“If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.” ~ Toni Morrison
I come from serially displaced people. Koreans take great nationalistic pride in their “purity,” and are dismayed to find out their racial and ethnic make-up is an amalgam of many peoples from many lands who criss-crossed the peninsula in the name of empire, adventure, accident, and plunder. More recently, my parents left Korea in the aftermath of war. A proxy war between two aspiring superpowers and their ideologies, it devastated the peninsula, divided it arbitrarily in half, and impoverished it in the wake of genocide.
My parents ultimately embraced the occupying power, as all good survivors know instinctively to do, and brought their three children to the far fringe of the USA, Honolulu, Hawai`i, to suck on the teat of American empire.
Torn from a primary caregiver, my maternal grandmother, and the land of my ancestors, and my mother tongue, I floated along, adapting with vigor. I entered school and quickly learned English and pidgin, leaving Korean behind. Whatever sadness I experienced at this rupture I learned to bury, and move on.
I experienced further trauma when our family left the islands in 1975 seeking better research opportunities for my father at University of Buffalo. Overnight I became Asian, other, strange, alien, and fugitive, in the 7th grade. Desperate for some sense of belonging, I developed armor, practicing making fun of myself. I learned to wear pantyhose, feather and curl my straight hair, and start to speak with curled r’s.
Since then I’ve made my home in many places: New York City, Nashville, Milwaukee, Detroit, and finally, I’m circling back around to Honolulu.
This morning I said goodbye to a home in Detroit, a year-long housesitting gig for my dear friend Adela, who is now based in Puerto Rico. It was not my intention to live alone in the large duplex for the entire year. Honestly I’ve never lived alone. I went from living with my parents to living in dorms and apartments with friends, then having my own family in my own home. After my young adult kids left home, so did I, embarking on a new stage of my life, living in house-share cooperatives and intentional communities.
Once I overcame my resistance to living alone, I savored it. I ate when I felt like eating, I cleaned when I felt like cleaning. I kept all the lights off and used a single candle. I drummed at all hours, turned music up whenever I wanted. My main room was my yoga room, stripped of all furniture. The whole house was my dance floor, the houseplants my witnesses. I didn’t realize how much I had conformed myself to the needs of others until this year. I experienced deep healing in this house, in this pandemic year, and I will be forever grateful.
Now, as I prepare, at age 58, to make a new permanent home in Hawai`i, I am relinquishing this house, and so much more. I am determined to whittle my material life down to a dozen boxes, to ship to the island.
I have been gradually dissolving the library that had me bound for decades: small press poetry, politics and social commentary, Korean language and history, yoga and healing.… In waves, I have given away hundreds of books, and I still have more to release. Yesterday, I took four boxes of books to the free store at the recycling center. A feeling of loneliness swept over me as I stacked the books on the shelves. Who the hell is going to appreciate these literary works? Avant garde poetry, experimental fiction, and essays? Many are first edition, small press, out of print. Many are signed and have personalized inscriptions to me. Yet I cannot keep hanging on to them. They hold me back, saying, “stay, stay, hold me, turn my pages, keep me.” But as long as I hold on, my arms are full, and I cannot embrace the new.
It’s not just the books. It’s clothing: hand knit sweaters by my mother, a cashmere vest of my father’s, silken hanboks, myriad scarves–many gifted or inherited. It’s artwork–by me, my children, and friends. And endless photos, and albums from back in the day.
Worst of all, the notebooks. What was I thinking, writing all this shit down? What do I do with them now?
On the car radio, I heard a piece about a junkyard in Chicago, where the remains of significant historic buildings are piled up. You can see bits of beautiful architectural landmarks peeking out of the rubble. That’s what it felt like to see my formerly treasured, carefully curated books on the shelves at the recycling center, randomly stacked.
All the parts of my life are open to review and renunciation now. All my identities. Remember “Peggy Hong”? The poet? The wife? From Milwaukee? Remember Hong Gwi-Seok? The daughter? Teacher? Caregiver? Activist? Detroiter? Remember when I shaved my head? The Badass Yoga Nun? In Hawai`i I will be Halmoni, Aunty Peggy, and Mom.
In this grieving process, past, present, and future flow together, weave, and blend. Who am I outside of time? Who am I without my identities and their markers?
This morning I swept clean every room of the upper flat I had been occupying. I opened the windows and smudged each room clean with tulsi and sage, singing, crying, and praying. May we all move on, with grace, trust, and love. May all spirits be released and liberated. May we all joyfully enter the next stage of our lives. May this house be a blessing for the new family. My final gesture was harvesting a handful of onions from the garden, resplendent with green stalks despite the recent frost.
I’ve released so much, but there is still so much more to go. We cannot force or rush grief. I touch and stroke each piece of paper, each photo, each article of clothing. Keep, give away, recycle, or landfill? Some pieces I come back to three times, six times, ten times, undecided. Some pieces I photograph for a digital archive.
I remind myself that the objects have their own lives, outside of me. I attempt to shed my anthropocentric, Judaeo-Christian, capitalistic notions of ownership. My books at the recycling center will continue their existence, even if they are discarded, burned, or destroyed. They are artifacts of a stage of my life that is now over, and artifacts of an author’s particular expression at a particular time. Aside from the raison d’être of the book itself, it exists as paper and cardboard, made from trees, and it will, like every object and embodied being, return to the earth and be composted. If we’re lucky, we will all ultimately feed the soil, beetles, rhizomes, worms, and bacteria.
When identity through objects is shed, what is left?
The practice.
Just what do I practice? Leaning into the unknown. Failing with magnificence. Dissolution of egoic attachments. Asking questions with no clear answers. Change as the only constant. I utilize the body, sound, image, breath. All of these modalities are available to me at all times, and have nothing to do with my possessions. This is how I find home, and make home.
1 comment:
Thank you for this post. I haven’t met you, but I very much appreciate your words. I recently became a mother and moved to a new place leaving most of my old identities behind. There is much grief, letting go and seeing how deep attachments to old identities and material things are. I often thought about renunciation and letting go in spiritual practice within the comfort of my established identities, home and materials which reflected those identities back. When all of that changes and is stripped away, we are only left with our practice as you say. Thanks for your courage and writing.
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