Homing
Dedicated to my father
Meet me
along a border, a boundary,
where earth and water meet.
Snow geese fly
tracing coastlines,
salmon leave
salty bay waters for freshwater streams,
grey whales slow
filling their bellies on long journeys to arctic seas.
What if borders are pathways,
not barriers
guideposts, banks of a stream,
fertile grounds for crossings
birthing diversity,
in estuaries, not elsewhere seen.
What if true freedom is
like geese and salmon and greys,
nowhere and everywhere,
movement in community
in flock, in shoal, in pod
not home, but homing
not home, but homing
not yet home, still homing.
Port Susan Bay, Washington
A slow resonant blow, the breath of a whale, sounds from the mouth of the bay. We hear it long before we see it, its protracted exhale amplified by the curve of surrounding bluffs. The first of the grey whales has arrived, stopping on its long migration north to feed on the abundant ghost shrimp in the shallow sands.
I live on a boundary, a border of land and water, an estuary where rivers flow into sea. A transition zone, an appropriate place to live as I move from my career as a doctor into something new—writing about being a pediatrician instead of seeing patients. This had not been my plan, but Covid impacted me in ways I never anticipated.
Last year, I made the painstaking choice to leave patients, families, and colleagues, and my career of thirty years; to express my love for this work in a new way, through writing and naming what goes unnamed; and to fulfill other life dreams and family responsibilities. In my first calling, I return to Taiwan, bringing my elderly mother back to visit family and honoring the legacy of my father in his hometown and Hiroshima, Japan.
Tuniu Hakka Culture Hall, Shigang, Taiwan
Before my father died, he said he wanted to be buried in the Liu family gravesite with his parents back in Taiwan. Like most conversations in our family, big or small, this discussion happened matter-of-factly around our kitchen table; wishes for the afterlife said in the same breath as what’s for dinner. While my mother stayed quiet, I eagerly said, “Yes, I will do that for you!” After he died seven years ago from a fall and dementia, my mother reminded me, “you promised to take care of his ashes,” with her own sense of assuredness and pride for not taking on such a difficult task. I nodded, still busy with my medical practice. But now the time has arrived.
This will be my fifth trip to Taiwan, but my first caring for parents. Before traveling, I reach out to cousins, elderly aunts and uncles in the US to find the location of the Liu family grave. Ties between my dad’s siblings in the US and Taiwan have loosened and frayed over sixty years of time. I do not anticipate the challenge I discover: no one knows where it is.
With too many barriers, I give up bringing my dad’s ashes this time and turn my attention toward finding his family gravesite. I put my trust in Google and randomly search various terms: in addition to Liu, grave, and Taichung, I add Hakka, the minority group of which my father’s family belongs. Hakka, meaning “guest families,” left regions of unrest for safer lands. Hakka people migrated from China, landing in Taiwan, where they are the largest minority group. My father’s ancestors arrived over nine generations ago.
Google finds Tuniu Hakka Culture Hall. My eyes widen and my heart quickens as I read: Shigang Tuniu Hakka Culture Hall was a reconstruction of the relics of the Liu’s Compound in Shigang, Taichung. The Liu Family is a huge clan that symbolizes the Hakka people who first came to cultivate the mountains. It is one of the most prominent families in Shigang and Dongshi.
Liu Family? Is that my Liu family? Huge clan? Am I part of a clan?
I close my laptop having found a place to start my journey back to my father’s hometown.
After spending nearly two weeks based in my mom’s hometown of Kaohsiung, my fiancé and I leave her with family and travel to Taichung. We have one full day to spend in my father’s hometown before leaving for Japan, where my father also spent part of his youth. We head out early morning toward the mountains to see Tuniu Hakka Culture Hall.
After arriving in the smaller town of Shigang, we find ourselves nearly alone in a quiet, isolated, brick courtyard, the steady sound of water spouting into a large half-moon pond filled with colorful, glimmering koi. A smaller courtyard of buildings waits behind a stately entry gate with painted wood carvings on each side and a bright blue roof with a central white beam, curved ends tapering into points like wings taking flight.
