I’m Cynthia Lin, the writer and director of A Funeral Procession of Fireflies. 

I was born in the United States and sent to Fuzhou, China, as a baby. For five years, my great-uncle and great-aunt raised me. They were the people I called my parents. My real mother and father existed only as distant presences — voices on the phone, money in the mail, a feeling of being watched from somewhere I couldn't see.

Children like me are called "satellite babies." It is a long-standing practice in the Fuzhounese diaspora: parents work overseas while their children are sent back to China to be raised by relatives. When I returned to my parents at age five, I arrived in a country I didn't remember, to a family I didn't recognize. 

Seventeen years later, I went back to Fuzhou. I lived again with my great-uncle and great-aunt on the same old street, not yet demolished for high-rises. Slowly, things returned — the sound of firecrackers, the smell of frying snacks, the cadence of the Fuzhounese dialect I had lost as a child. I began interviewing other satellite children. One described his absent parents as spirits — protective when he behaved, punishing when he didn't. I remembered that feeling. A Funeral Procession of Fireflies began there.