Episode Three Transcript: Exploring Ancestral Grief
Amy S. Choi:
You're listening to The Mash-Up Americans.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Welcome to Grief, Collected, where we explore how grief moves through our bodies, our families, and our communities, and why we need to feel it all in order to transform our future.
Amy S. Choi:
Today, we're talking to the trauma therapist and educator, Linda Thai, about ancestral grief, and how un-metabolized grief, particularly in mash-up families, is passed down through generations.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Hi, I am Rebecca Lehrer.
Amy S. Choi:
And I'm Amy S. Choi, and we are The Mash-Up Americans.
Rebecca Lehrer:
This episode will cut deep into your mash-up souls. Wow. It's going to go to deep.
Amy S. Choi:
Sorry.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Deep like ... I don't know. I was going to describe some mining terms or something, but you know I don't know that. Very, very, very deep into your souls.
Amy S. Choi:
We want to share with you something, you guys, that I feel, again, so much of this whole series has been about what we know, what we have sensed, what we have experienced in our lives and in our families, and that we are just getting validated by doing this research and talking to experts. But as mash-ups, we know that our families shape us, and there's so many different ways of being a Mash-Up in so many different ways that being diasporic, migrating, and having a deep connection to our culture, and then also bits and pieces of our culture have affected us. But there's a sociological theory called Family Systems theory, and it's basically the theory of how our families shape us and how families are complex social systems unto themselves.
And so if we consider that a family unit is a system, something as immense as grief shapes the whole system. It can shake it up, it can affect individual people, it affects the relational dynamics of that. And what has been fascinating to learn about as we got deeper into our grief study has been that not only does an event shape that complex system, but if that grief is not processed, if it is not experienced in a healthy way, or given a healthy outlet, that grief, guess what it does? It just keeps going. It's a gift that keeps going.
So in 1979 ... Oh, wait. I feel like I'm giving a history lesson right now.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Well, great year. '79. I'm not going to name names, but some great people were born then. Go on.
Amy S. Choi:
Somebody was born in 1979. That was me. And so in 1979, and this is very apt, this is something that I'm now thinking about all the time. A group of psychologists coined the term trans-generational grief. So at its core, that means that if a family or a unit is unable to mourn, that grief passes down to the next generation. Which-
Rebecca Lehrer:
Oh boy. Look, and then it's hopeful. Then we're hopeful. We haven't gotten there yet.
Amy S. Choi:
Okay. Okay. I promise we're going to get to the hopeful stuff soon. But I just want to give one more little bit of my history lesson, and it is actually about history and understanding that our grief and healing has historical context. So there's this term called historical trauma, which is essentially all of the cumulative effects of trauma and psychological distress on marginalized communities. It was studied and coined in connection with indigenous communities by a researcher, Dr. Maria Yellowhorse-Braveheart, who is Oglala Lakota, and she's a professor at the University of New Mexico. But she essentially defined how indigenous communities in particular have been affected through the generations from the horrors that the American government put them through. And here's where the hopeful comes in, is that once healing and the modern psychological processes that are in place for healing were put into the context of historical trauma, then suffering decreased dramatically.
So people suffered much less of the effects of trans-generational grief or historical trauma. There was less addiction, less anger, less emotional dysregulation, all of that stuff. And most importantly, it eliminates a lot of shame and a lot of stigma about why we feel the way that we feel. And I think that's just really important for us when we think about ancestral grief and family grief, which is what we're going to get into today, that it really illuminates the importance of remembering that we didn't just step out of thin air. We come from somewhere, we have a long lineage, and who we are rooted in in these long paths of people is really important to understand. And healing done in that context of who we are is the most important and valuable thing that we can do.
Rebecca Lehrer:
You know what that sparked for me in this moment is this idea that what we are doing in this show, in this project, Grief, Collected, is really thinking about the American cultural context that we all live in, and trying to apply that Mash-Up American lens, but where the American part of our hyphen is emphasized. And that's really what we are exploring here. And something about how we do grief here, or don't, or what the cultural history and trauma has been, and how we deal with it as Americans is so important to actually how we figure out how to move forward.
Which brings us to our guest today, Linda Thai. Linda is a trauma therapist, educator and social worker who specializes in trans-generational and historical grief and trauma. Alongside her teaching practice, she works with internationally renowned psychiatrist and trauma expert, Dr. Bessel VanDerKolk.
Amy S. Choi:
My body is keeping this score, yo.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Yeah, grief back pain?
Amy S. Choi:
Oh my God. During this episode, Linda will share what she has come to learn about the complexities of ancestral grief and what we can learn from it.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Linda, thank you for being here. As we start today, could you introduce yourself to our listeners, please.
Linda Thai:
Sure. So my name is Linda Thai. I was born in Vietnam, I was raised in Australia, and these days I live in Fairbanks, Alaska, the traditional lands of the Dene Athabascan peoples of the Middle Tanana Valley. And I am redefining what it means to be American.
These days I work as a trauma therapist, as a somatic therapist, as an educator, trainer, speaker, storyteller. And I am a former child refugee, and my family sought refuge at the end of the Vietnam War.
Rebecca Lehrer:
I see in your work the reference to boat people, and I wanted to know what weight that language, which has been considered pejorative, has for you, and how that's changed.
Linda Thai:
Sure. When I look into the politics of identity, I am fully aware that my condition is not my identity. So I no longer refer to the African American diaspora as slaves. You were enslaved peoples. Your condition is not your identity. And in a similar way, I'm not a refugee. I'm a person who sought refuge, and my family sought refuge. And as Vietnamese American author says, "It is so much easier to deny my own history as someone who sought refuge, to deny the word refugee." Because the word is so stigmatized by society that it's much easier to allow myself to become part of a nameless diaspora that somehow made it to foreign shores.
And so when I use the word refugee, when I use the word boat person, I'm actually reclaiming a stigmatized identity.
Rebecca Lehrer:
I love to hear ... Any reclaiming is like ... I'm here for all reclaiming, and also that's very helpful framing for us.
Amy S. Choi:
And I love that idea of ... I can imagine the connection between reclaiming that identity and redefining what it means to be American, how deeply connected those two things are.
Linda Thai:
Yes.
Amy S. Choi:
And I wonder if you could tell us a little bit of your personal story, because I think it's so integral to what we are really trying to get at in this conversation, which is about family grief and intergenerational grief, and how grief can be passed through generations.
Linda Thai:
So I left Vietnam at the age of two, and we were boat people. We made it to a refugee camp in Malaysia. We lived there for six months, my little sister was born there, and then we were sponsored out to Australia under a pilot rural resettlement scheme. I was raised in a very white part of Australia, and then my family sought more Vietnamese communities. So we engaged in secondary migration, made it to a big city, and I grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia for the majority of my life. And then in my late 20s I discovered Alaska.
And it was here in Alaska that I got to have a new experience of myself. Because in Australia I felt that I wasn't quite Vietnamese enough, and I also felt that I wasn't quite Australian enough. And Edward T. Hall, who's a cross-cultural anthropologist who did consulting work for the CIA during the Cold War, says that when you travel to another country, you are not actually getting to know the host culture. You're actually getting to know your culture of origin. And so when I got to Alaska, I actually got to experience how Australian I am, as well as how Vietnamese I am. Because this is the land of no god. And so I was going out of my way to get the things that I wouldn't otherwise be able to access here. Things like Vegemite, and to make my own scrambled eggs, and to make my own pho, and to incorporate the local cuisine. So I was making moose pho, and caribou rice paper rolls, and wild duck egg rolls, and halibut curry, and also making roast caribou, like a roast meal with three vegetables, which is very British/Australian.
