My People

Who are my people? Chinese, Americans, mothers, physicians, none felt like the definition as much as a stranger I saw one day on the other side of the street.

1.

I had been complaining I didn’t know what to write. Except I did know. I also knew why I pretended not to know. I needed to write about my people, also commonly referred to as “family,” “lineage,” and “belonging.”

I didn’t want to write about it because I preferred not to write inside a black hole without prescience of what I might discover. So, I cheated a little. I tried to mentally project the first few sentences to peer into the abyss. I imagined others drafting entire novels in their minds and then transcribing them all onto the page en bloc. Apparently, I didn’t possess this skill. My brain wouldn’t hold space for more than two sentences at a time before its gears ground to a halt, mid-sentence, like an old printer trying to print on the flip side.

I had tasted the promise of discovery before, one so tantalizing I had apparently voluntarily deleted social media apps and canceled Netflix. Yet discovery through writing remained a precarious exercise in trust. I knew I would find entertainment on TV. When I showed up with only a pen, I might find something I didn’t like. I might find nothing.

A romantic would consider this experience an adventure, but the glamor never matches its reputation when the adventure belonged to me. Mine resembled less of a mountain to summit and more of an endless Stairmaster session I must suffer through, one word after another, without guarantee I would find excitement, beauty, or even catharsis on the journey. Why bother? Why undertake this exercise that guaranteed nothing but tedium and fatigue?

In moments of mental clarity, I knew the answer. I, with my set of neuronal wiring, must proceed with this exercise even if I gained nothing except the transient experience of the Stairmaster. If I took a detour, I would become blocked – not from lack of inspiration, but from ignoring, intentionally or unintentionally, what I had been called to write.

Still, I would try, naively and futilely, to write somebody else’s alluring adventure. But my mind’s entrails insisted on its linear design. Nothing else could pass until this upcoming black hole in my path has been properly explored and digested into words. This process also prevents the familiar toxic fumes from accumulating and manifesting as resentful thoughts, compulsions to quit my job and move to a secluded island – then having failed to accomplish either – ultimately turn to endless doomscrolling. I had never needed to carry out those compulsions to restore equilibrium; I did, however, always need to sit down and write what I should have written to begin with.

2.

It wasn’t until after my mother and all my grandparents died that I suspected I didn’t belong with my family of origin. It dawned on me when I stared at a human resource form requesting my hometown: the city I had recently moved to considered me a stranger, but I no longer had family left in the towns I grew up in. Even more disconcertingly, I never connected those places with a sense of home even while I lived there.

Home hadn’t taken much space in my psyche until then. I blamed my oversized career – a physician with an engineering degree – an impeccable blend of my maternal grandparents’ occupations. My maternal grandfather, waigong, told my mother before he died that my medical education greatly comforted him. I felt pleased when I heard this. My mother looked pleased when she relayed this. Yet later that day, I again contended with a secret well of discontent, roughly known as my egotistical self who wanted all the glory of medicine but didn’t care for the work. Or perhaps better described as an unanswerable question: if I liked helping people so much, why did my soul feel parched at work? Or: I liked doing many things for three hours a day, I liked doing some things for six, fewer for nine, but I didn’t want to do anything for twelve hours a day.

I wondered what my physician grandmother, waipo, would have thought had she known her only offspring who followed her footsteps harbored such ungracious thoughts. My mother told me two stories about my waipo. Nobody considered waipo smart, my mother said, but she became a preeminent cardiac specialist in Beijing purely through hard work. She rarely left the hospital, and when she did, she spent downtime at home reading medical journals.

My mother mentioned the second story only once in a conversation that greatly satisfied my teenage ego and provided indelible proof of my maturity and indispensability to my mother. Waigong, my mother said, had repeatedly cheated on waipo, even once with a neighbor. Everyone in their social circle heard. Waipo must have suspected, although she never gave any indication to her children whether she knew. This history, my mother informed me, remained a deep source of shame for herself, and something she had never discussed with anyone, not even with my father.

