Culture is in your body before you can put a name to it. There is a sort of mysticism in waking from a lazy nap, crust in your sleep-addled eyes, as the scent of something familiar—food tied to a place you may never have lived, cooked the way it was taught to be cooked—fills the room. While you were asleep, the world went on without you: dinner prepared through habit and labor, games from someone else’s hometown played, the television murmuring in a language that does not fully belong to you. These small rituals, sustained by work and repetition, teach you who you are before you learn how to name it.

Then there is that good morning that comes—sarcasm, maybe, or sincerity. Either way, you are welcomed to the table, where there is an exchange of languages that has become its own ragged, messy vernacular, shaped as much by necessity as by affection. Your grandmother asks you something in a language you have to do manual work to understand. Where is the line drawn between one culture or another, between the lives that stay and the lives that leave? Rose Lu’s All Who Live on Islands is a collection of essays that tells the story of family, migration, and identity. The first essay is titled 穷人店、富人店, translating to poor person’s shop, rich person’s shop, telling the story of a dichotomy between classes.

This dichotomy sharpens when Lu describes taking her bu’uah—her grandmother—to the poor person’s shop. It is cheaper there, yes, but more importantly, it is known. Despite being in English, the shelves speak a language bu’uah has been fluent in all her life. Meanwhile, Lu’s mother stays behind at their Whanganui dairy, tending to the small shop that has become both livelihood and legacy. These spaces exist side by side, both familiar in their own ways, telling the story of a family built on work. As Lu says: “My family was poor, but we were the type of poor you could work your way out of.”

At the end of the essay, Lu talks to Bu’uah about her life away from home, in Wellington. asks her a question so simple it carries the weight of a lifetime: poor person’s shop or rich person’s shop? The question does not demand an answer so much as it opens a reckoning. Lu understands then that her wealth cannot be measured only in dollars. As she says, it is present in her ability to spend twenty dollars on a meal made entirely of eggs, but more profoundly it is present in the freedoms bu’uah never touched. She can read and write for a living. She can travel and cross borders and see the world. Her independence is not accidental; rather it is the result of sacrifices made long before her.

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