And so there was a homecoming that began to happen. And in that process of homecoming, I got to pause, and I realized that I'd lived most of my life like I was walking backwards through the snow and erasing my own footsteps as I made them. Invisibilizing myself before anyone else could invisibilize me, or marginalize me. And there was something very healing about being able to hunt and fish and grow my own food. And in the process of life here, I came to realize that I was a big ball of addictions and compulsive behaviors. And in the process of my addiction recovery, I thought I was done. And then I realized that there was so much trauma underneath the addiction that I was not aware of. And then after I did my trauma work, I realized that there was so much grief underneath that I wasn't aware of.
And so much of my own work that I put out into the world has been the process of my own process. Because trauma isn't just what happened that shouldn't have happened. It's also what didn't happen that should have happened. And grief is typically framed as I had something and now it's gone. And yet for those of us who were raised in alcoholic, traumatized, traumatizing homes, homes where there's been a dislocation or disruption of any kind, grief is also ambiguous. It's what I didn't get that I should've gotten, and the not getting of that has left pervasive emptiness on my own inner landscape. And because I don't get what I didn't get, I don't get it.
And we also live in a grief denying, grief phobic society. And for many of us, we were raised in homes where our parents were stuck in survival. And when you're living hand to mouth each day, you can't grieve. There's no bandwidth to grieve. And so parents with un-metabolized losses, traumas, grief, they're not able to be present for their children in ways that are developmentally appropriate. And so then as a child, you don't learn that it's okay to grieve. You keep moving forward, because that's what we do.
Amy S. Choi:
I have so many questions. Oh my god, Linda. Okay, Rebecca, can I go first?
Rebecca Lehrer:
Do it.
Amy S. Choi:
Okay. First of all, you're speaking our language. Second of all, what I want to do is take one step back. And first, you've so clearly laid out the landscape of this conversation and all the topics we want to touch on. But can we start with ancestral grief? So this grief that is passed down and that our ancestors couldn't feel because they were in survival mode. Could you talk about that? Is there a definition or a working definition of what is ancestral grief?
Linda Thai:
I don't believe there's a working definition of ancestral grief. I believe in reclaiming what it is that's knocking beneath the surface at my soul's door. And what knocks at the soul's door for many of us is the grief that our ancestors weren't able to experience and move through as a result of their circumstances.
So an example from my own lived experience is that when my family left Vietnam in the middle of the night, my family members who were left in Vietnam, they weren't able to name that we had disappeared. They weren't able to name that we had gone. They weren't able to mourn our losses, because that would've made them a target for the communists, because dad was wanted by the communists. That was why he left. And so there was no possibility there for my grandparents to be able to move through the disappearance of their firstborn child and his wife. And I'm the firstborn child of a firstborn child. And so somewhere in my own grief journey, I realized this isn't my grief that I'm moving through. This is the grief of my ancestors moving through.
There's also the grief that my parents weren't able to move through, because they are living in survival. And after I moved through my own grief process, I realized my parents raised us without their ancestors and their elders to guide them. But that hadn't occurred to me before I had done my own grief work. Resentment is an expression of un-metabolized grief. And so I was in my resentments, and I was not able to recognize the losses that my parents had experienced.
There is a price to freedom. And to see your own children moving away from everything you've known and loved and held dear to yourself culturally, is one of the prices of freedom. And my parents weren't able to grieve that. They didn't have an outlet for it, which then resulted in lateral violence, high expectations, tiger mom parenting.
Amy S. Choi:
This sounds familiar.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Part of that, seems to me, one of the things you're talking about is there's compounding layers of grief too.
Linda Thai:
Yes.
Rebecca Lehrer:
So there's actual death loss, I'm sure, as well as cultural loss. So what Pauline Boss calls ambiguous loss. This sort of understanding of the loss of culture. That price of freedom. And I wonder if even the generation that pays the highest cost, or if one even can make it hierarchical, your parents' generation, if they could even know that they've experienced that. In my family it's not something they know that they've experienced. It's something that we at generations later are uncovering, to your point.
Linda Thai:
Yes. Yes, at the parent generation level it can come across as judgment, resentment, holding onto your children and your culture more tightly, not wanting them to leave you, having higher expectations of your children to maintain a cultural connection, as well as a sense of futility and helplessness and hopelessness.
