In her novel Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, Marilyn Chin, whose family moved to the US from Hong Kong, writes: "Deep in her heart, she knew that each step backward would only mean regret – the vector goes in only one direction, the homing geese must find their new nest, the 10,000 diasporas will never coagulate – there was no way back to the Middle Kingdom."

Since March 2020, the pandemic has forced us into our homes. At the time of writing, more than 575,000 Americans have died of Covid-19. As borders have closed, I became more and more trapped in the fact of my Americanness. In the country where I was born, I watched years of inflammatory news headlines and anti-China rhetoric explode into anti-Asian violence. In the WeChat group, worried relatives talked of US Covid death tolls and stories of street attacks.

While Americans have been told to stay indoors, life in China has been near-normal for some time. In October, my oldest aunt, an insatiable adventurer, went on vacation to Everest. While she was there she piled a few stones on top of each other, a miniature Tibetan altar. She sent us a picture via WeChat. "So their souls may rest in peace," she said in the group. Another aunt replied: "You are at the spot closest to heaven, and closest to Mom and Dad."

Since my grandparents passed, their children have filled the WeChat group with messages to them. They address my grandparents' spirits directly, sometimes with heartfelt messages of longing, sometimes with regret, sometimes diary entries with news, complaints and gossip. For the parts where my Chinese wasn't up to it, there was in-app machine translation available, its innocent English, though fraught with errors, achieving a kind of poetry.