Full Circle Investigations: Across the Big, Wide Sea
For the past month, our family has been scattered around the US and Taiwan. For one, I recently moved to a new city in Arizona to work on a research project. Therefore, we apologize for the month-long hiatus.
My maternal grandfather has since passed, but not without showing us our capacity to support each other through the grieving and healing process. One of my favorite lines from an Ani Difranco song summarizes this period for us pretty well: "I know there is strength in the differences between us. I know there is comfort where we overlap."
I wrote the following reflection some two weeks before my grandfather's health plunged, and have since added some more thoughts.
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My maternal grandfather has been hooked to a respirator for the past several days. He is 92 years old, and his health is deteriorating rapidly. My mother’s eyes turn misty any time we bring him up. While her words indicate her acceptance of the naturalness of his decline, her downcast eyes and ever-flowing tears tell another story.
An immigrant’s story will always include chapters on nostalgia, pain, and suffering. My family's story is no different.
A couple of weekends ago, I decided to look into the historical circumstances that led my grandparents to pick up and immigrate, first to Taiwan, and then to the United States. What I uncovered is both fascinating and absolutely humbling. The challenge of untangling the complicated timelines of my grandparents’ lives, while understanding the broader context of their worlds has drawn me closer to them.
While in between cups of cold-brew iced coffee and dumpling snack breaks, I feel that I’m only unearthing a tiny portion of their stories, and that alone has given me new appreciation of my family and our complexities.
I learned that my maternal grandmother grew up as a wealthy landowner’s daughter, but she broke tradition by riding horses and opening her kitchen to the poor and hungry in her village. She also had a bit of a mischievous streak. While she attended class, she never learned to write- she would simply pay her other classmates to complete her homework assignments. My maternal grandfather,on the other hand, was the only child born to wealthy landowners and was a scholar. He is often described as a quiet and pensive philosopher, and made a living designing the intricate embellishments on qipaos in Taiwan after fleeing China. After the Communists took power, they were both forced to flee and leave their families, including partners and children from previous marriages.
My paternal grandfather was "orphaned" at a young age. He was essentially abandoned by his mother after his father died, so that she could honorably remarry into another family. He spent much of his youth working odd labor jobs ranging from a baker’s apprentice to a fisherman, and then a chef when he arrived to New York. He illegally left his service when his boat docked in Brooklyn, NY, and has numerous stories of his time evading immigration officials in NYC. My paternal grandmother married my grandfather at the age of 16, and was truly the mastermind behind investing the remittances he sent home during his time in the USA. She has outlived two children, and my most vivid memories of her involve her in meditation.
The above serves as a snapshot of who my grandparents are, which ultimately serves as a snapshot of fractions of my own identity. What unifies their stories are the struggles and difficulties behind their decisions to leave China, their home, for Taiwan. The wounds from leaving their loved ones in China runs deep, and is a pain that I could never truly understand. In the process of learning about their stories, I am beginning to see my grandparents in new light. I am grateful for their struggles, and humbled that I would have the opportunities today because of their choices. I am blessed for their toughness, their traditionalism, their resiliency, and for their efforts in raising our family.
Growing up, I always knew that the Communist Revolution played a large role in shaping the course of my family’s history. I heard stories about the tragedies that played out throughout the 1940s and trickled into the 1950s, leaving scars that still haunt people to this day.
In 2009, Lung Yingtai, a Taiwan-born writer and well known professor at the University of HK, wrote “Da Jiang Da Hai 1949” (Big River, Big Sea — Untold Stories of 1949), which inspired me to think about the untold stories from my own family. Here is a link to a blog that aims to translate these from Chinese to English: http://bigriverbigsea1949.blogspot.com/.
As Maya Angelou once said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” I cannot imagine one trying to bury these stories. That level of pain is unfathomable to me.
Here begins our investigation into the lives of those who came before us.
