Tonight, I stumbled upon my old journals. Notebooks and notebooks full of writing.

They were all in Chinese.

I wrote every day. Occasionally, between pages of words, I drew a picture. Doodled. I read through my old journal entries. I chuckled, laughed, cried.

The Chinese flowed into my mind like the tears down my cheeks. I had been too busy all year to write as much as I had in years prior, and I was worried that the Chinese would slowly fade away from me. I was relieved to find that I could still read my writing; it was as familiar as the back of my hand.

I wanted to write again.

I pulled out a clean sheet of paper and a pen. I took a deep breath and dove straight in. I didn't think too hard about it, and my subconscious guided my hands into writing down Chinese characters. I wrote for pages and pages, delighted to see that I still knew the written language.

When I was little, I did not see the richness in learning a new language. Like all my other fellow Chinese children, I went to Chinese School every Saturday afternoon for three hours. There, we learned to read, write, and speak Chinese; we also read about the cultures, traditions, and holidays of China. During summer vacations, I would go to China to visit family.

I was able to apply experiences from either Chinese School and visits to China to enrich my time in the other one. It was then that I realized how important learning Chinese was. This was my culture, this was part of my identity, this was the root of my ancestry. Now, everything about Chinese school no longer felt like an obligation; it was my curiosity that pushed me to attend class each week. I wanted to learn about the rich, ancient stories of Chinese history. I wanted to learn about the brush strokes of Chinese calligraphy. I wanted to learn about the modernizing world of Chinese technology.

I simply loved to learn new characters and discover the reasoning for why each character looked the way it did. Each character would be consisted of different parts that, separately, had meanings that could come together with each other to derive a new definition; truly, the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.

So, as I wrote in my Chinese journal for the first time in a long time, I smiled. I still had it - the ability to write in my mother tongue. Symbolically, this meant to me that my Chinese roots run deep. My journal overflowed with pages upon pages of Chinese words that I couldn't help but write down. I gushed with excitement. Though I had left it dormant for so long, I was still able to pick it up whenever I wished; this language would remain in me forever.