Found in Translation

Tomb Cleaning Day

1994. “Qīngmíng jié,” said Hu laoshi, pointing to the characters on the whiteboard and exaggerating the singsonginess to help us learn the tones. “Qīngmíng jié. Huìmǐn?”

Huìmǐn was my Chinese name, two different words for “clever,” which he’d given to me the year before. He was asking me to repeat the phrase.

“Qīng...míng...jié,” I repeated.

“Hěn hǎo,” he smiled. Very good.

Hu laoshi, my Mandarin Chinese teacher, was teaching us about Qīngmíng jié (清明节), Tomb Cleaning Day, a very important holiday festival in much of East Asia. We read stories and watched videos about this centuries-old annual tradition where Chinese families honor their deceased ancestors by sweeping clean their tombstones, then leaving offerings such as food and money to help their spirits navigate the afterlife. This is done somewhat out of obligation, and somewhat out of superstition: not giving them what they need could cause their ghosts to haunt you.

I appreciated this connection to ancestors that seemed to be lacking in my own life—a national holiday for visiting cemeteries and honoring the dead was foreign to me. Though, it did remind me of a very memorable art project from primary school. It was around Halloween, and our third-grade class walked across the old town common to the First Church. We brought along thin newsprint paper and crayons with their wrappers peeled off, and we made our way to the hilly graveyard behind the church to do gravestone rubbings. The stones were old and thin, slate with detailed engravings from the 1700s and 1800s that came through quite well on our large sheets of paper. 

My sister’s class did the same project when she reached third grade three years later. Over the years, when we moved far away from town, we’d describe the same two headstones that stood out to us both: “Struck by lightning” said one. “Kicked by horse” said the other, the cause of death included right there on the stone.

Tomb Cleaning Day also introduced me to the concept of filial piety—loyalty and devotion to one’s parents that often also extended to other ancestors. I had a hard time feeling any loyalty towards my father, and since my mother and all of my grandparents were still alive, I did my homework on Giovanna, my great-gram who died when I was three. My Chinese language classmates and I were to going to honor the hoilday together by bringing in photographs of our ancestors, making some favorite traditional foods, and by burning paper “ghost money” as an offering to provide our ancestors with resources for the spirit world.

When Giovanna died, my family told me she had become an angel, watching over me and everything I did. For years I believed that she was omnipresent and always watching, like God or Santa Claus. But just as I’d fallen out of favor with those two, I’d stopped believing at some point that Giovanna’s spirit was something or someone that I should honor or pray to. This school assignment had brought her back to me, albeit in a custom and a language that lay outside of our own traditions.

One thing was familiar though: cleaning the tombstone. Whenever I went with my grandparents to the cemetery to visit Giovanna, we pulled weeds and watered flowers. There were always flowers planted—geraniums in spring, mums in the fall. And we talked to her, out loud, like we were close enough for her to hear us now. But it felt to me like I visited her only because I knew her. My other relatives who had died before I was born, I hardly knew their names or where they rested. No one was passing that information down anymore. Maybe they had forgotten. Or perhaps we’d moved too far away from the places where they were buried. 

When I was six and my sister was three, our parents moved us to a different town, one where their money would go further as twenty-somethings with two kids: a small ranch-style home in Templeton, even further away from Boston—4 more towns and 30 more minutes west of Lunenburg, where their families lived, the place they had known their whole lives. 

In Templeton, a sleepy New England town of 5,000, few people came or left. We were received as outsiders who didn’t belong. I started first grade there and felt immediately that I was different than the other kids who had grown up knowing each other. They had older siblings in higher grades, and their parents had met in high school and stayed in town to raise families of their own. Their cousins were in the same school or even the same class. I knew no one, came from no one.

This is how it happens. This is how ancestral knowledge gets lost. How do you know who you are if you don’t know who—or where—you come from?

Whakapapa

2019. I double and triple checked that my passport was in my bag before I walked out the door. I was on my way to Hawaii, then Auckland, New Zealand, and finally to Tauranga, to meet my mother and step-father Michael. I was going to offer moral support to Michael, who was visiting his father who’d just received a terminal diagnosis, months to live. 