Aside from one small family, we are the only other people here. I search for a tour guide or greeter, somewhat disappointed to find only sun-faded signs posted in Chinese, a few with English translations, offering a self-guided tour. The first sign explains that we stand on the reconstruction of a Liu family compound that was damaged in the 921 Earthquake—a 7.3 [magnitude] earthquake that hit the center of Taiwan on September 21, 1999, killing and injuring thousands of people, the second deadliest earthquake in Taiwan’s recorded history.
One hall in the smaller courtyard displays pictures of the buildings destroyed by the earthquake, photos of the reconstruction and celebrations held after the center opened. In another room, musical instruments hang from the wall: flutes, small drums, tarnished brass hand cymbals, and traditional Asian stringed instruments. We ask each other about the two huge wooden molds splayed open in the center of the hall, intricately carved to allow for something to be poured inside—wax decorations? giant cakes? We have no idea. All the display descriptions are written in Chinese, and I can’t read Chinese, nor can my white-American fiancé, so we are left to guess.
We admire several old trees—a tall longan tree with a peach-pink orchid growing from its side and a thick, gnarled, and rooted breadfruit tree—each over 100 years old. I love the mild sweetness of longan. Unpeeled from its thin brown shell, its dark smooth seed can be seen through the globe of its translucent white flesh giving it its other name, dragon’s eye.
My spirits lift as we enter the ornate central hall housing the main altar, the room shimmers in gold script and red beams. Large wooden lacquered plaques with Chinese characters hang from the striped wooden ceiling, gold-framed paintings surround the altar where instead of a buddha figure more plaques stand displaying family names. Paintings of Liu ancestors and history cover both side walls. While I don’t recognize most of the Chinese characters, I know a few including my last name. But my last name is very common, like Smith or Jones. I am still unsure if this place is connected to me.
The entire compound contains rooms of information, but we move through it in an hour unable to read the Chinese. At last, I see a man in the courtyard who might work here. He is short, around my height, wearing a light blue baseball cap and a grey windbreaker, yellow t-shirt, and athletic pants. Very smiley, he is missing his two front teeth.
“Do you work here?” I ask in Taiwanese.
“No,” he replies in Taiwanese, “but can I help you?”
I pull out my phone to show him photos of my dad’s family tree. This dark pink, hardcover book includes one-hundred pages of Liu family history going back to Chinese dynasties. My father had shown me his own treasured copy years before he died, turning the yellowed pages with care, stopping at the book-marked page with his parents, siblings, and our immediate family. Only male family members were recorded in these family tree books, so my brother’s name was there but not mine. There was an extra sheet of thin paper taped over our immediate family tree that someone had made to include the girls of my generation. I am represented on this extra slip.
As the man takes the photos in, a huge smile breaks out across his face.
“Yes, yes, you are Liu family!” He raises his hands, one hand cupped around the fist of the other, pulsing them high by his forehead, bowing to me.
“Respect, respect to your grandfather, the doctor, Dr Liu. You come from a very good family,” reminding me of the status doctors hold across time.
“I am Liu too, we are distantly related,” he continues. “Do you speak Hakka?”
We were having trouble understanding each other in Taiwanese. “No, I’m sorry, only Taiwanese.”
“No Mandarin?”
“No Mandarin.”
“How can you not speak Hakka nor Mandarin?” he asks with another smile and raised eyebrows.
“I was born in America and my mother is Taiwanese; my parents spoke Taiwanese or Japanese to each other. We spoke Taiwanese at home. I took Mandarin Chinese classes as a child and then later in college, but without practice, I speak little Mandarin.” He shakes his head in disbelief.
Throughout my stay in Taiwan, I am an anomaly no one can understand. I speak Taiwanese well enough but cannot read, write nor speak Mandarin Chinese, the official language of Taiwan. It is impossible for someone in Taiwan to only speak Taiwanese, they would have to be a complete shut in, never attend school nor listen to TV or radio where Mandarin is ubiquitous.
