Episode 138: [Step 9] How I Rewired My Relationship with My Parents in Just 15 Minutes

Feb 11

In this episode of F*ck Saving Face, Judy Tsuei shares her personal journey of identity, belonging, and healing as an Asian American. She reflects on her experiences living in Taiwan and China, the complexities of her family dynamics, and the transformative relationships that have shaped her understanding of love and acceptance.

Through her storytelling, Judy emphasizes the importance of reconnecting with one's roots and the potential for healing within families, ultimately inspiring listeners to embrace their own journeys of self-discovery and growth.

Sound Bites

"I asked them, was it a planned evacuation?"
"I found a letter that made my mother cry."
"I felt so whole when I met them."

Takeaways

Empowerment comes from breaking through taboo topics.
The immigrant experience shapes identity in profound ways.
Community support can redefine safety and belonging.
Understanding family history is crucial for personal healing.
Cultural perceptions of affection vary significantly.
Reconnecting with family can lead to unexpected healing.
Life's challenges often lead to personal growth.
Healing is a journey that requires patience and understanding.
Transformative relationships can reshape our perspectives.
Embracing vulnerability is essential for emotional health.

Episode Highlights

00:00 Journey of Identity and Belonging

09:53 Family Dynamics and Healing

16:08 Transformative Relationships and Personal Growth

Links Mentioned:

Judy Tsuei LinkedIn
Judy Tsuei Instagram

There may be affiliate links included in this blog post.

Order an early copy of the book: bit.ly/shamelessbook

Transcript:

Welcome to the F*ck Saving Face podcast where we're empowering mental and emotional health for Asian Americans and voices of color by breaking through taboo topics. Life may not always be pretty, but it is indeed beautiful. Make your story beautiful today.

Judy Tsuei (00:02.668)

Did you know that I was featured in a Fast Company article about how I moved back to the country that my parents left in order to create a life for me and my daughter. And so at the time I was living in Taiwan.

There was a reporter who was recognizing that there was this trend of all these children of immigrants moving back to the country, that their parents had worked so hard to leave to build a new life. And so when I moved back, everyone in Taiwan was so friendly. I was able to live in this luxury high-rise building. My daughter was able to attend a Montessori school. It was a wonderful experience. And every subway stop had a park and somewhere for my daughter to play. Everyone was always

watching out for her, there was definitely a community aspect of things. But my parents kept feeling like they were so concerned that Taiwan wasn't safe. And this was remarkable to me because my family lives in LA. At this moment in time, my dad has had his catalytic converter stolen three times once they built a light rail station near where my parents lived. And they live in an affluent neighborhood in West Los Angeles. And so it was just shocking to me the

different points of view and this reporter wanted to know about it. She wanted to know why I would choose back to move to this country that my parents had left. And Taiwan is ultimately where my parents grew up. Although they were born in China, they fled China when the communist military took over. And I had no idea that in Taiwan there was this basically refugee influx of people from China. All of these people whose parents were in the nationalist military, you know, basically living together and

I didn't realize all of this until I was much older. I grew up thinking we were Taiwanese. knew many relatives still lived in Taiwan. I actually had not met a lot of them while we were in the United States. And it wasn't until I was in college or right around that time that my parents said, no, you're Chinese. Which was basically like saying that if you grew up and you thought you were Peruvian, but then suddenly you were told you were actually from Mexico or something. It was just such a...

Judy Tsuei (02:28.776)

shocking experience of, wait a minute, what are you telling us? This country that you, that basically executed my mother's father, that created so much, how shall I say, so much devastation. And now we want to be recognized as Chinese because it was becoming a superpower. It was very confusing to me. And I actually took my parents out to dinner one day. This book that I'm writing has been

years in the making. And when I say years in the making, it's because it's a memoir that's required living and healing and figuring out. And so I asked them, you know, in my mind, when you say you fled, it means that you ran in the middle of the night. Was that actually what happened? Or was it a planned evacuation? Was it a planned leaving the country of origin? And both of them said no, it was grabbing what you could and running for the boats. So what I had learned

in school when I had to do more reports about my grandparents, the only grandparent that I ever knew was my father's mother. She lived with us, everyone else. Her husband had passed away when my aunt was still in her early years on this planet. And my other grandfather, my mother's father, had been executed. And then my mother's mother had passed from cancer when I was a very young, again, just a few years on this planet. And so my grandmother was the only person that I knew.

