Feb 12, 2014 12:50
i keep hearing again and again about the traditional family - mom, dad and kids (hopefully 2.5 of them). There is nothing traditional about that. We have families that span many generations vertically, and many siblings horizontally. The Chinese in Singapore have clans where people who share the same surname and come from the same village who consider themselves family. It is rare to see a Malay family outing just with mom, dad and the kids - they gather as a family - with grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins.
Families sometimes have little to do with how they are related by blood. I was raised by a woman who is not related to me by blood. My grandmother adopted my mother and raised my mother. When i was born, i lived with her until i was 3 or 4. (We were just a few blocks away from my parents' flat) My grandmother was a ma jie - she took a vow of celibacy and served as a domestic worker, and later a school attendant. Her family here was not just us - but her sisterhood of other ma jies, and only a few of them were related by blood.
Perhaps that is why i see family as something very much broader than the narrow definition of mom, dad and kids. Perhaps my personal experience opened my eyes to see that it wasn't blood that bound us together, it was love. Many of the ma jies treated me like their own kin - and when one of them passed on, i performed the funeral rites as her kin. My sister and i are both drawn towards old ladies because deep inside, we know any of them can be grandma. We don't need to be related to someone genetically to consider them family. We feel for their plight - struggling to make ends meet collecting cardboard boxes or drink cans - because that could have happened to our grandma.
When i was a chaplain intern in a hospital in California, i was often called to the ICU as i was the only Mandarin and Cantonese chaplain (i was the only Asian chaplain for that matter). There was once an elderly Chinese patient who passed away, and i was called to be with them. But i noticed that the African Amercian nurse was distrought, and i helped cover some of her duties going through the paperwork with the family while she removed the tubes and cleaned the deceased' body. i sat down with her after we were done and asked her what was wrong. She said that she grew quite close to the deceased and she was getting better before she turned for the worst. Even though there was a language barrier there was something she could not explain - she could only say - "She reminded me of my grandma." i was surprised. Here is an African American nurse and a elderly Chinese woman. Not only are they not related by blood, they did not speak the same language, they did not look the same. They were as different as you can get. But yet, there was a bond - there was something much, much deeper. i think this is what we share as mammals - if we can share affection across species with our pets, then we can affection across cultural, social, racial, language differences.
We need to stop drawing circles to exclude people from what we define as family. Because that is what it does is this - exclusion. It is about defining what is us, and what is them. It is about drawing the line who i must love and care for, and who i do not need to love and care. Love is not inward looking, self-serving, and selfish. Love is ever expanding to include those on the margins, caring for those who cannot give anything back to us, caring for those who are different from us. Families are not defined by their composition but what they are based on - love. Whether it composes of a sisterhood of ma jies, or mom, dad and their children, or a single person and his or her pet, or grandparents with their grandchildren, or single parent households, or LGBT couples and their friends, or all of the above - love is what they share.
i hope one day we can call each other family. Regardless of race, language, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, educational level, socio-economic class. Regardless, because all that matters is love.