what to do when your elders don't want to grieve with you?

on mourning, "bad luck", anger, & my disapproving Asian elder community

Those ten elderly Asians who were shot in Monterey Park, California on Lunar New Year. I remember hearing about them a few days ago. Well, their names were released today. I saw first on Instagram, then I got the push alert, then I got some texts. Then Tik Tok was recommending the reels. Then I stared at the page as I recalled the times I’d wandered around Monterey Park in the last five years of my residence in Los Angeles, where this was the place for Chinese camaraderie. I felt sadness and anger throb through me as I thought about not just the lives taken, but the lives left in their wake that were still here but had to go on without them. I thought about how I’d felt this during the time after the Atlanta spa shootings. I got on my knees and prayed a bit today, prayed for this to settle into my heart.

It always does. I’ve kept meticulous track of mass shootings ever since I was a kid, ever since I realized some people dealt with their negative emotions by turning to violence. Whether mentally ill or not, they did not feel positively because people in a great emotional state don’t do these things. I thought then about my duty to keep myself positive, because I did not want to become a mass shooter ever or ever commit violence towards others.

It’s why I’m often afraid to be angry, and turn my anger into sadness before it can go out and hurt people. Yet anger is so often a symptom of grief. Let myself be angry too, not just sad. Because I can be angry yet with love.

At least… that’s what I believe, “as a young person.”

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At the dinner table the night I found out, the many people gathered there weren’t angry about it along with me. They’d rather I stop talking.

All the adults — no, the “older” adults —there were uncomfortable that I sat there with a look of despair upon my face. They either laughed a little awkwardly and walked away, or flat out said to not talk about it.

They started rambling to manage my emotions. They didn’t want to sit together about it. They didn’t know how to want to.

Because there’s no point in being sad about it, they say. It’s not anti-Asian violence, it’s just violence. It doesn’t affect you. How dare they say that that couldn’t have been us, only a few thousand miles away on the same coast, speaking the same mother tongue.

This is their reaction to anti-Asian violence too. This was how it was after the Atlanta shooting. After Michelle Go died, my mom said I shouldn’t go ever go out and do anything activism-related because it just puts a target on my back, disapproving even of me wanting to participate in public mournings of her.

In fact, they say, if this shooting is a bad omen for the year to come, we should put our heads down and be good. Maybe we have not been good enough. We should not do these loud, rambunctious things like grieve loudly and disrupt one another. We should just be sad, quietly, in silence, and think about what we may have done to the gods to deserve this.

What?

For all the softness I saw my parents with, knowing they one day would be that age and be vulnerable as well – it always gets interrupted when I realize they also have a harsh self view, that they are somewhat of the adults to my child, and they do not want me to take care of them. They do not want to share how they feel. They do not want to talk about breaking any “curses,” whether of now or of before.

They don’t want it.

Makes grieving very complicated when the surrogate group you want to protect won’t take you seriously.

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I want to say that I get it. Everyone grieves differently. Everyone is upset differently. That we don’t need to all do it together for it to be valid.

Yet that’s not really how I feel. I feel judgmental at anyone who can’t face their own emotions enough to hold others’ too properly. I don’t want my feelings to be socially appropriate right now. And yet, life is short. If I’m angry today, will I regret this if they died tomorrow?

The guilt I feel right now! For the community I once knew having just lost elders that could’ve been my family, to be at home with my family in Oregon here in this life right now, yet be so goddamn angry at those who are older. Those who cannot accept. Those who don’t want to think about this, when all I can do is think about it! All I can do is carry the emotional weight of knowing what is in the world, and daring to want to fix it.

You laugh at too many young people’s impractical dreams, when I carry the heart. I’m so angry that I am angry at how I don’t have my friends my age with me right now, and I feel this misalignment of values here. I feel like, as long as I am a kid, I don’t have authority to talk about things as an adult. And in the adult world, the emotional and mental health of us all affects us all.

How am I going to face that if I chalk it up to “God’s plan” and not some systemic way this could’ve all been changed?

