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BORN AND RAISED: LOVE

EPISODE SIX: Missing You

Description: ​Three stories reflecting on love, immigration, and loss: a romantic bus
route, queer-ying religion, and a mourning party.

Guests: ​Phillip Morgan, Dawn Morgan, Ishani Nath, Vivian Kendal-Kong

ALISHA​: Hey, it’s Alisha Sawhney.

AL​: And I’m Al Donato.

ALISHA​: From HuffPost Canada, you’re listening to Born and Raised, a podcast about
children of immigrants living in Canada. And, today’s episode is all about what it feels
like to miss someone.

[Theme plays]

AL​: Today we’re starting off with a bus ride in North York, Ontario. Aboard the 51 Leslie
route, to be exact. It’s a route very familiar to Phillip and Dawn Morgan -- the
mother-son duo taking a ride with us.

AL​: Can you tell me where we are?

PHILLIP​: About to head on route where my mom met my dad.

AL​: Let’s go back to the fall of 1972. Dawn would hop on the bus at Leslie and
Sheppard Avenue. And two stops later, the man who would later become her husband,
Emerson, would get on.

DAWN​: He usually was seated towards the back of the bus and he would get up
and give me his seat. It went on for I guess, quite some time.

AL​: So they would ride the bus together. Emmerson on his way to university and Dawn
on her way to work until …
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DAWN​: One day, I guess it must have been a Friday, he asked me what I was
doing on the weekend. S,o I mentioned that my mom was in Canada and had
been for several months, and she was going back home and I was having some
gathering with friends and having a party. And, you know, it was like a dinner
party and just social. I said, “You’re welcome to come, if you would like to.”

I really didn’t think he was going to show up, but I gave him my address and to
my amazement, there was a knock on the apartment and at the door, I guess
somebody must have let him in because he didn’t buzz, and there he was at the
door!

PHILLIP​: OK. See the whole time I thought dad made the first move.

DAWN​: No, women’s lib! I did!

PHILLIP: ​(laughs)

AL​: So what drew Dawn to Emmerson?

DAWN: ​Well one, he was tall, dark, and handsome, he was 6’2, 6’3!

But, we had a lot of things in common. We had the same values. He was a caring
person, the fact that he was always getting up and giving me his seat. And then
as time goes by, because he was always coming over, we started spending more
and more time together.

I can’t tell you a time when we crossed over, but we grew to liking each other and
spending more and more time with each other.

AL​: Dawn continued to ride this bus route for many years after she and Emmerson got
together. It became a place where she forged friendships and a place she returns to
remember them.

DAWN: ​So this route means a lot to me. I think if I was to use a term, I would just
say it was my first journey into living in Canada and what life in Canada would
eventually be. This was my stepping stone.

AL​: ​When I think about today’s topic, I almost feel like I was born into it. I can’t
remember a time, even in childhood, where my family wasn’t talking about what it was
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like back home, all the people they missed. I was always surrounded by the feeling of
missing someone. It’s further exacerbated because my relationship with family is a
long-distance relationship. I don’t know the majority of them, we’ve never met before
We’ve only talked through online, letters, sometimes sending photographs. As the years
go by, it’s become less about the words and more about emojis, or sending pictures.

One tradition that’s really stayed strong is sending balikbayan boxes, which is a very
popular practice in the Philippines. So a balikbayan box is about a waist-hand
cardboard box filled with canned goods like Spam, used clothes, used toys, whatever
someone requests for, so that might look like Nike shoes if they’re really bougie.

And I think getting those balikbayan boxes it can convey the message to them without
words that, “I’m thinking about them, I miss them, and I want them to be happy. I want
to take care of them.”

ALISHA​: Yeah, it’s like a care package.

AL​: It is a care package, exactly! Alisha, what does missing someone feel like to you?

ALISHA​: Well, I have a bunch of cousins who live in India. I’ve met them a handful of
them only once in my life when I was really young and I do feel like there’s a longing to
form relationships with them. And I sometimes think that, you know, how fun would it
have been if we had all grown up in the same country? Or if they visited, you know, in
Canada? And the memories we could have had together, so. It’s like there’s this whole
other group of women that I’m related to that have my last name, they experienced so
much of the same stuff as me back home, like I see them on Instagram, on Facebook, I
see their pictures in family photos, and their lives aren’t too different from mine. It’s just
a different country, but you know, a lot of their experiences look very similar. They
watch the same TV shows, follow the same kinds of music, and I would love to just get
to know them more. But I feel like it’s really hard because 25 years have gone back of
my life and I don’t really know them. I only know them through pictures.

