Fire and the Memory of Strong Trees

Dedicated to my Great-Aunt Alice. I love you very much.

—

Have yourself a merry little Christmas 

Let your heart be light. 

Next year all our troubles will be out of sight. 

It was one of the best days of my life—Christmas Day, 2019. 

Despite waking up on the floor crammed in a room with my whole family, I couldn’t help but smile. Because it was every kid’s dream—Christmas! 

It was the year we all wore matching Christmas jammies because my mom found them on Amazon; it was the year we cut down a Christmas tree as a family; it was the year we trekked off the freeway bundled in our snow gear to make our own sled run; it was the year we built our own snow cave; it was the year the snow fell like powder, the year icicles dripped daintily off of gutters, the year snowmen cropped up in every driveway because—it was that kind of year, the perfect American Christmas. My troubles were out of sight. 

—

Have yourself a merry little Christmas

Make the Yuletide gay

Next year all our troubles will be miles away

It was one of the worst days of her life—Chinese New Year, 1947.

It had all started to go wrong for her three years earlier—in 1944, when rebels in her hometown Kulja (which rested on the border of China and Russia) had begun to target and murder Chinese civilians. 

Before the revolt, she had been a daughter of a wealthy Chinese businessman and a Russian woman from Moscow. After her father was murdered, the Chinese government seized and locked away her father’s (and consequently her family’s) only source of wealth. 

She lived at home with her sister, sleeping on an ice-cold dirt floor. At home, rats scurried across her sister’s bed and a little pot nestled itself in the corner, catching the icy water that dripped from the ceiling. Rumpled sheets were strewn across the floor, wet from the snow that had blasted through the door which barely kept itself on its hinges. The smell of feces and urine permeated the air of the little shack in which they lived because it was too cold to pee outside.

In 1947, she left. 

It was the middle of winter when my Great-Aunt Alice and her family left her hometown of Kulja with only a handful of possessions to make the trek across China. Their hope was the shining promise of the United States—a land of opportunity, a land free from the bloodstained land of their hometown. She, along with her mother’s church, walked just under 3,000 miles to Shanghai. 

To sleep, they prayed. To walk, they prayed. To breathe, they prayed. For the promise of America, they prayed. 

On Chinese New Year, 1947, my Great-Aunt Alice and her church reached a provincial border. The only way through was to walk into a military compound of soldiers that would’ve slaughtered or taken paperless and penniless Russian and Chinese peasants into custody.

After waiting until nightfall, they walked through a military compound past sleeping soldiers, unable to make a sound. Only later did they realize that the only way they were able to do that was because it was Chinese New Year, and all the soldiers were drunk and passed out. As they walked with measured steps in knee-deep snow, they tried not to think about what would happen if they were caught. They prayed for a miracle. 

—

Once again, as in olden days

Happy golden days of yore

Faithful friends who are dear to us

Will be near to us once more

I remember hearing snippets of my Great-Aunt Alice’s story over dinner time, from my Grandpa, from my dad, from her memoir.

Huddling around a fire at Christmastime, my numb hands begin to thaw, red all over with warmth. 

What about Alice’s hands? I think. That winter, while my hands are warm and red, hers were cold and blue. 

At Christmas, I think of every immigrant’s journey that gave me my perfect Christmas—I think of my Taiwanese Ama who immigrated to the U.S. to marry my Granddad; I think of all the sacrifices she made; I think of all the times she moved around the country, around the world because her husband was in the military. I think of all the times we visited my Great-Aunt Alice’s home in Whittier; I remember, as a kid, dressing up to go to the house parties she took such pride in hosting. She was all smiles then, even when she battled cancer and heart attacks and diabetes.

At Christmas, while I sit warm by a fire at the perfect Christmas, I think of the immigrant journeys of my ancestors, their fingers blue with cold and their heads blooming with dreams—dreams of a better life, a life free from the pains of their homeland.

I wonder if those dreams came true. 

—

Someday soon we all will be together

If the fates allow

Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow

So have yourself a merry little Christmas now

My Great-Aunt Alice passed away in 2022. 

In a way, everyone was happy she wasn’t suffering anymore. Her childhood was marked by her immigrant journey, her middle age with domestic issues, and her senior life with health problems. She kept a happy face through everything and it was only when the muscles in her mouth stopped working that she stopped smiling. 

I don’t think the reality of her suffering hit me until the last time we visited her before she died. 

We walked through that front yard I remembered so well from my childhood. But everything was all wrong. Only when I got to the front porch did I realize it was because she wasn’t there to greet us. 

When we walked inside, we were greeted by a few relatives—a second aunt and her young kids. 

We made small talk for a bit, then one of the children beckoned me to go inside my Great-Aunt’s bedroom to see his Babushka. 

There she was—caramel hair once full and strong dwindled away into white wisps, eyes glassy and black and unfocused, mouth closed, nostrils flared, in a gown she would have considered far too revealing, skin white and cracked. 

I knelt beside her, clasping her rough fingers in my smooth ones. I’d never felt more like a child than I did at that moment. This woman was an oak that had weathered space and time and snow and death and disease and immigration and everything in between and she was—dying. 

My fingers were green, young shoots intertwining themselves with an old, sturdy tree—young life finding solace in the sorrows of old Christmases long past, long gone. 

I wonder, if, truly, my Great-Aunt and I will be together “soon,” or if the fates will allow it. I wonder if I’ll be able to “muddle through” the days without her soft smile, her steady perseverance, her unmoving tree. I wondered, on the day she died, about her house—how it would ever be the same without her. I wondered, on the day of her funeral, looking up at a slideshow with her smiling face plastered all over it, why that face had to disappear from my life. I wonder how long it will be until I can see that face again. 

I wonder how Christmas can be “merry” at all. 

Perhaps the “merriness” of Christmas comes from, not what we get, but what we already have. My Great-Aunt’s lack of Christmas gave me mine. The days she spent in the cold gave me my days of warmth. 

Perhaps, then, we don’t need gifts. Perhaps we only need a reminder of what we already have—a memory of those not with us, a story, whispered by a fireplace over a cup of hot cocoa, surrounded by family. 

Perhaps, at Christmas, when we warm our fingers by a fire, we need not feel guilt but perhaps—just perhaps—we might feel a little closer to the ones we lost, as if their souls are tingling beneath the skin of our half-numb fingertips.