Dear friends,

I’ve been sick for most the past couple weeks, and will be traveling for the bulk of the next two, so forgive me if today’s letter is more dogs-breakfast-y than usual. (I’m tempted to stop here, not having used this canine-smorgasbord idiom in adjectival form before: a discovery that has me feeling inordinately delighted. Do you also find that little things take on outsize import when you’re convalescing?) 

The best part of not feeling well is the excuse to dip, guilt-free, into the tsundoku by one’s sickbed. Mine is a cascade of curiosities-become-library-holds: American Han (Lisa Lee), Black Women Writers (1950–1980) (edited by Mari Evans), How Do You Live? (Genzaburō Yoshino, translated by Bruno Navasky), The Jemima Code (Toni Tipton-Martin), The Joy of Living (Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche), Maggie (Katie Yee), We’re Alone (Edwidge Danticat).

You can imagine my astonishment upon learning, nine pages into We’re Alone, that the book that carved high-school-age Edwidge Danticat’s indelible writing path forward was none other than Mari Evan’s anthology. I’d borrowed Black Women Writers (1950–1980) to read Toni Morrison’s “Rootedness, the Ancestor as Foundation” after searching for it in vain online. As with all of Morrison’s writing, every sentence in this short essay is worthy of a reverent reread many times over. Here’s one that sunk its talons into me, a koan-hawk of a sentence:

When you kill the ancestor you kill yourself.

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The koan-hawk evoked a passage from Thích Nhất Hạnh’s Present Moment Wonderful Moment—

Whose hand is this
that never died?
Who is it who was born in the past?
Who is it who will die in the future?

If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people. (13–14)

—along with a passage from Kathy Nguyen’s essay “Eulogies of the Unknown” (an essay addressed to her Bá after his death, about her still-living Má, born of a desire “to redocument [her] refugee parents’ lives”): 

Later, she would tell me that a generation, her generation, displaced and scattered somewhere at a distance, are dying as time catches up with them. You used to despair over the loss of singers, always commenting that a singer and songwriter is irreplaceable once they die because their vocal range and lyrics are inimitable. I remember you once shared a quote: “không ai có thể thoát khỏi thời gian?” But what about your life?

Sometimes ancestors are hidden rather than killed. Sometimes they’re not so much hidden as not inquired after—and therefore never evoked. Blame language barriers, reticence, fear of triggering awkwardness or grief or trauma or the unknown. (Why did I wait until until my fourth decade to ask my parents the simple question, What was my great-grandmother like?) Curiosities unvoiced, ancestors dormant. A hand that yields nothing of the past or future.

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On the way to getting some comfort food for the pantry, I listened to Namwali Serpell in conversation with Hanif Abdurraqib about the difficulty-verging-on-impossibility of adapting Toni Morrison’s writing to film. I thought of silver screen moments when the inverse is true—Kōji Yakusho’s wordless final scene at the end of Perfect Days, say—and then I thought of another sublime 2023 film, Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, whose English title is a far cry from the Japanese 君たちはどう生きるか. Kimi-tachi wa Dō Ikiru ka, the title of Genzaburō Yoshino’s classic 1937 novel, rendered in Bruno Navasky’s English translation as How Do You Live? None of the book’s plot—but perhaps all of its spirit—makes it into The Boy and the Heron. 

There’s hardly a Hayao Miyazaki film that I haven’t watched more than once, but The Boy and the Heron (alias How Do You Live?) was the first one that compelled an immediate rewatch, much as Katie Kitamura’s Audition, Möbius strip that it is, had me to turning from the final page immediately back to the opening lines. (It’s a 416-page book as far as I’m concerned.) The Wikipedia plot summary of The Boy and the Heron is comically, precisely inadequate—the difference between reading about a tomato and biting into a vine-ripened one. 

(Probably not a spoiler: “Mahito descends into an oceanic world. He is rescued from attacking pelicans and a forbidding, megalithic dolmen by a younger Kiriko, an adept fisherwoman who uses fire through a magic wand.” A few sentences/scenes later: “The two are separated by anthropomorphic, man-eating parakeets.”)

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There’s an ethically tortured quality to The Boy and the Heron and Bruno Navasky’s translation of How Do You Live? that draws me to these works, a quality that’s also woven throughout The Bluest Eye, whose first page is a plot synopsis of the entire novel because Morrison recognizes what is not the crux of the matter so much as what about, and why, and how.

There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

The agony of these ethically tormenting questions performs its own kind of smelting work—beyond physical transformation to a kind of alchemical purification.

High-end enterprise AI can generate a thousand uncanny tomatoes in a single second, none of which we can sink our teeth into. There is an unbridgeable gulf between these insatiable images and the three kids across the alleyway whose daily ministrations have coaxed the plants on their condo balcony to soaring heights (my balcony cherry tomatoes also tower over my head). 

We wave at each other across our balconies with ancestor-laden hands—theirs small, mine large—and I suddenly remember a time when I was about the size of the oldest of the three siblings, when a friend took me to the Mattress Factory. (You’re going where?!, my parents asked.) This is the friend who made me want to become a writer, with whom I’ve maintained an epistolary friendship of over thirty years. (The rule is no email or texts unless absolutely necessary.) 

This was a pre–social media age when it was still possible to linger with leisure through Yayoi Kusama’s mirrored chambers. We were years (lifetimes) away from being able to capture the Infinity Dots Mirrored Room with a smartphone. That ancestral hall of mirrors—polka dots and starry lights and two friends infinitely multiplying into an unreachable darkness—made it possible to imagine a world where we could be more than consumers in a capitalist world. It was a place to see ourselves as cultivators, creators, citizens for whom the welfare of the community must trump the violent machinations of the nation-state.

Why not offer our hands and hearts and singing, singular voices to questions that are worth tormenting ourselves with again and again? How do you live? How shall we live? What about..., and why…, and how...?

Poetry is an asker and respondent to questions, so I’ll close with an excerpt from Thích Nhất Hạnh’s “The Good News,” shared by a Roots & Refuge sangha member who came through town for an integrative oncology conference in Detroit:

The dandelion is there by the sidewalk,
smiling its wondrous smile,
singing the song of eternity.
Lo! You have ears capable of hearing it.
Bow your head.
Listen to her. 
Leave behind your world of sorrow and preoccupation
and get free.

Lo! When you revive an ancestor you revive yourself. I ask about my great-grandmother and learn that Cantonese Buddhist chants spilled from her mouth, that she was the kindest of souls. She died a month before I was born. 

How sad... I venture, but my mother interjects.

Not at all. Everyone said she died well, because she was 修道的人 xīudào de rén. 

A practitioner, though I prefer to feed the first character through a Chinese-English dictionary and open a mirror-room of other possible translations: decorator/embellisher/repairer/builder/cultivator/studier/taker of the path.

May we be well this autumn, as we take and study and cultivate and build and repair and embellish and decorate our paths. May only the most worthy of koan-hawks torment us. May we be free of the rest.

Till the next quarter moon,

~Chenxing

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