#29 For a Better World, Let Yourself Cry

Anyone is entitled to cry. About anything.

It means that the pain you feel is real and is telling you something. Something important in you is being lost, hurt, tread on, violated, threatened, or simply touched or awakened. You’re entitled to know that.

Beyond entitled. It’s your responsibility to notice that, to let it exist, to figure out why it exists, and to piece together what you need to find peace with it.

I have heard of my grandma crying once.

My grandma came to Hong Kong in 1950. According to her ID card, she was born in 1931. None of us know.

Almost everything I write about her here came to me second hand.

She came from somewhere near Suzhou. She has said “I am a Suzhou beauty.” According to

an old Chinese saying, “上有天堂, 下有苏杭” — The skies have heavens, the earth has Suzhou (literally the region around it). It’s romanticized as a beautiful city and a Suzhou beauty is part of the fantasy.

My grandma went to school — a rarity for girls in China. She went to school up through the 6th grade, when Civil War in China ceased that opportunity for her. In 1949, the Communist Party founded the People’s Republic of China.

For whatever reason, my grandma got out of China as a teenager.

I once asked her “Boo Boo, do you have any siblings?”

She shook her head while saying in Cantonese — she speaks only Cantonese and Shanghainese, “No ah, Boo Boo has nothing” in a tone not opening the door to any more conversation. Why did I even ask her? Because I didn’t know, and when I asked my grandma’s children, they didn’t know either.

That doesn’t mean she didn’t. It means that she won’t talk about it.

Back to her mythology told by others.

In Hong Kong, she became the third or fourth consort of a man four decades her senior and had five children with him by age 30 — two boys and three girls, my mom being the second child and first girl. My grandma and this man never married, though they lived together.

This man died when my mom was 11 years old.

He was a businessman, in textiles and nets — likely the material of fishing nets, and for whatever masses of complicated reasons, the bank liquidated his estate upon his death. Suddenly, a home with financial means and service became a single mom with five children and no financial entitlements as a non-married consort.

His children had financial entitlements though, available to all the children when the youngest boy, the fourth child, turned 18. Nothing went to my grandma other than a tiny monthly allowance.

For ten years between his death and my younger uncle turning 18, my grandma somehow managed to raise five children and cover their school fees in Hong Kong. In her mythology, she was never employed. She sold off jewelry given to her by the father of my mother, piece by piece.

My mother graduated high school and by the age of 20, became a teacher at a new local school.

At age 24, my mom took her inheritance to go to college in the US.

She meant to return home after graduation. Plans changed. At age 28, she graduated and started a family in North America.

What does all this have to do with crying?

There are several quotes on the internet with the same idea: “Pain travels through families until someone is ready to feel it.”

We know nothing about my grandma’s parents. We don’t know if my grandma had siblings.

I know enough to believe that my grandma was pushed out of a one life and into another and lived with hardship, loss, not a lot of choice, and no space to grieve it.

What does grief do when imprisoned? What any emotion does when imprisoned. You swallow it up inside you, where it doesn’t die but lives there in darkness, and sneaking around, hunting for sustenance, taking what it wants when it sees it. It controls you more than you control it.

In this mythology, my grandma was a hardworking, dedicated, frugal, sacrificing mother. People also mistook for a school principal. In old Chinese culture, people revere teachers with a sense of fear. A school principal means people fear you more.

How can a person pushed out by their family of origin, who doesn’t speak about it to their next family show others to give space for their own emotions?

What kind of emotional stability could this person provide to the next generation?

How can that next generation even know the difference between function and dysfunction?

Without knowing the difference, how can they stabilize their own emotions and show someone else how to do it?

More than ten years ago, my uncle’s then wife, a non-smoker, died at age 55 of a rare and deadly lung cancer. Someone didn’t want my grandma to attend the funeral. Someone else took her anyway.

In the mythology, she cried her eyes out. Hard, heaving, unstoppable crying. They were worried about her. Was she going to live another day?

Today the debate is active. My grandma’s first-born has died and one of the others is asking — should she be allowed to attend the funeral? What if she cries herself sick?

What if she cries herself to death?

I don’t have an answer for this. I don’t know the right or wrong way to go here.

Here’s another question though — what if she gets sick because she doesn’t cry?

The better world I want to exist someday starts with awareness and the courage to be with our emotions. Let them be signals — not controls — observe and learn from them. We each take care of our own, and let others have theirs.

What’s my role in this?

Letting the tears come as I write this and saying so.

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This is the 29th and final link of Don’t Break the Chain, a daily writing course by Cole Schafer. Want to read his stuff? Sign up for his newsletter, Sticky Notes.

Today’s prompt: How am I going to leave the world better than I found it?