Happy birthday, happy holidays, and other well wishes from me to you
Hallmark cards, poetry, and the depersonalization of grief.
The best section in a hardware store is the area with the paint swatches.
The best section in a bookstore is wherever there is the most natural light (and also wherever they keep Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner ).
The best section in a drugstore is the Hallmark card aisle.
I am absolutely fascinated by these cards, and let me tell you why.
Hallmark cards, to me, are the paper embodiment of something I see and pretend not to see every day: the depersonalization of connection. I say that, and I don’t even fully know what it means. I don’t know what most things mean. (Why does everything have to have meaning?) I do know this: the depersonalization of connection (and most everything I say, really) is inherently paradoxical. Not in some intellectualized higher education way of thinking. It’s contradictory because our need to be loved and our willingness to see each other will never align.
We were dropped in a footrace but it was also a treadmill and it moved so fast that the conveyor belt is miles long and there is no pause button to press so we will all be running forever and at this point, I am out of breath. We ran so fast that now we’re catching up to ourselves, we’re catching up to each other, we’re tripping and falling, we’re passing each other by and momentarily looking to each side, we don’t recognize the faces we see, we know nothing more than each others’ names, I couldn’t tell you your eye color if you asked. Sorry, I was looking at my phone.
We were dropped in a footrace and it was a track and we will be running in circles forever. We will constantly be chasing something we will never reach. They made it this way.
So when we are sad, or we are hurt, or we are happy, we know not what to do besides send a card we didn't even write.
My mom used to tell me I could work for one of those pre-made card companies. She said the messages I typed in Microsoft Office Word “Lucida” font were poetry and I could sell connection for a living. I could be a capitalist love machine. My words could fill a drugstore aisle, I could wish a million happy birthdays, someone could use my sayings to apologize to strangers I would never meet.
I was a little homemade Hallmark machine. I made cards to thank guests for speaking, to thank soccer coaches for giving parents a break for two hours a week, for birthdays and engagements and thank yous for thank you cards thanking them for thanking us.
But I never wanted people to read my words. I never wanted anyone to see me. I wanted to keep everything to myself. I wanted to fill myself with words and thank yous and sorrys just to see if someday someone would crack through and I would burst like some sort of balloon or it would be a piñata and I would fill the world with the sweetest things (like “I love you”, “I see you”, “you make me so happy”) or maybe words would just ooze out of me slowly like they are now and I would be a giant zit on your forehead and someone would have to squeeze squeeze squeeze just for me to say “you’re hurting me right now.”
I wasn’t built for a world where we are honest with each other, and neither were you and that’s why we need Hallmark cards. I was born with papier-mâché skin, you were born full of words like candy but taught to keep them in.
So, some might say a pre-written card is a drugstore gratitude. Some might think it is a consumer condolence. Sometimes I wonder if it is a cop out, but maybe instead it is a saving grace when there are just no words to say.
Like,
I want my roommate to know I’m so sorry her grandpa died — not sorry because there’s anything I could’ve done, but because the hole I see in her reminds me of the hole I see in myself — and what if I don’t have the answer to “will it ever get easier?”
I want my friends to know I’m thinking of them, or maybe I just want them to laugh at a card with a bathroom joke or be tormented by a small piece of cardstock that won’t stop singing until the battery dies.
I want my grandma to know I love the Hallmark cards she sends me. The ones with gold ribbon and cursive font where she underlines the words she recognizes like “granddaughter” and “beautiful” and I cherish that her name is written in ballpoint pen characters at the bottom because that is her talking and that speaks across generations.
I picture grandma at the drugstore, bent under fluorescent lighting, she looks at all the options and she knows just which one to get me every year without fail and I keep every card I’ve ever received in a box in the attic of my childhood home. It used to sit under my bed but I think that the lyrics seeped into my brain and I couldn’t sleep because I was so surrounded by drugstore love that I had nightmares. When I keep those cards Mom says I am hoarding, but I know I am just in love with words and also I know that I’m afraid that one day everyone in the world will decide to stop loving me, so at least with these cards I’ll have evidence that someone once did.
Well, maybe a Hallmark card is not a symbol but a bridge (there I go again with the metaphors, sorry).
Maybe these cards are a way of convincing ourselves we are good. A way of convincing ourselves we care. Maybe a Hallmark card says I’m doing my best. Or maybe it doesn’t, who am I to say?
What I know is, we live in broken communities where we don’t know our neighbors. We are family but we don’t see each other. We are alone and yet we’re not.
My condolences. Send love to your mother. Get well soon.
It takes a special sort of person to write about grief in a way that breaks you and builds you at the same time.
And there are few who have done so in a manner that have made me feel so wholly seen as today’s guest, Muriel Leung.
Muriel is the author of Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat Books), Bone Confetti (Noemi Press) and many other really beautiful poems and essays and musings that you should read!
Today, we’re talking about grief, erasure, family and our stories.
Thank you, Muriel, for sharing with us all!
