Baggage can be Claimed at Carousel 40: The Unpacking of Intergenerational Racial Dynamics by a Millennial Sherpa
By: Lauren Okano
Tags: Family History, Race Relations, Healing, Asian American, Millennials

Baggage can be Claimed at Carousel 40: The Unpacking of Intergenerational Racial Dynamics by a Millennial Sherpa Lauren Okano 5 days ago·5 min read

Baggage. It comes in so many shapes and sizes and my family, like most, has it all — the inherited sagging of the skin beneath our eyes, a fleet of suitcases distributed according to my grandmother’s will upon her passing, the bulging duffels that contain the material mementos my father won’t part with, and of course, the emotional baggage that isn’t entirely unrelated from all the others. I claimed a few pieces of said baggage at the Sacramento International Airport, Carousel #40, on my first visit to meet my Auntie Karen’s immediate family in 2018.

Auntie Karen wasn’t featured in my upbringing, though I always knew my father and uncle had a sister, and I was not to prod. Armed with my millennial sense of entitlement, tempered ever so slightly by my Japanese American upbringing, I inquired anyways. My inquiries revealed that her marriage to my African American uncle over 40 years ago had more than something to do with the family fracture. Our first connection in Sacramento was beautiful, heartbreaking, powerful, hopeful, and above all else, expansively joyful. My cousins and I exchanged aspects of our childhood that we were deprived of in the 90s. I shared details of our Japanese American lineage and its members for whom my cousins were separated from. We shared delicious, meticulously prepared Japanese soul food home cooked by my auntie. We began to open up about our divergent experiences of a few shared events. We drank lots of wine. We laughed, we wondered, and we committed to sharing our future with one another. I left feeling enlivened by that expansive joy and a tinge of sadness to have missed out on three decades with this…my… our … family. I packed this sadness away when a maternal figure, Mama G, shed a bright light on the fact that this just meant we didn’t have any baggage that decades in relationship with other humans inevitably yields.

We kept in touch through the pandemic, and as soon as we were vaccinated my cousin Bryan came to visit me in Seattle with his wife and cripplingly adorable son. Again, this visit was beautiful, heartbreaking, powerful, hopeful, and expansively joyful. The one-on-one time also allowed us to share more about our perspectives of how this family fracture evolved into literal and figurative fault lines. I felt myself struggling to contain our own dyads of perspectives, among the intergenerational myriads. In sharing a few I’m grappling with, I must be explicit that they are filtered through my own lens. Like all human lenses, it is custom fit and no singular “truth” will ever emerge.

To unpack a few contents:

1. Our grandparents were raised according to Japanese values that were typical of the time — children should act like miniature adults and emotion and love are not to be made explicit. I wish my grandmother had the opportunity to develop the capacities necessary for conflict resolution and emotional communication. If she had, would her attempts to forge forward over the years also have baked in the ingredients essential for healing the past?

2. Our Japanese American grandfather fought in WW2 as he proved his loyalty to the US. Our Japanese American grandmother experienced routine visits by the FBI to her childhood home during the war. Both wanted what was then a dead end — to integrate. They instead took the more possible path towards assimilation — to the dominant culture of Whiteness. A dominant culture that was, and remains to a large extent, anti-Black. Had my grandfather not unexpectedly died after my Auntie’s marriage, would he have had the time to heal his own racial trauma and disrupt this cycle? Would his decision have been transformed rather than transferred as a dying wish?

Apologies at this point are highly unlikely and would be Botox at best — fake, emotionless, and fleeting. Our respective understandings of how empowered another family member is to change the past, present, and future natures of our relations inevitably diverges. Indeed, they’re shaped by our own witnessing and experiencing — passive and active — of race and racial trauma in America. Ultimately, I believe that 99% of parents do the best they can during the times they can, and less than 99% of the time is that what their children wanted or even needed. What remains? BAGGAGE.

Herein begins this millennial’s descent from the Everest of idealism. My cousins and I do have baggage, much of it inherited from the generations that preceded us. It turns out that what Mama G shined a light on indeed illuminated present joy and future hope, but where there is light there are shadows. To be honest, this realization felt a bit like unpacking my weekly groceries — a recurring and universal nuisance in which the melties from the shelfies get sorted and shelved. What does not become nourishment will rot and stink up the whole damned fridge.

Believe it or not, we millennials are not the exception to this. Everyone has baggage. Everyone must triage what gets unpacked, and everyone’s likely to have a few boxes of stale pasta left in in the pantry by other family. Of course, in this middle-class millennial’s kitchen there might be dairy free ice cream, paleo pasta, plant-based patties, vegan butter, you name the trend — but irrespective of the contents of our bags, we must learn to accept, unpack, sort, nourish, and clean out the fridge from time to time. What is not transformed will be transferred. Racial trauma exemplifies this.

I may have come down from Everest, but I’ll never come all the way down. This millennial chooses to dream, from basecamp, thank you very much. I choose to wonder. I choose to expand rather than preserve — connections, joy, family, perspectives, healing, more. This is my choice, but this is also my unearned privilege. It’s been well over half a century since the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It’s been a little less than a half century since this family fracture. Statistically speaking, I have around a half century left in my life to harness this generational privilege to expand joy and healing, aided by the alchemy of time. I choose expansive joy, today, tomorrow, and all the days to come.