When I was six or seven, waipo came across town to take care of me for a couple of nights while my parents traveled for work. I had counted down the days until she came because I considered her the warmest and most gentle of all my caretakers, and I had long hoped for such a bonding experience with her. I had assumed our interactions were limited at my grandparents’ home because my grandfather’s dominating presence demanded us all to attend to him.

My homework that night involved writing a paragraph on my favorite fruit, a topic I found exasperating since I couldn’t imagine wanting to write about fruit. I also couldn’t decide on a favorite. To transcend the vapidity of the assignment, I stumbled into my first encounter with poetic license. I told a mythic tale of the banana in order to feature the mango. The banana, legend had it, used to contain a large pit in its center like its tropical relative; perhaps the mango would someday follow in its footsteps, I editorialized.

I wrote these words in the mid-90s, at least four years before I touched a computer. I couldn’t remember how I had come to this banana pit theory, but I knew the teachers would not be able to verify these statements. Factual or fantastical, this type of “nonfiction” excited me. I practically memorized the short essay and recited it to waipo on our way back from school the next day. She frowned ever so slightly and murmured, “Hm, that doesn’t sound like the banana,” with the same dispassionate and distracted tone she often spoke in before lapsing back into silence.

I hadn’t realized I craved something in her response until I failed to perceive it. I longed for some kind of emotional reaction – surprise, delight, or even disdain for the concocted words. Instead, I watched my prized creative work filter through the mundane lens of the material plane and interest her no more or less than waigong’s domineering requests. Unlike my mother and waigong, my waipo demanded nothing from me, not even obedience or attention. In return, she offered nothing but a factual exchange. And I couldn’t care less about facts.

. . .

Waipo received a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s dementia when I turned sixteen, several years after my parents and I immigrated to the US. My mother and uncle helped her move into a long-term care facility. Shortly after waipo moved, she forgot her husband. Everyone considered it strange since she remembered all her other family members. The few times waigong tried to visit her, she became visibly angry and yelled, “Who are you? I don’t know you!” Waipo was 70 then, and my mother remembered it as the only time waipo ever showed anger.

When I heard this, I realized why as a young child, I desperately craved her presence. She was a doctor. She knew how to keep me safe, not only from illness but from the unnamed narcissistic rage that had defined my most intimate familial relationships. She had endured it and remained steady, earning the trust of thousands of patient families. But in the end, she couldn’t keep me safe, and she couldn’t keep herself safe, not even with her medical textbooks, accolades, and decades of hiding behind a quiet, smiling façade. The only liberation came when her inevitable loss from disease momentarily collided with her will to honor her pain.

My father grew up in a Chinese military family, yet my mother was the one who raised me in the style dictated by Mao Zedong. She incessantly commanded, “Rein in your heart so you can focus on the serious business.” Serious business meant the unimpeachable: studying, scientific inquiry, calisthenics, chores, reading, or sleeping (at night, never resting or relaxing during the day). My mother did not confuse right from wrong, motivational pursuits from frivolous wastes of time. In fact, she didn’t feel confused much about anything. She thus paid no attention to experiences – particularly art – that muddled her perceptive clarity, categorically dismissing them as incomprehensible and useless.

My mother made an exception for piano playing because of its purported benefits for brain development. She tackled this activity with military discipline. I became one of many children shuttled into Chinese piano culture in the 90s, characterized by time-consuming devotion to attain technical mastery demonstrated by leveling up in an elaborate structure of ten levels via nerve-wracking live examinations and then converting said level into social currency.

I couldn’t have fathomed piano playing as art or play. I knew it solely as a form of exercise in self-restriction reminiscent of other serious pursuits. Similarly, my parents didn’t dare to entertain the idea that I made art. After all, only the naturally talented deserved this frivolity. Those lucky ones must then toil and suffer to earn the adoration of the masses and defend their privilege to make a living off of the unknowable and uncontrollable. My parents did not deem me deserving of this life.

. . .