AL​: Yeah. You know what I’m wondering, if they feel the same way though. Like, “Oh
man, Alisha in Canada looks so much fun. I wish we could talk and hang out.”

ALISHA​: Yeah, I met one of my first cousins, we met up in Florida by complete

coincidence, we didn’t even really plan it. And she’s a few years older than me and she
looked at me, she was like, “You are exactly like my sister,” like my other first cousin,
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and she’s like, “You’ve never really met her but you have the same mannerisms, you
move your hair the same way, you laugh the same way.”

I’m like, “How is there another girl across the world who is apparently just like me, but I
don’t know anything about her?”

AL​: She’s your doppelganger.

ALISHA​: Yeah!

AL​: Our next guest has also experienced what it’s like to miss someone in different
ways. Vivian Kendal-Kong knows all about emotional separation. After coming out, she
had to separate herself from her two loves. Her family and her faith.

VIVIAN​: My parents apparently met each other and knew upon seeing each
other that they were going to get married. So I just expected that to happen for
me. And so I was like, “I don’t have any sexual attraction to boys! I will meet the
right one and it will just happen! I will know, God will say, ‘This is your hubband!’”

(Laughter)

VIVIAN​: Yeah, no. That didn’t happen and that was okay. Because I’m queer.

AL​: Way more than okay.

VIVIAN​: So my name is Vivian Kendal-Kong. I am 27. And I was born in Canada,

born in the Durham region, but my parents came to Canada from Hong Kong.

AL​: Religion brought Vivian’s parents to Canada. They worried staying in Hong Kong
would lead to Christian persecution from China’s government, which at the time was in
talks to regain control of the region. In Canada, the church became their haven, as it did
for many Chinese Christian newcomers.

VIVIAN​: It’s a place for families to be able to sit down after a week of suffering
through language barriers and suffering through cultural shenanigans and just,
you know, hidden racism and stuff, to just sit and be with people that understand
all of that.
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AL​: She grew up singing in choirs, going to service and attending Christian camps.
Vivian even memorized bible verses. They had a special place in her heart. She’s still
really good at it, by the way.

VIVIAN​: Um, John 3:16, I guess. “For God so loved the world that he gave his
own begotten son…” (fade out)

AL​: What was less close to her heart were sermons against LGBTQ communities.

[MUSIC ENDS]

VIVIAN​: When I think about it now, it was very painful. But I didn’t feel it then,
because I didn’t know.

[MAKE A DECISION FADES IN]

And I was really ashamed of who I was because I was told to be ashamed of who
I was, once I realized who I was.

AL​: As she became more in touch with her queerness, hearing those views from family
started to sting.

VIVIAN​: Every once in a while if they saw something queer on the TV, my
parents wouldn’t really understand, but then they would also kind of be like, “He’s
kind of gay, isn’t he?”

And then they’d laugh about it.

To realize it was something that I was afraid of sharing with them made it so that
it was really difficult for me to function in their space.

I was just tired of it. I was tired of constantly fighting with them, I was tired of
always pushing them away. And so, I came out to them.

“We love you anyway, but keep it on the downlow.”

AL​: Vivian didn’t. She told her friends. She made a Facebook post.
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VIVIAN​: “I feel really free right now and I feel like I can be myself, I feel like I’m
free.”

And my dad was like, “Go be free elsewhere.”

There were months in which I was just not talking to them.

When your family is your only social support for so many years, and then to push
away your only social support of your own volition, that’s a lot of pain. That’s a
lot of emptiness, that’s a lot of just sadness.

There was a lot of just silence.

AL​: When they were talking, things got painful. At one point, Vivian’s mom made her go
to a conversion therapy session with the church’s pastor.

So I went, and this pastor talked at me for an hour and a half before I said a
word. “What experience in your life made you gay?” And I used to work under
him, and he was like a mentor to me. That was really hard to lose that part of
something I had joy in and to have that ripped away was really sad.

Pulling away from the church was like pulling away from home. So I pulled away
from two homes at once.

AL​: Vivian moved out of her parent’s place and stopped attending service… The church
was how Vivian’s parents anchored themselves to Canada. But for her, the values it
was teaching were tearing their relationship apart. So she made peace with being away
from home. And she came to terms with her situation through a hymn.

