Permission to Come Home by Jenny T. Wang

I first heard about psychologist Jenny T. Wang on an episode of NPR’s Life Kit: How to talk about mental health in the Asian American community. They were discussing her new book “Permission to Come Home: Reclaiming Mental Health as Asian Americans” and I knew immediately this was a book I needed to read.

It feels rather groundbreaking that a book like this exists - a book that talks about things I’ve felt so deeply my whole life but didn’t have words for - and at the same time, I can’t believe we are only starting to talk about these things now!

The parts of this book that resonated the most with me were the parts that spoke of this deep feeling of displacement and having nowhere that feels like home. I have felt this in my depths since I was a child and much of my adult life has been on this search for “home”. It certainly wasn’t in Abbotsford, where I grew up and constantly felt like an outsider. I spent many years attending a largely Mennonite church in attempts to feel a part of the majority community, which only left me feeling as isolated as ever. Vancouver felt like home for the several years I lived there - though I don’t think I appreciated that nearly enough when I was there. I should add that in the 7 years I spent in Vancouver, I lived in 10 different places… so I may have felt at home in the city, but I never felt at home in a place enough to stay for long. After finishing the teaching program at UBC, my partner and I were craving a change and a new adventure which sent us to the Yukon. We’ve called Yukon home for the past several years now - though for every year I’ve lived here, I’ve spent at least a month of that time thinking about leaving. In short, it has been hard for me to stay in one place for long and even harder for me to feel settled or rooted.

It was eye-opening to hear that I am not alone in this feeling, but it is a rather common feeling for the Asian diaspora. There is so much loss experienced as being a part of a diaspora: there is loss through assimilation and mimicry of the dominant culture, loss of language as we try our best to blend in in order to survive racism and xenophobia, loss of belonging - you neither belong “where you came from” or in “the motherland”, nor in the white-dominant society in which you born. We’re told to “go back to where [we] came from” and yet - where is that, exactly?, loss of connection to the family and ancestors that did not immigrate… There's a lot of grief to bear. We are in an in-between time and place, with nowhere to call home. Dr. Wang quotes James Baldwin in the book, “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”

Much of the book addresses the “permission” to be your full authentic self, to take up space and put up boundaries, and learning to have healthier relationships. These were concepts I grappled with a lot in my early 20’s; issues that I spent many, many, many hours (i.e. years’ worth) working through. With the help of a wonderful counsellor, I was able to see that I longed for parents who had a “western sensibility” - simply because I was being raised in a western society. But I had parents who were raised with a very different sensibility - not better or worse - but very different. I looked at my friends’ relationships with their parents and I didn’t understand why mine weren’t like that, too. As a child, of course I didn’t understand it was a matter of cultural difference; my kid-logic reasoned that it was because my parents didn’t care as much or didn’t love me as much. There is no blame to dole out here - my parents loved me dearly and they did their best and I love & appreciate them so much - but this is sadly just an unintended consequence of immigration and settling in a place with a very different culture to the ‘home’ culture. They couldn’t have known what I was struggling with, as I lacked the language to communicate it as a child, and their own struggles as first-generation immigrants would have been so different than mine. Although it sounds odd, I needed to grieve that the parents I had weren’t able to guide me through the unique struggles of being a first-generation Canadian settler of colour. I feel fortunate that I have felt at peace with this for many years now, and I’m excited for other people that might come to this place too by reading Dr. Wang’s book.

The most empowering piece of this book for me was knowing there are so many other people who are also undergoing an internal decolonization process like me. Reading Dr. Wang’s list of resources and seeing that I’ve read the majority of the titles made me feel like we are actually undergoing this journey together, side-by-side; we’re like a little school of fish, all devouring the same material, thinking about similar ideas & concepts, and undergoing the same metamorphosis - but many miles apart! We’re breaking through this deeply internalized racism so we can lead our lives as fuller people and we can help inform and empower others on their journeys, too. I know so many people who are reclaiming their heritage as adults are doing so after becoming parents - also similar to me. I think this is because we have the understanding of being a born settler of colour in a white-dominant society, and we can be the parents for our children that we needed when we were children. What a beautiful source of healing and internal reconciliation.

Thank you Dr. Wang for writing this book and sharing so much of yourself and your experience in these pages. I encourage anyone in the Asian diaspora to read this - as well as anyone that isn’t in the Asian diaspora but would like to understand more about our experiences.