I have this voice in my head that yells at me every time I write because I find that almost everything that ends up on the page somehow ties back to my identity as an Asian American woman. It’s this constant little echo of me asking myself (likely because I’m afraid someone else will ask me), why do you always write about being Asian American? Don’t you have anything else to say? I am still figuring out how to balance this pressure I feel to tell the stories of our community with my desire to just be able to write without having to contextualize my existence and my perspective. Your forthcoming book “Imagine Us, The Swarm” touches on generational trauma as a part of the Asian American experience, the challenging concept of the politics of grief, as well as family history and violence. What made you choose to look into this intimate space, or did you feel you had a choice?
I wrote my first book Bone Confetti in a mostly white MFA program. It's a book I'm immensely proud of, but it is also one that I feel I've had to be protective of, and that has shaped the writing of it--the heavy figurative landscape and language, the omission of any identifiable racial markers to the text. I think it's what happens when you're constantly misread or underread. In many ways, I had to write Bone Confetti in order to write Imagine Us, The Swarm (and I'm sure my next book will take on whatever is left unsaid from this most recent collection). I want to be explicit about the racial and ethnic issues and their intersections that I confront in my daily reality in a way that I couldn't in the writing of Bone Confetti.
I believe we're always choosing in that way, but sometimes our choosing depends on the context in which we write and live. I'm sure Imagine Us, The Swarm would be a different book if I stayed in Louisiana (where I did my MFA) or it wouldn't be a book at all. But it just so happens that leaving Baton Rouge and coming to Los Angeles, I was able to be in community with other Asian Americans and feel these conversations about familial grief and intergenerational trauma come to life in ways that they couldn't in my MFA program. Again, context of place and time. I wasn't ready yet to write this most recent collection until I physically became part of another space, one which is heavily populated with voices that looked and shared similar values as me. It felt like a breath of fresh air.
Much of your work as a USC Mellon Humanities in a Digital World PhD Fellow revolves around the ways technology shapes structures of power in relationships and in society. Has or how has digital technology impacted your relationship with your family and yourself?
Digital technology has been an incredibly useful conduit between my family across the diaspora and myself, a thread between our various familial narratives and my own. Digital technology, particularly social media, is so double-edged, but that's not a novel statement. It's connective but it's also corrosive at the same time. That being said, I set up an Instagram account for my mother so she can stay up-to-date on my literary events, which I post about often on my own account. There's something really sweet about walking parents through new technology and translating it in a way that will feel meaningful to them.
I think it has felt healthy to establish limits with how I engage with new digital technology. There's a compulsory immersion that happens with every advancement such that every upgrade, new model, etc. becomes integrated into our everyday lives, seemingly without question. I think there's a way to be literate in new digital tools without feeding into the consumption cycle. Much of this requires a type of deep attention that Jenny Odell writes about in How To Do Nothing (which we read in class together!) It's not about becoming an all-analog hermit living in the forest, but maybe there's a way we can be attuned to the social transformations happening with technology while choosing our participation strategically. That's where I'm at with digital technology currently.
Your essay on erasure is one of the most moving pieces I have ever read. In it, you say: “if the writing of trauma, for instance, requires some excavation of the recesses of the mind, then how do we account for the blank spots?” I think often about what you paint there as the experience of blank spots; in my life, these take shape in the dissonance between families and across generations — especially for those whose relationships have been colored by immigration and intergenerational trauma. This newsletter, for me, is about memory, remembering and filling the gaps that are so often left in history when our stories aren’t told. You also say this: “Sometimes what emerges from the erasure is a refrain.” Have any refrains emerged from your experience of erasure in relation to the way you view family, self and how to rectify any disconnects that arise between these things?
Yes! As I'm sure you've encountered too in reviewing your family history, there's stories we hear growing up that change over time. My father passed away when I was 18, and what I knew of his past was told through story flashes relayed to me by my mother. I knew his experiences in China were traumatic, especially since he had to migrate illegally to Hong Kong during the Cultural Revolution and was caught the first time.
In my father's passing, the stories of him move through various versions, from the arrogant hard worker to the dutiful son who constantly self-sacrificed for his family growing up, facing hardship and imprisonment as a result. These stories have overlaps, but I'm never quite sure, in their repetition, what is the absolute truth. Memory is funny in that way, refracted through everyone's view of people, the world. I feel it refracted in my mother's anger, her sorrow, her wistfulness, and sometimes a missing of a version of what was.
Once, many years ago, I found a picture in an old family album of a young man dressed in a Red Guard uniform. My mother said flippantly, "Oh, your dad. He grew up poor and susceptible to the ideologies of the time, so of course he was part of the Red Guard until they took and punished him." I remember that version of him for years. Later, when I returned to the album as an adult, I asked if I could take the photo with me, to remember this version of my father, to which my mother said, "Why? That's not your father."
And, finally, what is a question you wish you could ask your mom, or someone in your life?
To my mother: If there is nothing in your past that you can change, how will you live your life differently now?
Question to ask your mom: