Going Viral on the 4th of July
The Chans went viral on the 4th of July. Or at least semi-so. With over 7,000 post likes, 1500 comments and hundreds of shares, we figured that anywhere between 80,000 and 150,000 people were thinking of, and speaking, the name "Chan" at their BBQs and gatherings across the land on the nation's birthday.
“What a post! Pure soul-nourishing poetry! This is a tale of America. Our America. The one we are taking back. The true narrative. Grateful you shared this.”
Anti-immigration rhetoric was reaching a pitched frenzy in the spring and early summer of 2018. I had spent most of 2017 trying to forget Dad's death and Trump's election by stress-eating ice cream, lots of rice, and dumplings of all varieties (my three kryptonites). I also went from near tea-totalling to drinking a lot and alone. The Chupacabra - a bitingly spicy margarita at a local farm-to-table Mexican joint, and named for a mythical vampire-like beast that sucks its animal victims dry - felt paradoxically, for me, like the Elixir of Life.
Here is the thing about living with your hair on fire: it is not a sustainable situation. Eventually, the fire that used to get you out of bed in the wake of a disaster, burns up everything in its path and you are destroyed again, by your own hand. By the dawn of 2018, I was a pile of dispirited ash. And a bloated one that didn't fit into any of its clothes.
On January 1st, I poured a bottle of my favorite wine down the kitchen drain as a symbolic gesture, and felt the barest spark of life flicker and flare up inside me. It was gone again before I could seize it, but something was moving, picking itself up out of the dirt and trying to get to its feet again. I could feel it.
I took time to manage my social media accounts, which went way beyond just hiding or deleting people who annoyed me (a mere band-aid on a hemorrhage situation). It included unsubscribing to news outlets and online groups - even ones I agreed with - that were requiring fear, loathing and outrage at all times. I signed up with mindful intention to follow people and things that truly inspire me - Dan Rather, world projects like The Ocean Cleanup, and Lin-Manuel Miranda and anything at all #Hamilton. It meant turning off the news sometimes to let other people carry the outrage for the day because I was badly in need of respite and restoration. I stopped keeping wine in the house and recommitted to diet and exercise and lost 15 pounds.
I also planted a grove of trees in America's forests, in celebration of my parents and their indefatigable "growth mindset."
I felt back in the driver's seat - of my own life, at least - and I had made great progress in achieving ever-longer periods of "radical acceptance" of the turmoil that swirled around us. I found out that you can still call your senators and congress people without letting the subject you are calling about control your emotional landscape. Imagine that!
Outrage is insidious. It makes you think you've been busy because it is exhausting and how could you be so tired if you weren't doing absolutely everything you could to make a difference??? Paradoxically, it also soothes you in your inertia because it makes you feel morally superior, and you end up wondering why do I have to do anything really, when I am so much better than these other people? I can hardly think of a better recipe for apathy than perpetual exhaustion and a sense of moral superiority, can you?
People who exist in a constant state of outrage, then, may not do much more than broadcast to the world how mad they are and then go humping back into their sooth-saying lairs of doom, having achieved precisely nothing. I have been guilty of this on more than one occasion myself. But isn't it far better to have an emotionally even keel and be active and effective, than to have a public fainting spell over something and nothing but a bunch of likes and sad faces to show for it? Of course it is, and I felt I was learning this well. Get mad, sure, but do the work. Even better: don't get mad, and do the work better.
But then came the news of family separations at the Southern border, and the cages, and the youth of the victims, and the administration of anti-psychotics to get "compliant" (i.e., drugged, lobotomized) behavior. Forced injections of anti-psychotics into healthy children! Who don't know where their parents are!! Who aren't even allowed to hug each other, let alone be held or comforted by their captors! And, well, just like that, five months of work evaporated with a "pfffft!"
“I can hardly think of a better recipe for apathy than perpetual exhaustion and a sense of moral superiority, can you?”
My soul screams started again - those silent, uncontrollable paroxysms I started getting in Dad's last year, which wracked my body for seconds at a time, often bringing me to my knees in a cramped heap. But this was 2018, not 2016, and so when I got up off the floor, I did what I do every time now: I called my own senators to tell them to keep at it; I called Lindsay Graham, Jeff Flake and Paul Ryan and let them know that strong words from Republicans were a day late and a dollar short and I wanted to know what actions were being taken. I called Susan Collins and, in the words of a friend of mine, said I didn't want “to see the Russian flag flying over the Post Office.” I called the Office of Refugee Resettlement and demanded they allow entry and oversight by senators and congresspeople. I donated money to the ACLU to protect civil and voting rights. KIND to reunite children at the border with their families. White Helmets to help with the refugee crises abroad. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) for the same. These organizations do the work that almost no one has the guts or the means to do themselves, but we can support them and be engaged citizens. Disengaging is reckless and no longer permissible if we really actually do care (now in the age of "I don't really care, do you?"). I decided to pick my battle(s) and then get ready to fight them, in whatever way that I could. Our country and the world needed us, and still do.
