My family today is a patchwork of strong women, absent of men, by circumstance. They are true matriarchs in the image of my grandmother who raised me from infancy and my mother, a physician, who guided me to adulthood. — This is the complete, unpublished essay text I wrote for the New York Times piece “Keeping Love Close” — what love looks like in my family in this time of anti-Asian hate. One often hears of a child raised by a single mother as a disadvantage to the mother, child…