My mother claimed a legitimate reason to dismiss the arts. She didn’t receive a proper education, she said, because she had only completed fifth grade before the Chinese Cultural Revolution erupted in 1966. All primary schools and universities closed. The Red Guards – youths zealously devoted to Mao – roamed the streets ransacking homes, schools, temples, and museums, brutally attacking anything and anyone they considered lacking the revolutionary spirit. My waigong smashed his own collection of opera records to destroy potential evidence that would incriminate him as a “bourgeois intellectual,” one of the main groups targeted in Mao’s quest to eradicate “old ideas, cultures, customs, and habits,” purify the country’s ideology, and conveniently destroy his opposition in the process.

By luck, my mother did not have to participate in the mandated manual labor in rural villages as part of the Cultural Revolution’s “shang shan xia xiang” movement, which translated to “up to the mountains; down to the countryside.” Government officials had assigned her family to move across the country to work in a textile factory. There, my mother spent years alongside other young women working and singing Revolutionary Music. She didn’t work on the assembly line for long before factory leaders promoted her to broadcast upbeat Communist propaganda over the factory radio, a job – its content notwithstanding – she always reminisced as her dream career.

Meanwhile, my father finished seventh grade when the schools shuttered. He soon hopped on the train with classmates for months at a time to help different civilian organizations distribute propaganda on large blackboards. He read whatever books he could get his hands on and nursed his own literary dreams. He, too, recounted this period with fondness, a Communist coming-of-age story à la On the Road. He then joined the Chinese military as an Air Force mechanic, drinking baijiu and smoking cigarettes with comrades in their downtime.

. . .

Neither of my parents saw the insides of a classroom again until their mid-20s, in 1977, after my mother taught herself high school curriculum at night and then took the first college entrance exam offered in twelve years. By then, Mao Zedong was dead, new leadership began to usher in sweeping changes, and the radio career my mother enjoyed was deemed unreliable and too politically precarious. In response, she turned to science and eventually worked as a data analyst, far away from politics. My father entered a community college program to study computer engineering.

After my family immigrated to Michigan when I was 11, I stopped practicing the piano in the chaotic transition. I convinced my parents to let me join the school band and play the French horn instead. I stumbled through my first symphony rehearsal and straight into the magical terrain accessible only when 50+ people played simultaneously, with different frequencies and rhythms, to make collective live art.

I hadn’t learned to keep my yearnings private, so I announced I would dedicate my life to the symphony. Instead of brushing off this goal as a childhood fantasy, my parents worried. They suddenly missed my neutral-hate relationship with the piano and the quintessential performative discipline it embodied. My resistance to piano reinforced the default superiority of discipline (and therefore its parallel to control) and highlighted discipline’s reliance on repeating only endeavors I disliked to deprive myself of things I actually enjoyed. This labyrinthine framework soothed my parents’ nervous systems more than truth, more than joy, and certainly more than freedom, which they scorned as a comical American ideal. Never could they have imagined a militaristic practice transform overnight into an exercise in this threatening concept. After they sacrificed their ambitions and financial security to immigrate, how could I possibly justify a life purpose that amounted to nothing but pretty sounds?

Like so many immigrant families, mine came to the US in part to give me access to better educational opportunities, which always implicitly excluded the arts. In the absence of any logical explanation for a child of scientists and engineers to pursue such an intangible career, my parents clung to their demand for excellence, the only concrete yardstick to measure my worthiness to pursue music.

I pretended my parents’ fear did not affect my music, but sometime in high school, I began to distort this divine experience into another banal pursuit of the ego in its endless quest for external validation. By senior year, the original meaning intrinsic to experiencing music had long been abandoned and replaced with solos I could perfect and awards I could garner. Ironically, the daily practice became yet another way of practicing discipline for discipline’s sake.

My parents emerged triumphant after I enrolled in engineering school – “her own decision!” they emphasized. I supposedly loved problem-solving, which sounded so much more useful than blowing wind into metal. True to their word, my college classes became difficult problems, but I didn’t care all that much to solve them. My discipline, however, intervened reflexively. After all, one could not imagine a higher badge of honor for reining in my heart than to betray my deepest desires.

