[Content Warning: The following discusses a student who died by suicide.]
This early memory feels hazy: me as a baby sitting in a room in Japan on a mint green mat. The smell of dried bamboo seeps through the floor. My grandfather is there, the one who died shortly after I was born.
What I know of him was that he was an abusive alcoholic who held a rage and sadness from being disowned by his father because he didn’t want to be a farmer like him and wade through fields in muddy soil. My grandfather died of cancer, but didn’t tell anybody he had it. Not the wife he battered for years, not the father who disowned him, not his children he used to beat with an iron rod, not the next door neighbor he partied with at festivals and ceremonies.
All this was pretty common.
They lived in a small farming village called Yokaichiba, a place now so depopulated it no longer exists on federal maps. They grew lush fields of turnip, yuzu and cabbage. They lived loud with crass jokes I only now wish I knew. And they believed in ghosts and spirits and talked about them like they were a second cousin or close neighbor. “I saw so and so ghost in the fields up the street the other month,” my grandmother or my aunt would say in a matter of fact way. “She’s a thief. She’ll take little things from your house—a pair of scissors or a pair of socks.”
In this rural village, like many others in Japan, spirits are welcomed with a grand party every summer. They call it Obon Matsuri. Women, men, children of all ages don colorful, traditional garments and sweat like they never have all year, singing and dancing to the beat of thunderous taiko drums and melodic wooden flutes. “I hear the beat of the drums in my heart. Boom boom. Boom boom. Boom boom,” my late aunt once said as she placed a hand over her chest, mimicking the thumps of the beat. “It carries me even in my old age.” These Obon festivals happen every year in August. That’s what August always is about here—when the ancestors come on down and together with the living, shake it all out.
In the Spring of 2015, one of my students became an ancestor. He died by suicide. Alex would often be the smartest kid in the room. He would cross his legs, knees locked into a kind of knot, and give a “humph” to let us in on his exceptionally engaged mind, approving an interesting idea or disdaining an ignorant comment. We always felt him there. He was in the advisory and social studies classes I taught. In the first weeks of knowing him, he let me in on the boy he was crushing on. I felt honored he entrusted me with this secret. We saw each other and talked to each other every day of the week.
In late March, when he first went missing, I looked for him around Hester Street in Chinatown where he lived. Desperately peering into each and every face of a boy even remotely his age. I circled around Roosevelt Park, Allen Street and then East Broadway. I’m really not an amateur detective or private investigator, but the aches in my heart pushed me to scour the streets after school hours in search of him.
As I made my way down to the East River from East Broadway, I passed an empty school yard. The vacancy of the space made me nervous. When I reached the river between the two bridges and under the highway, the thought that maybe he didn’t just run away from home on Friday night grew larger.
“Alex, you there?” I asked into the river. It was an overcast day. Right then, like a scene out of something scripted, the sun shined a light onto the river and the southern clouds parted.
About a month later, police found Alex’s body in the East River just a little north by Harlem. According to them, this type of incident happened every year. A troubled soul took a final dive into the river and the icy, frigid waters kept the body submerged. Every April or so, when the water warmed, the bodies appeared, ascending another death.
In an Obon festival, the community dances in a circle in counter clockwise motion, the choreography often mimicking a harvest--hands waving up to pull crops, hands waving down to set crops aside. In ancient times, this took place during the full moon. In Japan, Obons have become a rarer site, especially in the cities; however, in diasporic communities like Los Angeles, Obons are held throughout the summer, as if they couldn’t get enough of them. If you missed an Obon one weekend, you could simply catch the next one and still see your old friends. Traditions have a different sense of nostalgia there, knowing how it all could have been taken away when we were incarcerated in camps during World War II.
When we heard Alex's body was found, holding circles in our classes became our saving grace, a space to funnel all that grief through testimony, held hands and soulful hugs. Circles coming back into itself, again.
At his memorial, we shared more words of consolement and encouragement, and we shared songs. I prepared a poem for the occasion, but by the end of the event it felt repetitive to share it. The students seemed to have all the wisdom they needed. The next day I shared a few words with them:
May we hold up the sky
Release the latch
Let you through
We carry you where it hurts
Where the hole is
Where we need love
According to often-cited studies, Native American and Asian American youth have particularly high suicide rates in this country. The racialized invisibility and lack of access to responsive mental health services characterize the crises. The intersectionality of Alex being a Queer Asian boy intensified our grief.
I wondered if there was credible research on spirits. This in itself sounds oxymoronic and an indication of our linguistic limitations. We do have our circles. And we need not wait till August to call forth ancestors and beckon the sun beyond the clouds.
Contributor Notes
Taiyo Na (Taiyo Ebato) is a writer of poems, songs, stories and curricula who lives on unceded Lenape land (Queens, NY). His “Artist Takeovers” playlist was featured on Spotify in 2017, and his writing has appeared in Aperture, Poets House, Unmargin and is forthcoming in the anthology We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word (Haymarket Books).
