Roshni:
You're listening to the Mango and Gnocchi Podcast. I'm Roshni.
Rebecca:
And I'm Rebecca. And we're asking the question, what is your grief craving? We are both nurses, grief experts and avid home cooks. We’re the founders of Marigolde, a grief wellness platform rooted in food, culture and rituals.
Roshni:
We created the Mango and Gnocchi Podcast to highlight the power of our collective food stories. Stories that nurture us, bring us joy, and take us out of our minds and into our hearts.
Roshni:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Mango and Gnocchi. I'm joined here with the amazing Charlene Lam, founder of the Grief Gallery.
Charlene:
Hi, Roshni. Hi, Rebecca.
Rebecca:
Hi, Charlene. Welcome. We're so happy to have you here today.
Roshni:
Yeah, we're so excited to talk to you because as a fellow artist and a curator, when I saw, you know, how you talk about grief and how you frame it, I just thought, wow, like, this is so deeply creative. It's visually striking. And it really spoke to, you know, the core of my heart. I want you to explain sort of like, what do you mean by “curating grief”? And that makes so much sense. But I would love for you to describe it. Like, how is that an artistic practice? How do you do that practically? And even for our listeners, like, how can we do that, you know, day to day in our life in very simple ways.
Charlene:
Yeah, I appreciate your enthusiasm for curating grief because not everyone gets it. But obviously when we met, we love food; we're not shy about talking about grief and loss. And I think we got the sense that we're both very artistic and we both love to use our senses in different ways. So I love that you get it. When I first started talking about it, I realized, oh— I had to back up, because to me, it makes total sense to curate grief, to put on my curator hat when I'm thinking of how to sort physical things as well as emotional things. But I realized I had to back up and actually even define curating, because if you don't have an art background, if you don't like going to museums or if you don't consider yourself creative, that might feel a little daunting and people might think, ooh, do I need to be an artist to curate grief? Do I need to be creative in order to do this?
It all started because when my mother died, I was an independent curator in London, and this was ten years ago, so 2013. And she left a house full of stuff in New York, which is where I'm from. And it was my job as an only child to clear up her house and to sort through all this stuff. And being able to lean on my creative instincts and my skills as a curator turned out to be key for sorting through all of my mother's belongings. I really… think by instinct, but I also say by desperation, borrowed this lens of curating. And I asked myself, what if I was to do an exhibition about my mother?
If I was to do an exhibition about my mother, which 100 objects would I choose?
And I actually still have the label on the box printed “One Hundred Objects”. I took this so seriously as a way to get started with looking at her things and sorting through the things, and looking at them in a creative and beautiful way. So for me it was very personal. It was what I needed to do in order to get through this terrible task that a lot of people have to do after they lose a loved one. And then it became a creative practice. I did do an exhibition in London about, I think it was a little over two years after my mother died, featuring her belongings, and I invited other artists to show their work, too— embroidery artists that I had worked with earlier. And then when I decided to help other people with grief, I really looked back and said, Why was that so helpful? Why was curating so helpful? And that's how I kind of derived my approach, which is called Curating Grief.
We all know what curating means because we like art and creativity, I think. But the word curating now means so many different things. We talk about curating our Instagram grid. People talk about curated resources in their newsletters. So it's become very broad in its usage. I still like to think of it in that setting of art and design in galleries and museums. One, because it's my happy place, museums and art. Like my parents took me to museums from a really early age. And two, because I find that metaphor of an exhibition and imagining that gallery space to be really helpful for how I talk about grief now and how I help my clients.
Roshni:
I'm imagining you like, coming into my kitchen where I'm just hoarding so many, you know, tchotchkes and like, oh, this spice, and that spice and this saute pan. You know, things I should probably get rid of, but, you know. I have so many things without handles. I'm sure that's very common that people hold on to. But, I totally relate to that instinct to like, hold on to as much as possible, because we're so afraid of like forgetting, or losing a piece of our loved one. And I'm wondering, like you said, you know, your mom left a whole lifetime, and probably things she inherited from her parents— and her parents. And for folks, you know, who may not be so deeply connected to the land of our families, I'm curious, like, how do you think we can create this semblance of home?
That's something I've been thinking about a lot. Is that material object, is it little physical reminders? Is it, you know, like my grandmother's mortar and pestle or her, like little spice dabbas that she had? What is it that constitutes and makes up you know, your space; both physically and emotionally?
Charlene:
Yeah. I love how you named hoarding.
Roshni:
I'm admitting it.