For all their mistrust in art, my family named me after an ink and wash (shui mo) painting by my paternal grandfather, my yeye. He was painting peonies when he heard about my birth, so he nicknamed me Dandan, after the mu dan hua. I answered to Dandan exclusively around my Chinese relatives, yet I don’t remember meeting yeye. He died when I was one, in 1989, a few months after the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

The circumstances surrounding his death remained mysterious. How could it be, his children asked, that a 66-year-old healthy man who regularly swam outdoors in the winter succumbed to the common cold?

The official cause of death read brainstem inflammation, but doctors suspected a mass in his brain, my parents recalled. Details. The real cause of death, his other children concluded, was Tiananmen, and his wife, my nainai.

My yeye and nainai both served in the Chinese military and were stationed in war zones during the War of Resistance to Japan and the Korean War, although neither fought in the front line. My nainai reported on the war as a military journalist. My yeye wrote battle reports. My father was born in 1951 and nicknamed Yuan Chao, which loosely translates to “aid North Korea.” My nainai left the war zone temporarily to give birth in Shanghai before she returned to North Korea a few days later, leaving her son in the military nursery. She wouldn’t see him again for another two years.

By the time I made memories with my nainai in the 90s, the wars were long over. But peace in her home could only be found on the balcony, where she doted on her plants, fed them homemade fertilizer, and composted eggshells directly onto potted soil inside clay pots set on muted green chipped enamel plates.

Entering the apartment felt like slipping into the shadows of her sunny balcony. My aunts and uncles tried to discuss everything in hushed tones behind her back. We all lowered our voices to avoid exposing nainai to stress. Still, the air permeated with an amorphous tension. Nainai kept a rotating roster of live-in caretakers who submitted to her lifestyle in exchange for a salary to mail to their home villages. At least a couple of times a year, my parents would help look for a new caretaker because she had fought with the previous one.

“This is why dad died,” my uncle said at the heel of every departure, “she killed him with her temper and her menopause.”

I couldn’t imagine nainai killing anybody. After all, she was the sick one because of a bad heart. Every year after a family reunion, when her children and grandchildren had left and my nainai found herself alone with her caretaker again, she would end up in the hospital because of chest pain. Every year, the same cardiac tests would return normal.

“Did she have heart disease at all?” I attempted to clarify, pragmatically, so I could complete the family history portion of a student health center questionnaire.

“The doctors couldn’t ever find anything wrong with her heart,” my parents responded.

“So, I don’t actually have a family history of heart disease?” I pressed, puzzled at their feigned befuddlement in what seemed like a straightforward situation.

. . .

I didn’t know how checking, or not checking, the heart disease box on the questionnaire would make me feel about my own predisposition for what my nainai had, however one labeled it. I did know more definitively that nainai had a sister with schizophrenia. I wanted to check that box instead. I felt comforted learning indisputable facts about a biological relative, but doctors didn’t usually care about someone’s great-aunt.

“Oh, and my first cousin on my dad’s side died of suicide at age 29,” I would also add, unsure of how to document his death in the paperwork, “he didn’t have a formal diagnosis, but nobody died of suicide if they weren’t depressed, right?” The doctors would nod in sympathy, but they wouldn’t write anything down. He was too remote.

Still, I felt strangely liberated – simultaneously lighter and more grounded – when I learned about my great aunt’s schizophrenia. I had suspected for years I possessed a penchant for sadness, but I assumed I had failed somehow. Failed to discipline myself into happiness through science and “serious pursuits.” Failed to refrain from dabbling in dark arts and their emotional companions. But now I had a legitimate reason why I couldn’t connect with eternal optimism despite being touted as a high achiever. I had a family history of mental health disorders! My cousin, too, shared the same great-aunt. He, too, lived in a time and place where an entire generation of adults worshipped the material world and believed discipline and logic should cure all ailments unnamed and unseen.

But my ancestors held lived-in evidence those elements alone could not protect them. I savored the relief that came from finally acknowledging a reality that anchored me in a way only truth could: my private self did not match the upbeat, disciplined persona I had adopted to reassure my parents I functioned like a well-oiled machine so they could feel safe, and so I could have a chance to find belonging.

