Cousins: Colors, Screens, Immigrants and Refugees

Throughout this year’s Refugee Week (June 19 – 25) we commemorate the strength, courage and perseverance of millions of refugees. In honor of this week and of Refugee Day (June 20) I have written the following blog.

A few early mornings ago, I heard an interview with a scientist, expert in soil. The interviewer asked her, how on earth (No pun intended of course!) did she end up making her life’s work a study in well, dirt? She replied with a story. As a young person, she was on a camping trip, and her little dog fell into the outdoor latrine. It was a laborious and messy excavation rescuing the little guy, that involved a fair amount of hacking at the hard dirt walls of the hole. In the process of this protracted relief mission, our protagonist could not help but be distracted by the spectrum of brilliant and vivid colors of the well enriched soil. She was mesmerized, not to the point of being interrupted from her task, but enough that when the pup was safe and clean, she was inspired to see more. Perhaps under more deliberate and certainly more savory circumstances. So not only, as is often the case, was there a silver lining to a stinky traumatic event, but it paved the way for a rewarding career.  Of course, as a lover of colors, I loved the story, and the many metaphors about how a rainbow of microbial diversity provides the field for a universe of life and growth. It also reminded me of how bizarre and nonsensical it is that we humans can be separated, even go to war about color. Go figure…

Screens

I always fancied myself something of a nature girl, with resistance, if not at times outright contempt for electronic modes of connection. Until the Pandemic changed everything in so many ways including that one. Not suddenly but soon and powerfully, I discovered the wide world of Zoom and “webinars,” where my lifelong introversion and solitude, my crazy insomniac hours and my cheese-vat stirring marathons morphed into a veritable social life. I was delighted. First there was “Grateful Ed’s Gospel Hour,” where neurofeedback expert extraordinaire, who happened to have a sense of humor to match, rhapsodized about all sorts of philosophical questions through the lens of brain science and rock and roll. What a wondrous combination for my brain! Then there was world class neuroscience rockstar Ruth Lanius, presenting all manner of brain research wonders in accessible language and adorned with vividly colorful and alive neuroimaging photos, that I could stop and stare at for as long as I had time, not to mention the bingeing replays of recordings that helped me learn the slippery stuff.  And sometime later, a new-to-me character, a beautiful young Viet Namese somatic practitioner, Linda Thai, who generously shared her own story as she taught trauma concepts in a style quite different from mine.  She even sang a bit. Linda talked especially about refugee and immigrant trauma. In some way she seemed kindred to me. Different personal stories, different sides of the world, different colors, even different historical epochs, but the themes and brains of trauma and neglect resonated deeply, certainly for me.  

What a surprise when at a recent conference, in a packed elevator, I found myself face to face with Linda! Well not only face to face, we met in a spontaneous and delighted mutual hug. Suddenly all the people around us vanished, and we were like a couple of long, lost cousins. Only we had never before met. Well only through the ether. And of course, as a bona fide child of neglect, I was amazed that she knew I existed, and had a similar feeling of kindredness to me. Imagine that. And having recently been thinking a lot about Viet Nam, and from different angles than I really ever had before, I was again amazed by the many wonders of serendipity. How do these things happen?

Cousins

My husband had a lousy childhood, but one thing I have always envied was that he had a wealth of cousins. He had five cousins, all boys around his same age. Their summers, (or my image of their summers) were a Mark Twain wonderland of boys being boys running around together as long as the long summer daylight lasted. My husband having a summer birthday, close to 4th of July, had celebrated with this crowd of boys.

I grew up in a boy-less family, so boy fun and abandon, is probably at least somewhat idealized. And we really had no cousins, to speak of. Yes, all my cousins were boys. The two that were “domestic,” living in the US, were both a good decade older than us. The third lived (and lives) in Switzerland and to this day I have never met him. Our grandmother was one of those types who  grandly hyperbolized about the brilliance and perfection of our cousins, as if by comparison we were pond scum (my interpretation.) The Swiss was a child genius; the older domestic cousin being movie star handsome and a tennis star too. The younger domestic cousin was a protégé and then a champion at chess, although somehow he disappeared from the face of the earth. Anyway, I always wished for cousins like my husband had, or better yet, like on the Patty Duke Show. And it was of course never far from mind that, most of our kin had been traumatically wiped out, and as ever we were lucky for all we had. A true but tiring message for a child.

Immigrants and Refugees

 I was always well aware of our status as refugees, less so as immigrants. Until recently in my work with a couple, where one partner is a Caribbean immigrant, and talks about that, feeling like an outsider, or having to abdicate his authenticity or voice, to “fit in.,” and whose ways are dismissed at best, if not outright rejected. I remembered the confusion of messages we got growing up, a strange dissonance of gratitude that we had a relatively safe place to live, but profound mistrust that we could be viciously turned on, on a dime. And appreciation for this country, with more than a spoonful of contempt for the materialism, superficiality and “shallow-ness” of the culture, compared to “our proud intellectual and humanitarian” heritage. Even the messages about earning well were very confused. On one hand we are not supposed to care about those things, and on the other Dad’s abiding, undeniable bitterness about how much higher the rabbi is than the step child cantor on the hierarchical pecking order of both salary and status. My child brain was addled. Not to mention the ever-present pressure to both be accepted, but not “assimilate” too much. Even American Jews were not “like us,” certainly didn’t “get it.” But if we dated or god forbid ever were to marry a non-Jew, there was much more than hell to pay.

Dad’s family fled to Shanghai and for 7 years suffered and survived in the Shanghai ghetto.  His mother died there for lack of medical care. All of our stories and images of Asian people were scary and evil. A very far cry from Linda! I had a Chinese boyfriend for oddly, also 7 years. In all that time, Dad never ever referred to him by his name. He was always “that man.” Already at sea in the world of relationship, this did not make a difficult relationship with my father or my boyfriend, any easier. And was a kind of annihilation of both my boyfriend and me, already a teetery young couple.

I suppose I have neglected immigration and refugee status as yet additional forms of developmental and even attachment trauma, that disrupts the formation of identity and sense of self. Feeling unseen, not known, not understood, unwelcome, lees than and unworthy, are all endemic to the trauma of neglect. I am grateful to my client and to Linda, for sharpening my lens on this. Especially now when the tides of climate change, fickle and tragic economies, crazy political conflict and war are fierce. People are emigrating or fleeing from place to place including many to foreign countries, and the US for one is becoming more and more multicolored.

Perhaps my most treasured inheritance from my mom was Pete Seeger. She loved him and he was a soundtrack, always playing and brightening the environment of our bleak little apartment in Manhattan. Pete said on that worn old album “We are all cousins!” Then he would sing the beloved old song All Mixed Up.

Hey, the name of the SF restaurant where I lucked out and met Bobby McFerrin is Third Cousin!  Hmmm…

Refugee Week 2023 is 19–25 June. This year’s theme is Compassion.

Today’s song:

True Repair: Yom Kippur, Why Apology Matters, What Heals?

Next week’s Jewish High Holiday Yom Kippur brings many thoughts. My childhood memories of that day are spotty and mostly painful. Our dad being the cantor was more nervous and irritable than ever, as that was the day when he had the fullest house of the year, meaning the “once-a-year-crowd”

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