As an American-born child of Taiwanese immigrants from the late 1950’s and early 60’s who came for graduate school, I grew up in a Pittsburgh suburb a decade later, as one of the only non-white kids in town. I was often teased in early elementary school, called a Jap and a Chink, laughed at for bringing sushi to lunch. On my second trip to Taiwan at age twelve, I was eager to belong. I wanted my Asian face to blend in and not stand out. But my braces and clothing gave me away; people pointed me out as an American. As decades pass and Taiwan has modernized, people dress more similarly between countries. I blend in now, but my spoken language, or lack thereof, still gives me away.
My newfound relative leads me back to the main room of the cultural hall, points to the walls, where pictures of our ancestors are posted—faded paintings of old Asian men in caps and ornate elegant robes seated in chairs. He points out a weathered painted column—the blue, gold, and pink colors still intact but faded around peony flower designs—from an original Liu family home still displayed in the hall as an artifact. He talks nonstop. While I only grasp a fraction of what he is saying, his enthusiasm for sharing our family history overflows.
He asks me how much time we have to explore this hall and nearby Dongshi, the town where my father grew up, and is stunned to learn we only have this day. However, to my surprise, he rearranges his entire day to spend it all with us.
We take a crowded bus to Dongshi and eat a quick lunch of hot noodle soup and chicken, then walk through town until dark. He walks fast, eager to show us as much as he can, every few blocks snapping selfies over his shoulder of us trailing behind. My fiancé and I chuckle when he is not looking, wondering where all these photos might end up. When we pass any elderly person, he shouts to them.
“Do you remember, Doctor Liu? The respected doctor?”
Without fail, they do, smiling upon hearing his name.
“This is his granddaughter from the US!” he exclaims.
And like he had done, they raise their hands, one hand cupping the first of the other, showing respect, shouting, “Good family! Good family!” I cannot stop smiling, feeling like a celebrity returning home.
One very elderly lady riding an adult-sized red tricycle in the middle of the road between buses, cars, and scooters, starts to follow us after hearing I am Dr. Liu’s granddaughter. She pedals right beside me, talking to me, smiling and nodding. As she pulls down her cloth face mask, she reveals a toothless grin. I barely understand a word she is saying. But our smiling and nodding seem to be enough and after biking quite a distance next to us, she sets off on her way.
My newfound relative fast walks us to every temple in Dongshi to pay respects to our ancestors: vibrant opulent temples ringed with red paper lanterns and dragons on the roofs, smells of incense and smoke from burning symbolic money in the temple ovens, offerings to ancestors. I catch up to join him, mimicking his gestures, standing next to him at altars, bowing with incense in my hands. At each subsequent temple, the ritual feels more real.
Hours later we end at the bus station, grateful to finally sit down. He says it is much easier and cheaper than calling an Uber to this small mountain town. While we wait exhausted, resting our feet, he runs across the street to the market returning with a bag full of treats for our ride home—several bags of different pickled plums, sweet, tart and savory.
Overflowing with gratitude to him for spending the day with us and for the good fortune of running into him, I thank him for taking care of us. He shares that he had been waiting for years, wondering when a someone from our US branch of the Liu family would return to Taiwan. I shake my head smiling, when he says he feels like the lucky one to be there at Tuniu Hakka Cultural Hall on the day an American Liu returns to Taiwan, searching for her own roots.
As the bus heads out of Dongshi in the darkness of evening, I feel my father’s hand in the course of the day. The coincidence was more than a chance meeting of a relative at a precise moment, of his availability and generosity to show us through my father’s hometown. While I did not find the family gravesite, I have taken a solid first step. As I tip to rest my head against my fiancé, already sound asleep, my eyes well as I send my father a prayer of thanks.
Hiroshima, Japan
I did not know a thing about Hiroshima until I was twenty-eight. My first husband and I were newly engaged. Our parents were visiting us in Seattle, where I had moved for my pediatric residency, and meeting each other for the first time over dinner at a waterfront restaurant downtown.
