Ancestral Embrace: Through Grief and Joy
An invitation to embody belonging.
Part of Vòng Vòng’s Connecting Dots Series
Grief is a relationship that invites you to relinquish control and sustain the unsustainable: radically accept what was, has been, is, will be, and the flip sides to it all; an irrefutable, repetitive request to return to and be in the now.
For the Global Majority, diaspora is part of our collective, ancestral fabric. While it’s a unique journey to each grouping of individuals, it shares a universal quality of all eventuality that there are always both light and shadow to living. This, too, can be embraced.
The Elusive Ancestry
It was during my master’s degree in counselling when we wrote a million papers on identity reflection that I realized I didn’t know the names of my grandparents.
Perhaps it’s because of the language or my family culture, likely both and more. In Cantonese, we are trained from infancy to address the adults around us based on their apparent age by their role (all gendered): mom (媽咪), dad (爸爸), brother (細佬), grandpa (爺爺), grandma (嫲嫲), big aunt (大姑姐), aunt two (二姑姐), aunt three (三姑姐), big uncle (大伯), uncle two (二伯), uncle two’s wife (二伯娘)… these are some of the relatives I have on my father’s side. Today, I’m only in touch with my mother and brother.
Within the extended family, there wasn’t much sharing of stories about the people and events that make up “our” history. Within our so-called nuclear family, many things were unspoken of, kept secret, unexplained. The unknowability hung in the air during much of the family time. Even as a child, our relationships felt porous to me.
What does it mean to not know the names of your relatives? There’s something unnerving about it, like, how did that happen?
Having a relationship with ancestry is a privilege
The relationship with ancestry was there for me to have throughout my upbringing. The hike as an entire family to visit the grave of my father’s father on a massive hill, covered with other graves. We offered food, took turns to say a word or two to him. The neatly piled oranges at the small altar at home. The cremation site. The joss papers for mom’s dad that we burned and burned, with a chance to say a word or two to him, too.
After immigration at the age of 13, for no tangible reason, I began to feel as though my ancestry had been erased, especially as my white counterparts and their families consistently showcased the ability to regale stories about their ancestors at length, as if they were also there, sharing time, victorious in their pedigree. The amount of knowledge some of them have access to about people from decades and centuries ago with a shared something—family name, land, “blood"—was utterly unrelatable to me, meanwhile I still hear jokes from non-East Asian people about how I’m probably related to Genghis Khan.
To me, people with intimate relationships to their ancestry are rich. Rich with a place to emotionally land, a sense of concreteness and direction for grief.
At some point, the relationship with ancestry faded away and it disappeared from my conscious life for a period of time. I feel like a ghost in my not-knowing. As the number of my years on Earth and away from my birthplace grows, the desire for belonging deepens.
Whichever path you and yours took, immigration, forced diaspora, choice-based migration, there seems to be a common injury with which we cope by reluctantly and wisely filing away parts of us that feel “inapplicable” or can no longer be relevant, and from which grief develops into a household staple.
Connecting through grief
When I went through a period of feeling motivated to be that person in the family to go on a quest to learn about our ancestry, I approached my mom first, which was a mistake. My mom has no family remaining and has had a traumatizing childhood and adult life; (re)acquainting with her personhood is an ongoing process. She became very activated when I asked simple questions about our ancestors. I think it’s because she had no idea who came before her.
Thinking about ancestry presents more than one level of grief: for me, it’s the not knowing (and a felt sense of near impossibility to know), the wishing for it to be different (seeing others’ relationships with their ancestors), and even still, the longing for those I’m irrevocably connected to over lifetimes. For those who have never experienced family in an embodied way, the notion of ancestry can be vacant, ghostly, and even repellent.
I learned rather immediately after watching Joy Luck Club (only recently, too; I’m not “good” with emotional movies and I was right to anticipate its affect) that the transformative, spiritual experience I had during the movie was hardly an uncommon one. I think a friend even described it as “cliché”. But it didn’t matter too much to me. From watching that movie, it became clear to me that I have a spiritual connection with my mother’s mother, who abandoned her when she was only two.
In a recent birthday ceremony held by my sister friend, the participants were invited to write down something they’d like to leave behind. The pieces were to be burnt on the Altar in the final part of the ceremony. I wrote a letter to her, the woman who gave birth to my mom. I wrote half in Traditional Chinese and half in English saying that while we’ve never met, I know her (and I fended off any shame attached to not remembering how to write “accountability” in my native language). That there’s no excusing and no doubt her abandonment of my mother has triggered, probably more aptly, continued a chain of excruciating intergenerational pain. And I’m choosing to believe that leaving her daughter felt to her, at least at the time, was her last and only choice. I asked for her protection. I don’t recall addressing her.
Collective Ancestry
While I haven’t given up on the idea of having a relationship with my lineage, the collective grief that exists in the world intercepts at the thought of ancestry.
We witness, embody, and I’m sure, struggle to sit with not only it but the growing of it. At times I want to reject it and say, I didn’t consent to this—this much Grief—my own, the world’s, all of ours. I believe that the depression the pain brings is a collective experience. I know I’m not alone in it.
Energetically it looms large, much like the idea of ancestral lineage. For me, sacredly, it’s become interwoven with collective grief. When I pay attention, I cannot think of another way to meet my ancestry but to recognize that others’ are connected to mine.
And now, though since a long time ago, others’ and my ancestral grief are being created in real time, its interconnectedness clarifying. Your ancestry is also mine.
Connecting with ancestral joy through rest
In my therapy practice, I sometimes share that yes, we will process the difficult pieces, and we also want to sit with what’s working well: when we experience ease, comfort, and safeness. Though I don’t use the word often, I mean joy.
In my personal process, I’ve been repairing, gently and slowly, my relationship with rest. One that has been severed, silenced, even erased. With this meditation on ancestral-collective grief, rest comes to mind as an entity with which I have an unconditional relationship. One that I cannot live without yet has been estranged since the early years of consciousness.
In my pursuit of restfulness, time and time again, I’m challenged to hold grief and joy simultaneously. Furthermore, to inquire into how rest is not merely for the individual but a necessary and somatic resistance, which is also a gesture of collective grief and collective embrace.
An invitation to embody belonging
How do you grieve those you don’t know?
The practice of empathy, with others, situations, various parts of myself, involves seeing (meeting and acknowledging with sincerity and intention) and accepting the light and shadow (and the rest in between), even when one is more distinct than another.
In the loving idea of connecting dots and yin yang (陰陽), I invite you to consider: how might actively believing that all parts of you belong allow us to cultivate a sense of belonging with others? How might it influence those around you?
How might recognizing that in these oppressive systems to rest and resist is both an active and passive exercise, as in taking individual responsibility and actions while also giving oneself permission to release the stories of shame and to normalize ease?
And how might that shift the relationship between us and our immediate environment?
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Who are the people, places, animals, living entities, objects, etc. that allow you, whether through intentional invitations or casually, to connect with your ancestral lineage, however far, whatever the format?
What does your relationship with ancestry feel like in terms of the senses, and does any particular ancestor come to mind?
What would it mean for you to expand into your lineage?
If ancestry is historically an obfuscatory idea to you, what are you noticing now, at this point of the letter? (Tip: use this chart for reference.)
How would it feel to imagine someone else’s ancestors as yours as well?
For further reflection and imagination of collective liberation, you’re invited to try the somatic visualization in this letter (under “an invitation to imagine collective resistance).
Thanks for reading.
Acknowledgement:
My gratitude to Karen Thảo La for creating and inspiring this opportunity to tend to our roots and expand into one another.