellow brown coat, and a slim waist. I take a step forward to take a closer look, but he dashes into a cluster of trees and disappears.
—
My mother used to talk about the market in syrupy, enchanting ways. Sweet, barbecue smells and juicy, paper-thin sheets of pork jerky, clothes of every kind of fabric, the adrenaline you get when you haggle something down to half price. Then, there was the stand my grandmother sold shoes at, full of color and local footwear. I had pictured my grandmother transporting bags of shoes on her body for miles. At the end of the day, I had imagined, she would carefully tuck her earnings under her soles, divide the money at home for rent or food, then do it all again the next day. It had always seemed like a noble pursuit.
My dwa yi, the oldest of my mother’s five siblings, is the only one who remained in Taiwan. “Who else would tend our roots?” she was rumored to say each time a family member left, one by one. “But really,” my mother told me. “She stayed for love. A different man each time.”
“What is your Chinese name again?” dwa yi asks in Hokkien. She’s sitting in front of a dusty white fan at the market, the bag of chocolates I brought her from M&M World slumped near her feet, probably half melted. There’s grime on the floors, dragged in from decades of market waste—raw meat drippings, oil splatters, sweat and spit. The sour, musky smells around us cement in my nose and ferment.
“I don’t remember it all,” I say from the stool across her, waiting for the rotating fan to bring cool relief my way. I only know there’s the word “Heng” in my name, meaning persistent, constant. My mother wrote it out for me in elementary school, but I was more interested in my English name, Aster.
“That’s too bad,” dwa yi says. “It’s important to know your real name.”
The phone rings and dwa yi picks it up without a word to me. She speaks in a dialect I don’t understand and laughs like she’s talking to a long-lost friend.
I’m left to the rumble of the market—the hawkish calls of vendors cutting air, the varied rhythms of knives cutting food. When I first stepped into the market, I was engulfed in signs I couldn’t read, food I had never seen, and thick streams of people that looked like me, flowing in and out. They could tell I didn’t belong, switching to English when I passed. “You try.” “Come look.” Was it how I dressed? How I walked? “For your belly,” a vendor said, holding up a nude colored shapewear that would squeeze me into a more palatable woman.
I had circled the market twice before I found dwa yi’s store, cramped with rows of clothes meant for middle-aged women, blouses with fake gems and flowery prints, loose pants with bright colors. The store was hidden by a crowded outdoor space she rents out. There, in front of the shop, young women huddle around bins of blouses, dresses, jeans at prices too low to be ethical. A monk walks by ringing a bell with his left hand and holding a bowl of change in his right.
“Did you get fatter?” dwa yi says once she hangs up the phone.
I thought we would talk about my mother or she would offer to show me her home. “When I take you back to Taiwan,” my mother used to say. “We will stay with your auntie. She has a big house, four stories. You can see where I used to live from the roof.”
“I remember your photos,” dwa yi continues. “You were much thinner.” How old was I in the photos, ten, twelve years old? When my mother used to criticize my American waistline, I would respond that there are more important things in life. But here, facing the disappointed eyes of my auntie, I suck in my gut. “And don’t tie up your hair or you’ll become bald like me.” I undo my bun and let my hair fall, despite sweat already beading down my neck. Crude and direct is the language of my mother’s blood.
“It’s just how we are,” my mother said, “we tell you the truth.”
“Do you have a husband yet?” dwa yi asks.
“No, a boyfriend.”
“Why didn’t you bring him here to show me?” she asks.
“It’s just a short trip,” I say. “Maybe next time.” But once I say it, we both know that “next time” is an empty promise. I half expect her to scold me for saying empty things. A woman with a cane squeezes between the racks to get to us.
“Good to see you again!” dwa yi says, going to the woman and turning her back to me. She takes the woman aside and hands her a bag of clothes. As they chat, my auntie’s eyes are light, her hand motions animated. She’s laughing.
A stray dog walks at the edge of the market, sniffing the ground for scraps while dodging foot traffic. She is thinner than the dog I saw at Beitou, her black fur missing in places. I reach in my backpack and pull out a pack of fried pork rinds I was saving for later.
“Do not feed the dog,” dwa yi calls to me, voice sharper, when she sees me stand. Her customer-friend was gone. “And do not look them in the eyes. Your Ma used to do that all the time, and all the dogs would keep coming to our house.”