Over an elegant dinner, my father shared in his quiet understated voice and with his gentle smile, that he had lived through the atomic bombing in 1945, forty-eight years earlier. He had never spoken of it my entire childhood.
Both of my parents grew up in Taiwan under Japanese rule, since Japan occupied Taiwan from 1895 to 1945. Both grandfathers believed in a good education and insisted that all their children do well in school. My father was the second oldest of twelve children and when he reached middle school, his father sent him and his older brother to Japan to get a better education than they could receive in Taiwan.
Living with the Japanese headmaster’s family, they attended middle and high school for some time before WWII, but once the war started, they—like all young men in Japan—were conscripted into the military. My father was trained and stationed in Hiroshima as a medic. He was just outside the city behind the mountains when the atomic bomb was dropped August 6, He saw the bright flash of light. He saw shattered windows. He saw a multicolored cloud. But he said there was no sound.
Three days later, he was told his job was to attend to the survivors. Going into the city, he discovered there were none.
He was left to identify and remove dead bodies.
He was sixteen years old.
His brother was in Nagasaki when the second atomic bomb dropped on August 9, 1945. My father went to Nagasaki to try to find his brother. He never found him. Knowing he had to bring something back to his family in Taiwan, he brought home a box of mixed remains.
Years later when I asked him about this box, he did not know what his family did with the ashes. Anonymous remains were not allowed in a family grave.
A friend and I video interviewed my dad in 2011, six years before he died. He repeatedly told parts of his story of tending to the bodies, perhaps a sign of his dementia that would lead to his death from a fall down our basement steps. He never woke up after that fall, even after we took him off life support. It took his healthy vigorous body seven long days to die. I never left his side.
In that interview, he shared what he had seen. Bodies charred beyond recognition, burned meat that fell off bones, a smell he couldn’t describe. He said, “Once you’re there, you don’t feel anymore.”
We asked if he had had nightmares.
“Not anymore.”
He was eighty-three years old.
By this time, I was a practicing pediatrician and realized for the first time that my dad had had PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) for most of my life.
He sheltered me from his trauma with his steady calm. I was always Daddy’s girl. Both of us quiet and shy, I stayed glued to his side as a young child, holding his hand, or sitting in his lap. My mother was too loud, strong, and brash for both of us. We took comfort in each other’s presence. He was always sitting right behind me every day as I practiced playing the piano. It didn’t matter that he was usually snoring or completely asleep.
In the years since my father died, I have continued to try to learn more about Hiroshima and the hibakusha, the Japanese name given to atomic bomb survivors. Most of the survivors who are still living were children during the time of the atomic bombing. They are now all in their eighties or nineties and will soon die. When they do, all that will be left remains on paper, in history books, in museums. History does not feel real, feel tangible—until that history is your own family’s, your father’s. Then it is in your cells—trauma that impacts one’s DNA, called epigenetics, its effects passed down through genes to generations. I wanted to know of his experience in my body, to feel it, to digest the aftershocks one generation later.
I also read stories of living hibakushas—courageously sharing their memories, finding joy amidst histories of pain, and speaking out against the threat of nuclear weapons. Inspired by their legacy, I scheduled appointments with staff and curators at the Hiroshima Peace Museum and the Peace Memorial Hall. I want my dad’s memory housed in a place of peace.
Nervous as I step out from the Hiroshima train station, I feel uneasy, that the atrocity of the bombing might leave a lingering feeling of dis-ease. But instead, I am surprised by the sense of relief and joy sparked by this beautiful city. It feels refreshing to arrive in the quiet, modern place—the silver dome of the Peace Pagoda glimmering across on the mountain. Stopped at a light in a taxi on the way to the hotel, a peace sign hangs in an office window, a symbol of the ubiquitous culture of peace.
