Needles and Threads

It feels like I’m fighting all the time. Fighting with my parents. Fighting to keep my grades up. Fighting to stay afloat. Fighting my diagnosed symptoms. Fighting between eastern and western values. Fighting to reconcile what I learn on my own with what I’ve been taught. Fighting constantly to bridge my experiences with those of my family. Fighting for one more reason to stay. 

The Chinese–the Taiwanese, Taishanese, Cantonese, just the collective Chinese–believe in the idea of feng shui. The idea of placement, whether it is of the person or object, has transcended thousands of years to this day. The idea of harmony existing should one be aligned with energy forces relative to everything around them. 

My family has never been superstitious, but we observe the small things that check off the right boxes. Not buying a house that had a staircase leading directly down to the front door. To prevent people from taking the easy way out and leaving. Placing the bed away from the bathroom entrance to prevent future kidney and bladder problems. Always dusting the windows because they are our eyes to the outside world. Never planting a tree in front of our front door because the Chinese word for “trapped” is a square with the character for wood tucked neatly inside. 

And because of these ideas, I was raised believing in placement. That I was given a place in this time for an exact reason. Almost similar to the western concept of fate and predestination but with an emphasis on duty and family. My duty was to my family, to help build something that lasts so that the children of my children will live to prosper and succeed. 

The Chinese believe in preserving the old, passing on traditions for the young to learn and treasure. I am but a single thread in the tapestry that has been woven for decades. Just one thread layered upon thousands of others. Chinese ideals for family, honor and duty are outlined by Confucius, who stressed the concept of filial piety. As my father has told me time and again, there is no true phrase in the English language for these two words, 孝順. This is a teaching drilled early on into the mind of every Chinese baby, the notion that we are the extensions of our families and, as such, must act accordingly to save face. For our families are defined by how others view us, and part of how others view us is determined by the behavior of sons and daughters. 

Sons and daughters are born to support their parents to give back for the years of labor that went into their upbringing. This circle of expectation breeds a vicious cycle of giving without being asked to. Vicious cycles breed quiet, often unconscious resentment. Debt is carried on in silence, paid for out of duty. Children are taught to bite their tongues and fulfill the debt we owe to those that painstakingly raised us. And the cycle goes on, generation after generation, the debt passed down, the next thread forced to bear the weight of those that were woven before it. 

How much like the other threads am I meant to be? Am I meant to follow their patterns, copying the curves of the colors and mirroring the shapes the lines take? Do I overlap with any other threads? Are there any threads before that are anything like me?

I am the daughter of immigrant parents, born across the ocean and brought here when I was old enough to go to school. I come from two fractured families. Two halves of a broken heart sutured together to raise me. My thread brings together two frayed quilts on the verge of falling apart. I grew up feeling like that tree planted in front of the doorway. I wished for a staircase leading out the front door.

I watched it all unfold in front of me. I watched my mother send money back to Taiwan every week. I watched my father bail my grandfather out of bankruptcy, dipping into my college savings when his paychecks weren’t enough. I watched them do all this and more in silence, never asking for anything in return. Doing everything they could to make ends meet. To repay the debt they owed to those before them. The rest of my family never knew, but I did. I saw everything.

I watched my parents fight bitterly, so close to breaking apart the fabric I tried so hard to hold together. I heard him threatening to leave when it became too much. I heard that he had found better elsewhere, that he didn’t want to be woven into our quilt any longer. I felt her tighten her hold, refusing to let him, suffocating his every option, destroying him. Her thread so heavy that it almost broke his. I watched all of this in silence, pulling tightly on my own thread, scared that if I let go, it would snap. 

“We prayed for you to get into a better school, not for us, but for you. Because we thought you couldn’t live with yourself if you didn’t get into somewhere better.”

I only ever cared because of them. I wanted to do it for them. 

“We thought you could do better than get a C in this class. We thought you cared more. How can you stand to see yourself in the mirror knowing that you didn’t try hard enough?”

I could only ever stand it because it was harder standing in the face of their disappointment. 

“You lied. If I saw you sitting on the side of the road, crippled and begging for money, I wouldn’t even look at you twice. I have no daughter.”

I learned that personal freedom also came with a price. It’s quite a hefty fee, comparable to the debt looming over my head. I grew up making sure I always had one foot out the door. But if I disappeared, I was afraid that the fragile stitch holding us all together would break. 

They found my medication twice and threw it away. They found out I was going to therapy through my medical insurance and forced me to stop. They told me to change the way I thought about things. They didn’t drive me over the edge but they pushed me close to it. Did I dare jump and pull apart the quilt?

My mother is Buddhist. For years, she dragged me to the temple with her and I never saw a point. But I noticed a shift in my parents’ behavior this year. Our temple holds a special ceremony for all members who turn 20 years old; the Japanese believe that the youth come of age then. After I attended this ceremony, I noticed they stopped bringing up the therapy claims on my insurance. They let me wear tank tops instead of telling me to cover up. They let me close my bedroom door instead of always leaving it open for them to walk in. These were small steps, but to me, they were novelties. 