[“It Is Well With My Soul” instrumental plays]

VIVIAN​: I have always enjoyed “It Is Well With My Soul.” It’s an older song, it’s
technically a song of grief, but it’s also a song of understanding and coming to
peace. And like, the lyrics,

“When peace like a river, attendeth my way,

When sorrow like sea-billows roll,
Whatever my lot, you have taught me to say.
It is well, it is well with my soul.”
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It fits in with the life experiences I’ve had. It’s okay to be pushed away from
people, it’s okay to exist not fully understanding where you are. You’re safe.

I constantly live between and that’s okay. And I think that having been born a
child of immigrants allowed me to be okay with being in liminal spaces.

And it’s okay to not fit and it’s okay to grow in a way where you make your own
place to fit, right? That I think is the beauty of second-generation. To never really
fit and being okay with that.

AL​: The rift between Vivian and her parents lingers, but time has eased the pain
between them.

VIVIAN​: We’re all growing as people and that’s a thing I’m actively working on
fixing.

AL​: Getting to this place took a lot of work, but Vivian isn’t alone. A while back she met
this girl named Maria. The two quickly hit it off and eventually fell in love.

VIVIAN​: I started sending her letters, apparently they all arrived at the same time.
I was like, “No, I was trying to be romantic!” She’s like, “I’m sure it would have
been romantic if they arrived at the same time!”

When we first met, we had discussed family and faith and a lot of different things.
It turned out she was also a part of the church. And she had also worked for the
church before. So we had this connection where we were both kind of lapsed
Christians, in that neither of us went to church as much as we used to.

AL​: One Sunday, that all changed.

VIVIAN​: “You should come to this gay church with me?” “A gay church?”

Yeah, I didn’t realize how much I missed it until I was standing in a congregation
and singing. Being able to be surrounded by voices that were harmonizing and
existing together. So I was like, “Oh… oh… yes… yes!”

I felt connected again. It felt like a piece of me that was missing had been slotted
back in place.
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I was like, “She’s taking me to church,” my mom was like, “Sh-I love her! I love
her so much! When do we meet her!” Basically. Because they knew I had been
away from the church for so long and they were just like, “Yes, finally someone
who can talk some sense to our child.”

AL​: Soon, a wedding was in the couple’s future. Now the big question was...

And, I was just like, “Would you be okay if we invited my parents?”

She was, “Do you think they’re ready for that? Because it’s a wedding, it’s
different from expecting someone, it’s a whole other level of accepting has to be
happening. Like, “Sure, you guys can date, but you’re not, you know, married
yet.”

Them being there, you can see in the photos the photographer took, they are so
happy. I was really upset with my dad the entire time because he was filming it
on his cell phone, I was like, “We have a photographer, put it down!” The fact that
that was my main annoyance, is a really good thing.

REVEREND​: I now present to you Vivian and and Maria Kendall-Kong, partners
in life, newly married in the eyes of God and in accordance of the laws in
Canada. You may give each other a kiss.

[Laughter]

AL​: This is from one of her dad’s videos. On-camera, Vivian is smiling, her arms are
open, and she nearly tackles him in a hug.

Vivan and her dad are in a better place now. It’s a place she never imagined they’d be,
after he told her to go be free elsewhere. It’s never going to be like it was before, but
maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe, it could be better.

VIVIAN​: To be able to talk about my wife openly with my parents, and to have my
parents ask how she is, and to have her ask how she is, and “Have you
messaged your parents recently?” “Have you talked to Maria about this?” “We
should go on a family vacation together,” like, it’s so good.
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There are no words to describe how amazing it is for everything and every part of
your life to come together in a way that’s so cohesive and so loving.

AL​: I think distance does not get enough credit when it comes to relationships. Like,
when I reflect on my relationship with my sister, distance has really helped us heal. We
erre kind of like cat and dog growing up. We were super close physically, but
emotionally it just wasn’t all there sometimes. I think a lot of that stems from us both
being second-gen kids, but in different ways, right? She’s a bit more rebellious, whereas
I’d be like, “I want to listen to my elders, I want to respect my mom’s cultural traditions
and values, always, I wanna follow the leader, follow the leader. “That’s my view.” She’s
more like, “I’m going to rebel, stay up all night, I’m gonna hang out with my friends!
Don’t give me that lunch!” Yadda yadda yadda.

ALISHA​: Classic younger sister.

AL​: Exactly. It was only as the distance of time, growing up, both of us becoming adults,
but also the distance of me physically moved out that I realized, “Oh my gosh, I actually
miss this human. I want this human back in my life.” We started tecting each other a lot.

I know “I love you” is very much thrown around as a “I don’t really hear it,” but for us it
was like, “Oh, we’d say it through gritted teeth.”

And now we actually text it genuinely like, “I love you so much, take care it anak.”