Some 24 hours of travel later, we arrived at Grandad David’s house. It looked much the same as my visit eight years earlier, but now without Barbara, his second wife who had passed away a couple of years ago. He was living alone in the house, within a retirement community. At 89 years, he got around fairly well but he socialized very little. Barbara had burned many of his bridges, and he'd allowed her to. Now cancer was taking the final months of his life.

“Your cousin was here yesterday,” David said to Michael in his British-Kiwi accent. “I brought out some old photo albums to show her. They’re just there on the table.” 

I loved old family photos, even if they weren’t my family. I loved the stories they told, the moments they captured. And I especially loved anything that showed us what Mikey was like as a young boy, since he came into our lives fifteen years ago as a fully grown 40-year old man. Back then, he joked that he wouldn’t bother to learn my name, calling me instead “Daughter Number One” and my sister “Daughter Number Two.” 

Mom, Michael, and I flipped through the albums together while David sat in his recliner a few feet away. He was tired, the cancer treatments taking their toll on his ailing body. “Keep talking,” he pleaded. “Even if I fall asleep, I like the noise. I so rarely have company.”

We laughed at photos of Michael as a baby—such a round, blonde little thing.  We laughed harder at photos of him riding Sunlight, his brown and white cow, to school. We pointed at outfits and hairstyles, more cows, pictures of the old farm where they used to live. I took pictures of the pictures with my phone, sending the good ones to my sister back in Florida to share in our amusement.

We skipped over the photos with David and Barbara. She’d been exceptionally cruel to Michael when he was younger, and still showed signs of hostility when we first visited in 2011. Half the visit was spent with Michael making “I told you so” faces at us. She was bitter, domineering, and braggadocious about her children, having no interest, it seemed, in learning about us, or what her step-son had been up to for the last 20 years in America. So none of us felt compelled to dally over photos of Barbara—may she rest in peace.

David got up suddenly and scampered to his office. He rummaged around and returned with another photo album, a white one. “I had to hide this away from Barbara,” he said, his voice tinged with both sadness and regret. “This one’s of your Mum.”

My eyes widened at the development. I knew almost nothing about Michael’s mother, only that her death had been very painful for Michael, just a teenager at the time. David sat back in his recliner as Mom, and I huddled around the new album and opened it. Michael stood behind us and watched over our shoulders, his body language both curious and cautious.

“Our Wedding,” it said inside, in perfect handwriting. “David Jack and Kay Rosemary, Married on 18th Day of May 1957.” Kay. Michael’s mum’s name was Kay. I’d never heard that before. We turned the page. And there was a cheerful, smiling young woman in white who looked just like Michael.

Kay and David covered in confetti. Kay and David outside the chapel. Kay and David cutting their cake. Kay and David arm-in-arm, smile-in-smile, in the back of a limousine. They were so young and handsome, so beautiful. My eyes filled with tears and I smiled at my mother. Michael looked on, saying very little as we turned the pages.

“This one says ‘Kay’s Dad & Mum,’” I pointed out to Michael. “Are these your grandparents then?”

“Gran and Grandad Valder,” Michael said with a tone of remembering, of nostalgia.

“You should take what you like,” David said sleepily from the recliner. “I’ll have no need for them soon.” 

“Dad, we’ll let you rest. We’ll come back later.”

“Fine, yes, fine. Go for tea, come back later.”

We went back to our rental flat to regroup a bit while David rested. Michael was quiet, somber. The situation was clearly weighing on him.

“You’re good at this family stuff, right?” he said to me after a while. “Family trees? Can you help me? Can you help me find out as much as we can about my mum? My father knows everything—every name, every person—in the her family. When he dies, all of that will go with him unless we write it down.”

My lungs inflated with a new sense of duty. “Yes, of course. I can do that. I’d be happy to.”

“You can ask my dad questions, it will be good for him to have something to talk about.”

“Absolutely.”

“Thanks Numbah One.”

“You got it, Mikey.”

When we returned to David’s house, I brought my laptop and a notebook. I sat at the dining room table, went back to the wedding album, and started taking notes. The wedding date, location, the full names of the bride and groom, their parents.