After dropping off our bags at the hotel, we head to the Peace Museum to meet the first curator. Anxious and eager for the meetings, I don’t want anything to jeopardize this most important task of my trip. A long line of visitors and hordes of schoolchildren, each group in a different uniform, pack the plaza outside the front doors. A security guard monitors the entrance stopping me from going in until the curator, a middle-aged woman wearing a blue suit jacket and skirt, arrives to escort us inside. I feel special walking in with her past all the lines and crowds, down to the museum library below.
I carry my dad’s information on a DVD and USB thumb drive: an edited version of the interview I had done, his obituary, a local newspaper article written about him, and the handsome photo of him displayed at his memorial service. This photo, taken by my mom when they were on a cruise together, shows all the things I love about him in his face—the barely-there smile that withstood all circumstances; his gentle, quiet, calm energy. I complete a simple form, hand them what I have brought, and that is it. For all the weight and meaning his experience in Hiroshima carries in my life, the actual act is the smallest and simplest of things.
The curator shows us the database, how and where my father’s information will be stored, and we ask questions about the library and the museum. I ask if there are any other Taiwanese people in their database. She says she doesn’t think so.
She shows us to the museum with just enough time left to see the exhibit.
A long black tunnel transitions visitors from the outside world into the main exhibit. Once inside, walls, ceiling and floor are all black, we enter darkness. Artifacts are charred, blackened, or faded: a child’s purple dress yellowed and tattered to the faintest hint of lavender; a tricycle burned and warped to mustard brown; black and white photos of burned and injured bodies. The only color lives in drawings made by survivors—horror only captured by memory—brilliant oranges and reds of blood, fire, and shards of skin. I move in closer to see one spare drawing of a naked woman, lying face down, her arms reaching around two small heads, one over each shoulder and two small hands reaching around her back—a mother burned to death with one child under each arm.
I feel grateful to be a doctor as I move through the exhibit. Grateful that I have seen burn victims before, seen the effects of radiation on cancer patients, been in the ER with patients with severe injuries and trauma. Grateful for some clinical distance. I want to see what my father saw, to understand his experience as deeply as I can.
I choose not to look away. He had no choice.
I experience it with only one of my senses. He was forced to take it in with his entire body. His words come to me again: “Once you were there, you didn’t feel anymore.”
It is remarkable that my dad remained the man that I knew. He was the kindest and gentlest man I have ever known. My friends would always say about my dad, “He’s so zen.”
When we went to parties with my parents’ Taiwanese family friends (called them aunties and uncles), he rarely socialized with the other adults. Instead, he was in the room with the children, holding the youngest child at the party in his arms, rocking them to sleep. He was a baby whisperer; babies intuitively know when they are in good hands. He gravitated to babies. I do too.
Two days later, I bring a duplicate DVD of my dad’s information to the Peace Memorial Hall, a place dedicated to the memory of victims and survivors. There I meet with a staff member, Mihoko, who I learn is also the grandchild of a hibakusha. She has worked at the Peace Museum and Memorial Hall for over 20 years, helping to honor victims and survivors. She shares that of the over 300,000 people who have died from the atomic bombs, only 27,000 have their names in the Memorial Hall database. She shares that deep stigma and shame still exist for bomb survivors. Other Japanese often do not want to marry or be connected to people associated with the bombing. They have suffered physical, psychological, and social pain. Even her grandmother is not in the Memorial Hall registry. Only 17 years old at the time of the bombing, her grandmother cannot bring herself to even think about the bombing for even one moment.
I am grateful to not feel any shame or cultural burden. Instead, I feel a deep honor for my father to be memorialized at a place of great suffering and horror but also a place completely dedicated that such a bombing never happening again, a place that holds a vision for a world free of nuclear weapons, a place that fosters peace culture for the whole world.
I ask her if there were any other Taiwanese people in the database. She searches the database and says, “There is one.”
“Shall we look him up?” she asks.
“Yes, please.” I pull my chair up closer to hers.
She types in the man’s name multiple times, not finding it right away. But after a few tries and combinations in the order of his name, she finds his record.
