A Story of Silence
FROM SPIRITUAL DIRECTOR, TINA LU
How does one even begin to heal from racism? Many people are asking this challenging question & are responding by doing tremendous work. Folks are challenging policies, addressing institutional inequities, organizing communities, & much more. Racism is a system of oppression. Systemic issues require antidotes at the systems level.
There is, however, work that also needs to happen on the personal & interpersonal levels. On Saturday, October 28th, I held a workshop that found us in this intimate space, where we gave ourselves permission to go deeper into our own stories & listen with curiosity to the stories of others. We embraced the truth that healing from racism will not come about through one-time workshops or even just through regular counseling sessions. Healing begins by identifying ways that we have personally internalized racist ideas & stereotypes about ourselves & others. This will be an ongoing process & a posture to adopt.
In this workshop, one exercise that we engaged in was to reflect on a time when we first realized that we have a racial identity. Below, I share an early memory that has shaped my understanding of what it has meant to be in my skin, living in America. During those early years, silence was often felt as an oppressive force in my life. It would be many years before I would come to experience & embrace silence as something that could be restorative & generative. My intention is to create a space for you to explore your own racial identity, & name, together with God, how silence can be both an oppressive & a healing force in your life.
- Tina
The details of that traumatic morning are mostly hazy.
I probably woke up to the sound of my mom’s voice as she gently nursed me out of my dream world.
“婷婷, 該起床了.”
I probably rubbed my eyes, ate a hot breakfast, then walked to school with my neighbors, ready for another day at my new school in America. A seemingly ordinary day.
Back then, I responded best to “婷婷,” Tingting, my Chinese nickname. 婷婷 was the only name I had ever known until second grade, the year we moved from Taiwan to America. “婷婷,” meaning doubly “graceful” & “dainty” were not words I would have chosen to describe myself. I disliked my Chinese name as a child because I was a climb-up-a-tree-&-dangle-upside-down kind of gal. Dainty? Graceful? Forget it.
In this new country, however, it didn’t matter anymore what my Chinese name meant. In this new country, I would go by “Tina,” the English name my parents chose for me. Easy to pronounce, seemingly easy to know. Back in 1988, whenever I introduced my English name, without fail, someone would say, “Tina, like Tina Turner?”
Everyone knew about Tina Turner. Except for me. My response was always an awkward silence, paired with a sheepish smile. Clearly, I was not a world-famous Black singer. I was a seven-year-old girl from Taiwan, “fresh off the boat,” who couldn’t sing, let alone speak in a foreign language that I now had to learn with alarming speed. Every self-introduction was a reminder of my ignorance & newcomer status. Armed with only two English words at the time: “Yes,” & “No,” I couldn’t blame people for thinking me as strange & an easy target of playground bullying.
My first memory of being racialized & of being silenced happened rather quickly & without warning. That morning, as I waited for the bell to ring before the start of school, I was probably watching my fellow second graders chase each other on the playground. I was probably standing next to Lisa, one of the nicest girls in my class. We probably weren’t talking to one another, because I only knew two English words at the time. Yet I probably felt content to be in the company of other classmates, instead of wandering aimlessly around the playground, unsettled & unsure of my new surroundings.
It was then that the punch came.
My memory of that morning is mostly hazy, but this part is crystal clear: out of nowhere, an older boy punched me hard in the gut. I was so shocked by the pain that I didn’t have enough time to look up & see what he looked like. I knew, however, that we were strangers to one another, & there was no reason for him to attack me other than to unleash some kind of racial aggression on a defenseless immigrant girl, who had no way of advocating for herself.
As quickly as he had appeared, he disappeared.
Lisa rushed to my aid & explained to the teacher what had happened, or at least that’s what I think she did because I could not understand a word coming out of her mouth. The next thing I knew, I was sitting in the front office by myself, & when the secretary asked me what happened, I was confronted with the reality that I could not adequately convey the story through gestures or tears.
This second silencing felt worse than the first. The secretary, the adult in this situation, did not advocate on my behalf, did not bother to call the teacher or contact my parents. She did not pursue a course of action that would have identified this boy & forced him to confront his own ignorance & cruelty. I was left to sit in silence & nurse my own wounds. After what felt like an eternity, I left the office quietly without asking to be excused & walked to class by myself. Unfortunately, I learned through this early experience to deal with racial trauma by sucking it up & pretending that things were fine, rather than confronting the perpetrators or the injustices in the system.
For people of color, self-silencing can be a common & understandable way of responding to racial trauma. Not only had I experienced trauma on an interpersonal level, but I also experienced how the systems of which we are a part can contribute to the internalization of this damaging idea that our voices do not matter. I was much older when I learned about the ways in which different people groups throughout American history have been systematically targeted, silenced & excluded, but on that day, having only been in America for a few weeks, I felt the stings of racism viscerally & deep in my gut.
There is a sense of loss when one cannot stand up for oneself. Thinking back upon that day, I wish that I had immediately told my parents what had happened instead of stuffing the incident deep inside of me. Perhaps my parents would have stormed the front office, called the secretary to account, & demanded an investigation. Perhaps the administrators would have found the student, set up a meeting & gave me a chance to speak in my native tongue, with words that would have rolled off fluidly, pointedly & effortlessly: 你傷害了我。我不喜歡。
You hurt me. I do not like that.
Perhaps, too, they would have given the student a chance to be courageous & practice humility, to look me in the eye & say, “I am sorry. Will you forgive me?”
If given the chance, I would like to think that I would have forgiven him.
We know the workshop surrounding this blog has already passed, but we hope that by reading Tina’s story you can feel a little less alone, or perhaps be reminded of the many complex ways in which silence can be part of someone’s life. If this topic brought up more for you that you’d like to reflect on, we encourage you to connect with someone to talk further. If a spiritual director feels like a good fit for that, we have many spiritual directors who have graduated from our program (including Tina!) who would love to connect with you!