My mother convinced herself that acupuncture would cure my so-called sickness. On the drive home one day, I noticed that one of the companies along the freeway was expanding, but every one of its new buildings looked the same but faced in different directions. She began by explaining to me the idea of feng shui, of strategic placement, and of self. 

“Let me tell you a story,” she said as she parked. 

In our Buddhism, there are two ways of understanding spirituality. There is the seeing and the feeling, the sky that watches and the earth that empathizes. The sky protects and sees our lifelines. The earth accepts and listens to our sorrows. Spiritual guides use these two methods to commune with our ancestral spirits to give us advice about our daily lives. Our ancestors watch over us, guiding our footsteps as we navigate through each day. In our Buddhism, our ancestors live through us, nay they are us. They manifest themselves in our lives and we endure their trials and tribulations as a test. Only when we pass do we break the cycle for them. 

My mother had seen my scars one day. She knew, they knew, I had been struggling for a long time but never how severely until now. Desperate, she went in for a special consultation at the temple. The spiritual guide saw me stranded in the middle of a lake in the midst of a thick fog. 

I learned that I have an ancestor in my quilt that was just like me. She suffered from severe mental illness and she was unhappy. My ancestor never got the help she needed. She took her own life. And now, supposedly, her sickness is mine to bear. 

Truth is a hard burden to bear. Our thread lines intertwine with that of our ancestors, bound by timelessness because we are extensions of their lives. But I don’t think that ancestors should be our burdens to bear. They are lessons, not added weights to consider in our lives.

I say this because the Chinese also believe in 命運, ming and yun. Ming, meaning life, determines our destinies. It is the cards we are dealt, the circumstances we find ourselves in, just how things are because life happens. Yun is luck, personal choice and freedom to handle what life throws at us. So ming yun, personal destiny, is both rigid and flexible. We cannot change the way life happens but we can adapt and mold ourselves to face what happens. Ming represents the type of thread we are, unchanging and fixed. Yun is the pattern we weave. And thus, personal destiny is actually governed by the choices we make. 

So yes, I was placed here in this time for a reason. Yet I have the autonomy to determine that reason. I choose why I am here in this time. I decide what I will do with my time here. 

Looking back now, I realize that my thread snapped a long time ago. It is not easy to continue mending something broken and carrying the weight of mistakes made in the past. Threads can only bear so much weight after all. 

When one thread unravels, the tapestry falls apart and all the other threads lose their place. That is hardly the foundation we want for those that come after us. Strength is not paying our debts in silence. Strength is utilizing the choices in our lives to help pick up those around us out of compassion, not obligation. Strength is choosing to use the stones thrown at us to build a platform to stand, not to barricade our hearts to keep people out. 

In Chinese culture, a family’s love knows no bounds. It is expressed in thousands of ways, and oftentimes, it chokes and suffocates. For love can be easily mistaken when it is forced upon someone else. We shouldn’t be choosing our families because we feel that we are paying them a debt or returning a favor done for us. We should be choosing our families because we are truly grateful for the life they provided us when we could not provide for ourselves. 

I always thought that I needed to have someone in my corner to help me up when I fell. I always thought I needed someone to hold me when I cried. I always thought that someone had to be my family or partner. I was trapped in my own mind, unable to escape, a caged bird longing for wings. 

Before there is duty to bloodline, there is duty to self. Before anyone could come occupy my corner, I had to let myself in. I had to understand that I would never be able to live up to the debt passed down to me, because we can never repay our parents for the sacrifices they made for us in the past. I had to recognize that their traumas haunt their actions and it was my choice whether or not to let my traumas haunt mine. I had to accept that they would never acknowledge their roles in my past trauma, but they were at least trying to make the present a little easier to bear. 

Forgiveness is a choice we make. The more my mother squeezed and held on, the more her caged bird wished to fly away. But when she decided to let go, the caged bird, faced with options, chose to stay. I can’t tell you that I will ever be able to fully forgive them, but I am tired of our threads weaving the same pattern generation after generation. I can’t tell you if I’ve passed my ancestor’s test, but I am tired of the blaming and accusatory fingers. I can’t tell you if I will fully heal, but I am tired of my ming controlling my life. I can’t tell you I am more in touch with my yun either, but I am tired of not even trying because I’ve been told not to. 

I choose to let go. I choose to stop stitching up the holes tearing apart our tapestry. I choose to stop being the thread that holds it together. I choose to be the needle instead.

I’ll sew my own quilt now. Maybe one day, I’ll look down and see new quilts, patched together so that I can identify each new story, each new generation, instead of them all blending into a single one. And I’ll be happy, truly happy, because I didn’t just add on a new thread to a broken quilt. I passed the needle down instead.