In August, we bring a set of new full-time writers to the blog. Today, please welcome Grace Hsu (‘25), who will be writing for us on the 12th of each month. Grace graduated from Calvin in 2025 with a major in speech pathology and a minor in English. A phonetics nerd outwardly but a poet at heart, Grace currently resides in Taipei, Taiwan, where she teaches English at a language school. Apart from writing, you can find her reading, running, and eating inordinate amounts of Thai coconut curry.
Last year, in the months before the snow, I noticed what seemed to be a father-son duo walking around the park across the street. They were both short, stocky, one of them clearly a smaller version of the other. Almost every day in the late afternoon, whether I was embarking on a run or tiredly walking home from our after-school program, I saw them. They rarely spoke; I think once the father beckoned the son back when he’d gotten distracted by some cool object near the sidewalk. But the rest of the time they were doggedly walking.
Seeing them made me wonder—would I be able to commit to a walk every afternoon like that? Were they motivated by exercise or love for the place they were in? My own routines were so in-and-out, so variable, that while the people at my ministry recognized me, I was not sure anyone else in the neighborhood did.
The founder of our ministry said that ten, fifteen years ago, the park was a locus of gang activity. But in recent years, there’s been a shift. Families show up to the playground in the afternoon. The community building in the middle has a mural of sprawling flowers in red, blue, white, yellow. In the spring, picnic blankets join the dandelions in dotting the new grass. And in the fall, I suppose, fathers and sons walk incessant laps around it.
Lincoln Park is certainly still scruffy around the edges—there’s an astonishing amount of little liquor bottles strewn near the sidewalk, evidence of what happens when the sun goes down and the families go home. But at the same time, cherry trees blossomed on one corner of the park during spring. I see vitality in things like the community gardens and in the prayers of our middle schoolers week after week.
I think this growth is something that takes staying through the seasons to notice. I’m glad I glimpsed it in the months I was passing through.
Five years ago, I moved to Grand Rapids, knowing this city would never be forever for me. I miss the humid little island across the ocean that I call home. I have had over a dozen dreams of wandering the dense metropolis of Taipei and awakened with a pit of disappointment in my stomach.
But at the same time, my roots have grown down into the River City. Summer mornings spent walking to Fulton Street Market. Falls where I look forward to ArtPrize. The surge of pride in my chest when I learn the roads in yet another corner of the city and can drive there without using Google Maps. And I have run the 0.59 miles (yes, I measured) around Lincoln Park countless times, lapping the flower mural, avoiding the tripping hazards of an uneven sidewalk.
This is how I stumbled into owning a place I merely thought I would stay in. And this is why I suspect, next time I move on, I will see the streets of Grand Rapids whenever I close my eyes.
Now, I’m applying to jobs in Taiwan much sooner than I thought I would. And maybe this is why the commitment question, the rootedness of father and son, still bothers me. I am choosing to move on, to learn another city from the bottom up, right when some pieces of belonging were beginning to click into place here in the Midwest.
So I am left to chew on a question that follows cross-cultural kids turned cross-cultural adults (or really, anyone who moves): when your world changes around again, how do you do it well? How do you push past the shock and begin to put down roots?
I hope it will involve curiosity as I learn new roads, even as they are more sprawling and have harder-to-memorize names. I desire the measure of commitment it takes to find a new cafe to frequent, and to show up at the same time every week. As I fall into new community, I want to open up a little faster, reach out with more courage, be less afraid of hurt.
And, I hope to find another running trail—around another park, perhaps, even if it brings back echoes of the places I’ve left behind, places that I now know I’ve loved.
Grace Hsu graduated from Calvin in 2025 with a major in speech pathology and a minor in English. A phonetics nerd outwardly but a poet at heart, Grace currently resides in Taipei, Taiwan, where she teaches English at a language school. Apart from writing, you can find her reading, running, and eating inordinate amounts of Thai coconut curry.