I have thus far avoided writing about waigong, my mother’s father, the unapologetic patriarch and tempestuous force that shaped my mother. He met my waipo during their first year of medical school together. Shortly after, he contracted tuberculosis and left medical school to quarantine. He subsequently attributed his successful battle against tuberculosis to daily exercise since antibiotics were not available to him at that time. He found a silver lining during this period. He quit medical school permanently and decided mechanical engineering suited him better.

Daily life at my grandparents’ orbited around waigong and his sphere of terror. He used to sing in a men’s choir and continued to exercise his impressive vocal range in yawns and sneezes, which clapped like thunder inside the apartment. My heart pounded with each strike. An eerie calm would follow, during which my cousin and I would second guess why human physiology could sound so terrifying. Silly us.

Waigong maintained a list of forbidden foods, not because of allergies, but because he simply couldn’t stand them. He banned vinegar, onion, garlic, and lamb from the home. I knew my waipo had long integrated these restrictions into her cooking, but my cousin and I tiptoed around his aversions, dissecting food to inspect for traces of pungency as if we lived inside a comedy horror waiting for waigong to suddenly explode from sniffing out a banned ingredient.

I had no intention of being on the receiving end of his fury. When my mother found herself unintentionally pregnant at age 34 after having only married my father three months prior, she did not want a child because of advanced maternal age (for the 1980s anyway) and busy work projects. When she hinted at an abortion, waigong allegedly said, “All the other women can have a kid, so why the hell can’t you?”

This question seemed to echo an incident during my mother’s teenage years in the 1960s that firmly established the family hustle culture. “Don’t you dare sit on your ass when your mother is so busy working for our family,” waigong demanded when my mother happened to be reading a novel as waipo cooked. My mother almost never admitted to her own mistakes, but she frequently told this story with genuine humility. My pre-teen self didn’t recognize the irony of this humility attached to her judgments of my own idleness. Waigong’s gendered commandment of my mother over her brother (and himself) also didn’t register. Witnessing my mother in rare moments of vulnerability unnerved me so much that this family story, in turn, profoundly shaped my life and choices.

I became a professional room reader and helper. I helped my family read labels at the grocery store and translate at the doctor’s. I helped my mother stop screaming by anticipating what she needed in the kitchen before she even knew. I helped my mother process her resentments towards my father when I was 13 by asking her what she wanted to prioritize in the marriage. She boasted about my maturity years later, oddly – to me – as if impressing an unseen audience.

6.

“Stroke the fur with the grain, not against it,” my father could be heard saying this Chinese idiom with a chuckle most days of my childhood. He meant my mother’s fur, of course. Going along with her schemes and violent outbursts and then doing whatever was necessary to calm her in the moment meant much less work for him than any other alternatives. It made sense, and I strove to adopt his laissez-faire attitude towards my mother’s attacks. Why would anybody try to oppose her?

Yet by middle school, an inexplicable contempt for my father bubbled inside me. I saw no reason to feel this way except he seemed to have nothing to say except hackneyed idioms. To converse with him meant talking about the weather, how I must stay warm, how I should be careful walking to school, how we should all strive to live happily. Occasionally, when my father felt powerful enough to voice his own opinion, he would inevitably comment that my mother resembled his mother, an insult so horrendous in my parents’ mind he had to disguise it as a joke.

My interactions with my father dwindled after I started college and he left Michigan for a job in Texas. I had almost no memories of him for almost a decade except for occasional dinners when he and I both visited my mother. After my mother’s shocking end-stage cancer diagnosis, he devoted the rest of her days caring for her, and I forgot about my sulky teenage resentments.

After my mother’s death, my father and I began to spend more time together. He and I had had so few one-on-one interactions that I saw no reason for anything but a cordial relationship. But rage crashed through my veins one day when my father rehashed the same idioms to my infant daughter. This unfathomably foreign and startlingly familiar energy left me momentarily speechless. So this power didn’t belong only to my mother and waigong. I held it, too – that same tumultuous, earth-shattering rage. I was never just the meek, tongue-tied girl hiding in shame, full of fear when she got a B in high school, and she didn’t want to go home but didn’t have the guts not to. I remembered the same girl who, after a long day alone with nothing productive to show for it, both craved for her mother to come home and longed for her to never return.

