Before launching directly into this month’s first newsletter (and, what feels like the inaugural version of it), I wanted to begin with a bit of housekeeping. Since last February, in 2023, I have contemplated in what way I would continue to share my writing while simultaneously finding it necessary to protect certain subjects that I am currently workshopping for longer projects —namely, my book, which is an essay collection about grief. While this newly updated newsletter will still maintain aspects of my usual writing, I hope to offer my readers other sides of myself—sides that grieve, of course, but also sides that explore aspects of grief that speak to more than just loss. This will come as a free bi-monthly newsletter to all subscribers, renamed “Dog-Eared” for its focus on books, and as weekly special content for paying ones: photo journals, reading recommendations, and my “Process Diaries.” These diaries will offer intimate peeks into the writing process for my book and longer projects. Paying subscribers also gain access to the entire archive, including posts previously published under “If You Can’t Laugh You May As Well Give Up.” There are three tiers available: monthly ($5/mo), annually ($50/yr), and founding patron ($75/yr). All tiers receive the paid subscriber-only benefits mentioned above.
As a writer, paywalling certain posts feels counterintuitive to my overall personal philosophy—that art should be freely accessible and open to everyone—but as I carve out my own freelance career, financially supporting “Dog-Eared” provides me the opportunity to create a more intimate community between myself and this newsletter’s readers. And as homage to Haley Nahman, who writes one of my personal favorites “Maybe Baby,” I will comp 2 paid subscriptions for every 25 that I receive. If you are interested in having your subscription comped, please tell me here. For those of you who have been quietly supporting me since 2020 (and many of you, for several years before that), I wanted to extend my deepest gratitude. I hope that while I am working hard on this book, you will remain here with me. And now, this month’s first free newsletter—an essay about ambiguous loss— “#1: A Map for the Missing”:
#1: A Map for the Missing
“It was amazing, he’d thought back then, that an unchanging property of an object wasn’t only what was there, but also what wasn’t. It meant that if you could define what was absent, create a map for the missing, that was also a way of knowing a thing.” —Belinda Huijuan Tang, A Map for the Missing
When Tang Yitian’s father disappears from their rural village, it is his mother who urgently calls and asks for him to please return home. She had walked for several hours, through back alleys and a still-blueing dusk, to the town’s telephone booth to do so. But going home for Yitian—to a post-Cultural Revolution China, after a decade of living and working in America—stirs up a series of what-could-have-beens. His career, his marriage, his family: they are all consequences of mistakes and choices that moved him further away from the life he had planned for. And in helping his mother track down his father, who in a confused state had walked out of the village, Yitian comes to understand grief as not only remembering what was once ours, but as recognizing what was never ours to begin with—the absence of fatherly love, for example, or the ghost-like mirage of a different, parallel life. Or, as Yitian comes to experience, the pain of becoming strangers with those we once knew so intimately. A Map for the Missing, Belinda Huijuan Tang’s debut novel, speaks to the ways in which our lives are governed not by what is in them, but what isn’t.
This concept, ambiguous loss, is one that I have been researching for many years now—having learned about it for the first time eight years ago, when This American Life put out “597: One Last Thing Before I Go.” In this story, Itaru Sasaki, a gardener living in the coastal town of Ōtsuchi in Japan’s Iwate prefecture, placed a decommissioned telephone booth in his garden as a way to communicate, one-way, with his recently deceased cousin. But what began as Itaru’s personal altar became a place of spiritual pilgramage one year later, when the 2011 tsunami claimed the lives of nearly 16,000 people with thousands more still recorded missing—Ōtsuchi having been one of the areas most devastated by the flooding. “So I named it the wind telephone-- kaze no denwa,” Itaru says. “The idea of keeping up a relationship with the dead is not such a strange one in Japan. The line between our world and their world is thin.”
At the time of this broadcast, in 2016, I was working on a manuscript of essays about my mother’s death—how it impacted me, how I felt about it—but what I was actually doing is what Belinda Huijuan Tang defines as “making a map for the missing.” In surveying my mother’s life, I wasn’t so much identifying where she had been, but orienting myself around where she hadn’t: on not becoming a writer, on not becoming her happiest, on not becoming very, very sick. And though I spent hours sifting through family letters and journals, I had arrived no closer to understanding who she had truly been than I had at the onset. If grief is what happens when we miss a person, then what is it called when we miss the missing? When we miss someone who was never really there, or ours, but someone that could have been? What does it mean to miss a mother I hardly knew, or the version of myself that could have known her? Death is an absence, yes, but it is also the shape of an entire world of possibilities—a world that, in grief, we must make a map out of.
Like Itaru, I used to fantasize about hearing my mother’s voice on the other end of the telephone, but I’ve come to realize that I’d much rather connect with one of my potential selves—ones that were born, unbeknownst to them, at the precise moment of my mother’s death. I’ve grown more curious about the other possibilities of my life had specific events not happened—something, I believe, haunts us all. I want to ask myself, this other version of me: What is it like? Having everything I have ever wanted? Maybe she coughs or clears her throat. The telephone is old and weathered, and static fuzzes from the receiver. Perhaps I even hear Mom in the background. Mom the writer. Mom the happiest. But then this version of me, clearly as curious as I am, says: I don’t know. You tell me?
With death, there is official certification of loss, proof of the transformation from life to death, and support for mourners through community rituals and gatherings. With ambiguous loss, none of these markers exist. The persisting ambiguity blocks cognition, coping, meaning-making, and freezes the grief process.—Dr. Pauline Boss
In ten years time, Tang Yitian returns to a home that no longer exists. The village he grew up in; the futon he once slept on; the house he and his family spent so much time in. All of this while his father is lost, walking toward fragments of his own memories—fragments that Yitian is only now coming to understand. In actuality, he never knew his father’s true character. Or his mother’s, his grandfather’s, his childhood girlfriend’s, and even his own. He had only heard stories and family lore, and in his search to find his father, Yitian sees how “if you could define what was absent, create a map for the missing, that was also a way of knowing a thing.” What does it mean to return to a place that no longer exists? What does it mean to never know such a place ever existed in the first place? This is what I loved most about A Map for the Missing: it made me reconsider the role that ambiguity plays in grieving. It made me remember how even though death, in many ways, is one of life’s few absolutes, there are some things—and many lives—that I will never experience. Grief, then, is being open to finding them.
You can buy A Map for the Missing on Bookshop.org, where a percentage of every purchase goes toward supporting local bookstores.