Amy S. Choi:
Thinking about not grieving as a survival strategy, as we try and metabolize ancestral grief or family grief, those things that are passed to us, is it important for our ancestors to do that as well, or participate in that? Or can this tide be shifted just with us?
Linda Thai:
I believe that the tide can be shifted just by us. Yeah.
There's a couple of things for me to say here. Another aspect of ancestral grief is that I lose a relationship with my ancestors. So I grew up without elders, other than my parents and their generation. And so then I move through the well bereft of what it feels like to have had elders, so then I don't get what that's like, and so then I don't get the loss that my parents would've experienced.
And then to speak into the piece about healing intergenerational trauma, you may have heard about attachment theory. And attachment theory, in my humble opinion, has been very helpful for me in terms of understanding the imprinting of early relationships upon the way I move through the world relationally. And yet, it wasn't helpful for me in repairing my relationship with my parents. And the adoption of a decolonized perspective of secure attachment has been what has been helpful for me. And so a decolonized perspective of secure attachment is secure attachment to ancestors, secure attachment to land and to nature, secure attachment to culture, food, language, traditions, how we mark the passage of time and of the seasons over the course of a human lifespan, secure attachment to bodies and to my body and to touch, secure attachment to time, and secure attachment to play, and to rest.
And once I was able to tether myself into a more expansive notion and felt and lived experience of secure attachment, I now had my cultural moorings and my anchoring back. I had a more expansive sense of where I belong in the bigger scheme of things. And I was then able to place myself and place my parents in terms of a larger scheme of things, which then allowed all of the stuff between myself and my parents to be held. To be given perspective.
Amy S. Choi:
That I think is so powerful, because it allows us to do the healing of ancestral grief outside of the parameters of the family that we are in. So what we were given is less impactful to us than how we can transform ourselves, or give forward. I'm a mother, and so I think all the time about the grief that was passed down to me that I'm trying to not give to my kids. And it's very, very helpful, just personally, to hear that and think like, oh, connecting with ancestors or with the world around does not necessarily mean that I need to fix my parents. Because that's not going to work. That's never going to happen.
Linda Thai:
If I could speak into that Amy, there's this part of us that wants to help our parents.
Amy S. Choi:
So bad.
Linda Thai:
So badly. And the thing is, when you grow up in an immigrant or a refugee household, what happens is you don't get the experience of your parents taking delight in you. And so for many of us, we experience the burden of being a burden. And yet we all know that being delighted in is our birthright. And so what we do is we surrogate and we substitute with the feeling of feeling needed. And so I find ways in which to be needed so that I don't get left behind, so that I can feel useful, so that I can feel helpful, so that I can feel wanted. But it's not the same as someone taking delight in me. And then that becomes a setup for codependency, it becomes a setup for workaholism, it becomes a setup for wanting to fix our parents.
Rebecca Lehrer:
I wonder, as you do this work, and you can speak to this if you want, it sounds like you have a lot more compassion for your family than maybe you did when you were younger. Has that been healing in your relationship, or healing more personally to you?
Linda Thai:
So firstly, I feel that healing is a lifelong thing, and involves the concepts of Kronos and Kairos. So Kronos is clock time, Kairos is soul time. And so things come to us.
When I was in graduate school, I learned that the dynamics of a dysfunctional family are don't talk, don't trust, don't feel. And I also recognize that when you live under communism, fascism, or any sort of dictatorship, being gay in a non-affirming society as other examples, don't talk, don't trust, don't feel actually become survival strategies. And so then what we're talking about, which is common, so common, is what doesn't get passed on as well as what does get passed on. And so there are parts of us that we disconnect from, don't talk about, and don't pass on, and that's what the next generation then doesn't get. And so there's a loss of cultural moorings.
