— crossing oceans
/ march 18, 2024
We all like to believe we are in control. But what if we are actually being controlled by an intricate web of scars that stretch from your most distant and reachable past? What if you could clear the web and see the truth of your nature? Would you be willing to get lost in the process of detangling, or would you choose to keep living enmeshed in an unseen time?
When I was 24 years old and still living in New York City, I used to stare at my hands with the strange sensation that I was living through the eyes of my mother. In these moments I would be overcome with complex, dark emotions that seemed to spawn from experiences that I had never personally encountered.
These emotions haunted me and dictated many of my daily decisions. I drank almost everyday and lost myself in the rage of nightlife in an attempt to ignore the well of feelings. Maybe even in an attempt to slowly kill myself. I couldn’t articulate why or exactly what I was feeling. I could only feel it pulsing in my body; lifetimes and generations of grief, shame, and anxiety flowing from my maternal line and into my bloodstream.
For many years the thickest fog existed around my mother. There was always a part of herself that she kept hidden from me. It was the life she lived in Taiwan before immigrating to the United States. Maybe a lot of children feel this way about their parents - that they are strangers. Until we get older, it’s hard to realize that our parents lived countless lives before us, or understand how exactly their past drips into our present.
The most contact I had with my mom’s family was during my younger years, when my Ahma (grandmother) used to spend a few months at our suburban home in North Carolina. She was a quiet woman with simple, elegant clothes. She was a Buddhist and she practiced Tai Chi in our backyard, adorned in a white uniform with a yin yang symbol stitched onto the left breast pocket. Besides these superficial interactions, Taiwan seemed like some magical tiny island, very removed from my American upbringing.
So why did my mom’s inability to divulge her family secrets make any difference to me when I was out in New York City living out my version of the American dream? Somehow my karma was intrinsically tied to her. Without this information, there were parts of myself that felt formless. I kept being pulled down into a well of unexplainable darkness. Where did this shame come from? Where did this fear come from? I felt stuck and destructive in my present because my knowledge of the past was such a black hole.
Even though we are all separate souls, maybe these karmic family cycles chain together over generations, locking us in patterns until someone decides to look for the key. Maybe the key is just to look in the first place.
By the time I was 27 years old, my lifestyle had become too destructive. It was a miracle I was still alive. Everything appeared to be a lie through my eyes, which looked with fear and pain. The only thing I could think to do was to run away to Taiwan and see what would happen.
Six months later I touched down in Taiwan, a place where I couldn’t speak the language and had no close friends. I witnessed my mom speak Taiwanese for the first time in my life. I didn’t even know that was a language before. I felt seen in the quiet, subtle ways that certain young Taiwanese people move, like the wind.
Once my mom went back to the U.S. I was left alone in her childhood city, and we were separated by an ocean for two years. Again, I would often look down at my body and feel her living through me. But this time the feelings were tied to very specific experiences. I understood the loneliness and disconnection of being a foreigner in a new country. I understood the consequences of leaving family and friends behind to chase after something unknown but potentially better. I found euphoria in the empty space of my old life, in the infinite possibilities of being anonymous. I began to wonder again about my mother’s reasons for leaving. What drives a person to want to run away and never look back?
In October of 2021, my Ahma passed away in her sleep at the age of 88. My mother traveled to Taipei to attend the funeral, and I saw her with new eyes. We spent the night together in her adolescent home and went to the funeral ceremonies during the day. At the funeral home, we spent hours chanting with the monk, throwing joss paper into a huge fire, and worshiping my grandmother’s spirit through prayers and prostrations in order to help her cross peacefully to the other side. I had never witnessed my mother cry so much. I felt my Ahma’s spirit wash over me, pouring hot waves of love into my body as we drove through a misty highway and up towards the mountainside temple where we would set her ashes to rest. As we drove back down the mountain, I felt the weight of my mother’s grief as she leaned against me in the car.
In the days that followed the funeral, my mom and I spent many days together talking and walking through Taipei. Maybe the grief unlocked certain memories in my mother. Or perhaps the passage of time had become so apparent. Either way, after so many years of brushing off my questions about her past, she finally began to open up, or spill out. Almost at once, the fog that covered her Taiwan chapter began to lift.
—This is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for clarity and privacy—
Linda: How did you make the decision to move to America?
Mom: I just wasn’t happy in Taiwan, and I had a few friends who went to the U.S. to study. I didn’t give it too much thought. I just wanted to get out of Taiwan. At the time, tourism wasn’t allowed yet so you couldn’t go to a foreign country except for work or study, or it required a lot of money. My family never thought they would send their kids to the United States. For a Taiwanese family, it wasn’t so common to think of sending kids there. They would send them to Japan.
Linda: Why were you unhappy in Taiwan?
