Letters to My Ancestors

In the fall of 2022, I discovered something astonishing. I found another version of the father I remembered, despite the fact that he had been gone for over 45 years.? ?

My father died from cancer when I was 13. During his illness, he wrote a series of letters to my older sister. Written in the 1970’s, the letters document Dad’s intimate emotions and thoughts while undergoing cancer treatment. My sister?was living in Seoul, South Korea, far away from our hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana.? Given that she and her husband lived in Asia for decades and moved nearly 10 times, it’s a miracle that these letters survived. Fortunately, my sister kept these letters near the Buddhist altar that she set up in each home that she lived in.? ?

In January 2023, I found another set of letters, in the back of a journal with a tattered black cover. They were over 75 years old. The journal was a scrapbook that Mom had kept during her courtship to Dad. She gave it to me as she was cleaning out her house, getting ready to move to a senior living facility. Mom was in her eighties, had been remarried for nearly 40 years, and was unsentimental when it came to the previous life she had with her first husband. She was ready to toss out the journal when she casually offered it to me. I jumped at the chance to have small black and white photos of my parents in their teens and twenties.? ?

You would have thought that the letters in the back of this journal were love letters between my parents, but that wasn’t the case. They were written in Chinese, and it was only after I asked a relative to translate, that I recognized what I had on my hands. These missives were the first communication my mother had with her parents after being separated from them during WWII. She was 9 years old when she left home to live with an aunt. When the war broke out, the two families were cut off from each other–one in Vietnam and the other in China. She received these letters, calligraphy on wisps of paper, in 1946 and 1947. My mother had finished her first year of college, and had fallen in love with a young Chinese-American soldier stationed in Kunming, China, my father. She was getting ready to emigrate to the US to marry my father. These letters brought my distant grandparents to life, and revealed their side of a story that had only been given my mother’s voice.?? ?

There was one more set of letters that provided color to my parents' lives, who have since passed away. My mother died in April 2021, on the same day that my dad died, only 46 years later.? ?

In 1995 and 1996, Mom exchanged letters with two cousins who lived in China. These cousins, a sister and a brother, knew Mom during her teenage years, after she had left home. In a sense, they became confidantes for my mother. In these letters, Mom had the freedom to talk about something that I knew very little about when she was alive–her emotional life. The last of these letters were translated from Chinese to English in June 2024.? ?

These three sets of letters–from my father when he was dying of cancer, from my mother when she was reflecting on her teen years after leaving home, and from my grandparents as they desperately longed to be reunited with their offspring–all speak to the emotional experience of being human. We know loneliness, abandonment, hurt, anger, sadness, and fear. We also know hope, trust, love, and gratitude.? ?

I began researching my family tree in 2018, starting with the life of my paternal grandfather. He was a colorful character, a stowaway on a boat from China, detained in Vermont when he entered the US illegally. The year was 1900. He was 15 years old and didn’t speak a word of English. Three days after being thrown in jail awaiting trial, he was out on bond. He had found someone to post bond, which was the equivalent of over $10,000 in today’s dollars. My grandfather reputedly worked in the Chinese version of organized crime after he arrived in the US.? ?

Between the documentation found on my father’s side of the family through the National Archives and the letter writing from my parents and maternal grandparents, I was able to piece together the lives of six people: my maternal grandparents, my paternal grandparents, and my parents. This process began in 2018. I wished I had asked Mom more questions about her life and her family before she entered hospice in 2021. On the other hand, her death gave me the freedom to delve into corners of her story and her family’s story that were blocked off when she was alive.? ?

I wrote letters to my ancestors?as a way to integrate and respond to what I was learning about the family I knew and didn’t know, people with complex lives, living during the enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act, during wartime, during stagflation and oil embargoes. I used these letters to speak to the dead of forgiveness and love, anger and gratitude, sadness and shame. It was healing for me and my hope is that it is healing for my lineage.? ?

I think we are all connected, in some ethereal, but very real way.? It’s with this in mind that I am sharing a few of these letters to my ancestors in a special virtual gathering .... Letters to My Ancestors: Missives of Hope, Compassion, and Love on Weds, June 26. Click?here?for details on this free event.