Without fluency in Mandarin, I am cut off from my family, their history, their culture, and everything of theirs that should, in some way, be mine, form a part of me. What I have left are photos of them. Yet the people in the photos convey nothing. Who were they? What were their names? How did they talk? What did they like? They tell me nothing about the subject, and therefore nothing about myself. But even so I can’t toss them out. More connected, more tangled, the modern experience requires establishing an identity, and to establish an identity, one must apply the appropriate labels. Yet they are not always applied with one’s consent, nor are they always completely applicable. I am Chinese, but also not really. But that part of me was taken away gently. How do others in more complicated situations than my own reconcile their identities? Identity shifts in response to the people and culture around us, and as more people move, travel, migrate, flee, they must rebuild who they are. How does personal history,or lack thereof, inform that shift? How does language create access to that history?