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蛇麼都好
As we enter the year of the snake, I’m reflecting a lot on the meaning of Lunar New Year, as someone who deeply rejected my Chinese heritage growing up and is trying to make up for that now. I have only had the opportunity to celebrate the holiday with family in China once in my life when I traveled to Hangzhou and Ningbo by myself for the first time during my Fulbright year in Taiwan. I’d only ever visited China and my extended family with one or both of my parents prior to that trip. It was an intimidating experience, navigating conversations and relationships with people who were ostensibly strangers to me and yet had an obligation to care for me as family.
For context, both my parents were born in the 1950s and lived through the Cultural Revolution in China. That could be an entire post in and of itself, but for brevity, I will just say that the things both sides of my family experienced feel like unfathomable horrors and undoubtedly left both my mother and father with traumas that have never been addressed. By sheer will and luck, both of them attended college and then graduate school, despite having to miss years of schooling to work in labor and reeducation camps. They met in Hangzhou while my mother was in her Master’s program in Japanese. She abandoned her degree to immigrate with my father to Florida so he could complete his PhD in the late 1980s.
My parents are the only ones on either side of my family to have immigrated to the U.S. I have met my extended family a total of six times in my life, all over stints of 4-7 day visits. I call them strangers because that’s what they are to me. In the interim years between each visit, I don’t speak to them or keep up with their lives. Growing up, I never understood the type of closeness I would see between my friends and their cousins.
Each time I visit, I am given special attention because I am the youngest of my cousin’s generation. These strangers welcome me every time, house me and feed me because in spite of an ocean-wide separation we are still of the same blood. While in Hangzhou that visit, my cousin 安安 was tasked with taking me around town, window shopping at malls, trying fancy 蛋撻 and bubble teas, walking around the famous 西湖 that I vaguely remembered from previous trips.
My parents did their best to maintain some Chinese traditions. My sister and I would receive red envelopes every Lunar New Year. Sometimes we would have potluck celebrations with other Chinese families in the area. We would eat mooncakes for Mid-Autumn Festival and 粽子 around the Dragon Boat Festival. Probably like most second gen kids, I didn’t really understand all of the legends and significance of these special treats. I didn’t appreciate the privilege of eating home-cooked Chinese food for every dinner until I left for college.
This Lunar New Year prompted me to dig up these photos from that visit in 2016. Back then I was more timid with my camera, wanting to conserve the film I had instead of shooting more consistently. I thought I had taken many more photos but in reality only used less than half a roll. I remember I had gotten my 奶奶 a pale pink knitted hat in Seoul, where I had been traveling just before going to China for the new year. She was in her hospital bed and was so happy to see me and wear the hat. She would always take my hand in both of hers and hold it while she talked to me in Mandarin. The next time I would be able to visit would be 2018, when I made my 安詳 series. 奶奶 will have passed away and I will never know what happened to that pink hat.
When I look at photos of my relatives, I see strangers and I see pieces of my own face. When I made photos in my dead grandparents’ apartment, I felt the weight and sadness of never having the opportunity to know each other. They kept my baby photos in their desk.
As I grew more distant, both geographically and emotionally, from my parents and what had held me to my Chinese heritage growing up, I saw a shift in myself in wanting a closeness to this part of my identity that I hadn’t had before. Finding and making an Asian American community here in Pittsburgh took me years, but now that I have it, it feels like one of the most precious things in my life. I understand how rare it is. I see how special it is to celebrate an identity that you’ve had to continually suppress in order to be accepted. It feels like taking the biggest breath I’ve taken in weeks when we all come together.
I am feeling a lot of things around this year’s holiday. Mostly so much joy, but also frustration and pain. I know many of us are feeling similarly. Thank you to everyone who celebrated with me. Thank you to all who have built community with me. I love you and I mean that.
I will be back to my regular format of posts soon with some exciting announcements. Thank you for reading xx