Hal the Green Lantern

As a child, I would often clench my left fist and stretch my arm out in front of me, imagining a Green Lantern ring on my middle finger. Today, my favorite superhero is still Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern. His alien ring can give shape to whatever he imagines through the power of his will. To me, no superpower is freer or more romantic. I hold out my hand, trying to make something appear in front of my fist.

A December afternoon in Shenzhen. My mother and I went, as we often did, to visit my grandmother.

I remember the sky that day being white—not blue, not gray, but entirely white. The sun was nowhere to be seen. There was no harsh sunlight, only a soft white glow spread evenly across the sky, like a light behind frosted glass. My grandmother sat in the armchair opposite me.

My mother was talking to her, half speaking and half shouting. My grandmother’s hearing had grown poor. After a while, my mother went into another room and came back carrying a slightly faded pink cardboard box. She took out an old notebook and handed it to me.

The notebook was worn with age. Every page was filled with copied text, and every page had a large X drawn across it. Several photographs were tucked inside. One of them had been damaged.

In the photograph, a woman held a baby boy in one arm while wrapping the other around a little girl with a bowl haircut and monolids. The girl could not have been more than five years old. Part of her body was missing. I later learned that what had been cut away was the arm of another person holding her. An entire section of the photograph had been neatly cut out along the outline of the girl’s body and the left side of her mother’s head.

I sat upright and examined the photograph carefully. I ran my fingers over the curved edge left by the scissors. It felt soft, yet slightly rough. The little girl in the photograph pressed her lips together, gently biting her lower lip as though she were smiling.

I pointed at the girl.

“That’s Grandma, isn’t it?”

My mother nodded.

“What happened to this photograph?”

“The part that was cut out showed her father. Back then, it wasn’t safe to keep photographs of him, so in the end none survived.”

He had been a county magistrate under the Nationalist government and was executed in 1951. During the Cultural Revolution, even keeping visible evidence of that connection could put the family in danger.

I lowered my head and looked at the photograph for a long time.

I turned to look at my grandmother. She was smiling at us. I opened the notebook again. It was filled with quotations from a once-prominent political figure who was later purged during the Cultural Revolution.

I asked my grandmother, “If you thought what you had copied was so dangerous, why didn’t you just burn it?”

She answered slowly.

“I couldn’t bear to.”

I picked up the photograph again and turned it over and over in my hands. My fingers followed the curved edge where the photograph had been cut. My palms began to sweat. The photograph, already softened by age, grew even softer in my hands. I set it down, afraid that my sweat would dampen it.

She remained hunched over as she talked with my mother. Her back rose in a high curve, her body bent forward at almost a right angle.

I looked at her. Her memories seemed to bend with her back, as though one day they would break and disappear, taking her father’s face with them. I began to imagine the man’s face, what he might have looked like in uniform, and the expression in his eyes as he faced the barrel of a gun.

He was fading. He existed only in memory. When my grandmother, my mother, and I were gone, the last traces of him would disappear too.

I thought of my own memories. I tried to recall that night before an exam two months earlier, a night that had felt so important, but I could no longer remember it. I could barely remember my first week in Germany, either.

These personal experiences are precious. A sudden thought, a dream, or a childhood memory can feel so vivid and distinct at the time, yet when we try to recall it, it may survive only in fragments or be gone altogether. With time, these experiences slip away like water through our fingers.

I want to hold on to them, or at least capture them as they are now. But by the time I act, some are already incomplete. Gaps will always remain. The same is true of my grandmother’s father. I know he existed, but I cannot picture his face. Even if I wrote down everything I knew, what remained would be only a small part of my grandmother’s memories of him.

Later, I began writing fiction inspired by him. I wanted to show this absence—how a person’s existence can fade.

The protagonist is a young man who travels from Taiwan to China, to the city where his grandmother spent her childhood. He wants to find the part of himself beyond his identity as a young Taiwanese man—that indistinct, missing fifth—but cannot. He tries to imagine his grandmother’s father, the expression in his eyes as he faced the barrel of a gun, but it never feels quite right. He searches for the man’s name, the year he died, and the county magistrate’s residence where his grandmother said they had once lived.

Fiction allows me to begin with these gaps. I cannot restore the missing parts exactly as they were, as though repairing an artifact. But I can let something new grow there, or use what I create to convey that incompleteness. The man I cannot see in the photograph becomes someone a fictional character tries to find.

For me, fiction involves preserving, completing, and creating. I can keep the fragments I still remember and give them a literary form that can stand on its own. A story can be complete even when the search within it remains unfinished. The gaps are still there, and they become part of the story.

This is my own ring, and I become Green Lantern as I write. Writing lets me begin with what I still hold and use imagination to give it form. These precious yet incomplete experiences can give rise to something new in fiction.