| When my father moved to Taiwan, a fax machine and a shared love of music bridged an ocean.  Photograph courtesy Hua Hsu “We were enthralled by the same music, but we related to it differently,” Hua Hsu writes, in a moving and deeply perceptive essay, excerpted from his forthcoming memoir, about the connections and distances he experienced in his relationship with his father, an engineer who built a life in the United States as a young professional before returning to his native Taiwan. After his father went home, Hsu would often communicate with him from America via fax, and the saved dispatches serve as a chronicle of a young man finding his place in the world, and an older man sending back a mixture of guidance and curiosity from afar. One of the subjects the pair discussed was the life, art, and death of Kurt Cobain, of the band Nirvana, in 1994. “That’s the dilemma of life: you have to find meaning, but by the same time, you have to accept the reality,” Hsu’s father wrote. “How to handle the contradiction is a challenge to every one of us. What do you think?” —Ian Crouch, newsletter editor Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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