Charlene:
I doubt that you're actually a hoarder. But I've been fascinated by our relationships with objects and why people keep things, long before my mother died. I'm very attached to objects. I love things. So I was, even before I had to clear out my mother's house, it was difficult for me to let things go. So that really was a case where I realized, Oh, I am so ill-suited for this task. Every time that we have to move, my husband and I, we get in fights. Divorce usually gets brought up– because I have so much trouble letting things go. So I wanted to touch on that because when we think about our families of origin in our culture, I do have hoarders in my family, not just in the kind of colloquial way that we talk about hoarding, but people who have a hoarding disorder are most likely, even if not diagnosed. So I think that also informed my interest on why do people keep things? So there was a period where I was doing research about that, and it was so interesting to learn that people keep things for all kinds of reasons. And that definitely extends into my grief work where we think about, oh, some people do keep things because they think they will be letting their person down. They will be dishonoring their grandmother's memory if they let go of that family heirloom. Or other people think, so-and-so will be mad at me, because the message they've gotten is “You need to keep that. That was her favorite.” So I just kind of want to note that, hey, if you want to keep things, I'm not saying you need to get rid of everything. I am not Marie Kondo.
And if you want to let go of things. Permission is given there too. Not that you need permission, but I really find in my grief work, and maybe find this too, that people are seeking permission. Maybe because we get so many messages.
Rebecca:
How do you coach someone through that? Because it's one thing to say, I give you permission to let anything go that you need to let go of. And it's another to actually, like, bit by bit, kind of release yourself from that attachment. So how do you approach that with your clients?
Charlene:
Yeah. I think we often talk about the role of bonds and ties.
Bonds attach us to people and to things and to places and to flavors, to smells… all of these attachments.
And part of my work is helping people to become more aware of what these bonds actually are. So I often talk about this example of the soy sauce in my mother's kitchen, and I have a demo soy sauce here with me. This is not the soy sauce that was actually in my mother's kitchen, but I talk about it,
Roshni:
Oh, no? It's not the 2013 vintage that you saved for over ten years without using it?
Charlene:
No.
So that is part of it, right? That it's not the original piece. I was tempted to keep it. That soy sauce in her kitchen was one of the last things that I let go of. I actually had to call my cousin in for reinforcement because I couldn't throw away the soy sauce that was in my mother's kitchen. And sometimes I talk about these objects as anchor objects where my mother's soy sauce had all these stories and memories attached to it. Good ones, like how she would cook. And she was an amazing cook. She made Chinese dishes, but also Western dishes. And there were family memories about having dim sum and getting together with family when I was a little kid, and even as an adult.
And attached to it were not-so-great memories and not-so-great stories about how I missed my chance to learn how to cook from my mother. And did that mean I didn't care enough? Why didn't I come home more? Did she know I cared? Does that mean I was a bad daughter? All of that was also attached to the soy sauce. So you can imagine that all of those are bonds and ties. No wonder I felt so attached to it, right? And yeah, I did think about “do I take the soy sauce with me?” This is clearly very important. But I lived an ocean away. It didn't make any sense to put this in my suitcase. How do I explain that to the airport security people? “It was my mom’s soy sauce….” Right. So sometimes I talk about our full range of options.
I don't have to keep the bottle of soy sauce. I do want to keep some of these stories. They are not the same thing. The stories, and the memories, and the meaning, and the object. They're not the same thing.
Roshni:
Charlene, I'm wondering if you can tell us a bit more about your mom, like what she was like you said. You know, she's this amazing cook and I know, you know, this act of cooking and nurturing can be so complicated sometimes— it's like we do it out of joy, but for a lot of people, they have to do it, you know? And they may not always have a choice. So I'm just curious how your mom navigated that and how she nurtured you. Like, what was her style, what you took away from her? And wondering, you know, how you're nurturing and caring for yourself now, living again in a different country.
Charlene:
Yeah, my mother was home to me. For a very long time. My mother, Marilyn, she was an amazing woman. She was born in Hong Kong and moved to New York City when she was 15. Her family immigrated and she arrived, not really speaking English, and she had to figure out how to integrate into America. She attended a high school that was quite mixed, and she also helped out in the family laundry. My grandparents, they opened a Chinese laundry. Like a lot of Chinese immigrants did. And she led a couple of different lives. She had led the life that she did in high school and as a 20 something, figuring out what's her identity, what's her role in this world. And she also led the life of helping out with the family business, ironing by hand, helping customers. And later on, she kind of noted how she gave up a lot of her childhood in order to help the family.
And I think in the way that she raised me, she was very conscious of not wanting that for me. Even in high school, when I said, you know, “I think I want to get a job”. She said, “No, your job is school. I don't want you to worry about any of that”. And that included cooking, cleaning all the tasks around the house. Me not learning how to cook from her was not because we didn't get along. It wasn't because I wasn't interested in food. I love food. My family is very food motivated. Very food focused. Like a lot of Chinese families are. But I think my mom really felt like, no, my job was school. She was going to take on all the household roles. So while she might, yes, have me chop some vegetables or wash some things for her, setting the table was really the extent of my job at home in terms of household tasks.
