Pagan Blog Project: Blood

On my father’s side, I am, technically, half Thai and half Cantonese. In the 1890s, his grandfathers both emigrated from southern China to northeastern Thailand. They married Thai women and produced my grandparents, who were contracted to marry because their fathers were friends from the same village back in China. Apparently, my grandmother hated my grandfather and didn’t want to marry him at all. She wouldn’t let him into the bed for days after their wedding. Eventually she relented, and my father and his three siblings were the result.

My grandfather died in 1957 of an epileptic seizure, so I never met him. I did meet my grandmother, however, a number of times. She was a tiny woman who couldn’t even read or speak Thai (she spoke a local Laotian dialect), much less English, and had the equivalent of a fourth-grade education. Yet, after her husband’s death, she managed to run his sugar cane- and rice-exporting business, building up a modest fortune, and sent all four of her kids to college and my father to America. She was once recognized as “Mother of the Year” for this feat, and received a gold chrysanthemum brooch from the King of Thailand himself. She carried it around everywhere, tucked inside her blouse. Grandma-from-Thailand died many years ago, but I still remember her fondly and count her as first among my disir.

My mother’s family is typically American. Her father was a mixed-blood American Indian of Kanza, Osage, English, and French descent. Through him, I am a descendant of a man named Jonathan Tinker, an early settler of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Further back along that line, there are English and French, Saxon and Norman nobility, Harald Fairhair and Aud the Deep-Minded (if you believe Heimskringla) and ultimately, Charlemagne. Along a different branch, there are French-Canadians from Montreal and the Native Americans they took as wives. There are blacksmiths and fur traders, warriors, hunters, Army generals, and people sent away to Indian boarding schools.

My maternal grandmother’s family is mostly a mystery. I can’t find muchinformation about them. All I know is what she told me before she died. Her father walked all the way from a tiny town in West Virginia to Oklahoma in search of work in the oil fields. He found it, but after a disastrous fall from an oil derrick, he took up plumbing instead. He died in 1961 of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head after learning that he had cancer, and in his note said that it was to spare others and himself pain and suffering. Great-grandma lived until 1973, and I vaguely remember her holding me as a small toddler. She had twelve children, eleven of which lived to adulthood. Grandma was the oldest; she died a few years ago, and I miss her terribly.

On both sides of my family, there have been problems. An opium addict, someone else who ran an opium den. A number of alcoholics, some thieves, people who ran away to foreign countries rather than be drafted. Some of them abandoned their families or beat their kids. Some of them were just good-for-nothings. There have also been heroes, however: my grandfather, who shot at the invading Japanese and blew up a bridge to try to keep them out of the village during World War II. My uncle, who went to Vietnam at 19 and suffered from the experience all his life, yet who was never bitter or angry about it. My grandma, who endured an alcoholic, sometimes abusive spouse, stayed with him for 67 years, and never lost either her generosity or sense of humor. My other grandma, who defied the expectations of her generation and culture. My dad, whose life story reads like an adventure novel that “no one will believe,” according to him. There are probably others I don’t know about, on both sides of the line.

I am not ashamed of any of these people, however, no matter how flawed they were. They made me who and what I am today — diabetes, unmanageable hair, and all. Their blood runs in my veins, and as much as possible, I have tried to uncover their names, where they were born and died, what they did. I’ve even acquired photos of some of them, born over a century before me, from total strangers who share these ancestors in common. I have had my mitochondrial DNA tracked to western Europe and central Asia, ultimately beginning in Africa, like just about everyone else alive today. I’m insanely curious about my ancestors. But aside from those I have spoken with through trancework and other unconventional means — the German nun, the two Buddhist monks who were brothers, and the old Mongolian reindeer herder — I still don’t know who most of them are.

They came from all over the world, and they married whom they would in spite of whatever taboos existed — interracial marriages go back a long way in both sides of my family — and they did what they did, and here I sit, descendant of both peasants and kings, fine English ladies and braves from the Plains, rice farmers and soldiers. My family tree isn’t any more colorful than most people’s, I imagine, but it’s mine. And they are mine, these people who lived and died and passed on their genes and their orlog and their family characteristics — a sense of humor being the primary one — down to me.

I have no children and never will, and it remains to be seen whether or not my brother will have any, so it could be that this branch of the tree ends with us. But it’ll go on in other places. Perhaps one day someone will look up my name and dates of birth and death, and uncover some of my writing, and try to learn more about this person in their background — the weirdo who their Great-Grandma said never married and followed some zany religion. Some people might see this as a tragedy, that I’m not leaving an inheritance of faith behind for my children to continue, honoring our gods and rekindling the Northern Tradition. I don’t. The tree keeps growing no matter what. In the end, it’s all about blood.

Advertisement