heritage

dear mom,

I don't know you at all. How can I crave your existence every night when I don't even know you?

We just got back from China, where the purpose of the trip was probably very important and sentimental to Dad. We visited Fuzhou.- his (paternal) ancestral home. We walked through the center of the old town, where our great uncle pointed out where our great great grandpa's home used to be before the government seized his properties. We tiptoed through the basement columbarium to see his ashes and our great grandpa's ashes, and then our great uncle and aunt excitedly showed us the spots that they bought to be able to rest in peace in the same place as family. It was surreal to see. And it felt good to witness, but I couldn't help but think about you at every turn.

This isn't the first time I've lamented the somehow severed connection between me and your family. I struggle with this fact every couple weeks. Do I need to take more action to uncover this side of my family? Should I be asking more questions? Should I be more demanding of my dad about finding where they are? Or do I let it pass by like a crushing footnote to my life? Do I just accept that I will never know half of my history and try to look forward to the future instead? It feels like a fight every time I have to bring it up. Why can't I know my dead mom's family?? Followed by Dad's one line excuse about a disconnected number or a suspicious extended relative he doesn't want to interact with.

On this trip, I was made aware that I didn't even know where we you were from. In the simplified language that my family speaks, I didn't realize everyone but me was confounding the meaning of the word "mom." "Mom" to my brother and "mom" to my dad often doesn't refer to you. That is maybe a separate thing I'll unpack in a different letter. In short, what I'm trying to say is that I didn't know you were from Hebei and not Sichuan. There was a time I didn't know that you and Ling only met in college (do I even have that fact correct?), and so I thought you grew up with this person who my dad brought in to replace you.

I'm still not sure what this new information means to me, for I have rested part of my identity (one of the few pieces I thought I knew) on this fact that I now know is untrue. And such a simple change feels like it somehow has big implications in my mind because what does that mean for my identity? This identity that I feel like I've been manufacturing from scratch because I never got a chance to know you, and I never wanted the chance to know Dad.

I honestly want to ignore this because thinking about it just reinforces how much I don't know you. How I'm pretending like you can come over, where I could cook for you and eat with you while talking to you to know you more... when the reality is I can't really know you more.

Without you, without your family, I'll never know you more. Dad stands between us, as a metaphorical barrier. I think I know he isn't intentionally keeping you from me. There is just an emotional distance that has settled there, and I cannot imagine having any kind of nurturing conversation with him about who you were. The awkwardness has become like a boulder that sits at the back of my throat whenever I try to even form a question. I wonder how this will extend to any hypothetical interaction I might have with your siblings or parents. Would my broken Chinese even be able to carry me through all the emotions and curiosities?

I don't have a plan; I don't have intentions for tonight. I don't know where I would even begin if I had you at my table for dinner. I would just wing it. It's a fridge-clean-out meal kind of night because I don't know you at all. Breakfast tacos for dinner - is this even something you would eat to humor me? I would dice up an unused half of an onion and caramelize them down, a few little potatoes to fry in some butter, the last of my lapcheong sausage from a pack. There are egg whites I could quickly scramble with some homemade shiitake furikake. I have toasted corn tortillas that are about to go stale. We can top our tacos with fresh tomatoes and the last of my chili crisp. And we'd eat them in silence, bits of filling inevitably falling out the other end with each bite, the juices flowing down our forearms, only the sounds of us licking our fingers to fill the silent evening.

miss you still,

Amelia