It also occurred to me that I have another weapon I can wield, and that is the power of the pen. And so, in my rage and despair, and because I felt I had taken real-world measures in response to the current crisis, I turned to an invitation-only Facebook group, called Pantsuit Nation, and dashed off a good old-fashioned rant like the days of yore. My words can cut and sting, they can annihilate; but they can also convince, raise up, and heal. I know this and I have spent a lifetime learning to carry my gift of words responsibly and with compassion. I don't always succeed.
A woman named Libby Chamberlain started the group in the fall of 2016, just before the Presidential election, as a way to rally her own Facebook friends in support of Hillary Clinton on election day. But, remarkably, sentiment in the country was so high that it took 24 hours for the group to grow from 30 individuals to 24,000. By election day, there were 3 million, and now there are reportedly over 4 million active users. The group is not affiliated with any party or candidate, but the focus has always been on progressive causes: immigration reform, racial justice, religious freedom, and women's reproductive rights, to name a few. The energy is also generally positive and enabling, which is why the page survived my 2018 social media purge.
Chans on the 4th of July
My family and I were sitting in a darkened theater at the start of the movie "Black Panther" when I got the first notification of someone responding to the post. I got that first little hit of dopamine that the administrators of the page had seen fit to publish it. Not everything submitted to the page gets published. There are gatekeepers. As there should be, to keep the quality and relevance, as well as representation, in posts high. My rant had made the cut.
And then the notifications started to accumulate and accelerate before my eyes, as they went from 1 to 4, 5, 6 to 30, to 39 to 64. Likes, loves, wows, comments.... I could not finish one without getting a dozen more notifications for new ones. I turned to Brent and said, "I think the Chans are blowing up!"
I knew why. It's because we are as American as apple pie and people could feel it in their bones on the 4th of July.
I turned the phone off to watch the movie. After the movie the notifications were in the 3,000s and climbing. Over the next couple of weeks, they continued to grow. I read and responded to every single comment, and can I tell you something? In over 1,500 comments, there was not a single snipe, troll or insult. It was like a slow-rolling atomic love bomb going off in my face, and I realized that what the world needs now - at least one small piece of it - is some of that Old Chan Magic.
I had been agonizing for nigh on two years about whether I was up to the task of writing a book about Dad or the family. With this post, it seemed to me that if I was waiting for "a sign" to just take the leap, let the world spin beneath me, and see where I might come down when I landed, then this was it. The Pantsuit Nation post was an inflection point. I wrapped up a few things in my workaday world, and unceremoniously cleared room in my schedule. Something inside me had shifted, demanding that I realign, open up, and start moving.
Creativity is something that bubbles up naturally from within us all, I believe, if we can but make the space for it. And it really is about making space for it. For me this meant intentional simplification of my obligations that were not moving me toward my goal of creating more. It meant meditation and journaling, and taking meaningful action steps, however small, each day. If, as I believe, the creative spark is simply there, inside of us, and it comes from the unconscious, fully formed, waiting to be expressed, then you don't have to make it or grow it, and you weren't "born without it." All you really have to do is stop blocking it. Easier said than done, I know.
But I did do it. I did make the space and set the intention. I did take the small action steps every day, and check in with myself that each step felt "good," and "in alignment" with what I was trying to achieve, even admitting that what I was trying to achieve was not completely clear to me, still seen as through a glass, darkly. I made the space anyway, and this blog is what came out.
So I send out a rocket of gratitude to the thousands of people who read my post below, and urged me to do more and not stop there. If you haven't read it, do! It's the reason there's a Chan's Peking Kitchen to begin with.
“Thank you. You are the America we celebrate.”
Here is the original post:
I have two kids and three jobs, not counting Mom in Chief. Do I want to be fighting mortal combat to preserve our democracy right now? No. I don't. I'm tired. I miss my parents. I am a joyful and loving person. I don't want to be the Firebrand. But here's a news flash for everyone: I will do it. I will do it because my ancestors did it, and far worse. I'm from slaves and sharecroppers, a Chinese laundryman, revolutionaries, village schoolmasters, Unitarian ministers and educators, artists, and poets. Survivors and trailblazers nearly to a (wo)man. That is a heavy and humbling legacy. But I for DAMN sure ain't going to be the one to drop the baton.
