What it means to be Chinese

My body has been trying to find her way home for so long. As I sit here writing this, drinking the Chinese herbal tea I got in Chinatown today after meditating in a Chinese Buddhist temple, I am feeling immensely grateful for the thousands of years of wisdom cultivated by my ancestors that allow me to experience this moment. I had been avoiding my culture for so long because intergenerational trauma made it something I wanted to escape rather than a source of healing. It has now become an anchor for me in a world where it is increasingly easy to become unmoored.

In the past few weeks, I have made an intentional effort to access the ancient healing traditions of my people. I started cooking more Chinese food and made cabbage and pidan soup, mapo tofu, easy egg fried rice, and zha jiang mian. I recently received some Chinese herbs from my friend who studied Chinese medicine in Shanghai, in exchange for a lesson in soapmaking. This inspired me to visit the Chinese herbal medicine shops in Chinatown which have always been such an enigma to me, but which I realized today are such a treasure trove.

In my experience, being connected with nature is much more than yoga poses, Buddhist mantras, and vegan food…it is the vibrant poetry in the calligraphy my grandpa wrote, the resonant sunshine on my grandma’s skin as she foraged for herbs in the Chinese countryside before her village became gentrified, and the songs of my ancestors as they bathed in grief and joy surrounded by those they love.

“If the wounding is ancestral, the medicine must be ancestral as well.” -Dr. Jennifer Mullan @decolonizingtherapy