“I thought she never liked dogs.”
“Is that what she told you? She would feed all kinds of dogs. Even tried to hide a small one in our house. Did not last very long. Your ah gong immediately started sneezing.” “Really? She didn’t really tell me much.”
Dwa yi starts to vocalize as if she’s going to say more but immediately retracts. The gap between us fills with the sounds of people haggling, scooters whining.
“Do you want something? Find something you want,” she says instead. I glance at the bins, but everything’s too small or too bold.
“I should go now,” I say, understanding that it’s my time to leave, even though I just arrived. “I’m feeling a little tired.”
I’m not sure what my mother dreamed of. Her warm return lived only in words. Dwa yi doesn’t offer to let me stay with her, and I don’t ask.
She tries to gift me a cap. I put on the plainest one I could find, but it’s too large and the metal clasp won’t snap shut. “Hey,” she yells at the vendor she rented the space to. “Your hat is broken.” She tosses it to him.
“Well,” she said. “We tried.”
We tried.
On my way out, the same vendor selling shapewear tells me her underwear are buy one get one free. “For your belly!” she shouts in English.
I relax my stomach and tie my hair up, leaving my neck bare to the slight breeze. —
Chewing on garlic-marinated tendons in a small noodle shop fully open to the street, I’m reminded that tendons were always my favorite part of my mother’s bone soups. Stewed for five hours or more, they are juicy and springy or, as my mother described it, QQ.
Maybe what I inherit is not in my bones but in my tendons, I want to tell her. The strong jiggly bits tie muscle to bone and can handle tremendous stress. I imagine my mother piling her spoon with equal portions of noodles, meat, and vegetables immersed in a rich broth. She tells me I’m thinking too much, that I can build both strong bones and strong tendons, then plunges the perfect bite into her mouth.
Besides me, a child slurps his noodles and brings the bowl up to pour the last drops of broth in his mouth. “Can I have more?” he asks his mom.
“I knew you’d want more.” She gives him the rest of her bowl. There is no “thank you.” It is just a given that mothers give, and that they know us more than we know them.
—
The last place on my list is Hualien, a narrow county on the eastern coast of the island tucked between the Central Mountain Range and the Pacific Ocean.
“They say this is where Portuguese sailors saw Taiwan and called it ‘Ilha Formosa,’ or beautiful island,” my cousin, Yueyue, says. After I left the shop, dwa yi told her to reach out to me. For the weekend, Yueyue has been accompanying me around northeastern Taiwan. She tries to speak in English, and I try to speak in Mandarin or Hokkien, and we end up talking in a patchwork of three languages we somehow manage to understand.
We’re at a park overlooking the ocean, and even in the light’s last breath, even with the sweeping, heavy storm clouds overhead threatening to release, it’s beautiful. Or maybe it’s because of those elements that it’s beautiful. The expansive textured coast from the lighthouse in the distance to the sleeping mountain range, the silhouette of betel nut trees, the pounding chant of waves breaking on rocks—all moments I never had in the desert.
We fight the wind and head for a bench, our muscles finding rest after a full day of hiking at Taroko National Park. Without speaking, we pull out the food we bought from the night market and start devouring the chewy roasted corn with chili sauce, grilled prawns on skewers and bamboo rice. The stray, clay-colored dog that has been following us finally lies on the grass a few feet away and rests her head between her paws, keeping her gaunt belly safe underneath her. She eyes our food without picking up her head. She ran and weaved in front of us for hours, from our hotel to the Dongdamen Night Market and to here, stopping to sniff or scavenge and looking back regularly to make sure we were all on the same path.
“Should we feed her?” I ask Yueyue.
“If you feed her, she will follow you.”
“That’s what your Ma said. She’s been following us anyway. It’s kind of comforting.” While we sit side-by-side, the differences between my cousin and me grow starker. Only a year younger than me, she’s three inches taller and her hair is in a gelled-back pixie cut while my long strands blow wildly in the wind. Her skin is bright, smooth and freckle-free. She doesn’t hesitate to ask for help or chat up taxi drivers. She walks like she’s never lost, her feet never stumbling or wavering at turns even when we are lost, while my feet question all the new bumps and dips. She’s a forensic scientist and always knew she wanted to be a forensic scientist, while the only theme of the jobs I’ve had—a boba barista, a blackjack dealer, and most recently, an administrative assistant—is that they weigh down the skin of my second ah yih’s forehead. “Your mother won’t say it, but I will: She did not move here so you can take jobs like these,” my second ah yih once said to me, before my mother got sick. “These are jobs our generation takes because we have to.”