And so for me as a child, my parents experienced traumatic homesickness. So whenever I would ask about Vietnam, and I wish that elementary school teachers would stop telling kids to go home and ask your parents about your genealogy, because for those of us who come from immigrant and refugee families, the answer you get is either, "I don't know," or some sort of dissociated collapse. Because in my circumstance, my parents weren't able to talk about who they were or where they'd come from without having a trauma response. And so as a child, I made that mean that there was some sort of shame about asking about who I was and where I'd come from. That there was something fundamentally wrong with us as a peoples. And my parents were therefor not sharing that with us. Because there was no other sense I could make of it. And yet there was a part of me that always wanted to figure that out. And only in later years I realized, "Oh, my mother has a ninth grade education. My dad has a sixth grade education," and they don't know the names of their family members because we don't do that in our culture. It's like auntie number one and uncle number three and cousin number ... So no wonder they're not able to answer any of these questions.
And so as a young adult, I actually enrolled in modern Vietnamese history and modern Chinese history when I was a college student. And the professors in the department, there were two Anglo-Saxon professors and two Vietnamese professors. They knew why I didn't know, and they knew why I wanted to know, and they didn't need to ask me why. And that was so healing for me, because one of the areas of shame for many of us is that we don't speak our own language anymore, or the language of our ancestors, and we don't know the history of our country or our culture. And people somehow expect us to, and expect us to be the bridge between some far flung place and this place here. And our inability to do that results in me appeasing someone else.
And whenever people ask me, Have you been back to Vietnam? Which is a very well meaning question, it just lands on that big wound around belonging. And 98% of the time, I'll fake my way into avoiding feeling the pain inside of me that comes up and having that be exposed. And then the other person will have some sort of response such as, "I love Vietnamese food. Vietnam's on my bucket list. Can you give me some hot travel tips for your country? I've been to Vietnam and I loved it there." Which is akin to saying, "I've been to Puerto Vallarta and I love Mexico, and Mexicans, and Mexican food." There's just so much that then just keeps me more shut down and disconnected. And finding these places where people get why I don't know and don't need to ask why, and yet offer me a space where I can begin to learn and reclaim has been so incredibly healing for me.
Amy S. Choi:
This is so powerful. What are the other significant ways that you would say are of connecting to your grief?
Linda Thai:
There's an ancient technology that weaves its way through all cultures. It's song, movement, storytelling, and silence. And ritual is the container. It's the vessel within which these practices can then arise. Anxiety needs structure, grief needs a container. And that container is community and rituals. And there's a comfort in having these rituals that we can turn to, and that are always there for us. That we may perhaps know deep in our bones, even if we've become dislocated from them, our ancestors, our collective ancestors, we survived because we made it through these dislocations and displacements together.
And so for generation 1.5, 2.0, further generations, life gets easier when you find your people. And we forget that. That that's how our ancestors survived, and that's being asked of us is to redefine what it means to be American, and to continue to find and forge meaningful relationships and meaningful purpose together.
Amy S. Choi:
I love that. Kind of a horizontal rooting towards others.
Linda Thai:
Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Lehrer:
You mentioned how ... You have a particular clarity, and there's an acuity, the description of understanding, you're getting to Alaska and you, "Oh, I'm so Australian, and I'm so Vietnamese," and all these things. Being in a different place showed you something about yourself that it wasn't clear to you until those moments.
And I think one of the things we really are trying to do in this project is identify something about American pathology around not metabolizing grief, which is a language you use, versus processing or work. But our hypothesis is that there's this sort of ... We love to move forward, we're part of history, we're part of a global story, but we tend to do mythologizing, and then forward moving. And I think this is our hypothesis, and this is why we want to talk to somebody who's smarter, and your particular experience is different from ours. Because we are both born here in the States. And I think whereas we can relate on layers of grieving, and ancestral loss and those things, sometimes we don't know what we don't know about ourselves and our Americanness, and we wanted to talk to you about that. What have you observed about how American culture can't quite handle grief? Or what are our relationship to grief and grieving?
Linda Thai:
The first white Americans here are also dislocated. So their survival strategy was also suck it up, stuff it down, keep moving forward. Just like our parents. And yet it's become de-contextualized over time. And so there's a Resmaa Menakem quote that trauma de-contextualized in a person looks like personality, trauma de-contextualized in a family looks like family traits, and trauma de-contextualized in a peoples looks like culture. And so the suck it up, stuff it down, keep moving forward strategy is a survival strategy for a peoples who had no way of metabolizing their grief.
