Mei / Steph writes essays / CNF
Mei Wen is a Chinese Filipino writer who explores her relationship with herself, her family, and art through essays. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in diaCRITICS, Spellbinder, The Lumiere Review, Anak Sastra, The Ekphrastic Review, After the Art, and 11 x 9: Collaborative Poetry from the Philippines and Singapore, among others. She enjoys nurturing communities, film photography, and watching cat reels. Born and raised in the Philippines, she now lives in Switzerland. Mei Wen is a pseudonym.
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Featured works
about
First published in diaCRITICS, in 2023.
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This essay is pretty close to home as I interrogate (for the first time in a long time) my background and heritage. Also, I’ve always wanted to include a bit more explicitly some of my politics in an essay, and I’d say I’m pretty successful on this one.
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I doubt I could have written this essay when I was much younger and only starting to write “creative nonfiction.” I wasn’t mature enough in my late teens, and I didn’t have the emotional and physical distance I needed to write about my Chinese and Filipino upbringing with tenderness while still being critical. I was also weighed down by my experiences of being read by people I wasn’t writing for, people who seemed dismissive (“I didn’t get it,” “I couldn’t relate”) and only demanded context upon context without recognizing that maybe the piece wasn’t for them. This one’s for me and for all those who are neither here nor there, and both here and there.
Acknowledgments: Julienne Maui Castelo Mangawang and Isabelle Kish, for workshopping the essay with me; Andy Lopez, Louie Anne Mapa, Theo Itchon, Carlo Laurena, and Lio Mangubat, for reading the initial version of the work; Rafael Mirafuente, for being the person I can talk to about everything in the essay and allowing me to untangle my thoughts.
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Trivia: This essay received 2 rejection letters and 2 acceptance letters (my withdrawal was overlooked, hence the extra acceptance!).
about
First published in The Lumiere Review, Issue 11, in 2022.
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My maternal grandfather passed away, widowing my grandmother, on my first wedding anniversary. In some ways, I wrote this essay to see if the timing meant anything. My grandfather being in the late 90s, my family knew his time was fast approaching. It also didn’t help that in the photos from my wedding, I thought my grandmother didn’t look so cheery. This unsettled me, since she had sounded excited when she called me loads of times before for wedding updates. Did she sense anything on my wedding day? What was on her mind?
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I wrote the piece to explore that. The essay is in the future tense and in the 2nd-person point of view because I also wanted the work to capture the feeling of imminent loss and how that loss lingers; to bring comfort, and to show what grief looks like in a regular multicultural family, or a family of immigrants.
Acknowledgments: Andy Lopez, for sharing her love for the 2nd person with me; Charlize Recto, Clarice Sanchez Meneses, Theo Itchon, Brigitta “Ega” Hegarini, for their feedback at workshop; Izo Lopez, for encouraging me to write about the circumstances; Rafael Mirafuente, for being the person I can vent to, cry to, bounce crazy ideas off with, and for making me see my family better.
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Trivia: This essay was drafted and scrawled in my journal in March 2022, a few days after I lost my guakong. It received 6 rejection letters.
about
First published in Spellbinder, Winter 2023 Issue, on 1 January 2023. Republished in Pandan Weekly.
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A month into the 2020 community quarantine, like most people, I started feeling claustrophobic at home. I decided to read more, and I blogged/journaled again (in a private space). One of my first entries would become “Alone with a Book,” a personal essay about reading, the erosion of a friendship, and learning to be a friend to myself.
The blog post was easy to write. I had no expectations; I was just focused on expressing myself. But it would be difficult to edit, to turn it into a coherent-enough piece for other readers without losing any of the scatterbrainedness that comes with loss and guilt. In the many, many drafts, I was all over the place and hiding behind criticisms of society and social media. I was angry, and it would be much later on when I would realize that underneath the anger was heartbreak. A year probably went by when I knew (on a random day, when I was brushing my teeth—nothing special) that the essay needed me to just convey what I truly felt about losing someone’s friendship, and why I felt what I felt.
I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have come to that conclusion if it weren’t for all the things I tried articulating in the earlier drafts. If I hadn’t thought so loud, if I didn’t stumble. There’s a quote somewhere here about the journey and not the destination. But also, this is how the mind works, how life works. Even if the dozens of paragraphs I wrote didn’t make the final cut, they’ve been vital to me both as a person and as a writer.
Acknowledgments: Louie Anne Mapa, Charlize Recto, Paolo J. Cruz, Brigitta “Ega” Hegarini, Rafael Mirafuente, and other SEA Lit Circle folks, for helping me sort out my thoughts in various drafts.
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Trivia: The first draft was written in September 2020. This piece received 8 rejection letters.