GENDER & PRONOUNS: Non-Binary & They/them.
DATE OF BIRTH & AGE: September 18, 1970 (50).
HOMETOWN: Jackson Heights, Queens, NY.
CURRENT LOCATION: Finch’s Lake.
OCCUPATION: Author & Professor.
HOW LONG THEY HAVE BEEN IN AMORY? Resident — 7 years.
TRIGGER WARNINGS: mentions of homophobia, racism and government sanctioned execution, divorce and adultery.
It was raining on that Tuesday in Shanghai, their mother insistent that she could go to work that day, despite her stomach being so big it felt like just a light breeze would knock her over. But she never made it to work, her water breaking just as she stepped out the door, though the heavy rain was enough to make it seem like it was just part of the weather. It happened fast, a neighbor hearing her scream out, helping her to their car. They called Grace’s father from the hospital and he sped through midday traffic to get there in time. To meet their first born, their hope, their light. On that day in 1968, the rain came down hard, but all their parents could remember was the peace they felt the moment they held Grace for the first time.
Born Meixiu Ko, they never imagined life beyond China and the reality they knew. As a young child, they weren’t aware that they didn’t share the same luxuries as kids around them, under the impression that being in Shanghai meant they were as close to “made it” as possible. But it was the early 70s and China was under communist control, anyone seemingly “counter-revolutionary” were to be executed and that wasn’t the kind of future Grace’s parents wanted for them. So in 1972, the Ko’s packed up and took 4 year old Grace all the way from Shanghai, to Jackson Heights, Queens, New York. .
In their first few weeks, the Ko’s stayed with a family friend and some of Grace’s first memories were of trying their best to be quiet and cause no trouble. They understood from a young age the horrors that their parents had taken them away from. They had seen the pain on their mother’s face as the plane took off and it took years before they considered what it meant to leave home, to leave a whole country that you knew for somewhere so foreign. But like always, they made it work. Grace’s father eventually got a job as a custodian at a local high school and by the time they turned five, Grace’s mother had gone to work as a secretary for an accountant that had an office near Wall Street. And together, they created a life for Grace that was full of love, a deep kind of love that Grace has always done their best to never take for granted.
And Grace was known for being a well behaved, “quiet” kid. As they learned English, they found solace in the books that taught them the language, the tv shows they’d get to watch for an hour a night, the culture that seemed so foreign to them yet so familiar. It helped that Jackson Heights was popular for Chinese immigrants and though they were thousands of miles from Shanghai, they always felt a close connection to their home, to the life their parents had left behind. But they were settled with the life they had. The routines with their parents, their ability to pull all of their attention whenever they got a good grade or perfected one of their mother’s recipes. They enjoyed the fall evenings out on the front stoop as their parents drank tea and watched them bike up and down the street, sure they would always catch their father sneaking a bottle of alcohol out of his shirt pocket to pour into their cups, their little giggles enough to let Grace know that one day they wanted a love like that.
Of course their childhood wasn’t all peaches and cream, but to their memory, the goodness that their parents gave them overshadowed the negativity the world threw at them. There was the inherent racism that came along with being Asian in a country that was in turmoil. Reagan was formally apologizing for the Japanese internment camps in the late 80s, Vincent Chin’s death had trickled all the way from Detroit to New York City and it was the first time in their life that they had started to see their community come together in different ways. The Vietnam War that had started before they were born, ended when they were 7 and they could still recall that day in April and the conversations being had at home about how they had left a country that was now fighting against the very country they lived in.
And then there was the fact that they were a young woman growing up in a world that was just starting to treat women as more than something to make a man shine. But despite it all, Grace managed to find their comfort zone and stayed in it. From an early age, their love of books always led them to the library. They felt like their library card was the key to the city and Mrs. Ko would often come to pick up Grace at the library and find them surrounded by piles of books, begging her to let them take it all home. But it wouldn’t be until high school that Grace would ever consider writing, at least as a means of art, of expression or anything that was more honest than the words that came out of their mouth. They were happy but they also sensed that there was more, more than Jackson Heights, more than just having a crush on the boy that lived down the road, more than the same four friends they had for what felt like forever.
