A Small Corner, Polished

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Every Chinese New Year, my family brought out all this silver tray-basket, shaped like a lotus leaf. As a child, I helped polish every piece — methodically, one by one — until everything gleamed. This tray held dried watermelon seeds, offered to guests at New Year. A ritual of preparation, welcome, and care.

I have not polished it in over sixty years.

I crossed the Pacific five times before settling permanently in the US in 1993 — which means I am technically one day older than my birth certificate says. Each crossing was a small crisis. In Chinese, the word for crisis — 危機 — is made of two characters: danger, and opportunity. Every immigrant knows this without being taught. We didn’t leave because it was safe. We left because we saw the opening inside the danger.

That instinct has never left me. Last week at 4:30am, every smoke alarm in my house went off at once. My partner searched the internet in a panic. I put in earplugs, got the stepladder, found the manual, and unplugged all five alarms one by one. Silence. That is not just how I fix smoke alarms. That is how I do everything — and how most immigrants I know do everything. Quietly. Methodically. Without waiting to be rescued.

The tray is tarnished now. Before I bring it to this exhibit, I am going to polish a small corner of it — just enough to show what it still is. The silver was never gone. I just got busy arriving.

Photo caption if needed.

Grace Cheung-Schulman • Age 77 • Santa Rosa resident

Grace Cheung Shuchlman was born and raised in Hong Kong when it was still a British colony—a bilingual world where she was educated in Chinese and English and learned early to move between two cultures. She has called Santa Rosa home for 23 years, and in 2021 she co-founded AAPIC North Bay—the Asian American Pacific Islander Coalition of North Bay—to build community for people who arrived as she did.