And I asked my father one day about this lineage of ours. And he told me that my mother's father was pretty high up in the nationalist military, that he helped all of his men and his pregnant wife and his one-year-old daughter escape from China. Then he wanted to do right and go back and help rescue the rest of his men. He was hiding with his in-laws. And his in-laws, you know, his wife's parents, they came and they beat up

his father-in-law and said, if your son-in-law doesn't turn himself in, we will come back to kill you. So my grandfather couldn't let that happen. He turned himself in and then nobody knows what else happened to him after that. And I remember when I was young and I was cleaning the house, it was something that we did. I don't know why we were on hands on knees using rags instead of a mop, but that's how we helped clean the house. And so I climbed on top of the washing machine to wipe the cabinets above there and I found a letter.

Judy Tsuei (04:54.764)

It was written in Mandarin. I couldn't read it, so I handed it over to my mother. And in this handwritten letter, when she opened it, she immediately started crying. So it was a letter from my grandfather to my grandmother saying, if you need to give up one of the children, give up the younger one because I've never met her before. But you can't give away the older daughter because she's my heart and my soul. And he was referring to my mother. So ultimately, my grandmother became a single mom with two girls and...

husband who had passed or that they didn't know anything of what had happened. So she tried her best to raise her two children and eventually she got remarried and had two sons. But before that happened, there was a wealthy family who took to my aunt and said, we can adopt her and we'll give her a better life than what you're able to provide. And my grandmother initially did not want that to happen, but

According to my cousin and I've asked her this question when I was living in China another time and I was able to visit with her when she moved to China we chatted about it and she said yeah, like that family came and basically took my mom in the middle of the night and You know our grandmother thought well, she's gonna have a better life. So I should let her go so my mother and my aunt look exactly alike and from the back when I went to go visit them together

in Taiwan when my mom came from the States with me coming from China when I was living there, meeting in Taiwan, meeting up with my aunt, I couldn't tell who was who from the back. It was the most jarring experience and so weird because here was this woman who looked exactly like my mother and yet the relationship she had with her daughters is very different from the one that my mother had with me. And

she was kind to her children. You could tell when she looked at them that she had love in her eyes. And I just wondered what that must feel like to have a mother like that. My aunt, my mother and I went to my grandmother's grave site and paid homage. And it turned out that because they look so much alike, my mother became a teacher when she was young, that she would have students who said, you know, it's so weird. There's this girl in town or just outside of town who looks so much like you.

Judy Tsuei (07:13.036)

and my mother who knew who they were talking about, but didn't say anything. And so my aunt didn't know she was adopted until she ended up working at a television station when she graduated from school. And it just so happens that one of my mother's family members also worked there and made friends with her. So then this friend who had befriended my aunt pulled her aside one day and said, you know, you're adopted and would you like to meet your mother?

So my aunt and my grandmother were able to reconnect before my grandmother passed. And in addition to living in Taiwan, I also lived in China. I went over there to teach English in my mid-20s. It was not a great experience to start. I don't know why, but I fled my teaching post in the middle of the night like a fugitive. My friends came and helped me. It was a really messy time. My eating disorder was also at its lowest. And so I ended up at the time, know, China was burgeoning.

in Shanghai especially, which is where I was, and I was able to get a job working at the country's largest English language magazine very easily. I started working there.

I had other mishaps. I found out because I had overstayed my visa and I didn't know anything about it that I had to go talk to the embassy and I could have been fined. But because of the way China was and I had an assistant who spoke Shanghaian, she was able to talk to them and get the fine from like thousands of dollars to like a hundred. Again, living in these countries that my parents left opened my eyes so much. I thought that my family was not affectionate and that that was a cultural thing.

But then I went to China and people were holding hands. Parents were loving on their kids. People of the same sex, just friends, were holding hands and being just so affectionate and so lovey-dovey. And I thought, wait a minute, have I been lying to myself this whole time? And then when I was living there and then saw my aunt who just looks so much like my mother, and I wondered, is she like this because she was raised

Judy Tsuei (09:23.458)

by someone else or what happened because I ended up making a really good friend when I was living in Shanghai and he flew with me over to Taiwan during a holiday. So my mother was flying in to meet me and he came and hung out with us with my aunt while he waited for his father to fly in from the States. And while we were there, you my friend's Mandarin was so much better than mine. And we went to the famous museum in Taiwan and this whole time

while we were going around, we even went to karaoke. At one point he just turned and he looked at me and he said, your mother is so hard on you. And he could understand the Mandarin. He could understand. it felt like someone was finally seeing me for the first time and seeing what I had gone through and endured. And those experiences in China and in Taiwan revamped my understanding that it wasn't necessarily a cultural thing so much as a familial thing.

and that the ways that we were broken were caused by the people to whom I was born, the family, the family members and the relatives. And recently my uncle passed, myself and my three younger siblings, we all went to the funeral and this uncle had lived on the East coast, so we hardly ever knew him. What we do, what I knew of him was that he was, he seemed austere. We'd been told all these things about him and his family and

