BY TARA SUN VANACORE
*Editor’s note: The following story was a runner-up in our first ever annual NüStories personal essay contest. This year’s theme was Chinese identity – read more here.
In March of 2024, I visited the cemetery where my great-grandparents are buried. An hour outside of Taipei, the cemetery overlooks a lush green forest. It was a misty day, drizzle washing marble dragons, blue tile, and obsidian plaques at each family’s shrine. Representatives of three generations of the Sun/Yu family, we hiked up the terraced hillside, past blooming cherry trees. My great-uncle Henry (San Jiugong), my grandmother’s brother who spends half the year in the US and half in Taiwan, led the way. My aunt, uncle, and several cousins had traveled from the US, and I had joined them after a work trip on the Mainland.
In the van on the way to the cemetery, I had passed a heart-shaped stone to each family member. As we ascended, I held it, feeling the warmth from each of their hands.
I brought the stone from Washington, DC, where it lived on the altar I’d kept for years and which now featured a photograph of my mother and me. Had she given me the stone? Perhaps. She may have collected it in Vermont, where I grew up, or on her travels. I couldn’t ask her, because she died in October 2022, at the age of 60, three months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Like so many questions, I would have to imagine her response. Yet as I was preparing to leave, glancing at her photo one last time, it felt right to slip it into my pocket and bring it with me.
My mom was born in New Jersey and grew up in Taiwan with her grandparents for the first six years of her life. This trip back was a way to commemorate her origins, to visit the places where she played and ate and slept. To breathe the air and feel the humidity that she remembered, see the coastline and taste the tropical fruits that she loved.
The cemetery visit was something I’d been anticipating and dreading. How would it feel to walk among the spirits of my ancestors? My Chinese-ness, always diluted by my white-ness, was sure to obscure some essential revelation. The memory of lowering the urn containing my mom’s ashes into the earth was always present. What if I couldn’t face a reminder of that awful moment? Would I feel closer to her here, on the other side of the world, and what was the point of searching when we would never meet again in this life?
The regret that I had never made this trip with her weighed heavily. We visited Taiwan once, when I was 13, and though I dedicated my studies and career to Chinese language and cultural exchange, I hadn’t made use of that knowledge to come back with her. Talking to relatives who remembered her years in Taiwan, it became clear that this was the place she felt most fully loved and seen. She should be the one making this walk, not me.
San Jiugong had prepared flowers and incense. He would tell us what to say. What to do. The hierarchy, though annoying, was a relief in the moment. I watched my mom’s brother and sister walking with their kids past the graves and knew they were sorting through memories of their younger sister. This was a kind of homecoming for them as well. My aunt had told us, while waiting for the subway in Taipei, that looking like everyone else around us was a disorienting experience. I envied them their ability to assimilate, even visually, even knowing that they too felt removed from our family’s history on the island.
Our family’s shrine includes a dais, long enough to cover a coffin. Above it is a plaque listing the names of family members, those who have died and those still alive in my grandmother’s generation. A photograph of my great-grandparents is etched into the stone wall above the plaque.
It rained gently as Jiugong walked up and laid his hand against the plaque. He addressed his parents and explained who had come and why. Quietly, I helped translate for my cousins. Then he invited my aunt and uncle to step forward and pay their respects by bowing. Turning to me, he said, “you join this generation, to represent Anna.” As the oldest cousin in my generation, I was often expected to be a spokesperson, or to join the adults, but I wasn’t expecting this. I wasn’t ready. I stepped forward and bowed, but how could I stand in for my mom?
What did I say as I leaned my hand against the stone? In what language? I felt that I should speak Chinese, so they might understand, and yet the words felt inauthentic, as Chinese will never be my mother tongue. Two years after my mother’s passing, I stumble when explaining my heritage. Now that she is gone, I remind myself that I’m still half-Chinese—that I must actively claim that part of my identity. I hate to say, “my mom was Chinese,” and experiment with the present tense.
I believe I used a combination of languages when addressing my great-grandparents. I thanked them. I said that I hoped my grandmother and mom were with them now. I felt so vividly my mom’s love for her grandmother, that strict woman of the perfect posture and the wooden cane whom I barely remember.
It’s an essential part of our family narrative that my mom was abandoned by her parents and separated from her siblings to live in Taiwan, while they began a life in the US. But how hard it must have been for grandmother and grandchild to part when the time came. My daughter is six now—the age my mom was when she came “home.” The thought of her entire life being spent on the other side of the world is impossible to imagine—how her whole personality might be formed in my absence. Standing at the grave, thinking of my own mom and my own daughter, I had a sense of how generations can and do stand in for one another.
My cousins stepped forward to bow and make their quiet offerings. We lit the incense and placed it in the small houses guarded by the statues of the gods who protect the dead. I placed the heart stone beside the etchings of my great-grandparents. It had traveled across the ocean for just this moment.
I hope it is still there, that it withstands the monsoons, the heat, the custodians’ rounds. My mom had a vision of her grandmother—her Abo, my Atai—days before she died. This is how she knew it was time to stop treatment and prepare to die. Offering this stone that she and those who loved her had held felt like bringing her home. And despite not knowing the words, or the cultural references, or the details of our family’s time in Taiwan, I believe now that we did enough. If my mom’s spirit is anywhere, a bit of it is certainly in Taiwan. I will be making the trip back to visit her someday.
About the author
Tara Sun Vanacore (she/her) was a finalist for the NYC Midnight short story competitions in 2023 and 2024. Her writing has been published in NüStories, Book of Matches, The Fantastic Other, The Atlantic, the Woodrow Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum, and Women’s Wire Weekly. Tara is half Chinese and grew up in Vermont. She is a proud supporter of the 826DC Afterschool Writing Lab. Find her at tarasunvanacore.bsky.social.
Photo: Great-grandparents. Credit: Tara Sun Vanacore