The Dash Between Two Dates: How I Let My Story Live

For a long time, the image of a tombstone stayed with me.

Not because of the stone itself, but because of what sits between the two dates. One date marks a birth. The other marks a death. Between them is a small dash, easy to miss if you are only looking at the numbers. But that small line holds everything that mattered. We do not choose the day we enter the world, and we do not choose the day we leave it. The only part that is truly ours is the life lived in between.

That idea followed me for years, even when I did not yet understand what it was asking of me.

For more than twenty years, I tried to write one book and could not do it. The failure was not because I lacked material. It was because I had too much of it, and too much of it was still alive inside me.

I grew up in the shadow of war. As a boy, I lost my homeland in Laos when my family fled communist soldiers who wanted people like us dead. I remember landmines. I remember the fear of movement and the fear of standing still. I remember how death could feel close even when no one said the word out loud.

One night in the jungle, my family became separated. I was alone. There was gunfire. There was no time to think in big, meaningful ways about life or history. There was only the next step, and then the next one after that, because surviving was the only choice I had.

When the running stopped, my family and I ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand. Life there trained the body to pay attention to small things: how much food was left, what might arrive tomorrow, what might not. Hunger had a rhythm. Silence had a weight. Even as a child, I could feel that weight, though I did not yet have words for it.

Years later, whenever I sat down to write about those experiences, the memories were all there. I could see the jungle again. I could feel the fear. I could hear the sounds. Inside me, the story was vivid. On the page, it became stiff and lifeless. I wrote one draft, then another, then another. Each time, the same thing happened. What had been a flood in memory turned into dust in language.

It took me two decades to understand why.

Every time I tried to write the book, I began at the beginning. I always started with the youngest, most frightened version of myself, as if chronology were the same thing as truth. Without realizing it, I kept walking myself back into the darkest moment of my life and then asking that boy to turn pain into art.

He could not do it.

Of course he could not.

I was asking the most wounded part of me to carry the heaviest thing.

The story of my family is also part of the larger history of Iu Mien refugees, a history many people still do not know well. Iu Mien communities were deeply affected by the Secret War in Laos, and many families fled to Thailand before resettling in the United States and other countries. The Mien International Enrichment Network's "Who We Are" page offers important background on Iu Mien history, language, and the Iu Mien (Yao) people, along with the resilience of Iu Mien culture, identity, and community. As someone who has spent years working in Iu Mien culture and language, I knew the history mattered. What I did not yet know was how to tell one family's part of it without being crushed by where it began.

The turning point came in a dream.

In the dream, the book I had never been able to finish spoke to me. It did not sound like a project or a deadline. It sounded alive.

It said:

“You had no choice in your date of birth, and you will have no choice in your date of death. But you have full control of what happens in between.

“That dash between two dates: that is your life.

“I was conceived during that dash, but you locked me inside for more than thirty years.

“If you never let me be born into the world, I will die with you and be buried with you. There will be no legacy.

“But if you let me live, I will never die. I will live on after you.”

I woke up shaken, but also clear in a way I had never been before. The book was not just a task I had failed to complete. It was something waiting to be born, and I had been keeping it trapped inside me. For years I had treated it like work I was avoiding. Suddenly I understood it as life I was withholding.

That realization changed the way I approached the story, but it still did not tell me where to begin. Oddly enough, the answer came from Star Wars.

One day it hit me that one of the biggest story worlds of my generation did not begin at the chronological beginning. George Lucas did not start with baby Anakin. He started in the middle and trusted the audience to find its footing. The more painful origin story came later, after the characters already had shape and weight.

That gave me permission to stop forcing my own book to begin at what I now call Episode 1.

Instead, I started at Episode 3.

I began with a period of my life when I was older and steadier, far enough from the original wound that I could look at it without disappearing into it. I could still remember the details, but I was no longer standing inside the most terrifying part of them. For the first time, I could breathe while writing.

That is when the words finally came.

After twenty years of stopping and starting, the story began to move. I was no longer asking the frightened child to lead. I was letting the adult storyteller lead, and bringing that child into the narrative only when I was strong enough to carry him. The facts had not changed. The history had not changed. What changed was the point of entry.

Then a second force entered the story: time.

A festival was coming up to mark fifty years since the Iu Mien people first set foot on American soil. For our community, it was not just another event on a calendar. It was a gathering shaped by memory, survival, migration, and identity. Fifty years after arriving in America as refugees from a secret war in Laos, Iu Mien families would come together to honor what had been endured and what had been built.

As that date approached, I realized something that should have been obvious much sooner. The history surrounding my book was not separate from the book. It was the book. It was my family, my people, and the story I had been trying and failing to tell for twenty years. There could be no better place to release it than at that gathering.

This time the deadline was real. I could not move it, soften it, or talk my way around it. For years, too much freedom had made postponement easy. Now there was a fixed date in front of me, and it worked on me the way the tombstone image had worked on me: as a reminder that time does not wait for us to feel ready.

So I finished it.

After twenty years of not being able to bring the book to life, I went from that dream to a completed manuscript in one year.

The book became Love in Wonderland: A Family’s Escape from War and a Son’s Search for Home. When I launched it at the festival, I was not simply presenting a title. I was placing a story into the hands of the very community that had lived the broader history around it. What had almost stayed buried inside me for three decades was now out in the world.

That is what still moves me most when I think about the dash between two dates.

One day, my own dates will be fixed in stone. But this story will still be here. The history of my family, the experience of Iu Mien refugees, the search for home, the language and culture that shaped us, all of that now has another way to keep living.

That was the real gift of finally writing the book. I did not just finish something. I let it live.

And maybe that is the question that stays with me now more than any other: what is waiting inside a life, asking to be let out before the dates are set and the dash is over?

For me, it was this story. I could not force it into the world by attacking the hardest part first. I had to begin where I could breathe. I had to recognize that memory alone is not enough; a story also needs a doorway. I had to accept a deadline. Most of all, I had to stop treating the thing inside me like an impossible burden and start treating it like a life that deserved to exist.

That is how this book finally came into the world.

That is how a dash becomes a legacy.