This blog is dedicated to my mother, to China and Japan
Miyasan Yumei 1949
Known then as
"Yasuko Miyafuji"
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By Miyasan's Daughter, on January 16th, 2012 Some things happen so easily, so elegantly that’s it’s difficult to not believe it was meant to be.
Last week, I received an email from Doris, a beautiful lady I haven’t seen in over 14 years. She sent the email to myself and another beautiful lady, Dee, whom I haven’t seen in just as many years. Doris wrote she missed us. “Let’s get together”, she said.
So it was quite wondrous when in reply to the Doris’s email, Dee said she’d be in town the next day and asked if we could do lunch then. I replied and said I would just happen to be in the general area for Brhiannon’s art class, and perhaps we could meet for lunch at that time.
Within 24 hours, three women who had not been together in 14 years were having lunch in New Cumberland, and talking as if no time had passed at all.
I had another experience like that with a friend from high school. I hadn’t seen her since my oldest, who turns 30 this year, was in diapers. But yet, just a year ago, Giny and I sat in an airport while she was on her way to Norway (another long and beautiful story), as if we had just come off a weekend and were having lunch in between classes now.
This is what amazes me the most about my truest friends. Time doesn’t exist. What’s real in our relationship circumvents time. You catch up on the details in another person’s life, but the essence of the ones you love remain, and you recognize them. And you know them so well, and the intimacy that was never thinned by the passing of time invites you to dive right in. No superficial small talk. Just meaningful conversation punctuated with laughter and heartfelt confessions and genuine sharing.
That doesn’t happen with people who hide behind images or personae. Those things shift and change, so you never know who’s there even if you just saw them an hour ago.
You can be who you are with people who are real. They do not live in pretense, and so you don’t have to either. Not that there aren’t those who choose to live in pretense regardless who they’re with, but with a genuine person it is safe to be yourself.
My mother spoke of only one friend with whom she had a relationship like this. Her name was Shigecko. My mother called her Geko chan.  Best Friends: Gekochan (left) and Miyasan (right) Geko chan was the one person my mother could be herself with, the one who accepted my mother for who she was, who encouraged her to follow her dreams as she shared her dreams with my mother, who saw my mother as a worthy human being.
Geko chan became ill in her early twenties and passed away.
My mother never stopped loving her…or missing her.
It’s never occurred to me until now how terribly lonely my mother must have been. I knew she had to have felt lonely living in a western culture as a minority. Her frequent talking about the land where she grew up made me realize that. But I think the cultural differences couldn’t have been as alienating a factor in her life as not having a true friend to share her present moments now.
There were other Japanese women my mother came to know. And I know she had a few American born friends as well. But there was a closeness, a bond she shared with Geko chan that I know she never found in anyone else.
Perhaps if she had remained in Japan, she would have had a larger number of women with whom she might have been able to experience or create that depth of friendship. Whatever the reason, my mother lived without that sense of sisterhood that I have come to really cherish and can’t imagine living without.
By Miyasan's Daughter, on January 12th, 2012 I didn’t mean to do it. I was moving the boxes, and I thought, no big deal, I’ll just open the little box. There were stamps and other papers in there, but nothing of a personal nature. Then I went to the box that held two ornamental paddles and an old black lacquer jewelry box.  These hung on our walls in Japan and New Mexico It was my mother’s, a music box, with a mirror and a painted scene on it. I picked up different pieces of memory, earrings, necklaces, most of it mine, but some hers.
And then I opened another box. Undated black and white pencil/charcoal drawings. I wasn’t sure when she had done those. Among those sketches was my mother’s divorce decree from my father, and my name change decree, when I took my mother’s new surname as my own – Yumei.
It wasn’t until I opened yet another box. This one was filled with letters and cards. I opened one addressed to me. And that’s when it happened. A door long left unopened within me, slowly swung from its hinges, and a draft filled that empty room.
I read her words. She was writing to comfort me, to give me courage, hope. The date on the card was just before I left the father of my first two children. I was uncertain about the future and sad.
She wrote about rainbows, her recollection taking her back to the Yangtze River. No matter where she was in life something always took her back there. Always to that balcony waiting for her brothers. Now, we were both standing on that balcony, and she was holding that rainbow out to me, telling me to hold on, to believe that it would take me to where I needed to go, that I would find that pot of gold, my pot of gold.
 My mom's words, Chinese characters, and kisses inside a card, 3/29/87.
She calls me “My sweet sister”. There’s that familiar feeling of ambivalence. What does she mean sister? If it hadn’t been for the fact that she had insisted I be her mother for as long as I can remember, I wouldn’t be so conflicted. I hadn’t wanted to be her sister either. I had needed a mother.
I don’t remember my reaction to the card back then.
But now the words on this card look suspiciously different, like maybe they carried some hidden meaning I did not have the capacity to see before.
Could it be that she wasn’t trying to get me to be something else to her? That maybe she was trying to be something to me? Sister to sister, woman to woman, a line of female warriors, survivors. Maybe she was inducting me into a clan of women by virtue of the challenges and sorrow we shared…and I didn’t see it.