We call each other “anak” as like child kind of as a joke, it’s kind of like calling your
friend son, like, “I love you son, I miss you son.”

ALISHA​: It’s nice that you and your sister are close now. I don’t totally feel like I can
relate to the sibling rivalry in that sense, but distance, it’s an interesting concept
because I sort of learnt that it’s okay to distance myself from some relatives when I’ve
gotten older. It doesn’t mean that I don’t like them anymore, it just means that I’m now
an adult and I have to work on my relationship with them and what I want it to look like.
And they can’t just be up in my face all the time. And be all nosy because I’m not a little
kid anymore.

AL​: Mmhm. Actually enforcing distance as a healthy boundary.

ALISHA​: Yeah, it makes have I think a healthier, happier relationship with all these
people I truly do love, I just--
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AL​: Would like some space every now and then!

ALISHA​: Would like some space, exactly! I think there’s a lot to say about having a
chosen family within your family. So, as much as we may feel like in big ethnic families,
there’s so many people, it can kind of get complicated having lots of these relationships.
But, you know, if there’s negativity, cut that out! It kind of takes our generation to break
that cycle, to form our own relationships, to form our own families, and that’s culturally a
very Canadian thing to do, to maybe separate a bit. And not--

AL​: It feels like a betrayal, but it’s not.

ALISHA​: Right, it does feel like a betrayal. But I think that’s sort of the ethnic obligation.
I think when you assimilate into Canadian society, those kind of viewpoints evolve,
right? It takes our generation to change it.

***

ALISHA​: Our last story is about missing someone who isn’t coming back. And how
celebration kept one mother’s memory alive.

ISHANI: ​So my name is Ishani Nath. I am the senior editor at Flare.com. I am from
Ottawa, but the reason I am brown is because my parents are from India if you trace us
back.

AL: (​off-mic)​ ​The reason I am brown! (Laughs)

ISHANI: ​Can I say that?

AL: ​Yeah, yeah, yeah! That’s fine!

ISHANI: ​Indian culture was--you know, it was one of those things that looking back, it
was definitely a component and something that my parents particularly my mom, was
trying really hard to instill in a lot of different aspects of my childhood.

I was put in Hindi school which did not take and I can not speak Hindi. I also like, never
wanted to wear Indian clothes, I didn’t want to go to Temple. I kind of prided myself on
being a “coconut.” So, the idea of being brown on the outside and white on the inside.

One of the things I realize, looking back, that she really actively did for us, in terms of
culture, was the Diwali party. So, she was known for throwing this massive Diwali party.
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And it was a staple on our calendar every year, it was always hosted at our house.

AL​: Alisha, I think I need a quick refresher. What’s a Diwali party? I know there’s something
about lights. And, yeah.

ALISHA​: Yeah, you’re right about the lights. It’s literally the festival of lights.

AL​: Oh, OK! (Laughs)

ALISHA​: Yeah! It’s five days, it’s celebrated by millions of Hindus, Sikhs, Jahns across the
world. It coincides with the Hindu New Year. Basically, it’s a celebration of new beginnings and
triumph of good over evil, light over darkness. My grandma would probably not be very
impressed with that explanation?

AL​: Why not?

ALISHA​: Well, she would be like, “Keep going.”

AL​: And then?

ALISHA​: Yeah, that’s the best way I can put it.

AL​: Sounds like a blast.

ISHANI​: She would be cooking all day. We would have cleaned the house the week
leading up to it. We would get this big bin out of the basement that was filled with paper
dolls and plastic tea lights. Me and my friends would decorate the whole house.

Right before the party, we would all go get ready and wear our fanciest Indian clothes
and full jewellry, big winged eyeliner, the whole thing. And when people started to arrive,
it would be a big, immediate buzz and excitement. We would get presents from the
“Divali Monster” which is not in our cultural practices at all, this is just something that we
came up with. There would be a small pooja, which is like a prayer ceremony. And we
would just ball out on culture, we went all in.

And looking back, it was a really unique experience given at the time I was pushing at
everything else. But that was the one day a year that I would fully embrace it and we all
looked forward to that party so, so much. So, she did a lot of these things I think as a
way of making me feel connected, in an environment that she felt so unfamiliar with. Like
she spent time living and growing up in India and I didn’t, so she was trying to pass it
down to me.

[Music fades]
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ISHANI​: She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer basically. She was quite young when
she got diagnosed. I think she was a We really didn’t expect it. She was quite young
when she got diagnosed. I think she was a little over fifty. But it, it just completely
changed everything. Throughout her cancer treatment, there were ways she found to
make it fun, or make it a party, or find a reason to bring people together.