Mom: Part of it was family, my dad wasn’t doing too well in his career and we did get harassed. I was just very young and felt cornered into a certain thought and couldn’t see the big picture about my living condition. I didn’t like to deal with the phone harassment of people coming to ask for money. My dad was a builder and he didn’t have enough resources to support his interests. He wanted to build a dream house, but he didn’t have enough money to support that. My mom had to borrow money from her friends and family, even his siblings had to loan him money. It was just the old way of doing business, your resources depended on your family members. So in there, I just felt trapped, I wasn’t happy with that situation. I was ok, but somehow I just felt ashamed. I felt ashamed about a lot of things when I was younger. Now you look at it, it probably wasn’t anything to worry about, but back then as a young person, I thought everybody had a better life than me.
Linda: I remember you telling me that you used to have nightmares about not being able to find a job in America, what was that about?
Mom: In Taiwan I had a job for a few years and felt like I wasn’t doing too good. I just couldn’t land a good job. Either the pay wasn’t good or the work didn’t feel good. I was kind of old, around 26 years old. I was always scared that I would have to go back to Taiwan and look for a job and I wouldn’t be able to find any. That was in my dream for a long time, for a few years, until my early thirties.
At the time, one way to find a job was through your friends or relatives. But for me, I didn’t have that and I had to rely on the newspaper listings. I just didn’t know how to get a better job.
Linda: Do you remember how you felt when you first got to America?
Mom: Oh the road looked so big. I landed in Los Angeles and stayed for ten days. Then I flew to Louisiana and it became so small. I have a pretty good memory of the first school, but I changed schools a few times.
Linda: Oh you did?
Mom: Yeah, I’m a rolling stone gathering no moss. Have you heard that?
Linda: No, what is that?
Mom: That’s a saying. The person who cannot succeed just keeps changing. I think mainly because I didn’t know myself. Even now I don’t know myself too much. I’m just more open and susceptible to what’s coming. Even in high school my friends called me an old lady.
Linda: Why did they call you that?
Mom: They saw me, I didn’t see myself. Maybe because of the way I cut my hair, the way I dress, the way I talk. I was probably just too old fashioned. It’s possible that was true, but that was just what they saw. I didn’t see it in myself.
Linda: Did you ever feel like you were missing out on something in Taiwan by choosing to be in the U.S.?
Mom: Not really. I always thought the U.S. had a better life. I like the more big, open space.
Linda: Did you ever worry that you would lose some of your Taiwanese culture?
Mom: Not really. Why would I lose my Taiwanese culture? Once you have that, it’s with you forever. I just felt sorry that I didn’t have access to things like Tai Chi, temples, or places to get the books that I wanted. But I got used to it.
Linda: How do you feel being in Taiwan this time?
Mom: It feels ok. I’m past the stage of being emotionally upset or whatever. I’m at the point of acceptance now. I’m more at ease with everything that has happened.
Linda: What if I had asked you thirty years ago?
Mom: Taiwan has gone through a lot of changes since I left. Even when I came back with you in 1995, I felt so many changes already. And every time I came back there were more changes. The part that I didn’t like were all the high rise buildings. Even though there is more convenience, I felt like I lost the peace. The city lost its peace.
Linda: So it’s not the place that you knew.
Mom: Yeah, right. Totally different. Last time in 2009 when I came back with your brother, it felt very foreign. Now I’m more adjusted to see it in its current form, but yeah it’s very foreign. The neighborhood where Ahma’s house is has changed so much. It used to be so peaceful. In the back where the school is now, it used to be a vegetable farm. There used to be a young widow with her young son who worked there sometimes. But I guess you just have to gradually accept what isn’t there, and what is there.
———
Before I could accept the conversations and events of this time with my mother, I had to walk through a death portal of grief and mourning. I mourned the passing of my grandmother, there was now an empty space in Taipei without her. I mourned for my mother, for the child inside of her that had to carry shame and couldn’t access resources and safety in her home or in her country. I mourned for myself, for the childhood I wish I had where I could be held closely by my family in Taiwan. And I mourned for the time spent holding the pain of the women before me.
There was also relief and validation. I had known these stories all my life through the sorrow that reverberated through my body. I had known, but now there was proof. Now there was proof of my own power and inner knowing. In a dark room I could still feel my way to the truth.
By listening to and questioning the pain in my body, and subsequently grieving for the stories of my mother and her past, my displaced sorrow was illuminated. I could finally place timelines and images to feelings. The unknown pain moved from inside my body to in front of my eyes. The cycles of suffering took shape and I could turn the storms of chaos into dust. I was able to detach myself from the stories, see them as my mother’s own, and witness my separate body moving through time and space.
Now two years since the passing of my Ahma, my body and mind have softened as I continue to detach from what isn’t mine. When I see my mother I have an awareness of both separation and compassion. This process of ancestral alchemy is not easy, and it might be never ending, but it is worthwhile. When we are able to free ourselves from the spirals of the past, only then do we have a chance to walk into a clear, open space and create new life for an entire family line. ///