I imagined my mother witnessing this moment as my father huffed, once again, the most tainted verdict in his book: despite all the harsh posthumous critique I heaped upon my mother’s memory, my anger reminded him exactly like hers.

By this time, I had learned to call shame by its name. Instead of disappearing into shame, I stared into my father’s eyes, “You’re right. I am like my mother. You watched her rage for 30 years, and you did what was easiest for you every time. You acted like you were the nice parent, that nothing bothered you, but you watched me suffer and never once protected me. So go ahead, call me my mother. It doesn’t change the truth about what you did.”

“Holding a grudge now, are we?” He remarked.

I could see it now, the grudge that would get swept under the rug keeping the peace.

7.

There had been times when my mother spoke of my waigong with objective disapproval. He yelled too much. He didn’t enjoy trying new things. He had good ideas, but he offended people by the way he communicated them. Her disapproval of the superficial aspects of his lifestyle disguised an implicit approval of his values. Waigong favored my mother not only because of her intelligence but also because she visibly cared about what others thought of her, perhaps above all else. With every accomplishment of hers and later mine, she pleased him. In turn, he rewarded her with silent approval – the absence of blatant disapproval.

The summer I announced I would be a pre-med in college, my waigong and I took a walk in the neighborhood alone. During the walk, he spoke to me for the first and only time with what I now identify as presence and compassion. He wanted to tell me, he said, that he had always supported my dreams of playing music as a career. In fact, he had told my mother several years prior to let me pursue it as far as I wanted to. Medicine, he continued, without bitterness or anger, meant a difficult journey. He knew from personal experiences the sacrifices one must make, and he wanted to at least tell me before I made any decisions.

The very last time I saw him in person before his death two years later, we played ping pong in his neighborhood recreation center in Beijing. I was 23 and wore running shorts and a tank top my mother dubbed an “American bra.” She then forced me to go shopping for a more respectable outfit, which turned out to be an all-white ensemble with a knee-length tennis skirt that I detested.

Still, I had plenty of practice detaching from my body to perform what garnered me the most family approval. I wore the white skirt and played sacrificial virgin wearing my purity on my sleeve to keep the male elder content. I wore the white skirt and pretended to enjoy the company of a stranger whom waigong wanted me to marry. Wearing the white skirt, I could almost convince myself that the quintessential purpose of my life was to please my grandfather. His pleasure meant I could survive. I didn’t need radical, American ideas of freedom or autonomy. How presumptuous to assume they would apply to me and my family.

8.

It wasn’t until after my mother and all my grandparents died that I cremated my former life purpose and understood how to write nonfiction. That summer, I took a stroll on a busy street with an unobstructed view of the sunset. I pretended to text but swiped open my camera app instead to covertly capture the sunset. Masking my love for sunsets with indifference had become second nature. I had lives to save, new medical data to read, and a toddler to wrangle. Chasing sunsets did not help me with any of that.

Then I spotted a middle-aged man cross the road to the side with no sidewalk but a better view. He stopped to do nothing except stare at the sunset. I slowed my steps to watch. He unapologetically lifted his phone camera for the whole world to see. A year ago, I would have hurried past, cringing at his unbridled wonder of a cliché. Now, a spark of recognition awakened. I with my phone camera, he with his, forever taking inferior photos that could never capture the divine, but that of which we continued to stand in awe to witness, nonetheless.

So, these were my people. The ones who yearn. The ones seeking intangible moments of mystical beauty.

. . .

Much later, I thought about my yeye painting peonies with maobi the morning I entered this world. I thought about my waigong’s smashed opera records. I thought about the stories my nainai wrote for the military newspaper and my father’s dream of being a writer. For decades now, I had unwittingly lived out each of their passions as if they had been written into my DNA, persecuted by none but ghosts of a traumatized collective. It had not been their time to face the pain and embrace the artists inside them, but perhaps they were my people, too.

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