I have thousands of pictures of my mother’s life in Taiwan, and the beginning of her life in the United States.

But there are only a few faces that I recognizes.

There are only a few places that (I think) I can identify.

I cannot read the writing, my mother’s handwriting in Chinese characters, that were left behind as clues for me when she left this earth 27 years ago, less than 10 years after her mother.

My mother died too young, in an accident.

But now, her generation is getting older.

I am grasping at family, family that my mother, after her divorce from my father, struggled to keep up with. I do not know why. Maybe it was because of shame, divorce being rare in her generation. Maybe it was because there was so much to do, as a single mother, trying to support two children with ten years between them, who were so different, including a little girl who had all the spunk and life that my mother also had as a child, before her life here taught her that she was invisible, passed over too many times for promotions, seen as a hard worker, but never a leader. Maybe it was because she was ashamed of me, the most “American,” by her choice and mine, the least connected to anyone else in her family.

After my grandmother died when I was 7, my mother and aunt kept speaking Taiwanese and Mandarin to one another, but I tuned it out. I didn’t need it to communicate. My mother wasn’t a fan of driving and Chinese school was too far away and cost money we didn’t have. I just wanted to be like the popular kids at my school (which I never was) and that meant because as assimilated as possible into white American culture. I didn’t want to be different. I wanted to belong. So, I turned my back on my identity. It wasn’t hard to do.  I didn’t understand the difference between Mandarin and Taiwanese. I didn’t understand what it meant to be Taiwanese American, to call myself Taiwanese American, and not Chinese American. There was so much I didn’t understand.

It has been challenging trying to reclaim that understanding, in the aftermath of loss. On top of a complicated grief process, having lost my mother so suddenly at such a pivotal time in my life, understanding what it means for me to claim being Taiwanese American is also complicated. How can I be Taiwanese American when I have never been to Taiwan (and don’t know how I would find family that is left there if I went and don’t know who or how would even remember my mother, my aunt and my grandmother), don’t speak Taiwanese (and don’t speak great Mandarin, having only put myself to serious study of it in the last few years), and have had (until late, and even now, mostly through friends and Twitter) a very limited knowledge of Taiwanese history and the Taiwanese diaspora?

The experiences I’ve had with the Taiwanese American community are also incredibly complicated. I feel like a complete imposter. No one has ever been unkind to me, but I feel an invisible distance that comes when you’ve lost your language, lost your family connection to an ancestral “homeland” that also has a complicated colonial past, lost your knowledge of your heritage (immediate and historical).

Despite these complications, there is a deep kinship that remains with the Taiwanese American community, particularly the elders who are near my mother’s age and second/ third generation Taiwanese Americans who are trying to navigate the values and beliefs our parents had and our own which are profoundly Taiwanese American. There’s a lot of diversity in the diaspora as in any diaspora, but I am beginning to seek, and find, community, in embodied ways that go beyond knowledge, but are felt deeply in my heart.

Yesterday, May 15th, there was a shooting at a Taiwanese Presbyterian Church that is a sister church to the church I belong to. It was politically motivated and evidence of increasingly violent tension between advocates of the current Chinese government (and its “One China” policy) and advocates for Taiwanese independence. This is complicated and something that most Americans have a very underdeveloped understanding of. It is particularly complicated for Asian Americans in the United States, for Taiwanese Americans and for Chinese Americans. My own understandings of this (while likely more developed than many people’s) could take up a very long blog post, but I am too tired today to do this education.

What I want to focus on is the fact that the ripple effects of this shooting in community.

When I heard the news about a shooting at a Presbyterian church in Orange County, I knew it had to be a sister church of ours. When I heard it was a Taiwanese Presbyterian church, I knew that someone I was closely connected with would have relationship to the victims, because the Taiwanese American community is small. The man killed was my 2nd cousin’s classmate’s eldest son. They are loose connections, but when you are part of a community that has had to fight for its existence to be recognized, it feels deeply personal.

The day before the Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church (ITPC) shooting, there was a shooting at Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York. I mention this because the Black community in Buffalo is also highly interconnected. The victims of the shooting were lost to their families and to their community.

Every time I hear about a mass shooting, it reminds me of Sandy Hook, a community where my brother and nephew still live. A tiny town where my nephew still remembers the day, 9 years and 5 months ago, when there was a mass shooting at his school. I still think often about how if my nephew’s birthday and my son’s birthday (they are only 3 months apart) were switched, my nephew would have been in 1st grade that day.

It reminds me of Mother Emanuel AME church, where my own pastor lost her best friend to a racist hate crime fueled by white supremacy, a crime that echoed through the shooting in Buffalo this weekend and then again in Laguna Woods for a different reason, but with a similar refrain.

When I heard the news about ITPC, I would not even call my Pastor because I know about these ripples.

I am tired.

This does not feel like a cohesive and coherent blog post with a beginning and an end that make sense. But I have not felt like a cohesive and coherent person much of late. I am carrying too much and making space for many emotions that do not neatly fit into a box.

I guess that’s the point. There are layers of loss, legacies of loss, for us as individuals and for all of us collectively.

Each loss has immediate impact, seen and unseen, but also carries with it a legacy that is often so much deeper.

That legacy of loss runs deep for so many of us, stealing our time, our energy, our focus, our ability to simply be and breathe freely, to walk on the street, to go to school, to the store, to our places of worship, to concerts, to any place, without living in fear, to speak our hearts and minds without fear that we will be harmed.

It is exhausting.

I am so tired.

I am tired of feeling loss. I am tired of feeling lost.

I know that there is much work to do. Advocacy and education, at the forefront of them. I know I will raise my voice in time.

But today, there is grief. There are many words but also profound silence.

And yet, always, there remains love and/in community.

Legacies that cannot be stolen no matter how much we grieve.

And today we grieve.