I still get the horror of my mother every time I walk into my home. That coolness she exhibits, the façade that no one can possibly cross. When I was growing up she was a cold mother who was never there, who was constantly in her own head, locked up in her room, on the cellphone. The originator, she screamed at me all the time because she didn’t know why I was different — like a parent with a child with Downs. Empathy for someone different to you is borne from understanding difference, and I often wonder if someone raised in the East understands difference, when there is no reference point or material to work with. Like two planets, like two passing ships, in rejection, in orbit.