A bunch of her friends and her would have chemo parties. So she would have chemo
parties, her friends would come over, they would do tequila shots, have a great night,
and, you know, get her chemo the next day.

Whether it was dying her hair purple when it started to come back, or throwing these
chemo parties, or taking everyone to Jamaica, she was always adamant that it wasn’t
just that she was fighting to live, she was fighting for the life that she wanted.

After the first round, she ended up getting cleared of cancer, which was amazing, she
lived cancer-free for a number of years, but unfortunately it did come back.

So that last week, when she was in the hospital and declining every day, so many
people came to the hospital and hung out with her that the nurses had to give us the
storage closet.

We had our entire family from both sides come in, all of our friends from Ottawa, a bunch
of my friends from Toronto, all of these people were at the hospital every day, for like
almost the whole day. And they would just set up camp there and visit my mom
whenever she could, but they were--they had a buffet going, everyone would bring food,
it was like a small--it was almost like the parties that she used to host, and it was like she
was hosting it, she was just not in the same room. But it was very much the same vibe of
everybody catching up and … it was a warmth. It was a warmth that she had created
that she was almost passing on inadvertently.

She passed away on April 24, 2015.

It is something I’m still dealing with. It’s not a...it’s not something I thought I would ever
deal with, like you never think that, but I think a lot of people talk about moving on when
someone passes away and I don’t know that that’s ever true..

I don’t know that you ever actually move on and I think that’s what I realized. It just
becomes this kind of constant piece of you that’s missing. You don’t ever know how
much that loss is going to impact you or how it’s going to impact you in various ways.
Sometimes it’s as little as when I’m cooking and I don’t remember what to put in a
certain thing or I want to try and make this thing she used to make me when I was sick.
And I don’t know the recipe or I don’t have the ingredients, or I don’t know what this thing
is in English, or I don’t know what this English thing is in Hindi, and “How much salt do I
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put in food? How much garam masala--what is garam masala?” Like how do you make
that? All these little things, I can ask my aunts. I can ask my grandma. But I want to
know it from her.

Everytime I realize the source of those answers is no longer there and instead I have to
figure it out on my own, it hurts all over again.

When I think about her and I think about what I miss the most: when we would be sitting
on the couch, I would just snuggle up to her. When I think about the love that we had,
that’s what I think about. It’s the type of embrace, it’s not even an embrace, it’s just the
closeness, so I think that’s--it’s not a love you put into words, it’s a love that you feel. So
that’s what we had.

ALISHA: ​Ishani’s family turned Diwali weekend into a new tradition.

We’ve turned it into this weekend called Thankswali. So it’s on Thanksgiving weekend,
every year. The Saturday will typically be Diwali and the Sunday will be Thanksgiving
dinner. And the dinner was actually a tradition that started before she passed, so it was
all the kids got together and hosted a dinner for the parents, as a thank you. So she was
actually in attendance for a few of these kid-run Thanksgiving dinners. But after she
passed away, I kind of took it on as a hosting thing. So, ah, that was my way of saying
thank you.

She loved it. It didn’t matter if the food was not always great, sometimes we messed
things up, the timing was off, we were learning.

But I think she wanted so badly for us to try--specifically for me to try--so I think now if
she saw what we’ve been able to do and how we’ve been able to honour her in a lasting
way, I think she would be happy.

ALISHA​: Grief can be ongoing, but it can turn into something beautiful, like it did for
Ishani and her family…. I just want to thank Ishani for sharing her mom’s story.

AL​: That’s the end of this season. Born And Raised is hosted by me, Al Donato.

ALISHA:​ And me, Alisha Sawhney. Our producers are TK Matunda, Stephanie Werner
and Al Donato. Our Executive producers are Lisa Yeung and Andree Lau.

AL:​ Additional production work courtesy of Maija Kappler, Katie Jensen and Vocal Fry
Studios.
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Big thanks to today’s guests Ishani Nath, Vivian Kendal-Kong, Phillip and Dawn
Morgan, as well as all of our wonderful guests this season.

ALISHA​: And a big thanks to you, our listeners! We’re so grateful that you’ve come
along for the ride. We hope you loved listening as much as we loved making this. If you
did, feel free to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and wherever
you listen to us. It really helps us out.

AL​: This may be the end for this run, but it isn’t really over. To see photos of our guests,
show notes, and read a transcript of this episode, check out huffpost.ca

ALISHA​: And that’s it for this season of Born and Raised.