I walked into the bathroom and saw my cousin there. And prior to that, my sister had asked, like, do you even think we're going to recognize them? And we walked in and she just burst into tears, this cousin of mine, and she was so happy to see us. She didn't know that we were coming. And later I would find out that she would go over to her father's coffin and whisper to him, they came, they came. That event allowed me to reconnect with two cousins I haven't seen in almost four decades.

to find out that we have kids the same age, that they're HAPA, that their birthdays are just months apart, and that there was so much that we were unpacking that was untrue that we were told. And both of my cousins just said how much they wanted to form a relationship, that after all of this time, they wanted to heal the traumas. And having met them and their mom's side of the family,

Judy Tsuei (11:49.356)

I was just so happy. I felt so whole. felt like we do have an opportunity to change things and to do things differently, which had I not gone to the funeral, I don't know if any of that would have happened. My cousins told me that they follow me on social media, that they know so much about my life and they want to fill in the gaps. They know about the book that I'm writing. They know of what it must be like because of what it was like for them. And so I do hope that our relationship changes because I felt

so whole when I met them and to have this conversation. And I was skeptical at first because I didn't know what to believe. But I thought about the life that I want to have versus the life that I've seen the adults around me have. And I wanted something different and so did they. And so I believe that life is unexpected. And one of the things that I'm working through right now is understanding that it is true that the things that you want

often most of the time come in ways that you do not expect. So with this episode, I hope that it gives you some hope. I hope that it gives you some belief in what healing is possible and that there's an opportunity for all of us to find our chosen family, to reconnect with our families of origin, to do the work and to, as difficult as it is also to release attachment to what that outcome might be.

And so I'm sending you all of the love and light and I look forward to you hearing my interview with Amy Yip next week where we explore this topic further. If you are also interested in working with me more on how to alleviate those perfectionistic tendencies, how to get out of that feeling of not being good enough, goalpost always moving, feeling like you've accomplished all these things and you can check all these things off your list, but yet you're still not fulfilled.

This mastermind is for you and it includes a free breakthrough session, which the results that my clients have been getting through this experience are unbelievable. Things that were a 10 intensity in terms of being triggering go down to a zero within a couple of hours. It's unlike any other healing modality that I've ever experienced and I can speak firsthand to how one 15 minute technique truly transformed my relationship with my parents where I'm excited to see them. I'm joyful around them.

Judy Tsuei (14:18.028)

My mom recently made a comment during Chinese New Year when my parents worked so hard to create this lion that my daughter and her classmates could use to play with. And I taught about the Chinese zodiac. My dad taught Chinese calligraphy. It was wonderful. And when I was taking them to lunch, my mom was talking about how my daughter is very guai, like she's a good girl. And I was saying, really? Because she seems pretty sassy lately to me. To which my mother said, well, that's because you're a bad mom. And she said it in jest, but

my mom's jokes, quote unquote, are often filled with barbs or passive aggressiveness. And in fact, that was one of the things that I noticed the most when I was with her and my aunt is that my aunt would joke with her daughters too, but you could tell it was lighthearted and it didn't mean anything. Whereas my mom's always felt like a dig. And so when she said that, my response was, hmm, that's disappointing that that's her model of the world, but I'm going to focus on how they showed up.

and how they did these incredible things for my daughter and her classmates, which then the other Taiwanese mom was able to borrow and use for her kids' classes, and the ripple effect that that created, and how happy I was to see them when I took them to lunch, and I knew they would appreciate the architecture of this space. My parents are very creative people, and they've built some amazing things, so I was so happy to share that with them.

And that I know that I can go from now through the rest of my life with no regrets, knowing that I love them fully, that I feel my relationship with them is healed. And I don't have to go to, I don't have to lose them to have any regrets that I didn't do the work or that I couldn't enjoy them while they were here, because I am enjoying them while they're here. And that anything that used to be super triggering, I can just let go and just truly appreciate them. And that alone, that 15 minute exercise changed my life.

and I wasn't even focused on my family, I was focused on my career. So I can speak to how powerful this work is. And if that speaks to you, then go to my website judyzway.com forward slash mastermind and you can learn about it. And between now and the spring festival, when the 15 day festival for Chinese New Year ends, you can use the code CN as in Nancy Y CNY to save 888 bucks.

Judy Tsuei (16:32.568)

you'll get that breakthrough session in there and you'll meet an amazing community of people and it's only limited to six spots. So if it speaks to you, please definitely go check it out and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.

Judy Tsuei (16:45.294)

Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you'd like to support me and this show, please go to iTunes and leave your review. It means so much to me and it'll help others find this podcast. I'll catch you in the next episode. And if you'd like to stay in touch between now and then, please visit wildheartedwords.com and sign up for my weekly newsletter. I've had people share with me that it's the best thing to arrive in their inbox all week. Aloha.