one of the cousins. “Don’t sit on Grandma!” someone would yell, and the offender would guiltily jump out of her seat.
Even though I felt we tried so hard to make our ancestors happy and to speak to them so that they would hear us, they never seemed to speak to us or guide us in the way I wanted, in the way the Grandfather Spirit had guided my grandmother and mother years ago. Where was his equivalent for me? I needed my questions answered, too.
My confusion and frustrations with the gods, saints, and spirits of my childhood only grew with age, and especially after I left home for college. Still, in the beginning of my college years, I missed them, those unseen and unresponsive Beings with whom I had lived for seventeen years. I felt at times bereft in my new Waspy environment, three thousand miles away from ever-warm Southern California, longing for the comforts of home, which included the rituals of offering and prayer I had always known and taken for granted. In that idyllic college town in the mountains of western Massachusetts—where a Congregational church housed in a two-hundred-year-old white colonial building and an Episcopal church housed in an even older Gothic edifice sat in the middle of campus against the spectacular reds, oranges, and yellows of my first fall foliage and then the blinding white of my first New England snow—I felt a little out of place. There was not one pair of chopsticks or a single Buddha statue to be found, except, in the case of the Buddha statue, maybe buried in a photo in one of the books stored in the East Asian section of the 10-million-volume college library.
At first, I tried to perform the rituals of home in my dorm room, but on a much more modest and inconspicuous scale. I placed a little can filled with grains of uncooked rice on my windowsill, overlooking a brick building with ivy climbing up its walls. The can was positioned right next to a Gregorian-lunar desk calendar that reminded me in Chinese characters which were the days for me to speak to the gods and my ancestors. And on those days, when my roommate wasn’t around, I went through the motions of lighting one or three or five sticks of incense and praying and then standing the incense in the can of rice, just like we did at home. I realized then that my mother had never taught me how to carry on the rituals myself, to establish the lines of communication without her there. What was I supposed to say to call the Beings to me? How was I supposed to address them? I felt like a fraud, playing pathetically at being a Buddhist, ancestor worshipper, practitioner of popular religion, and whatever else I was supposed to be.
I had never thought to ask my mother about the philosophy behind all this, why we bothered to do all this offering and praying, where the source of her faith in these invisible gods and spirits lay—probably because I had a feeling she didn’t know the answers to those questions herself. She didn’t know the teachings of the Buddha any more than I did. She performed the rituals because she had seen her mother do it, and her mother had seen her mother do the same; these were unquestioned family traditions that had been passed from one generation to the next in the old country, where every family did the same. My following of those same traditions seemed empty, even on this modest scale, on this liberal arts college campus that had felt at first so alien but was growing more familiar every day, where I was being encouraged to think, to question, and if I was so moved, to reject. I stopped performing my prayer rituals regularly after the first semester, although I did not stop presenting my list of unanswered questions to any Being that might be listening.
Armed with that new sense of freedom and possibility that comes with college life, not to mention hard-earned work-study money and a credit card, I began unconsciously searching for my Grandfather Spirit equivalent one autumn night during my sophomore year. Bored in a college town with not much to do on a Saturday night except drink, my friend Sue and I fell victim to the persuasive power of years of late-night commercials—we called the Psychic Hotline. “Come on, Sue. It’ll be fun,” I urged my wary friend.