They had to cut her open to get me out.

A caesarean that was clean, clinical, but no less sacred.

Not the gentle arrival some imagine, but mine nonetheless.

I came into the world not with ease, but with insistence. A scar left behind, a signature before I’d even learned how to sign my name.

It was October 1982.

Guangdong, a port city in the far south of China, brushed by the South China Sea. XS District, to be exact. Most likely the No.2 Hospital. A practical kind of place. The kind that didn’t need to be beautiful, just capable of beginning something.

My parents were both 28.

My father, Choi, as his surname would later travel. A man already immersed in circuits and screens, working as a computer engineer at a time when “technology” was still made of metal, wires, and quiet ambition.

My mother, Zhao, had just stepped off the navy ship and into her next chapter: Bank of China. A blazer replacing the uniform. But make no mistake, she carried both kinds of strength.

They were both born in Guangdong, but they weren’t exactly local. Their parents were migrants from other cities, part of that quiet post-revolution generation who moved not for adventure, but for survival. Not tourists, builders.

I was their second child. But the first to stay.

There had been another before me, a quiet soul who passed on almost as soon as they arrived. That loss was never loudly spoken about, but you can feel it, even now, in the hush between family stories.

So when I came, I wasn’t just a baby.

I was a promise fulfilled. A plan not broken.

A small, squirming anchor for their future.

We were a small family. Just the five of us.

No siblings. No chaos.

But plenty of stories folded into silence.

Love in the shape of bowls of rice left on the table. Hands that didn’t always hug, but always fixed the heater when it broke.

If someone had looked through the glass of that hospital room, and maybe someone did, they might have seen a newborn flailing like he was trying to swim through air.

They wouldn’t have known who I’d become.

But they’d have seen the spark.

The unsettled energy.

The quiet refusal to just be still.

That was me.

The boy with no memories yet.

But already, the story had begun.

Reflection

I didn’t choose the scar, but it chose me.

It marked the beginning, and maybe shaped everything that came after.

A mother with two lives already under her belt.

A father who could take machines apart and put them back together, even if feelings were harder to engineer.

I was born into a generation of movement, of reinvention.

And somehow, that became part of me too.

This isn’t just nostalgia, this is mapping.

This is saying: Here is where it started. Here is how I began.

Some stories begin with a kiss.

Mine began with a cut.