The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(118)

Buddhism


Years ago, I ran into a young man named Timber Hawkeye at The Bookworm in Camarillo, California. At the time, I didn’t know he was the author of Faithfully Religionless and had 500,000 fans on social media. He just had a peaceful, thoughtful affect, and a cool T-shirt that read: BUDDHIST BOOTCAMP. NON-JUDGMENT DAY IS NEAR. Suddenly he had 500,001 fans.

Timber once said, “By no longer identifying as victims of the past, we are empowered to change the future.” I pondered that along with my own understanding of epigenetics and wondered how inherited trauma might be reconciled by re-remembering the past. I also wondered how changing the past would affect the philosophical concept of karma.

I took my questions about the confluence of karma and intergenerational trauma to Jason Wirth, doctor of philosophy at Seattle University, and Soto Zen priest.

When I first met Jason, it was at Seattle’s Kubota Garden. He asked about my faith and I cheekily said, “I’m a deist, agnostic, Shinto, Jesuit—a little bit of everything, with the option to change my beliefs as I discover new things along the way.” To which Jason smiled gently and said, “I think that means you’re a Buddhist.” He may be right.

Jason and Timber were both incredibly patient with my coarse, unenlightened questions about Buddhism, karma, fate, and both entertained my abstract thoughts about epigenetics. My discussions with them were educational, enlightening, and edifying. I’m grateful for their kindness and the avenues of thought they opened up for me.





The Nonfiction Beneath the Fiction


In the process of writing this novel I consumed countless books, articles, and interviews for research, and there were some that I’m particularly appreciative of. These are the books that were not only educational, but were an absolute pleasure to read. Books that I thoroughly enjoyed while getting to pretend that I was “working” were:

The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America by Nancy E. Davis and Lloyd Suh’s stage play, The Chinese Lady. One is nonfiction, the other fiction. Both were completely absorbing. Afong, you have not been forgotten!

The Flying Tigers: The Untold Story of the American Pilots Who Waged a Secret War Against Japan by Sam Kleiner. This was a fascinating encapsulation of a less understood, less appreciated, chapter of WWII. My great-uncles, both Chinese Americans, worked with the AVG. Perhaps someday their story will be known as well.

Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing by A. S. Neill. Before there were alternative high schools, there was the audacious idea of Summerhill. Founded in the twenties, this maverick school in England is still going strong today—a democratic community celebrating nonauthoritarianism and genuine freedom. Oh, how I wish I had gone there as a child.

Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco’s Chinatown by Guenter B. Risse, and The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco by Marilyn Chase. It was an eerie, head-shaking experience to write about a highly politicized epidemic in the past, in the middle of a highly politicized global pandemic in the present. As the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same, and tragically, the more people die.

Then there are these bits of nonfiction that were inspiring. One deserves its own book (and a box of Kleenex for the accompanying tears), the other needs some venture capital.

First is the true story of Huang Huanxio. When young Chinese women of her age were getting married, Huanxio went to college, became a nurse, and was working in Hong Kong when the British colony fell to the Japanese in 1941. Because she spoke English, she was assigned to work with the Flying Tigers at Yunnanyi, where she became known as Rita Wong. The only Chinese nurse working at the hospital near the airfield, she fell in love with an American aviator who vowed to come back for her after the war. Tragically, because she spoke English, Rita was singled out for harsh punishment in the Cultural Revolution and was beaten so badly her back was broken. She survived, married, and spent the next six decades in Kunming before passing away in 2007 at age 95. A cousin later produced a cache of love letters from the pilot, postmarked 1946. The letters had been hidden from Rita. Not only had the pilot returned to China, he went to Rita’s hometown in search of her, but was unable to locate the nurse who had captured his heart.

The other bit of inspiration was Siren, a real-life feminist dating app launched in Seattle in 2015 by artist and entrepreneur Susie Lee and Katrina Hess. Upon its debut, their unique creation was named GeekWire’s App of the Year. What’s more impressive, after one year of operation, Siren was the only dating app to report zero online harassers. No misogynistic creeps. No unsolicited photos of strangers’ penises. But by 2017, having run out of future funding, Lee and Hess were forced to close their digital doors for good, and apps with deeper pockets, like Bumble, took over the marketplace.

While Siren had no real-life, misogynistic investor lurking in the wings as depicted in the chapters about Greta and Syren, a 2021 report on “Diversity in U.S. Startups” showed that venture capitalists are still funding entrepreneurs who are mostly white, mostly male. VC-backed startups, as of this writing, are 89.3% male and 71.6% white. And that’s an improvement over previous years. Why do I mention this? Because Susie Lee and Katrina Hess are Asian American women at the top of their game and still struggled to sustain enough funds to keep their successful company afloat. But hey, if you’re an altruistic billionaire and you’re reading this, I can put you in touch.