Then, just as they were about to start high school, Daniel was born. Daniel their baby brother, their first best friend, their favorite person in the world. As the first child in the family to be a full American citizen, Grace watched as Daniel experienced the world so differently from the way they had. He never questioned his Americaness, having no ties or memories of China. They watched as he made friends with everyone, always impressive, always with a smile and Grace couldn’t resent him, only admire the work that had gone into giving him a life like that. And in a way, Grace believed that the universe had given them Daniel as motivation, as proof that they had a purpose. And being Daniel’s big sister was a challenge Grace had never backed down from.
For Grace, high school was a blur of helping their parents with the baby, trying to be more social, having their first crush on a girl, discovering their love for writing in their junior year after a particularly magnificent English teacher and spending far too much time dreaming about how hot Linda Hamilton was in Terminator. There were a few crazy parties, some bad dates, a few late nights on the subway with their best friends they had found through the local rec centers after school program. There were a few fights with their parents, growing pains and a growing realization that college seemed like the most life changing thing in the world. They’d be the first in their family to go and though they wanted desperately to leave New York, with Daniel being six at the time and their parents still working, they applied to in state schools only.
In the Fall of 1986, Grace started at Pace University on their Manhattan Campus. With a major in journalism and a minor in East Asian studies, they were determined to keep their tie to their home while also embarking on new adventures in the place they had come to know as home for so many years. Despite not having the most formal campus experience, Grace enjoyed the luxury of having all of New York City be their campus and they saw the city in a way they never did when they were growing up in Jackson Heights. They met activists, poets, fellow writers, democrats, republicans, communists, anarchists and an endless list of more. They went to parts of the city they never knew existed, made friends with drag queens and eventually met the first group of queer people they had ever really encountered. Their first kiss with a woman happened in an empty 7 train car as the sun came up and they were positive they had never experienced anything sweeter.
Upon graduation from Pace, they worked the graveyard shift in the offices of CBS News and had a part time gig at the local library. 4 months after graduation, while they were starting the process of applying to graduate school, Mrs. Ko gave birth to a baby girl. And Grace had never met a challenge quite as fierce as their sister Maya. Being two decades older than your youngest sibling was not something Grace envisioned, though Daniel always makes jokes that it was just a testament to how much their parents loved each other, And in 1991, Grace left to Syracuse University to pursue their masters. It was the furthest away they had ever been from home since coming to the US and it was still in the same state. But the distance and the campus experience was transformative for Grace. It pushed them and one of the first achievements mentioned whenever Grace is introduced at an event is that they published their first book during the summer before their second year of graduate school.
But while it’s one of Grace’s most proud moments, it’s also their most shameful. Their first book, titled The Journey: From Shanghai to Jackson Heights is a memoir, in which the year that Grace spent at home with a newborn baby, working, applying to school, dealing with a pre-teen Daniel, is portrayed as one of the most stressful of their young life. A portrayal that Maya has just started to forgive Grace for. But Grace never expected their first book to get the attention it did but their publisher would always say that it was their writing. It wasn’t just the story, it was the way they wrote it that brought people in and Grace realized for the first time in their life, that their voice was something worth sharing.
When Grace returned to New York in 1993 after graduating from graduate school, they moved into a small one bedroom apartment in the west village while working for the New York Times. Their memoir had gotten them plenty of attention and enough to get them in front of journalists who despite their clear biases, couldn’t help but admit that Grace Ko was a damn good writer. But they still spent a lot of that time visiting home often, getting to know Maya as she grew up, hoping that when she was old enough to understand, she’d read the book one day and find it as something funny to laugh about. (That would later not be the case.)
After two years at the New York Times, Grace entered a PhD program at Columbia University. At 27 years old, Grace felt like they were most at home when they were learning, writing, working on anything that told a story. It was all Grace wanted to do. To tell good stories, to tell stories about people like their parents, like the teachers they had met in high school, like the people they had left behind in China. Many of the pieces Grace wrote for the New York Times gave more voice to the Asian American community than it ever had before and it was something they felt passionate about. And it was during this time in their PhD program that Grace found their love for teaching which would eventually lead to them being a professor at Hunter College, Bronx Community College, Sarah Lawrence College and eventually Columbia University.
It was also in 1995 when Grace met Alana Silvers during their first week of their PhD program. At this point Grace had been with men and women and realized they didn’t really prefer one over the other but rather that they just enjoyed the company of people who moved them. But they hadn’t come out to anyone in their family and they hadn’t anticipated entering into a relationship that would end up being so long term. And it wasn’t, at first. Even though Grace was clearly in love and enamored with Alana’s personality, her writing, her everything, Grace was still hesitant to dedicate themselves to someone when their career was just starting. So they were on and off for the first two years but lots of subpar nights with other people was enough to make Grace realize that Alana was it for them, the one they wanted a future with.