“Dad, Stephanie’s going to write down whatever you can remember of Mum’s family.”

I smiled at David and nodded, and he settled his slender frame into his recliner and started talking: About arriving in New Zealand from England in 1950. About the first farm he worked on before he switched to the Valder farm. About Mr. Valder’s beautiful daughter Kay. Without prompts or hesitation, he named off Kay’s parents, her parents’ siblings, their spouses’ names, their children, their children’s spouses. I scribbled frantically as a family tree came into focus. And as time allowed, I reached back to the photo album and attempted to match faces to names.

“This photo says Yooma, Graham, Russell, Kay…” I mumbled.

“Yes, at a formal dinner? That was to celebrate Gran & Pop Valder’s anniversary,” David said from across the room, without seeing the photo. “There should be another just beside it, of all the Valder children together, with the names on the back.” And sure enough, there was.

“You’re right,” I chirped, complimenting David on his sharp memory. I didn’t betray his secret, which I knew intimately from my own experience: he knew these photos so well—the sequence of them, who was in them, where each was taken—because he’d looked over them dozens, probably hundreds of times. Probably in secret, away from the scornful eye of his second wife.

That night when we went back to our house, Michael poured a drink and started telling us about his mother. She’d been diagnosed with brain cancer and died six months later, at home, at the age of 40. Her last days were the worst he’s ever experienced, her screams and cries giving voice to her agony from even the gentlest touch. Though his older brother had left and enrolled in the Navy, Michael was still living at home, working the farm, and witnessed his mother’s rapid decline and excruciating death.

The next morning, we drove back over to David’s house, hoping to take him out for coffee if he was feeling well enough. 

“I didn’t sleep a minute last night,” he sighed as he put the kettle on. “I spent the whole night thinking about your mum.”

I exchanged a silent, heartbroken glance with my mother.

“I’m sure looking through all those photos and talking about her family stirred up a lot of memories for you,” I offered.

“She was the love of my life,” he said. “We had such plans. To raise our family, to grow the farm, to hire help so we could travel the world. But she died. She died before we could. I didn’t want to travel with Barbara. I was supposed to take those trips with Kay. I still have her ashes, you know, in the back of my wardrobe. I hid them from Barbara all these years, so I can be buried with my love.”

“Where is Barbara buried?” Michael asked.

“Oh she’s up in Tauranga,” he growled. “It’s so far. I have no intention of being buried there with her. I want to be buried with Kay.”

That night, I got online and started researching the names that I got from David, of his family as well as Kay’s. I found Valders going back to the 1800s in New Zealand, arriving from England not long after New Zealand was first colonized. This piqued my interest in the deeper history of the islands, of how Aotearoa came to be an English colony, and what was the history of the Maori people who preceded the Europeans on this land.

I read about the Treaty of Waitangi, written in both English and Maori in 1840, signed by various Maori chiefs and elders. I learned of the deceitful translations that led the Maori to interpret certain promises which were suspiciously left out of the English version, and how this led to inquiries and challenges that even today must be interpreted and decided by a special treaty tribunal.

I fell deeper and deeper into this research, straying quite far from my original goal of tracing Michael’s family origins. But I felt that doing so in New Zealand, much like doing so in America, obligated me to understand—or try to—the impact of immigrants and colonizers onto the existing land, people, and culture.

My long-time love for studying languages has evolved in recent years to include the connection between language and land, sensing a far deeper spirit when local, native, or indigenous words are used to name or describe a place. In this way, culture also comes into the picture, carrying with it the lore and legends, the myths and meanings, that connect a people to their land. To their home. To themselves.

This had been on my mind the day before as we drove from our volcano-view flat in Maunganui, through Tauranga, passing through Waitao and taking the Te Puke highway on our way to the Te Rerekawau Falls. I wondered about place names here in New Zealand/Aotearoa, and how much of the indigenous language has persevered through (despite) British colonization. It’s obvious when looking at road maps and highway signs which words are Maori place names and which are Anglo: Rotorua, Putaruru. Hamilton, Bethlehem.

I tumbled down my research rabbit hole until I found myself fully absorbed in something new: whakapapa. 

