I am a bad descendent

Me, 1980-something

When I first started trying to understand traditional Chinese wisdom and other inherited practices, I realized how difficult it was to separate them from the Western frameworks I was raised in. I was used to thinking in diagnoses, symptoms, categories, and proof when traditional wisdom requires us to think in patterns and cycles and seasons. Where I was educated in anatomy and germ theory, my ancestors were educated in a life force that traces the lines of the natural world and energy organized around water, metal, wood and fire. The mind warps and bends trying to anchor itself in something familiar while frustration and shame tells me that I have no business trying to live with my ancestral wisdom. 

I am a “bad” descendent, a diluted result of assimilation and survival. How do I make sense of traditions that feel visceral but that English is wholly inadequate to describe? How do I reckon with my inadequate grasp on my mother tongue, a legacy of assimilation and fear?

So much disappears when people are forced out of their homes. War interrupts lineage. Immigration fractures language. Assimilation teaches silence. Survival leaves little room for storytelling. Sometimes our ancestors did not pass things down because they could not. Sometimes they could not because they had to become small…quiet. And sometimes there simply was not enough time, money, safety, or shared language left to carry everything intact.

Many of us in the diaspora did not inherit these traditions whole. We inherited fragments.

A brothy soup made a certain way when someone was sick. Warnings about eating cold foods or going out with wet hair. Herbs wrapped in unmarked bags. Rituals repeated without explanation because the explanation itself had already been lost somewhere between migration, survival, and assimilation.

I will never claim to fully understand these traditions in their original form. Tradition preserved in its perfection is an impossibility but I would rather engage in my inheritance imperfectly…thoughtfully… rather than lose it entirely. I want to engage in these traditions carefully, without turning them into trends or stripping them from the histories and people they come from.  As a member of the diaspora, I have a choice to carry forward the rituals of my birthright and live with them meaningfully, within the life I inhabit now.