By Belana Beeck
What does it mean to heal your inner child? To overcome past trauma? To find the puzzle piece that had been lost years ago, or in another life?
In a story in Pete Hsu’s short story collection, If I Were the Ocean, I’d Carry You Home, “Korean Jesus,” Hsu explains that the healing process means to be granted a wish, writing, “This second wish only comes to a few, just a few, and by just a few, I mean those few who didn’t wish for puppies and candy. I mean those few who wished for something else. Something desperate. Those are the few who sometimes come to be ready to be little again. You get me? To be little again. To be innocent again.”
And what does it mean to be innocent? Because there’s a difference between innocence and naivety. You can choose to hang on to nostalgia, to let your senses remember the way it feels to be blanketed – a comfort. You can choose to step back from mundane rituals and breathe—sit on a swing perhaps?—and remember what it felt like, when you were young long ago. And you wonder why you haven’t done so, why days go by and you don’t just go to a park and enjoy swinging the way the characters in the story “Main & Maine” choose to do. There’s a beauty in feeling the breeze whistle past your skin, the shout loud in your ears but comforting all the same.
It’s like when you capture the small moments, the in-betweens. Whether that be a mental snapshot or a literal one with a camera. Capturing seconds, people, strangers, yourself, and learning opportunities. Capturing the “ghosts, or just normal people caught in twilight, in-between where they’re coming from and where they are going” the way a photograph does in “Astronauts,” a story about a man who transports undocumented Chinese into the U.S.
Those moments then feel visceral, tangible. They’re special because they’re turning points. Instances where you realized that something within you shifted, clicked into place. You grow, you change, you heal, you ignore the doubts, the judgment, whether it comes from the voice in your head or the mouths of others. At the end of the day, Hsu concludes in the story, “A Penny Short,” it’s, “who [you] are in [your] heart that counts. It doesn’t matter if [you] have the wrong job or marry the wrong person or never play the cello again, as long as [you] still love the things [you] love, deep down.”
In the titular short story, Hsu once again pushes aside the doubts and judgements and expands upon the idea of how nothing matters at the end of the day other than those who love you: “He says, ‘The ocean will take everything, eventually.’ … He wants to explain something about loss to Scharlene, but he’s not saying it right. He tries to think of a better way to say it but nothing comes to mind.”
Loss is inevitable, whether we lose people like our friends and family, our objects, our homeland, or even our memories. Sometimes it’s ourselves. It comes back, if you let it and if you want it, in some form or another. Like a wave pulls back and then pushes forward, it rocks you home. Sometimes you have to go into the ocean initially as a piece of glass – edgy, cutting –to then be able to come out of it a beautiful, smooth stone. Thus, to be your own ocean.
At first, I thought this book would present two characters, one that guides the other—who’s the titular “I”;who’s the “You”? And it does to an extent. It beautifully portrays the lives of many characters jumbled up in a giant universe of moments. And all these characters learn something from their neighbors, teaching the reader about luck, how to accept change, how to let go of pains, and how to come to terms with feeling small in a giant galaxy.
But maybe the “I” and the “You” can also be oneself. Adults talking to their child selves. It’s important to be your own ocean, Hsu argues. It’s important to be your own constant, lover, friend, mentor, and cheerleader. Without that, we get lost in that ocean. It’s too big, too dark, and too strong. You can’t just float and let it do all the work. Without our conscious choices, who knows where it will carry us. Constant change and reflection, constant waves and movement.
And home? It could be a place or a person. If a person, make sure it’s yourself too.
If I Were the Ocean, I’d Carry You Home is available from Blue Cypress Books, Bookshop, Elliott Bay Book Company, Green Apple Books, Skylight Books, and Waucoma Bookstore.
Belana Beeck is a prose and poetry writer, interested in fantasy, historical, and contemporary fiction. She is also eager to showcase her Latinx culture through her work. She earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Chapman University.