“Did you ever visit the U.S.?” I ask my cousin, digging into the opened half of a bamboo tube stuffed with glutinous rice.
“No. I did think about going to the U.S. for college before, but my parents reminded me my life was here.”
Even with the wind beating against my ears, I can still hear the clamor, music and voices of the night market. A mixture of those who grew up there, those who visit, and those who, as my mother used to say in Mandarin, “come and come and go and go.”
“I’m glad I didn’t go,” Yueyue continues. “I think it would have changed me too much.” “How?”
Yueyue starts at the other end of the bamboo tube, unearthing a few chunks of rice and depositing them into her mouth.
“It’s like how your Ma wanted to come back and live here, but she never did, said it wouldn’t feel right,” she says. “My Ma told me it’s because she kept hearing about all the people who would return and get, what’s the word?” Yueyue pulls out her phone to look up an English translation. “Reverse culture shock. For people who come back, everything seems too fast, too crowded.”
“I always thought she would feel more at home here.” Even though we need three languages to communicate, it feels easy to talk to Yueyue, like she’s another life bonded to me, another path I could have been placed on.
“Wasn’t she the first to leave? She couldn’t see a future. She couldn’t fit into the market life. My Ma stayed because no one wanted to keep the shoe stand. Or that’s what my Ma said.”
I thought I was stuck in the in-between, being not American enough or not Taiwanese enough. But my mother was stuck in her own in-between.
“I guess I didn’t ask her enough before she—before she passed away.”
The clouds are rumbling now, but no one around us makes moves to leave. Only the dog gets up and stretches, slowly leaning her weight back then forward before tip-tapping her feet back to her normal standing position.
“We should go,” I say.
While Yueyue walks ahead, I crouch down and place a grilled prawn on the floor. I had saved it, even though I knew I could be worsening the problem with stray dogs, or encouraging her to follow us further, or causing chain reactions I couldn’t define.
The dog comes over and assesses me with her dark brown, almond shaped eyes. A stray finding a stray. Her ears are perked, one clay, one black. She takes the shrimp between her teeth, then to my surprise brushes her head against my arm. Her fur is surprisingly soft, her ears are velvety, familiar.
For a moment, I am my mother, encountering a different dog whose coat is also red brown like clay, but she is smaller and waiting near a dirt road. She lowers her head as if bowing when I approach. I offer her my leftover portion of rice mixed with lard in a paper box. She looks at me and whines, then she brushes her head against my arm. The dog drags the box with her teeth down the road. I follow with enough distance between us to not scare her, until I see her pull the leftovers into the alleyway behind the school. When I walk by, I see three puppies licking the paper box clean.
“Aster?” For a second, I think it’s my mother calling me, the way she always did with the “r” never curving, but rising up gently. Instead, it’s Yueyue’s voice that breaks through. Unlike dwa yi, Yueyue calls me by the name I know. I am Aster, named after the star-shaped, yellow and lavender flowers my mother saw when she moved to Las Vegas. You can grow where water is scarce, my mother told me. You bring color where the earth exists in beiges and browns. You survive, you thrive.
The clay-colored dog with the black ear pulls away, the shrimp still tenderly held in her mouth. She darts down the slope until she’s out of view, perhaps to find a spot to eat safely, or perhaps there’s someone else waiting for her.
“Coming, I just almost forgot something.”
“I saw you feed her, you know.”
“I can’t help it.”
The dog never re-emerges, never follows us back. In her absence, the stormy sky finally releases. The drops drum on my skin, beating faster and faster. They permeate my thirsty skin, my bones, my tendons, the sinewy parts of me that know, deep down, the name of my mother’s favorite flower.
Angelica Lai is a writer based in Seattle. Her fiction and nonfiction works have appeared in the book collection “Six Words Fresh Off the Boat,” Literary Mama, Columbia Journal, Paper Darts, Firewords, and The Fourth River, among others. She is a senior editor for Slant’d, a nonprofit independent publishing house empowering AAPI creatives. When not writing, working as a digital marketing manager, or negotiating with her toddler, you might find her making food puns on Instagram @punsonaplate.
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