Be in the Wild and Free

creative nonfiction
by Ahming Zee

I’m a bird in the woodland, and caught in a mist trap hitched across the trees. The harder I try to break free, the deeper I get entangled. I’m about to get caged, I think.

I awake to realize, with beads of sweat, that it was a nightmare, a reprieve that I’m alive and free, yet clouded with anxiety; It was not just a nightmare, but another nightmare after so many nightmares, for days, weeks, and months. My mind gets hung up on that trap in the woodland: Was that the path I regularly fly through, or was I simply lured into it? I cannot tell, but this nightmare reminds me of a Chinese poem – a one-word Net to the one-word title “Life.” The Net, which was thought to be referring to our social interconnections prior to the Internet age, should now be seen in a new light; maybe the concept of mist trap is what the author, Bei Dao, really meant, as we attest to our humanity that’s constantly stuck waiting for another awakening, and those that ensue. Or maybe its duplicity is open for interpretations with the internal shifts of our daily worldviews depending on where our souls land on a given day.

I was torn switching my career from liberal arts to science at the time my family and I financially struggled to keep our small family afloat, and to retain our valid residence status on a foreign soil. It was a detour in life made out of necessity to succumb to the reality to be able to eke out a living. Yet it’s the power of the pen which we put to paper that represents a voice, an act of faith, the liberty of our souls. And that is universal, regardless of career, race, and social status.

As I sit at my desk every day, leafing through the writings of mine and others’, and meditating on the cultural baggage I’ve carried through the years, I flash on the bits and pieces of memory, episodic and fragmentary, from which I see themes threaded through a common inner journey, the one with thorns and pricks, yet with threads of hope, flickering and glimmering at times, but never get snubbed.

Now being in the wild means that we are in the constant lookout for food and drinks, hoarding them as we see fit, and sharpening our claws and eye-sights for better views in the night, but isn’t that where the fun is that our caged counterparts must have missed?

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Ahming Zee (pen name) is a Chinese American writer based in Boston. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Constellations, Ariel Chart, Sudden Flash, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Door Is A Jar, and elsewhere. Ahming holds a BA in English, an MA in American Studies, and an MS in Library Science. Previously, He served as Assistant Professor of English in Beijing, Poetry Editor for Hawaii Review, and Staff Writer at Ka Leo O’ Hawaii (Hawaii Daily). He is currently working on his debut novel. Find him on X @ahmingzee, and on Bluesky @ahmingzee.bsky.social