My father held the square tin as though it were a gift he’d just received, his elbows bent, box in both hands just below his chest. As he approached the van where Steph and I waited, it looked for a moment like he wanted to shake the container to determine if it held a watch, a candle, a glass figurine. In reality, it was a canister of ash and bone fragments. A debt he owed to his dead wife.
A month after her funeral, the three of us were at Cedar Hill so that my father could pay for Jonathan’s remains to be disinterred, then cremated. It struck me then how many transactions were necessary in mourning. So many invoices to be paid over the past few weeks: the obituary notice, the funeral services, the casket, the flowers, the burial, the death certificate, Jonathan’s disinterment and cremation, and, eventually, my mother’s monument.
Steph and I waited for our father in the car, not speaking as we watched the smoke drift from the building’s chimney and fade into the trees. I wondered who we were witnessing take on another form.
As we left, bursts of gold and crimson scattered throughout the cemetery. The monuments obscured the groundskeepers and their leaf blowers, which made it appear as though ghosts had kicked the foliage.
At home, Steph and I took turns standing at the microwave to reheat bowls of a thin broth with pork bones, boiled mustard greens, and winter melon. I warmed crispy noodles in a pan and we slathered them with a gravy of fish cakes and bok choy we’d made the previous weekend. We ate these without speaking, spooning rice into our soup and slurping loudly, chomping on the noodles with visible, audible relief. Afterward, the TV still blasting the Nightly Business Report with Paul Kangas, our father carried the tin with Jonathan’s ashes to the family room. For the next decade, my parents’ only son would sit at the base of the fireplace behind a jungle of wilted and rotted plants.
* * *
Watching my father clutch his son’s ashes, I understood the weight of what he held. One can grieve a person, place, or ideal. All of those things have heft. The word itself, grieve, comes partially from the Latin gravare—to “make heavy; cause grief.” Heavy. Like the realization that his wife and son were not ready to leave their lives behind; that each of us was scared of death and all that it would bring; that with it, our sense of home—the people who made it, the paperwork that codified it—could easily be upended.
Freud wrote famously about mourning and melancholia. These two types of grief were distinct from one another, he posited in an essay from 1917. Mourning had an end in sight; a person in mourning had a grief that adhered to a specific person or object. But melancholia was an ongoing state—pathological, almost. The melancholic may know they have lost something, but not exactly what they have lost.
The scholar Anne Anlin Cheng puts it this way in The Melancholy of Race: “The melancholic eats the lost object—feeds on it, as it were.” Eats, feeds. As though those who have internalized loss become ravenous in their hunger for sustaining their grief. It bloats them, but they continue to feast. Perhaps, instead of asking if I am exorcising or taxidermizing you, I should ask if really, I am taxidermizing myself. What within my grief am I afraid to lose? It is the idea of her, of course. Here, so many years later, I can’t shake her death and don’t seem to want to in the first place. Eats, feeds, eats, feeds—insatiable.
But Cheng’s broader argument is that identity formation—and racial identity formation in particular—is melancholic itself and is shaped by the push-pulls of loss and recovery.2 I get this. The immigrant family tries to preserve a history and a life that the surroundings resist. They try to invent a new way of being while always seeking a home within the negative space.
I find this melancholy in the story of Yung Wing, who was buried in Cedar Hill not far from where Jonathan first rested. So many historians tout Yung’s firsts: that he was the first Chinese immigrant to graduate from Yale; that he wrote what was arguably the first Chinese American memoir, before a “Chinese American” identity was called such. But it is Yung’s existence in Connecticut and the question of his belonging that I find most compelling.
As a child, it was hard for me to imagine that anyone alive centuries ago in Connecticut looked like my family. Wethersfield’s borders had placards that delighted in how it was established in 1634 and therefore the “most ancient” town in the state. On elementary school field trips, we toured the homes of white men named Joseph Webb and Isaac Stevens that were built in the 1700s and preserved with assiduous detail. It was impossible for me to feel as though my family, or anyone who looked like us, had roots here. We felt so new and had no community outside of our relatives. I did not know that there were immigrants from China of my great-grandparents’ generation who lived and died not far from where I was born.
While at Yale, Yung was granted American citizenship, which was unusual in that era, considering that many Chinese immigrants in the American west were denied such, and the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 would make that xenophobia and racism law. It was perhaps, as some scholars argue, the privileges and proximity to whiteness that a prestigious institution like Yale afforded Yung.
Still, Yung struggled to find work after his graduation. His sponsors had hoped that, following his time at Yale, he would return to China to continue their mission work. The scholar Robert G. Lee once made a distinction about immigrants: A foreigner was “innocuous” and temporary; an alien had no desire to leave and was therefore considered a threat. I had previously considered both labels—foreigner, alien—to be similarly derogatory, practically synonyms because they both served to otherize immigrants. But an immigrant’s permanence so quickly can eradicate any veneer of welcome.
After years of traveling between China and the U.S., Yung eventually made a life in America. He married a white American woman named Mary Kellogg, and he started the Chinese Educational Mission, which had the seemingly contradictory goal of helping China stave off Western imperialism by bringing young men from China to the U.S. to study science and math. When the Chinese government disbanded the mission because officials feared the students were simultaneously becoming too Americanized and facing too much discrimination, Yung turned to diplomatic work. During a visit to China, Yung agitated for progressive reform, which in 1898, led Empress Dowager Cixi to put a $70,000 bounty on his head. Yung fled to Hong Kong and tried to return to the U.S., but the American consulate refused to admit him. The secretary of state retroactively invoked the Naturalization Act of 1870, which denied American citizenship to nonwhite people, in effect stripping Yung of his. But with the help of friends, Yung found a way to sneak into the U.S. despite this law. Though Yung Wing would spend his last years in Hartford, he would do so without a country.