I don’t know.
I stare at the card, look at the lipsticked kiss marks as if they have something to say to me.
And suddenly I feel a deep ache within me that only comes from missing someone in that terribly poignant way, when the missing you feel knows it will not be answered. I guess that room wasn’t so empty after all. Tears press close to my eyes, but they do not fall. They remain suspended within me like a realization dawning.
And I know, right now, in this moment, today…I wouldn’t mind being a mother to her. I wouldn’t mind at all.
By Miyasan's Daughter, on January 4th, 2012 It could be a Pandora’s Box…or a treasure box. Perhaps it’s a little of both.
Today on the phone, my oldest daughter, Dionna informed me she had a box filled with writings by my mother — loose leaf paper (numbered, thank goodness), scraps of paper, and envelopes, lots of envelopes written on the front and back.
Is this where I got that habit? Jotting down notes on the closest piece of paper I can find, whole pieces, little pieces, and yes, envelopes and yes, numbered!
So how much influence does my mother really have on me, on my writing that I had always thought of as my talent? After all, hers was painting. What influence could she, who could barely speak the language, have on me in that area?
Obviously, in ways I never expected.
Funny, I never made the connection as I threw them all into the box. I had saved those papers, when I cleared out her apartment after she passed away. A few years ago, when I closed my storage, I asked Dionna to keep them for me.
In all this time, 15 years now, I never looked at them. Actually forgot about them, until Dionna brought them to my attention today.
So this year I will read them. Why not? Something is drawing me down this path, and it’s not just so that I can relaunch a blog or create a new FaceBook page.
It may take me the entire year…or two…or even longer. It will not be easy.
Dionna read just a few lines from one envelope, which was an interesting experience. Because when my mother wrote, if she didn’t write entirely in Japanese, she wrote in both English AND Japanese. She’d start to write in English. If she didn’t know the English word, which was just about every sentence, she used Japanese. And of course, they would be significant words, like what the sentence was about.
But I recognized right away the several sentences Dionna read, even with the missing English. She was writing about Vernice and our brother. And I knew, even with the missing English words, she was trying to explain to herself why she had not seen what was going on in our family.
For a moment, I could feel doubt constricting my chest and throat. Do I want to do this?
Well, I won’t lie. A part of me says, “No!”
And it is louder than the part that says, “Well…yes”. But not stronger.
That fact is, it could be a Pandora’s Box or it could be a treasure. And there’s no one around to tell me which one it is. It may be that everything worthwhile is a little bit of both, or maybe that’s what we tell ourselves to help us go through where we would not.
But I think that perhaps, in lifting the lid to the unknown or facing what we fear, we may find that the shadows we’re so afraid of are actually cast from the wings of angels coming to take us to that place of wholeness. But more than that, if for no other reason, I’m ready to hear my mother’s voice through these words she had written years ago. The words she left behind.
That, alone, is enough for me.
By Miyasan's Daughter, on January 3rd, 2012 Mountain Moving Day
Yosano Akiko
“Mountain moving day has come”.
is what I say. But no one believes it.
Mountains were just sleeping for a while.
Earlier they had moved with fire.
But you do not have to believe it.
O people! You’d better believe it!
All the sleeping women move
Now that they awaken.
From Hamil and Gibson, River of Stars: the Selected Poems of Yosano Akiko
Born in 1878 and died in 1942, Yosano Akiko was a prolific and visionary writer from Japan. Now, over a hundred years later, she reaches across the oceans and death itself to touch me.
There is not one Mountain Moving Day, but many. And in the lives of mountains, who is to say how long a day is? But to be certain, it is happening.
Mountains were just sleeping for a while.
Earlier they had moved with fire.
Oh, I want to remember it! More than that, I want to feel it. Does molten lava flow through my veins as well? Do the mountains in their terrible and life-sustaining stillness feel the fire beneath them? Do they remember, or like me, have they forgotten?
I want to remember, and with intention, direct that power within me — if with destruction then as preparation for life, a friend to the Sequoia and virgin grasslands. I am no stranger to getting burned. But I am also no stranger to rising again.
Yosano Akiko mentions belief three times in this short but powerful poem.
…But no one believes it…
But you do not have to believe it…
O people! You’d better believe it!
True, we are creatures of disbelief. We only believe what we think we see, but we do not realize how often we see what we think. We have looked at mountains with unseeing eyes of prejudice for so long we are blind to their dancing.
We mine, we dig, we bore tunnels through their very soul and each other. We plunder their resources and strip off the fertile earth of our humanity…but that does not mean the music does not play. We do not have to believe it. The song exists. We have only to accept its invitation to join. It does not ask for our permission to be.
Yosano Akiko still warns — O people! You’d better believe it! — the mountain is awakening. It is happening now, all around the world.
Only those who remain asleep fear being crushed. But why should anyone fear mountains moving? Or even more foolishly, try to stop them?