My grandpa fled China at 19, condemned to beheading by the empress dowager, Cixi, for his leadership in the rebellion that would eventually depose the dynasty. He never laid eyes on his family or home again, though he died an old man. A poet, a scholar, and now, revolutionary and refugee, he lived out his life in America as a laundryman in Savannah, GA. Together with his mixed-race wife, he raised six feisty, resilient, hilarious kids.
Many decades later he was interviewed as part of Roosevelt’s Federal Writer’s Project during the Great Depression. His interview can be found online called, simply, “Laundryman.” He was 70 at the time of the interview, but was described as looking much younger. "Yes, I look young,” he is recorded as saying. “Always work hard, not eat too muchee, not worry too muchee. If you worry about trouble you better go die.” Coming from a man who had escaped his own beheading through sheer cleverness and force of will (a story for another day), and been forced to start again from nothing, this was a simple statement of fact. When his son, my father, was a grown man in his own right, my grandpa told him “I not worry about you. You got a stiff neck, like me.”
(note: if you are on mobile, turn the phone horizontal to see the captions to the pictures below.)
My dad, the next generation, faced his own brand of tyranny abroad (in the China-Burma-India theatre of WWII) and at home (as a person of color in the Deep South). Before WWII Chinese Americans were only used as coolies in the US Army. My dad was the first generation to serve and he made a meteoric rise to full Colonel. He went on to become an optical engineer with Kodak, and worked on the Top Secret CORONA Project, which was only declassified relatively recently, but which is now credited with having helped to end the Cold War. His task? To create a camera lens that could take the first pictures of Earth from space, with resolution high enough to discern between two yellow lines on a highway, or to read the headline of a newspaper. Of course, it must also withstand the forces of launch and re-entry without cracking or melting. That famous first picture of Earth from the moon? My dad led the team who made that lens. He had 13 patents in aero-space engineering, many of which continue to be used today. He died in 2016 at the age of almost 103.
My dad - Col. Robert Earl Chan. First generation of Chinese Americans allowed to serve in the US Army. Rose to Colonel. Became an inventor. Helped end the Cold War. Married two white women whom he loved and had a wonderful life and family.
At 102, being greeted back at home after his Honor Flight Mission to see the DC war memorials, in 2014. The oldest and most senior-ranking honoree.
And now here I stand. Third in a line of tyrant crushers. Can I rise to the call? I’m tired and afraid, but I see my ancestors and family as my crucible and my guides in this terrible new challenge. I won't back down because they didn't. And if current political climates were different I might memorialize these two men and their families in other ways – meditate on different aspects of their journeys and their characters, which were legion, but things today being as they are, what I find myself thinking most about is that they did it all in a time when our society was almost as unfree as it ever was for people like them. Neither man could marry freely; my dad couldn’t serve the way he wanted (in the Air Force), although he was already a licensed pilot, because of race; nor could he work the same jobs as his classmates to help pay for college....
But they did it all anyway. And they fought and stood for your rights as well as mine – not just in rebellion and war but in their very being. Their mere existence was a bullhorn for equality and social justice. I can't, won't and don't believe that it was for naught.
I think we all thought the Greatest Generation’s job was to eradicate fascism and beat tyranny back to the gates. But we were wrong. What if their job was simply to hold space, to buy us time, and to inspire future generations to pick up the baton and continue the fight? Will we pick it up? Will there BE a baton to hand to future generations? Or are we simply unworthy inheritors?
I have compared my dad, Col. Robert Earl Chan, to a hickory, which is known as a "pushing" species; strong and flexible, it can endure poor soil and harsh conditions better than other hardwoods. They persist. May they inspire us to as well.
My grandpa's name translated to mean Great Phoenix. That means, from the ashes. Stiff neck, America! Don’t bow your head to tyranny. I can hear my grandpa telling us, “Chop wood, carry water,” and my dad, “There is no try, only do.”
Who are your ancestors who have fought the fight, and now need you to carry it forward? Look to them as I look to mine. There is wisdom, assurance and fortitude there, I can feel it. Can you?
On Resources: Making noise is never a waste. Find ways to make your own. And then help support organizations such as these, which can do the heavy lifting and carry the fight continuously even when we flag and fall:
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), International Rescue Committee (IRC), The White Helmets
Read my grandpa's FWP interview from 1939, written by his daughter (and my aunt) Gerald Chan Sieg
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