Object

Christine Wong

MHC Seminar 102

Prof. Constance Rosenblum

In my family’s house back in Hong Kong, there is a spot dedicatedly sanctified (although my family is not religious). Like many traditional Chinese households, we place the “spirit tablets” and the black-and-white photos of our respectable passed relatives on a household altar. It is representative of our lineage. We worship our ancestors with incense sticks, fruits, and in special festivals, roasted meat, a tradition originated from Buddhist practice.

Growing up, the three siblings of us learned to stay away from the altar. It was unavoidable, however, to run into the altar at our apartment in Hong Kong, a city notoriously known for its tight living spaces. The altar is reddish, wooden and basically a “religiously decorated” cupboard without doors. We placed both paternal grandparents and a paternal great-uncle’s photos and spirit tablets on the altar. The blood red light bulbs in the wooden altar add even more eeriness to the black-and-white photos. The copper incense holder is placed in front.

My grandparents passed away before I was born. Their photos are the only impressions I have of them. The burning of incense for them is the only interactions I could have with them. We pray for luck, and tell our ancestors about our wrongdoings and our lives while we worship like they are gods. Most Chinese do that out of tradition and custom, but not of religion. It is the same in our family. We worship, but we do not embrace the beliefs and stories in Buddhism.

Basically, the altar signifies a passing on of family history. For us, it is not of real religious purpose. However, my parents do not talk much about our family history, unless we ask. So, we only know about our grandparents’ deaths and their general dispositions. I was only told that my granddad was a very educated and cultivated man, while my grandma was strict.

We do, more or less, think that our ancestors have some kind of power in our lives. For example, we have to apologize when we “disrespect” the altar. My siblings and I used to toss stuffed animals around the apartment when we were young. For a lot of the times, we knocked the incense holder down to the floor, pouring ashes everywhere. Then we were made to recite two lines of rhyming apologies while pressing both palms together in front of the altar, “有怪莫怪，細路仔唔識世界。” I remember being intimidated by the altar very much.

Now, I have left my country and have abandoned the only interactions with my ancestors. My family members continue the custom in Hong Kong. Perhaps, if my family would later choose to settle in the States with me, they might bring the spirit tablets here, which signifies that we would establish our roots here onward. Since the tablets represent our lineage, moving them here will be testimony to our recognition of immigrating to America and to the shifting of identity as true Americans.

“Lo the devil with seven scarlet cloaks”

Twenty years ago, a young professor of literature and his wife left an uncertain life in Kosovo for a better one in America. That man was my father, and from that day he stepped on U.S. soil, my father has taken on a dual identity. The first was the family man who worked long hours as awaiter to support his family. The second was the stubborn scholar, who felt in his heart an impulse to create. These two forces always balanced each other out, though that of the artist kept my father up late at night, typing away at his manuscript. What was remarkable to me then, as it is still is to me know, is how could he have persisted when the odds looked like they were stacked up against him. Here was a literary man 4000 miles away from his home country, who, far all his talents in his native tongue, could not speak English. This last fact made it very hard for him to apply for teaching positions at the prestigious universities. The scholar that he was, he needed something, a match, to keep the fire in his heart alive.
That match was the “Mountain Wreath,” the Montenegrin epic composed by the Bishop-Prince P. P. Njegoš. Originally, this book was a gift that my mother gave my father on their one-month anniversary—half in love, half in jest. She knew that he had read the book in his youth, as many Yugoslavians were required to, and that he had hated it, but “this time you will forget that you hate it, and love it, because your wife gave it you as a gift.” With that odd logic born from love, it followed that my father actually started to like the book, and see his culture in a different light.
When it was time to leave Kosovo, it was at a particularly unsettling time, and stories about armies preparing to fight were not uncommon. On the day of their flight, as my parents were driving to the airport, having left a village that was nearing violence, my father had just remembered something which caused him to make a painful groan. My mother was frightened that he might have been hurt by someone in the village, but the source of his dread was the “Mountain Wreath” that he had left on the top of his desk at home. Fearing for their safety but unwilling to part with that precious gift, he left his wife by a relative and drove back into the village to retrieve his book. Having escaped with his life and his book, my father and his wife finally left Kosovo.
That book, for all the wisdom it contains, meant as much as it did to my father because it had validated his hard work so that he and his family could prosper.

My father, the emigré (here shown at 30)