Which was why, when I read the Tao Te Ching for the first time in college, I rejected it as simply too easy. “Flowing like water” sounds innocuous until the water starts flooding your boat, and instead of taking up buckets to dredge it out, you just sit there soaking your ankles until you sink. “Flowing like water” was what led to the tragedy of my childhood. So I put the Tao back on my shelf and wrote my midterm religion essay on Genesis instead.
But now, years later, I regretted my cursory college reading and took a basic online Chinese philosophy course. In it, I learned about the Chinese practice of ancestor veneration—perhaps the oldest form of religion. We build altars to our dead and light incense to them, praying to them for guidance. These ancestors are equipped to advise us because they possess thousands of lifetimes’ worth of knowledge—the wisdom collected throughout our entire bloodline. Adherence to ceremony and tradition were ways we could follow that ancient wisdom and impart it to our children. This intergenerational fount of knowledge helped create the path. The way. The Tao.
But now I was even more confused. If my ancestors provided my family with the path, then why were we intent on blocking our history off with secrets and silence?
So I reached out to Russell Jeung, a professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. He has written many books and co-authored Family Sacrifices: The Worldviews and Ethics of Chinese Americans. I asked him, “The more I learn about the Tao and ancestor worship and the Tao flowing intergenerationally, it just seems like the antithesis of what you would want in terms of secret-keeping and the erasure of history. Do you have any thoughts on that?”
I could tell Jeung was skeptical about my line of questioning from the get-go. There was a long pause, after which I could hear him puzzling hesitantly on how best to respond. “I don’t know if silence is necessarily secret-keeping,” he said slowly. “I’m sure parents don’t talk to their kids about a lot of things. They don’t talk about their sex lives. I don’t know that it’s necessarily a Taoist approach. There are probably things they’d just rather forget. And there is a Chinese popular religion thing where people don’t talk about negative things. It’s why people don’t talk about cancer. You know The Farewell?” he asked, citing Lulu Wang’s Golden Globe–winning and BAFTA-nominated film about her family’s decision to hide her grandmother’s lung cancer diagnosis from her. Her grandmother was supposed to live only six months, but her family thought she would fare better and live longer if they told her she was just fine. The approach may have worked. At the time I am writing this, eight years after her diagnosis, Lulu’s grandmother is still alive.
Jeung suggested that this was not a result of a singular belief system (of which China alone has many) but a culture of positivity and superstition.
“It’s why Chinese people don’t talk about death. When you articulate things and you speak things out, it makes it reality. Right? So by talking about death, you sort of make it come true. That’s why they don’t say negative things during the New Year time. You always say positive, good things. Because you’re speaking that into reality. Have you heard this Chinese saying, ‘Eat bitterness’? You just take that grief and you swallow it.”
“Okay,” I pushed back. “But I can’t imagine swallowing that grief is good for you. I think it can make you sick. And don’t we still learn from passing down hard things?”
“Well…the Western approach is ‘We’ve got to heal, we’ve got to take control.’ And I think that’s a privileged position.” Jeung took a long pause again. “Most of the world expects trauma and suffering. Most people live through it. It’s not an exceptional, one-time experience. So even if you get health issues as side effects from trauma, it’s like, well, yeah. People suffer, people get sick. And so it’s only privileged people who think of it otherwise.”
As most good liberal people do when they are called out on their privilege, I withered in shame. Privilege seemed like a bad word. But something about this didn’t sit right with me—if my desire for accountability and acknowledgment was entitled, did that mean disempowered people did not deserve justice? Still, as I hung up the phone, my family’s voices scolded me: “Ah girl. You are just too American.”
* * *
—
A couple of weeks later, I spoke to Hien Duc Do, a professor of sociology and interdisciplinary social sciences at San Jose State University, and he also suggested that I was misplacing my blame—but not because I was privileged. First, he suggested that their “forgetting” was not so much cultural as it was a case of good old dissociation. This was a fair point. After all, hadn’t I forgotten wide streaks of my childhood in my effort to survive? Do brought me out of my cultural obsessions to recognize that this was not a uniquely Asian American problem. Plenty of white Americans of the Greatest Generation had no interest in speaking about their time on the beaches of Normandy, either. I have Jamaican and Mexican and WASPy friends whose parents also preferred to bury their family secrets in a hole in the woods as a survival mechanism.
Then he encouraged me to consider that the blame should not just rest on Asian culture, because the American culture within which our community existed had a significant role to play in the perpetuation of these secrets.
“In America, there’s the pressure to assimilate, to do well, and to not reveal anything negative about our society,” Do told me. “To be the grateful refugee because the United States has allowed us to become successful. It would be ungrateful to reveal how traumatic or difficult that was, so it’s easier to point to the success, to go along with the pressure of the model minority myth.”
America herself is called the melting pot for a reason. We are systematically encouraged to forget, to blend in. At Piedmont Hills, my white English teachers assigned only one book by an Asian American—The Joy Luck Club. I guess we did also read The Good Earth, a book written by a white woman about a Chinese family, which was full of stereotypes I chafed at. Our history classes covered the Revolutionary War up to World War II. We never learned about the Vietnam War or Korean War—though you’d think the history teachers would have attempted a unit, considering at least a quarter of our population was Vietnamese. To this day, one of my Vietnamese friends, a child of refugees, has no idea whether the communists came from the North or the South.
On the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., there are no names of the Vietnamese soldiers who fought alongside Americans. Or the Korean, Iraqi, Cambodian, or Hmong soldiers who sat in the trenches with us over various wars. There is no memorial for the Afghan interpreters America left behind to die in exchange for their help. We have not made remembering them a priority.
But as Paul Gilroy writes, “Histories of suffering should not be allocated exclusively to their victims. If they were, the memory of the trauma would disappear as the living memory of it faded away.”[1]