And I use the word metabolizing conscientiously, because when you metabolize something, it becomes fuel for your own growth. Now, processing, digesting has connotations of something moving through, and yet metabolism is a catalytic process that creates fuel. And when we can reclaim the horrors, the hardships, the truth of what our ancestors did and lived through in order to survive, there's a humbling, and a gratitude, and a generosity, and a generativity that then emerges. However, what I see here in the landscape of US culture is something that Francis Weller describes so very well. He says that America has so many mechanisms for amnesia and anesthesia. We live in a grief phobic and a grief denying society. And so it then becomes reinforced culturally that there are more fish in the sea. That there are plenty of other opportunities out there. That, what are you crying about? I'll give you something to cry about.
And then we also do the oppression Olympics, which is really lateral violence. When my dad says, "It's okay, I lived through the Viet Cong invasion." And I'm just sitting there going, "But a kid took my lunch." And he says, "We lived on food rations in the refugee camp." And I'm like, "But a kid took my lunch."
Amy S. Choi:
You're like, "Dad, we both ended up hungry. Okay?" One of the things that we at Mashup have been thinking about a lot is that when it came to grief, this was a topic that kind of obsesses us. We've been developing this, and talking about it, and researching it for almost the past two years now. And it's not the same as a lifetime and a career of doing it, but this has been something that's been so critically important for us, and why we've devoted this time to it and reaching out to people like you. And one of the questions we were trying to answer is that it felt so obvious to us that all of us needed help. And when you say it manifests in addiction, or anger, or blame, or need, or this or that, it's like, oh right. Look at the news. When we think about what are the stakes, why are we doing this? It now seems very obvious. It's like, oh, well if we could identify that this is grief, and that this is a thing that we need to work on or metabolize, then it's like, oh yeah, the proof is right in front of us. Look at any headline. Look at the New York Times today. It's filled with grief.
Linda Thai:
Yes, it is. It's filled with expressions of un-metabolized grief. And yet the news cycle also feeds off of outrage. And then what do we do with that outrage? And so when we talk about collective traumatization, we also need to talk about collective grief and collective containers for grief.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Well, can we talk about collective containers of grief? Because I see that a lot of the stuff you talk about is a connection to nature, and you seem to have really honed in on finding a relationship to nature as being a critical piece of bridging to some healing, or some next level of grieving that can help us move on. Not move on. That feels productive. But help us just be. Help us be. And so I would love to dive into that a little bit. Your relationship to nature, what you think about that specific relationship that could help us get out of our heads and get out of our computers and maybe find some healing.
Linda Thai:
So when I talk about Ancestors with a capital A, it's the elemental Ancestors. It's water and fire and earth and wind and nature connects me to capital A, Ancestors.
In nature, there are other cycles of creation and maintenance and decay and/or destruction. So there was something really humbling about coming back to nature and living within the cycles of nature that brought me back to a more expansive sense of what it means to be human. And it's that paradox, in my insignificance is my grandeur, and I'm part of a larger grandeur.
Amy S. Choi:
This has been so incredible, Linda, in all of the framing and reframing that I think you are helping us do, and also even thinking about each migration of our family, each dislocation or relocation is also a reframing of what that family experience is, or what our experience is as people. And I think years ago we talked to Dr. Mindy Fullilove, who coined the term root shock, of what it means for community to be uprooted and to be pulled out of where they are, and how you need to nurture and tend. And I think we are always looking, this is the most American thing about us. Looking forward. But I think in what we hope to do is how do we transform the root shock? As you say, how do we dip into what we know and what our ancestors gave us and create rituals anew? And I feel very invigorated, and also like we just made this podcast our own personal double therapy session. Thank you very much.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Well, you know I'm going to charge you for my next therapy. No, I'm charging you, Linda, for my codependency therapy sessions.