My mother was 22 and living in Japan, when Yosano Akiko passed away. I wonder if she was aware of her writings, if she had been moved by her words…if these words ever touched her as they do me now, if they made her believe in the impossible, even for a moment.
Somehow I see this poet standing with one hand outstretched to me, and one to my mother. Neither are alive any more, but all around me I feel the power of the rocks, the large boulders I lean up against when I go off the trail in the park near my home.
I know they are with me, and in the moment of clasping hands, I see a mountain range that stretches further than my eyes can see. And they are moving.
By Miyasan's Daughter, on November 11th, 2010 …to be Miyasan’s daughter?
For so long I had seen my mother through her wounds, her needs. And in my way, I related myself to her through my own. But now, as I’m engaged in a writing challenge, (NaNoWriMo – a novel in 30 days) I find that I’m seeing her in more and more a different way.
It’s not because as I’m writing I’m appreciating her as an artist more, although I am. It’s that as I’m writing, I’m uncovering – and not altogether happily and certainly not consciously – those things that have been holding me back.
Writing in this way has reopened doors long since closed, and uncovered the trapdoors lying hidden under well worn rugs and heavy furniture. I didn’t mean for this housecleaning to occur, but it’s happening. Creativity is like that. It leaves nothing unturned as it seeks out the images and connections in subconscious places – within metaphors and similes, made up or pieces of your life – doesn’t matter.
The writer never knows she’s talking to herself, doesn’t realize that as she’s crafting some seeming unrelated story to anything real in her life she’s really hanging out pieces of her psyche for everyone to see. It’s not always so pretty.
So I had an emotional meltdown this morning, crying in the shower, sitting on the couch with my depression comfortable against the cushions next to me.
And I realized as I was talking to my youngest child that this emotional upheaval had nothing to do with anything that had occurred within the last 24 hours, although it was so tempting to connect the dots and just stop where they ended before your eyes.
But they don’t stop before your eyes. They continue past the point of vision to where true seeing occurs. And I realize, sitting here with my tea and chocolates that my emotional upheaval had everything to do with what had transpired since my first breath of feeling guilty.
And my reaction against it wouldn’t have been so strong, had it not been for the fact that this feeling is still haunting me after all these years.
I have felt guilty my whole life for having more…being more, at least as perceived by the ones I loved most.
And as a result, I’ve always been trying to make up for it. What “it” was, I’m not sure. But what I am sure is that my life was an attempt of an apology for taking up space, for breathing, for being Daddy’s favorite, though that carried its cost. Out of the price everyone paid, it might be argued I paid the least, though it still was costly enough.
And I still apologized. Probably one of my drives for years of activism was not only for the justice of it for others, but the redemption of it for me.
With no right to really be here, what right did I have then to write, to sing, to create? Borrowed at times, stolen at others, I piecemealed my creativity while doing what others needed or wanted more. And when I left my family of origin, I made sure those who entered my intimate circle would admire and resent that which attracted them to me in the first place, so that I would have to choose.
It’s noble to be of service, it’s wonderful, a good and right thing to do. But if you serve others because you don’t deserve anything yourself, then it’s not.
And as I fought the voice in me that told me I had no right to write in this NaNoWriMo thing, especially something as impractical as a fantasy novel, I realized how hard it was for me to give myself permission. And when I did grant that permission, and felt so good and proud, I did not anticipate the horrible backlash within me that would assault me for my impunity.
Until this morning. I did not escape the backlash, but I was mindful of it. And I listened, and I heard. And as I spoke the words, I felt a lightness descend and a weariness lift.
And I thought of my mother who had wrestled with her own creativity and the frustration of creating only in between the scrubbing of floors of other people’s houses or the feeding of her children or the heaving of her chest as she cried over my father again.
And the jealousy she felt and hated herself for at seeing me having so much more than she ever had – the chance at life she thought she’d given me, that she wanted so much for me and that taunted her as never being able to have herself.
And I told my youngest child, if her Nana had lived, she would have evolved and grown to where I knew she would have a different perspective, and the love she did have would have strengthened, and the insight of time and the lessening of it would have brought balance and peace to her heart and to the words she would speak.
This is not wishful thinking. Miyasan had that capacity and she had already traveled far so that no one who experienced less could judge her. There is no reason to believe she would not have traveled farther or taken back what she had once said or done; no reason to believe she would not have sown gentler seeds or created more beautiful art through her paintbrush and life.
What does it mean to be Miyasan’s daughter?
It no longer means being a survivor.
When I pick up my pen or sit at my laptop, I can sense her hands. I look at my hands, they are dry and aged, wrinkled with fine lines and calloused with knuckles ever so slightly growing larger. They even look like hers, and I am fiercely proud of them.
Miyasan was an artist. Even the apology that was her life did not change that. And it does not change it for me either.
Because I am an artist. I am my mother’s daughter.
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From one generation to another, I see your strength
Demian E Yumei 2011
Reclaiming my heritage as
"Miyasan's Daughter"
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