Taking the aunties for a ride

Buckle up

August 6 is the anniversary of the nuclear genocide at Hiroshima which, despite the immediacy of its horrors, was insufficiently compelling to prevent a second one at Nagasaki three days later. Somewhere between 100,000 and 250,000 people were killed between the two. It remains the only use of nuclear weapons in armed combat. This was the culmination of a battle between two aggressive empires that made casualties of their own citizens and innocent people across a global theater of conflicts.

This is as far into the militaristic weeds as I’m willing to venture. My priors are these: that this event capped the three-year incarceration of people of Japanese descent in the US, my family among them; and that Hiroshima is one of the homes of my ancestors.

Every year on August 6 I’m confronted by a grief that feels incomprehensible. Rather than face it in its totality, my mind fixates on factoids. Gingko trees survived, foliage intact, while every other plant around it disintegrated. The flash was so powerful that imprints of kimono patterns were etched into their wearers’ skins. Some people were reduced to mere outlines on the ground. These anecdotes are points that, while gruesome, ground me in narratives rather than emotions. They have a fixity and specificity that can’t unspool like my feelings can. 

In past years, this day has floored me, nauseated me, made me inconsolable, confused me, enraged me. This year feels different. 

I have historically been skeptical of ancestor worship, and the value of filial piety and its attendant responsibilities are somewhat lost on me. Having the identities that I do, and being descended from two mutually hostile flavors of imperialist-colonizers, I find it plausible that my ancestors would have tried to burn me at the proverbial stake. While I don’t think I’m incorrect to believe this, I have perhaps misunderstood the prompt. Some Asians and earlier generations of Asian Americans will no doubt hasten to add that I’m also too Americanized, too much of ingrate, to get it. But this is my newsletter, not theirs.

I feel different this year because I realized that, in addition to being too literal about my ancestors’ hypothetical bigotry, I made a sort of Mulan-inspired assumption that this connection is transactional. We make small offerings of rice, persimmons, and incense and get something in return. I have yet to receive my dragon, but in the Disneyfication of it all, I lost the thread. “They wouldn’t want anything to do with me,” I thought, “so what could I offer them? What could they offer me?” The paradigm shift is this: I have begun to think of my relationship to my ancestors as “taking the aunties for a ride.” 

By this, I mean that I have the opportunity to show all the aunties (and chiller uncles) life through my eyes. They were integral in bringing me to this point in history, so they get to come along for the agonies and ecstasies of existence in late-stage techno-fascism and climate collapse. It feels a bit like I’m experiencing things on their behalf as well as mine. It’s spiritually resonant even if it’s ridiculous in every other way, and my bar is low enough to accept it. 

It adds meaning and perspective to the mundanities of my life that might, to them, feel luxurious and exotic. And it gives a fun injection of perversity when I participate in any of the unspeakable activities to which I apply myself. “For the aunties!” I say as I get the hair removed from my asshole. “This one’s for you!” I say as I buy a $9 carton of strawberries. “Enjoy!” I say as I drive a thousand miles down the California coast in less than a day. 

I’m being glib. It truly feels profound in the moment. I’m not using my ancestors to justify buying fancy produce (I don’t need an excuse for that). Rather, I’m alchemizing my grief, paying daily homage, and perhaps, by some miracle, allowing some energetic vestige to use me as a conduit to live out a life cut short. 

It remains a day of mourning for those of us connected to this low point in human history. My wish for us is to be in community for our mourning even if we have to summon ghosts to do so.