O Canada Part III - Part of Your World

As I indicated in my first post, not all of my trip to Toronto was touristy. My last full day in Canada, our first stop was the local Buddhist temple by my uncle's house:

As far as religion goes, my household was not the shining example of piety, an unexpected thing.  Both sides of my family, at least in my grandparents generation, were pretty devout, though in different beliefs.  My father's parents were Buddhists, while my mother's family practiced Catholicism.  Even my aunt and uncle are pretty strict, devoting an entire room to shrine, and playing the Nianfo (a Buddhist kind of chant/mantra - "Namo Emituofo") on repeat throughout the whole day in every hall of the house.  Despite "dabbling" in spirituality as a child, I'm not a very religious person myself.  Still, that doesn't mean I didn't appreciate the experience.

Actually, the trip was mostly for my benefit, which didn't quite register until I glanced over at my mother bowing uncertainly before the shrine to the Buddha Amitabha and realized that she didn't know what to do either.  We were only there so that I could see the memorial tablet for my grandparents.

Top shelf, second BW picture from the left

You see, readers, I grew up not knowing my grandmother.  This might not sound like a big deal, but in a way, it's sort of a defining absence.  Across the cousins of my generation, all my family was born in Taiwan, from the oldest cousin to the second youngest, and my grandmother had a hand in helping raise all of them.  All but me.  Being the youngest grandchild has the perk of being a bragging right, but in this case, little else.  My family had moved to America well before I was born, so the only contact I had with my grandmother were letters I couldn't read, phone calls I couldn't understand, and gifts that came from an invisible hand.  I very, very vaguely remember meeting her for the first time when I was three or four, but it's the same as remembering a scene from a movie - you know it happened, but you weren't involved in anyway.  All I had were stories of this amazing, tender, loving woman who I would never know and who I was convinced didn't care for me.  How could she?  She didn't even know me.

She passed away when I was 10-yrs-old, but that only seemed to deify her in my head.  As I got older, I became irrationally obsessed with the idea of flying out to Taiwan to pay my respects to her final resting place.  I finally got the chance in undergrad, when one of my classes offered a 1.5 week trip to Vietnam and Taiwan.  Even that was a pipe dream, though.  None of the cities we visited were even close to where my grandmother's ashes were kept, and I wouldn't have the time to go out there on my own.

So, it was very touching that my uncle thought to take me to the temple.  Even though it was just a small tablet with a her picture and some more pretty words that I couldn't read, I briefly felt a little closer with these strangers from another world.

I said that today's entry would conclude my thoughts, but I think I'll leave it here for now, as I still have some things left, and this is already getting pretty long.

Until the next.