How to mourn your auntie

I said Kaddish for my Chinese auntie during Kol Nidre on Sunday night, as the threads of my life converged.

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, has just passed, the gates of heaven closing for another year – and when they’ve closed for the Jews of Hawai’i, they’ve closed for good, since we’re the last major community this side of the international date line. (I mean, unless there happen to be any observant Jews on Midway Island or Niue or in Pago Pago at the moment.) I can’t help feeling the doors thundering closed, hour by hour, around the world throughout the day, ending with our own N’ilah (“closing”) service at sundown.

The Yom Kippur liturgy has two thematic throughlines: repentance and commemoration. It’s mostly repentance, but there is an irruption around midday, in between the repeated recitations of the longer and shorter confessional prayers, in the form of the Yizkor service, a memorial for the dead. Many congregations, ours included, produce a “Yizkor book,” which is a list of names to be read out and memorialized. These aren’t necessarily past members of the community, although they are certainly included. Rather, it’s a compiled list of those for whom members of the community have the obligation of mourning – parents and grandparents, to be sure, but others as well. Everyone has the right to add to it, and it is updated yearly. In a congregation like ours, with a high rate of conversion, it is a list that includes a number of non-Jews mourned by members of our community: Irving and Fayge and Hyman, but also Hiroshi and Ah Sing and Miguel. I am a Jew by choice myself, so whenever (God forbid) I have cause to add to it, I will be adding the names of cradle Catholics like I once was. In short, it is a list defined by the living, rather than by the departed, and understood first and foremost by them.

In this it is very like the lists of names of donors and beneficiaries that I find inscribed on sixth-century monuments that I study. As we call out the names of the dead, I find myself wondering if they did something like this, back in the Northern Qi or Western Wei. So many monuments are just lists of hundreds of names, the living and the dead together, marked and ordered by ties of kinship and community that are now imperfectly visible. What’s missing from the lists as we receive them today is the reason why each person appears. If you could resurrect one of the members of the group, they could probably tell you: oh that’s Zhang San’s uncle who went off to fight the Southern Liang and never came home; there are Li Si’s three wives, somebody got them out of order. It’s the same with the Yizkor list. As a member of the community, you can guess the connection most of the time – huh, look at that, Mort’s parents had the same first names as Alex’s great-grandparents – and if you can’t, you know somebody in the room can. But if the Yizkor book somehow survived twelve or thirteen centuries into the future, probably nobody would know who Harry and Yetta were.

I recently wrote the following line in the chapter I’m working on right now, in my book-in-progress about Buddhist monuments and women’s history in medieval China: “To be lost to history is, arguably, the common experience of most human beings. This may be changing somewhat in our own relentlessly self-archiving age, but our natural state is to be bounded in time by the limits of human memory: eventually, most of us will be forgotten.” And the thing is, we aren’t forgotten all at once: we’re forgotten piecemeal, part by part, by the people who hold in trust the different fragments of our past, and what we meant to them.

My auntie’s name was Martha Hsu Wang Tih 許王悌, the mother of my friends Melinda and Tim. She lived a remarkable life all her own; this is simply the part of it that I keep. Mrs Hsu was one of the first Chinese people I ever met, in the eighth grade, after getting to know Melinda through a church choir in Bangor. This probably sounds like an exaggeration, but it is impossible to overstate the near-total whiteness of my childhood home town of Dover-Foxcroft, Maine. It was a place where ethnicity and race were a big blank – things that happened to other people in other places.

After I went away to boarding school and started studying Chinese, my parents moved to Bangor, and I saw the Hsu family more often, at the holidays and over the summer. Mrs Hsu was increasingly, and generously, enthusiastic over my interest in Chinese culture; it is to Melinda’s and Tim’s eternal credit that they remained my friends in the face of it. She taught me to make Northern Chinese-style dumplings and scallion pancakes, in the way I still do today. If you’ve been to one of my dumpling parties, you’ve tasted her legacy.

Melinda and I kept up a correspondence through high school (by mail! hey, we’re Gen X) and then we went to college together. I kept on with the Chinese, modern and classical. One Christmas holiday I came home with an assignment from anthropology class to take someone’s life history, and Mrs Hsu consented to tell me hers, including her family’s hair-raising flight from Qingdao to Taiwan in 1948. I made her cry, sifting over the memories, and decided then and there that I would never be a cultural anthropologist. But I still tell her story when I teach mid-century China, both hers and Mr Hsu’s very different one, as a way of helping students understand what the human costs of the 1949 revolution could be.

We all kept in touch; got together over the holidays once we were all out of college; saw each other a few times in LA. She met my children. Time passed, as it keeps doing, and we all got older. It’s now forty years since Melinda and I first met.

The halacha of mourning applies to relatives of the first degree (your parents, spouses, siblings, or children). It doesn’t have much to say about mourning your auntie. But the Kaddish is a statement of faith in the face of loss, and a hand raised against the possibility of forgetting. During Yizkor, everyone says the mourner’s Kaddish, as a community memorial, but during Kol Nidre, mourners stand while the community bears witness. So I stood up to be counted, because memory counts.

May her memory be a blessing.