by Jenny Tang

The author and her grandfather, 1997. Courtesy of the author.

The Progressive

Filtering of Truth

Jenny Tang | Apr 2025 | Issue 44

When I was young I wanted a statue of myself. I was humble, I wanted a mere statue for saving a lake or a patch of forest or something, not to revolutionize the study of truth, like my dad, who wanted to “beat Einstein,” a dream he abandoned four months before graduating with a PhD in Physics to help my mother start an accounting firm in Arizona. He would eventually make enough money to buy a Mercedes-Benz, an achievement so stable, so small compared to what his dad did, which was to abandon school at age seven due to the Japanese invasion of WWII, then live alone in a monastery, become an apprentice to a banker, then switch to being a doctor’s apprentice when he felt guilty counting debts during famine, which allowed him to open his own office in rural villages, which taught him enough to get admitted to the top medical school in the country after years of night study. My grandfather eventually became Kim Il Sung’s personal physician with his own train car to North Korea, and once disappeared from my family for 10 months while he secretly lived with Mao Zedong who secretly was almost blind from cataracts, so ill that he had a body double for his last few years. Meanwhile, my dad became a target of all grandpa’s cathartic anger—the only release for all the pressure and rage and helplessness grandpa felt—the boy who got smacked by ping pong paddles until they broke, who made a makeshift radio out of spare parts only to have it smashed because grandpa thought it distracted from school. The boy who avoided school buildings because of desks flying out of windows during the Cultural Revolution, who left China because my Missionary-taught grandma knew English and was selected to be in the first class of World Health Organization Pharmaceutical Fellows after China’s border opened. She applied to grad schools for my dad while touring American universities. Brown admitted him, Oklahoma gave him a full ride.

So I was born a Sooners fan to my mom who once peeled baskets of oranges as big as her child-body as her first job, who met my dad in Buckeye, Arizona after her dad suggested that she could make money pole dancing. She went to Oklahoma instead, and I grew up knowing my bloodline is linked to dictators who controlled the fate of 25% of Earth’s population, to the poverty that fought cashiers over 25-cent mistakes. That my mouth looks like the mouths that ate out of plastic bags on sidewalks and the mouths that blessed million-dollar gifts. My mouth, hungry at the breathing end of inherited brilliance and abuse.

So when people ask me how I didn’t sense something was off, why I didn’t feel suspicious at the grandiose tales told by a former man in my life, I want to look them in the eye and say:

In my world the path to greatness lies in shadow and sacrifice.

There is no normal.

Only the progressive filtering of truth until it can be captured by mere tales we tell.

Jenny Tang is a Chinese-American writer and poet. She has attended workshops at Tin House, Lighthouse Lit Fest, and Juniper Summer Writing Institute. When Jenny is not writing her memoir or working, you can find her hiking, climbing, pspsps-ing cats, or cooking soup, all while enjoying the breeze of the California’s Central Coast. She is honored to have KHÔRA house her first piece of published prose!