It didn’t matter that I was now a girl. I was also, still, the eldest son. I had a duty to fulfil, a role to play, an obligation of blood. This is Chinese love, the truest love.
Iwant to take a moment here to note that white people are always asking queers of colour to tell them the “ethnic gay story.”
“Was it hard to come out to your family?” They ask eagerly, eyes shining with hunger. “Are they very traditional, which is to say, queerphobic?” (It is taken for granted that the traditions of non-white cultures are queerphobic.)
Liberal white people love the ethnic gay story. It confirms their belief in the superiority of whiteness and assuages their sublimated guilt over the queerphobia and racism that are still rooted deep within white-dominant, colonial Western society.
What the ethnic gay story misses is that the queer children of diaspora are not the passive victims of our villainous, ignorant families; or at least, not in the way that whiteness likes to imagine us. Our relationships with our blood, our selves, are more complicated than that.
So I don’t believe that when I flew to Victoria for the funeral, leaving my punk queer femme clothes behind, that I was being forced to leave my womanhood behind as well. As I washed off my makeup and dressed in a black suit and tie, for all the world my parents’ son again, I was not choosing between being trans and being Chinese. What I chose was the strength of my family’s values — loyalty, lineage, the fulfilment of duty, gratitude to one’s elders — and the magic of queerness: transformation, change, adaptation and resiliency.
So perhaps it isn’t as strange as it seems that when I took the weight of the rosewood coffin that held my Yeh Yeh’s body in my gloved hands, lifting it up with five of my male cousins, I felt stronger and more certain in who I was than I ever had in that time of my life.
In that moment, on that island an ocean so far away from where my ancestors were born, I knew who I was: My mother’s daughter. My father’s son. A woman as Chinese as they come, as strong as the iron and the bones my ancestors lay in the ground to build the spine of this colonized nation, as queer as new moon rising.
It’s hard to walk with ghosts on your shoulders, but when you learn to listen to what they are saying, you realize that they are telling the story of who you are.
Atraditional Chinese funeral ends with a rite of cleansing. A fire is lit in front of the doorway of the departed’s home, and the family in mourning jumps over the flames before re-entering the house.
The flames purify the living of bad luck, and the rising smoke lifts what remains of the departed one’s spirit up into heaven. This is an old, old custom — older than the arrival of Christianity in Asia, older than the spread of Buddhism into China, older than Taoism.
My family approximated this by lighting some rolls of newspaper on fire in my Yeh Yeh’s driveway. Picture it: 40 Chinese people, spanning four generations, dressed in funeral wear, standing around a pile of burning paper in a driveway in the middle of suburban Victoria.
As I prepared to make my own leap over the fire, I bowed my head and closed my eyes. I thought about Yeh Yeh, the things I would never say to him, the things he’ll never know about me. In the distance, I could hear the sound of sirens.
And then the sounds weren’t so distant.
Racing the down the street, sirens blaring and lights ablaze, came a small fleet of fire trucks and police cars. They drew up to my Yeh Yeh’s house, and several uniformed officers jumped out.
The elders of the family recoiled, scandalized, the little kids darted behind their parents, and those of us in our 20s and 30s stepped forward protectively.
As it turned out, the neighbours had been watching through their windows, and someone had called 911. Lord knows what they must have said. An Asian cult in formal wear is performing a Satanic ritual in someone’s front yard. My grandparents had lived in that suburb with their white neighbours for over 20 years, only to have my Yeh Yeh’s last rites desecrated by racism.
I like to think my Yeh Yeh would have laughed to hear what had happened at his funeral. I like to think he’d acknowledge what I did for him with quiet approval. I like to think that someday, I’ll tell him that story in the place where the ancestors live, a place between the worlds, where every story can be told and understood.