I stop by Cedar Hill one recent fall when I’m passing through Connecticut on a road trip by myself. On Yung Wing’s grave are the plastic remnants of grocery store flowers that someone had left behind. That his grave continues to be honored a century later moves me, along with the significance of its location in Hartford.
I have not come across in-depth accounts of Yung’s funeral—just brief mentions that a friend and pastor of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford led the services. Considering that he was Christian and that Hartford did not have much of a community of Chinese immigrants then, I suspect his burial at Cedar Hill Cemetery lacked Chinese customs. I’m curious if this was what he had chosen—he’d be near his wife, after all—or if he had requested that his remains be sent back to China, where his parents and siblings rested, only to have the circumstances of his isolation prevent this.
Most of the men who came as laborers to America’s western states tended to be buried according to Confucian rituals. In many cases, their remains were returned by ship to China so their final resting place could be among family. Bone repatriation, it was called; the word repatriation saying a lot about one’s so-called rightful country.
That Yung Wing’s body rests in Hartford—and that the Chinese government recognized his remains there with a plaque—might give him the last word on the matter of his citizenship. This barbs me and feels both like triumph and defeat. I know, after all, that where a body rests says so much.
When my mother told Steph that she wanted to be buried in Fairfield instead of in Hartford, I understood this decision logically. But it showed that my family’s epicenter had shifted, and that perhaps our anchor had never been our home like I’d thought. It had always been our mother. We still had the physical remnants of the life she’d built for us, which itself was a feat, but in spirit, we understood it had left us.
* * *
Each of my family’s Lunar New Year celebrations from my childhood blend together. We took the photos of my mother’s parents and my father’s mother that sat on top of the TV and propped them on our kitchen table. The absence of my paternal grandfather’s photo underscored to me how my father seemed fatherless. All I knew was that my paternal grandfather had left China for Cuba to work in restaurants and had died there. We did not have an image of Jonathan—a photo would have been too gruesome, given his condition—and this, too, vanished him from my mind.
The new year was one of the only Chinese holidays my family observed. In the days that led up to it, my mother scrubbed the floors and vacuumed between the couch cushions. She hauled a stool to the center of the kitchen and she trimmed our hair. On New Year’s Eve, she rushed home from work to finish the last details. It was jarring how, since Lunar New Year was not a recognized holiday in our town, it often fell in the middle of our everyday routines, rendering it both mundane and disruptive. My parents bustled about in the kitchen, preparing groceries from the sole Asian supermarket in our area. They soaked bok choy and gai lan in the sink and rehydrated dried shiitakes to fold into glass noodles. They warmed a whole roasted duck in the oven; they boiled a chicken in a stockpot, its head and gnarled feet taking turns bobbing at the top; they scraped the scales from a red snapper to prepare it to be steamed. My sisters and I took breaks from homework to chop scallions and ginger, which we sprinkled on top of the steamed snapper or doused with scalding oil to serve with the silky chicken. I helped lay out all of the platters on our kitchen table. My father reminded us what each one symbolized.
Before we ate, we pulled on our winter coats and my father slid open the back door and set a metal can on the deck. There, we built a small fire and burned joss paper and the tissue clothes we’d cut for my parents’ ancestors and Jonathan. Afterward, we stood before the spread and lit joss sticks for each relative, bowing three times together.
We have to make sure they have a chance to eat, my father would say as he gestured to what we had cooked.
I rushed through the motions, unsure what I should think as I bowed. Was this prayer? How does one pray? Should I try to invoke a higher power, or the dead? I never asked my parents if this was symbolic or if maybe they believed our dead relatives existed in another dimension. So I studied the plates before us. I never imagined these ghost ancestors like I did my mother, but I wondered then if they were scarfing down what we’d steamed and blanched and stir-fried.
One year, while we waited for the joss sticks to finish smoldering, our doorbell chimed. My sisters, who remember this story more clearly than I do, said a crew of firefighters or police had gathered at our front door. A well-meaning neighbor worried that our house was burning. I don’t know how my parents reacted. Embarrassed, probably. Bemused, maybe, if they didn’t think too hard about it. Later, they would share the story theatrically, cheerfully, at the next family party, drawing chuckles.
* * *
Not long after we brought Jonathan’s ashes home, my father dragged his headstone from the van to the backyard while I was at school. I hadn’t noticed that we brought the marker from the cemetery in the first place; my father must have returned to Cedar Hill by himself to retrieve it.
He deposited the stone near our back deck in one of the overgrown garden beds clogged with bull thistle and cheatgrass. He likely moved efficiently, not pausing to allow any sentimentality to seep through. He did not bow; he did not offer any words to his son. After all, it was a tombstone that marked nothing. After all, his son’s ashes were inside our home, to be buried later at his wife’s grave.
I discovered the headstone later that week when I hauled the garbage cans through the yard to the street. Jonathan’s marker sat flat in the garden bed.
Whoa. I jerked back and barreled into the house. You put Jonathan’s gravestone there?
Hey, my father said. Where else would I put it?
He didn’t want it inside, and I couldn’t blame him. That would only invite trouble.
It just looks like, I said, waving my hands, flustered, I don’t know, it just looks like you buried him here. It looks like a grave.
Whether my father could or would acknowledge it, he cultivated his grief this way: He let the vines stretch thick and run amok over his son’s stone. There was something stunning in how the vegetation persisted, the whole scene so easily confused for decay.