My dad died and I didn’t look at the body. The decision made a kind of sense, considering the rules of my life up till then, and considering how my dad was found: a few days after his death, decomposing on the couch of his office, in a squat gray building in Albany, California. “A few days” was what they said when I showed up in the parking lot, having rushed from San Francisco in the middle of a workday. As usual, the fog had lifted as I crossed the Bay Bridge from west to east. Less than a mile from where my dad died, I had gone to high school, lived in a series of cheerless rentals, seen my parents get divorced. The light in that part of California had always felt too clear, imparting a bleakness that lays every flaw bare. There was no disguising the meanness of my father’s death: the bare concrete, the ugly building with its smeared glass doors, and beyond them (I imagined) the stained couch that my dad used as a bed, the hot plate where he cooked desultory meals, the office furniture littered with receipts and takeout containers.

The light was clear, the day a blur. I don’t remember which officials milled in the lot. I don’t remember if the person who asked if I wanted to see the body was short or tall, gentle or stiff; I don’t remember the color of their shirt, the cut of their hair. I remember only that they said “a few days,” suggesting that in that indefinite period my dad’s body had changed. Did I want to look?

I hadn’t been afraid when I got the call, but now I was—a vague fear, by which I mean a fear of specificity, a fear of seeing too precisely and having that sight haunt me. I answered automatically, by force of lifelong habit. “No,” I said, and lost my chance to look.

Obfuscation is my inheritance. My parents, like many immigrants, depicted their pre-America lives as mere prologue, quickly sketched. Once, we lived in China. The winters were cold. You were small. Now we live here.

That unwillingness to plumb one’s past is unimaginable to me, but, then again, I’m American. I grew up devouring cold cereal and sitcoms with plots that revolved around girls who preserved the details of their lives in pink satin diaries. I owned such a diary, in America; in America, every life is an exception, every person worthy of a story. “Oh!” someone exclaims at a party when I name some American city I’ve lived in. They have a cousin or a friend from the area, and have I eaten the local food, and what do I feel about the local sports team? In Lexington, Kentucky, circa 1994, very few questions followed when my parents answered, “China.” That was the goal, to some extent. The past became easy to overlook.

Once, I was born in Beijing. The spoiled child of a large, extended family, I was known for asking non-stop questions and staring neighborhood aunties in the eye. When I moved to Kentucky, at the age of four, rules shifted along with time zones. Now I was the latchkey kid of two impoverished immigrants, and life was sparse and tentative. How can one be saucy in a language she doesn’t know? I learned English through books, formally. I stopped asking questions. I kept my gaze down.

The many years and cities and apartments of my childhood blurred together, indistinct because no distinction was made. My parents offered no explanation for why we couldn’t afford Oreos, why we had to move across ten states, why they fought viciously over a sheet of paper. One Christmas, I sobbed in public over my desire for a seven-dollar Beanie Baby. “You don’t love me,” I accused my parents. Visions of dramatic reconciliation danced in my head. But, unlike the parents of American girls around whom sitcoms revolved, my parents offered no comfort. They marched stone-faced from the store. I wouldn’t learn until much, much later about my father’s gambling debts, or the predatory Ph.D. adviser who forced my mother out of her field of study, or the letters from relatives in China advising that we move back.

What I got from my parents, when I got anything at all, was a mythology of the future. It was laid out in painstaking detail: my next homework assignment, my next standardized test, my next year of school, my college applications. Western myths ended with kingdoms won or riches gained, a castle on a hill; my parents’ version of a happy ending was a degree, a white-collar job, a down payment on an American house.

Childhood avoidance became an exhausting adulthood competence. After my dad died, I took a single week off from work, not explaining the circumstances. I paid the funeral parlor and picked up the ashes, called the junk-removal service and paid for that, too. I took a ceramics class, moved in with my boyfriend, scheduled dinners and vacations. I was upwardly mobile, in possession of a healthy 401(k). I stood on the steps, if not right in the lobby, of my promised castle.

Only as an adult have I begun to understand the scope of what preceded me. My parents grew up during the Cultural Revolution, a time when events of mythic proportions engulfed an entire nation—and thereby became normalized. Very recently, I learned that my mild-mannered, rule-abiding mother took part in the Tiananmen protests. She noted this casually as we bickered about something insignificant—maybe the way some young people these days wear their hair. Young people always latch onto fads, my mom said, and then: Tiananmen. She batted away my astonishment. It wasn’t a big deal, because—just like the awful dyed-hair trend of 2017—everyone was doing Tiananmen in 1989. Everyone in that generation experienced mortal danger, or starvation, or hard manual labor. My uncle has a story, told with equal casualness, about how he quit being a picky eater. The key is to get stranded for two days in a jungle with a truckful of other boys hired out to earn money for their families, with no rescue in sight.

There are, among us in America this very day, buying their groceries and paying their car insurance and scolding their children and walking their dogs, millions of Chinese and Mexican and Colombian and Vietnamese immigrants and refugees who should be writ as large as any Greek hero. They are survivors of famine and war, desert crossings and night bombings. They choose to live quietly. They minimize their origins and speak mostly of their children—the real heroes, these immigrants believe, of stories that take two generations to tell.

I count myself lucky to have even a few glimpses of my family mythology. A friend’s father still has not told her about how he, one dark night, swam the channel from mainland China to Hong Kong, to escape, or how he, alone among his companions, survived the journey. The color of the sky, the chill of the water, the pain or fear or elation her father must have felt in those hours, whether the moon was visible or not—all lost to silence. It was the friend’s mother who shared the story, finishing with an admonition: don’t ask your father. In other words: even when you have seen, look away, look away.