Immigrant Buddhist Memoirs

I am what they call a "convert Buddhist" - born white in North America, to a nominally agnostic family, but raised in Christian culture. I came to Buddhism in my late teens and early twenties, and adopted Shambhala Buddhism, which contains threads of original Tibetan Buddhisms and also American adaptations, specifically for people like me.

But I am aware this is not the only experience by far. One of my ongoing "research" projects is to learn more about race in North American buddhism - specifically how the convert buddhisms we have now in North America often cater more towards white folks than people of color. In the meantime, I am also taking up efforts to immerse myself in the experiences of immigrant buddhists, sometimes called "ethnic buddhists" - folks who (or whose parents) came to the US as buddhists, and attend temples or places of practice oriented towards only their kind - e.g. Thai, where all attendees are Thai or Thai ethnically, and speak only Thai together. This seems especially important now, in the heightened era of intense national discrimination against immigrants.

Your Story Must Change

This afternoon, on our annual winter writing retreat, one of the participants noted: "Dammit. Now I am feeling compassion for my mother. I wasn't supposed to feel that!" We all laughed - we know she feels plenty of compassion, always has, but it is true in her writing and stories its often been hard to uncover that. And if we can't uncover it in our writing, we won't feel it completely. We could also relate to what she said - it would be so much easier if her damned story would stop changing, if her mom could stay the evil bitch and she could remain the innocent princess.

If your story isn't changing as you write it, you are in trouble.
This means you have to stay vulnerable, open, raw, and not fixating on a specific story.

There is no one version of your life, not even from your own perspective. As you write memoir, your understanding should change along the way. If it doesn't, if you find you are pinning down facts you've decided long ago are 100% true, then you should stop writing.

Memoir, like life, is not solid. There's nothing fixed or known for sure, even in retrospect. Our constant attempts to make that seem untrue are a part of the process of peeling back what really happened.

Today is the twentieth anniversary of my mother's death. Yet again, and again, my story about her, my loss of her, my life with her, changes. I stay open to the changes. At some point enough will be pinned down to finish the book, but in the meantime, there's no reason to hastily paste together a solid story. In the meantime, I let my story change, so I can keep changing, too.

Lithium Jesus

Lithium Jesus by Charles Monroe-Kane came to my attention a few months ago, when a friend and fellow memoirian and student and avid reader sent me a text one afternoon, with a link to an interview Monroe-Kane just did, and an ad for a reading he was doing that evening. She was very excited - we are both interested in and keep an eye out for well-done memoir on mental health challenges, and the quote she sent me from the interview sounded very profound. It pointed to confusion about feelings of spirituality and struggling with sanity.

However, she got ahold of the book faster than I did, and was a bit disappointed. Mine took until this week to come in - he's a local author, and producer for Wisconsin Public Radio, so his book flew off the shelves. By then, I was a bit reticent, but wanted to go for it. Reading Undercurrents by Martha Manning and other similar books (here) or Alexandra Fuller's work (here), I and some of my friends and clients I work with find it incredibly satisfying when someone can render on the page the direct experience of being outside what is normally accepted as mentally sane behavior.

And the fact is, all of the memoirs I've read from people with severe mental health challenges have been women.

Incident-Based Memoir Versus Thematic Memoir

Typically, there are two reasons/narrative threads under writing any given memoir. The first, and most common, is to write a memoir about a particular incident. Half a Life by Darin Strauss is about the author accidentally striking and killing a girl on a bike with his car when he was eighteen, and the impact that had on his life and community. History of a Suicide by Jill Bialosky is about the author's sister's death from suicide and the author coming to terms with it. There are a million examples of these kinds of specific memoirs. They can be quite lovely and focused, giving a central event to focus attention on, and explain further experiences from.

However, when we read only these memoirs we get the idea that only folks who have had "big things" happen to them in their lives (read also: tragedies) can write memoir. It's good to notice even most memoirs written based in an incident also thread through the themes of someone's life, like Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong, in which her eventual diagnosis of epilepsy clarifies some of her difficult journey with spirituality, but in fact isn't the central focus of the story.

And, there are memoirs which truly just focus on a thread, a theme, or a connection throughout someone's life, rather than single incidents, and certainly not always around trauma. In our story-obsessed culture, these memoirs tend to get less media, but they are insightful and powerful nonetheless.