Amy S. Choi:
Oh, wow. The needing to be needed? Yeah. We don't want to talk about that right now, right?
Rebecca Lehrer:
How dare you. We're so appreciative of you.
Amy S. Choi:
Thank you so much. This was so great.
Linda Thai:
Oh, this was so much fun. May your snot fly everywhere.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Well, speaking of snot flying everywhere, we cried, we laughed. I think that something we've been ... This ancestral grief, this extraordinary experience of ... She really read the room. She really read us. That's all. She understood the assignment, as the kids say. She understood who we are. And I think we've been figuring out ourselves different ways that we are exploring this. Mine, figuring out if I should get German citizenship because now I can. What does that mean? What about for you? What did it bubble up?
Amy S. Choi:
Well I just think all this stuff about choosing who our ancestors are, and maybe connecting to things that weren't given to us in our family. And holy shit, the thing about deserving to be delighted in. Oh, that was a lot. But I think ... Don't laugh at me guys, but I honestly believe that my love for BTS is part of this reconnecting. Of course there's so many things about Korean pop culture that have allowed, I think ... I won't speak for the whole Korean American diaspora, but at least for me, has allowed me to reconnect in to my culture in a way that wasn't available for my parents.
I truly remember being little, and we would go to the Korean grocery store and they would have old, old copies of VHS tapes, of Korean dramas, and we would rent them for a week, and that was how we would be able to get culture from Korea. And I just also remember the first time I watched a BTS concert video, not even the first concert I went to, but a taping of it ... A taping. Wow. The word tape is now in my head. But a replay of a BTS concert, and I saw them giving their ending speeches at the end, and I was weeping. Weeping my face off. And it was just something really profound about me as a 43 year old person, 40 at the time, seeing Korean figures speaking English with their Korean accents, with zero shame, and being adored by millions of people all around the world. And I was like, "How is this even possible? How is this even a thing?" It felt like I was taking a leap into culture. It healed something that I truly did not think was still broken in me.
And I hope and encourage everyone to find something if they feel that migratory grief. Doesn't have to be BTS. It could be. But that just gives you joy and allows you access into something. Anything that you may have felt that you didn't have or that you didn't know how to get into. And it doesn't matter how silly it is, it doesn't have to be big and profound, but anything. I just love how Linda said that also nature can be your ancestor. Whatever it is that you find strength and spirit in that heals you, fucking go for it. That's my wise words. Fucking go for it.
Rebecca Lehrer:
And I will go to a stadium concert with you, because it's healing something for you. And then I'm healed seeing all these people being healed.
Amy S. Choi:
I know. It's so good.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Is that what Revival is? I think that's what Revival is.
Amy S. Choi:
Maybe.
Rebecca Lehrer:
Well, thank you to Linda Thai for her time. Please go to Griefcollected.com for more. We have a beautiful website for this podcast, which has so many incredible resources, readings, playlists, and other fun stuff. Yes, we said it. Grief can be joyous when you're in it, when you're confronting it. In a few days you'll have a new experience in your feed from us. A meditation from Linda.
And next week we speak to Dorothy Hollinger, a psychologist and the author of The Anatomy of Grief: How the Brain, Heart, and Body Can Heal After Loss.
Dorothy Hollinger:
Don't be surprised when it erupts, and sometimes it's like, "Wait, that was two years ago. Why am I crying like this?"
Amy S. Choi:
Ooh, get ready.
Rebecca Lehrer:
See you next week.
Amy S. Choi:
Bye.
Grief, Collected is a production of The Mash-Up Americans. Executive produced by Amy S. Choi and Rebecca Lehrer. Senior editor and producer is Sara Pelligrini. Development producer is Dupe Oyebolu. Production manager, Shelby Sandlin. Original music composed by The Brothers Tang. Sound Design support by Pedro Rafael Rosado. Website designed by VOKSEE. Grief, Collected is supported in part by a grant from The Pop Culture Collaborative. Please make sure to follow and share this show with all of your friends. Ciao.