So in 1998 when they were both teaching and writing, Grace working on their second book, Alana working on her first, they moved into a two bedroom apartment in Brooklyn and started to build a life and love like Grace had always dreamed of, one like their parents had. Grace still visited home often and eventually came out to their parents, especially once Daniel figured out that Alana and Grace weren’t just “roommates” when he asked to stay over and realized the second room in the two bedroom was more of a guest room than his sister’s room. And it was tough at first, their parents unable to wrap their head around it. It was Daniel who was their saving grace, seemingly before his time in the way he embraced Alana as another big sister with such ease. It was Maya, however, who just couldn’t get past it. And the older they got, the more the distance grew.
In 2002, at the age of 34, after a lot of conversation, some arguments with their parents, Grace and Alana decided to go ahead with having a child with the help of one of their close male friends. Motherhood had always been something Grace wanted but never expected would happen the way it did. They didn’t imagine they’d be raising a child with a woman, that they’d constantly have to answer questions about who the father was and if Alana was their babysitter. But they protected themselves with their love for each other, their determination to give their child a good life. Allen Ko was born on a sun filled Friday in the middle of the day, Grace’s water breaking an hour after Alana had left the house for her morning lecture. For years, Allen would be known to Alana’s students as the reason they all got to leave class almost as soon as it started.
Grace’s 30s were a blur of diapers, daycare, giving birth to a daughter, no work/life balance, a hectic but beautiful marriage and a fight with her sister that would ultimately result in a silence between them that has lasted over ten years. When Maya was 14 and Grace was 36, Nina had just been born and Maya was old enough to finally read Grace’s first two books. The second was fiction and about anything but their family but there were clear influences of their own experience. To say the least, Maya disagreed with the experience they shared and despite that fact that she already felt weird about Grace being with a woman, the books caused Maya to throw such a tantrum that they ended up having a screaming match in front of their parents house in Jackson Heights.
It put a strain on their relationship with their parents since Maya was still at home, though they called their mother twice a week to check in, three when they were feeling extra lonely. And they never stopped their kids from going to see their grandparents but they refused to see their sister and Maya was happy to refuse as well.
Grace eventually stepped away from teaching and dedicated most of their time to their kids and writing. They eventually bought a brownstone in Brooklyn with a beautiful backyard space and plenty of room for the kids to run around and grow up in without being removed from the city as a whole. But four years after Alana and Grace decided to have their third and final child, Alana’s father fell ill and they were forced to think about whether staying all the way out in Brooklyn was the best choice. Especially when Alana was also being offered a position at Amory University. It was horrible timing and Grace felt selfish for saying how much they hated the idea but moving back to Alana’s hometown felt like the opposite of an upgrade. Of course the town was cute, Grace had visited plenty of times with Alana but it wasn’t the place they wanted to raise their kids or live their life. Not to mention it was even more of a drive away from their own family. Who the hell wanted to drive from Upstate New York to Queens? But ultimately, they gave in and they packed up their beautiful brownstone (one which Grace still cries over) and made the move a few hours north to Amory in 2012. A year after officially getting married once same sex marriage was legalized in New York State. In 2013, Grace published their fourth and most recent book, a fictional story about a family from the New York suburbs who moves back to Shanghai when the father’s parents get sick. It was a New York Times Best Seller and highly acclaimed as Grace’s best novel to date. So much so that Grace is filled with fear that they’ll never be able to top it.
In the seven years that Grace has been in Amory, they’ve become involved with their kids' schools, done a few pieces for the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The New Yorker and various other magazines and newspapers. They’ve built up their social media following, still gives lectures and guest talks and is a frequent contributor on CNN and MSNBC, especially on issues related to Chinese politics and the Chinese-American experience.
If Grace had to put a time on it, Grace would say their relationship with Alana started to deteriorate a year after their move to Alana’s hometown. Everything changed, and the passion and love that had once been there, ultimately resulted in a divorce that Grace isn’t sure they’ll ever recover from. A 50 year old single mom is not who they imagined they’d end up being, but they suppose they have always dealt with difficulty the only way they knew how, with their head held high and the power of their ancestors behind them.
POSITIVE TRAITS: Committed, Passionate, Formidable.
NEGATIVE TRAITS: Jealous, Judgmental, Impatient .