On the screen, appears the black and white photo of a young Asian man, wearing a soft brimmed cap and a collared uniform like those worn by high school students. He was 17 and had died in the atomic bombing. He could have been my father. I do not have any photos of my father at this age. This young man had similar circumstances as my father, he too had been in Japan as a student. He too found himself in Hiroshima at the wrong time.
For the first time of my entire visit to Hiroshima, at the first sight of this young Taiwanese man’s photo—history is no longer abstract, even my father’s story is no longer just a story. Seeing the photo of someone who could be him brings everything together for me.
For the first time, I cry.
We tour the Memorial Hall walking down its spiral halls down to a fountain surrounded by walls etched with names of victims of the bombing. We watch a film about meteorologists who were monitoring their instruments and sensors on the day of the bombing. For the moments the bomb detonated on that beautiful clear morning of August 6, 1945, there was no reading of the sun.
Mihoko shows us a display of the cut of the earth, the ground of Hiroshima, the layers of earth like rings of a tree, even and encrusted. A timeline of history marks the different layers—smooth even layers of earth from the Edo (1600-1800’s), Meiji (late 1800’s to early 1900’s), Taisho (1912-1926) and early Showa periods (1926-1989) and then the rubble and debris-ridden thick chaotic layer of the bomb’s destruction—history made visible, one time point taking up the same amount of space where hundreds of years of history had passed without impacting the earth.
My fiancé and I are drawn to the trees, the hibakujumoku, the survivor trees who withstood the atomic bombing and still stand today. We end our trip visiting Hiroshima Castle, stopping to visit each of the hibakujumoku, to touch them, to honor their presence—the eucalyptus with its sickled leaves arcing over the side of the moat, koi swimming at its feet; the holly tree bright and full with red berries; and the giant pussy willow, its trunk bound with twine and one gnarled branch propped up with a stick, like a crutch supporting an injured limb.
I am struck by the singular focus of Hiroshima, completely rebuilt from the deepest of human suffering, into a place and a beacon of peace. I am so moved by my time in the Memorial Hall feeling my father’s story move into me, the resonance of his experience settles into my bones. I feel weighted by the passing of so many hibakusha, their stories lost with their deaths and the pressing need for us to keep these stories alive, never forgotten, so that we can live in a world without nuclear weapons, determined that this never happen again.
Before leaving the Memorial Hall, I asked Mihoko, “Is my father, hibakusha?” needing to confirm that even in his unique circumstances, he belongs to this group of humans who experienced living through the atomic bomb.
“Yes, he is hibakusha.”
I am the daughter of hibakusha.
I am the daughter of a Taiwanese hibakusha.
Port Susan Bay, Washington
As I return home, each road I travel is narrower than the last. When I finally reach my one-lane road, I always turn everything off in my car, stop listening to the podcast that accompanies me from Seattle, welcoming silence. It is as if the canopy of old growth trees here quietly demands this kind of reverence, the small winding road, forest ravine on one side and a bluff on the other. It is not until the last turn that you can see the water. It appears like a revelation, an opening, the quenching of a deep thirst for a spiritual sense of return.
I return carrying more pieces of myself from other places and distant times that I had not known were within. I return having honored my father, knowing someday I will travel again carrying his ashes in my hands. With each passage away across borders, unbounded, I return ever closer to home.
What if borders are pathways and guideposts
What if true freedom is nowhere and everywhere
Not yet home, I am still homing.
1 “Tuniu Hakka Culture Hall,” Taichung City Government Tourism and Travel Bureau, Publication date: August 18, 2023, Access date: March 28, 2024, https://travel.taichung.gov.tw/en/attractions/intro/1247.
Lenna L Liu is an emerging Taiwanese-American writer and retired University of Washington emeritus professor and pediatrician who cared for children and families at Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic in Seattle, WA for over thirty years. She is the loving daughter of dedicated parents who immigrated from Taiwan and the proud mother of two inspiring, young adult sons. She enjoys yoga, meditation, dance (especially Argentine tango), paddleboarding, and long beach walks along the shores of the Pacific Northwest.
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