In its simplest translation, whakapapa means genealogy. But when you spend some time with it, it deepens to indicate a person’s sense of place in the world as defined through their ancestors’ stories. Traditionally, it’s a tale, a song, or a chant, a legend about who someone is by naming the ancestral energy before them, layering their mythology and collective history back and back to the mountains and the rivers, and to the time earth and sky separated and the world was born. To know one’s whakapapa is to know one’s connection to creation, to be rooted firmly in one’s ancestral identity.

My heart thundered in my chest. All I could think was: there’s a word for this.

Bathsheba

2019. I was preparing for a trip back east to Massachusetts for a wedding. It would double as ancestry research time, so I was digging into the history on my mother’s father’s side to prepare. My mother had grown up in Lunenburg, and her father in Ashburnham—that much I knew. But I was surprised to discover that his father, Walter, was born in Templeton. Then I found his mother, Evelina, and she was born there also. And her mother, Elizabeth. And Walter’s father John also had Templeton roots, his mother Catherine being born there, and Catherine’s mother Lucy, and Lucy’s father Asa and mother Bathsheba. Generations of our family were rooted in Templeton back to the 1700s, back when the population was less than 400 people, before it was an incorporated town. All those years that I felt like an outsider, I was actually returning home. Home to a town that had forgotten me.

Bathsheba, Bathsheba, Bathsheba. I whispered her name over and over. I was instantly obsessed, due largely to the fact that one of my favorite literary heroines is Bathsheba Everdene. I had a Bathsheba! My 5th great-grandmother. She had lived 82 years of life and died some 50 years before that book was written, but I pictured her as the same type of smart, stubborn, enterprising woman who exists in those pages.

I found all of these ancestors in a single document, a collection of vital records from the town of Templeton before the year 1850. It was filled with the births, marriages, and deaths of my relatives, people whose names and stories were unknown to me, forgotten, buried with them. Next to Bathsheba’s name on the page, and her husband’s, was some kind of mark. I flipped to the front of the book for the definition: they were both buried behind the old First Church! Where I did my gravestone rubbings!

A few weeks later, I parked my rental car in front of the tall white church with its clocktower and its steeple. Despite growing up right down the road, I’d never returned since primary school. I walked through the fence to the graveyard for the first time in over 30 years. 

Autumn leaves lit up in hues of red and gold around me. I looked for Bathsheba’s headstone. Her husband’s name was Aholiab, and they were buried side-by-side. I counted on their names standing out, being easy to locate. I was right.

I saw Aholiab’s stone first, and gasped to find Bathsheba’s stone broken off its base, laid flat back into the soft earth. The inscription was still visible, and I knelt down to run my fingers across the faded words.

“Hello,” I whispered as my fingertips traced her name on the cold stone. “I’m Stephanie. Your great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter. It’s so nice to meet you.” I stood up and walked over to her husband’s stone, and introduced myself to him too. I couldn’t believe they’d been there all along, all those years I lived nearby. Then I noticed the other two gravestones in their plot:

Edward, who was killed by lightning, Sept. 9, 1806, a. 28 y. 7 m.

“No way,” I gasped. 

Edward, who was kick'd by a horse the 20th of July, and expired the next morning, in the 16th y. of his age. 1822.

My eyes grew wide as I moved in front of the two stones: there they were. The very two my sister and I remembered. The ones from our art classes 30 years ago. 

I pulled out my phone and opened the digital family tree I’d been building. Bathsheba had a son named Edward, born in 1778. He would have been 28 in 1806—the dates lined up. His wife Susanna was several months pregnant with his child when he died. Struck by lightning.

She gave birth to their son, named Edward after his late father. Younger Edward died at the age of 16. Kicked by horse. 

I stared at the stones in total disbelief. They’re here, just like I remembered. And it turns out that they were my actual relatives.

I knelt down and pulled the weeds from around the graves. I brushed the dust and dirt off of Bathsheba’s toppled headstone. I said a quiet prayer to my ancestors. Qīngmíng jié.

I felt rooted, legitimized, part of this town in a way I hadn’t been before. I felt filled by their stories, by their spirits. I felt strong, steady, and powerful. 

This must be what it means. Whakapapa.