I stare dully at how the camaraderie I see on social media can’t be replicated by my own immediate elders. I don’t put the expectations on them, but I feel the repercussions of this mentality. I feel the awareness that not everyone’s family of that age wants to think about it. They don’t want to face it. They don’t want to see it. They have internalized self hate, feeling unworthy of defying whatever is making them clam up. What do I do?

I am weary that I am building community for my generation, but that I can’t connect enough to the other generation.

I don’t want to hear that it was just a bad omen. I don’t want to chalk it up to “well this year’s a wash, let’s just move on with our lives then and refuse to be happy or refuse to be upset,”

I don’t want to.

Because I believe omens are not an indication of what will happen next. They’re a reminder for you to buck up. And I feel an immense amount of grief today, not just for what was lost, but what can be lost still if my parents and my family friends don’t want to face the monsters under the bed, the emotional rage that plagues us all, that makes us commit violence against each other whether physical or implicitly.

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I do a lot of astrology. I track transits, I’ve studied birth charts for 7 years, I talk to my friends, we muse about our signs, we give offerings to the planet lords.

I also channel. I talk frequently to the goddess Jiu Tian Xuan Nu, who has watched over me for the last year consciously, probably longer than that.

I always kept a sturdy amount of faith growing up, whether it was from deciding to interpret the Judeo-Christian Bible on my terms as a kid, or from believing that the suicidal thoughts of my childhood would not define the kind of person I grew up to be. I dared to have love be the answer, always.

I do think about the universe.

I don’t think anything is a real sign you’re fucked, ever.

I’ve really worked on my spiritual life, because I’ve always thought it necessary. I thought this was going to get me through life, and it has. But more importantly, I know that I can’t do things without other people. And as our world expands, really, really, largely, I know everyone has had to find their ritual around this. Everyone has had to look the unknown square in the eye and fully form a conception of it. And everyone does it better when they do it with other people.

Many of us already grieve, a lot. We grieve “smaller” things, like rejections or fights or breakups. And the “bigger” things, like sickness, mass deaths, genocides, also get our attention. Fixation on the dull, resounding pain in our psyches will be in our minds unconsciously in the background as we also go through our daily lives with the little stabbing throbs of anxiety. I feel those must be connected — you’re anxious because you don’t want something bad to happen. You can only be anxious after bad things have happened at some point in your life, to where you’re anticipating future bad things.

Our mortality can cause fear; it can also cause fierce commitment and determination, to not let this put out our love.

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I know this because the Internet exists today. You can know in minutes not just the tragedies of this week, but the tragedies of history of all time. When you look at one sickening event, you suddenly realize how sickening the existences of the entirety of civilization have been. You can’t really go to the grave as a conscious person unaware of it all.

And you can be fucking mad about it. You can be mad that people die. You don’t have to have something specific to blame, someone to hold responsible, for yourself to just let the agony splinter through you and shriek.

Asians repress their anger at times. You’re taught to really play it cool. Growing up, my mom would tell me she hoped I’d never get Italian friends or any hot blooded “white friends” who just would blow up all the time and be loud, be unafraid to show their emotions, all of that.

And yet, what good has it done me, to feel like I can’t express, to feel like I can’t even cry too loudly in this house? It’s made me bottle up, spill over with resentment and helplessness.

And in the face of that, I would rather believe then that there is no God, that divination doesn’t matter in the face of the human spirit. That will itself can prevail, that will itself can not let suffering break you no matter what.

Because grief without hope is the real poison. Giving up because of that sadness is the real tragedy. This is not what is intended.

I refuse to see deaths and tragedy as an omen. I refuse to stop trying with my stubborn elders. I refuse to not feel.

I angrily think, if this is a sign from God for the days to come, it is a sign that I shall not for one hell of a second stop loving, and if there wasn’t a clearer call to action that I should be loving even harder than I am now, then I’ll be damned.

I wearily accept that perhaps for my elders and me, I can only lead by example and pray God moves their hard hearts, rather than drain my energy on explaining to them why activism and awareness all matter.

And that I can handle it. That my back is strong enough to carry us all. That I can do it.

That I don’t think we need the world to be fair for us to owe it to ourselves, to still be hopeful on principle. To still do our jobs to love, and also hold the fear and sadness in our hearts.

And to hold it for those who can’t do it yet.