“The Map” 《地圖》is published by San Francisco’s legendary Arion Press as its 2021 spring broadside:

“Arion dedicates this broadside to the Graduating Class of 2021, their families, and their teachers who have persevered through the greatest global pandemic in 100 years.”

Gift a copy to a parent, teacher, or graduate in your life. Please order at www.arionpress.com

I’ve traveled far from my parents since I was eighteen: to go to college in Beijing and to come to America to continue my study in chemistry and biomaterials. I stayed in the US to live and work. For many years, they endured endless worry about my whereabouts and doings, in places often beyond their imaginations. Whenever I visited them in China, my father would examine a map, and show my mother exactly where I would be traveling to next, from meeting friends one subway-stop away, to whatever distant part of the world I might visit. The image of them, hovering over the map, never left my mind. I wrote “The Map” 《地圖》in 2017 for my mother and father. It’s written for all parents and children in the world.

In the fall of 2019, my mother was hospitalized. I rushed from San Francisco to Nanjing to be by her side. Soon after, the Chinese version of “The Map” was published in Xinhua Daily, one of the country’s oldest newspapers. My father and I brought the newspaper to my mother in the hospital. She couldn’t speak, but tears came to her eyes.

In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded. I traveled back to San Francisco for a poetry event with the Chinese Culture Center for the Lunar New Year, right before the lockdown in California. Following Father’s Day, the English and Chinese versions of “The Map” were published side by side in the San Francisco Library’s Poem of the Day series. When Arion Press approached me to publish “The Map” in English and Chinese— I felt that in a vast world of uncertainty, it’s “The Map” of love that guided and led us to each other.