And I really do credit her for encouraging me to have a real childhood because she really didn't miss out on a lot of that for herself. And she wanted to keep me safe. She wanted to be that security, and she really was. Even after my parents divorced, and they sold the house that we lived in, in California, even after we lost my childhood home, the apartment in New York, my mother's home, her house, was my safe place. When my husband and I moved to Europe, we could leave our things with her. She was our permanent address. And I knew that if anything happened, I could go back to her house. So she was my home. She was my safety. She was my security. And we would go back on major holidays, and we would go and relax at her house. She would cook for us. The Chinese dishes, the Western dishes, and she would just spoil us. So that was home to me. And when she died, yes, we talk about the primary loss of a person and we also talk about all the secondary losses, all that ripples out from there. And losing my mother really was losing my sense of security and safety and home.
Rebecca:
In what ways do you call her back in?
Charlene:
It's been a process in a lot of different ways. My mother, she did find ways to bring joy. She was always really good at enjoying things, enjoying food, enjoying the little things. And in her last years, she really blossomed. She moved back from California to New York, where her friends were, and family, and she bought a house of her own. She built that out into her dream house by the lake, and she really treated herself. She bought cashmere sweaters. She went out for dim sum and lunch with her girlfriends all the time. She would organize these girl trips of retired ladies, and they would travel the world. In her last couple of years, she went to South America. She went to Russia. And when she died, she was planning a trip to Asia, and a trip to Alaska. So she was living very fully. And I think that was inspiration for me to treat myself in the way that my mother would have treated myself. I don't like feeling deprived.
I get quite sad when I'm hungry. So I had no qualms about having lots of comfort foods in her house when I was figuring out how to clean it out. I would go to the shop and get dumplings. I would get potato chips, I would get chocolate pudding. Head cheese, which is kind of a weird one as a comfort food, but it means a lot to us as a family. And so it started with the food, as a way to comfort myself.
But then it also became wearing her cashmere sweaters, saying, you know what? No more cheap fabrics, only things that feel good on my skin. Cotton, and linen, and silk. And not thinking of that as indulgent, but essential. So I really do credit my mom for finding her way to taking care of herself in a lot of ways, and inspiring me to not feel ashamed or to doubt myself about taking care of myself after she died.
Rebecca:
Thank you for sharing some of those moments that brought you back to being close with your mom. And even as you processed and curated her objects, you mentioned a few of the foods that were important to you, that kind of guided you through. And in our podcast, we like to ask, you know, what is your grief craving? And I invite you to walk us through one of those, or a few of those memories where you answered that craving.
Charlene:
Dumplings. Dumplings are my love language. I still have this dream of going on a dumpling world tour. Just traveling the world, sampling everyone's dumplings.
Roshni:
I love that.
Rebecca:
Yes!
Roshni:
Can we go? That’s a retreat you need to organize!
Charlene:
Yes! There's so many good dumplings, right? We've got Korean Mandu. We've got Turkish Manti. We've got, of course, all the Chinese ones. On this recent trip to New York. I was in New York for five days and I had at least eight different kinds of dumplings. And some of those, a big number of those were during dim sum, but I was so delighted.
And dumplings go way back. I don't remember this too clearly because I'm the youngest child in my extended family. So, my grandmother would get together with the family every Sunday and apparently some people would go to church and then they would all go to dim sum at this particular restaurant in Chinatown, in Manhattan, in New York, which is where I grew up until the age of ten.
And, apparently she would host dumpling parties, where the family would get together at our childhood apartment, which was my grandmother's apartment, and make dumplings. So pork and chives, and all the wrappers. And I do have vague memories of how you seal the edges of the dumpling with beaten egg yolk, I think. Different people have different techniques for how to seal it, what kind of wrapper you use, like how you pleat it. Again, I was too young to really make many of them, but I ate a lot of them.
And the beauty of living in Chinatown was that there were a lot of places to have dumplings, and there was a place on Doyers Street that was the dumpling house. And my mother would tease me because I would use so much vinegar, I would use so much vinegar on my dumplings that my lips would turn white.
Roshni:
Vinegar lips?
Charlene:
Yeah. Because sometimes people kind of tend to do soy sauce with dumplings, or they do a mix. I just loved vinegar. So yeah, white lips. Dumplings. Totally worth it. So I, I definitely default to dumplings. When I lived in San Francisco and I didn't really know how to cook, I think I pretty much lived on frozen dumplings.
Yeah. Any occasion.
Roshni:
It's definitely a food group.
Charlene:
Yes, Right. I'm like, what's our diagram of food groups?
Roshni:
Dumplings are not dumplings.
Roshni:
What's your favorite filling? Because I’m big on, I love like, the chives and shrimp. I would say that's my favorite.
Charlene:
Oh, yeah, definitely with chives. Hmm, I mean, I will eat them all, right? There is siu long bao, or in Mandarin is xiao long bao. So that's like the steamed soup dumplings that tends not to have chives. That's pork. And sometimes if you do the special kind, it's with crab meat on top.
Roshni:
Oooh.
Charlene:
Really hot, really juicy, really fatty. My husband's like, Ooh, that's a little bit too much for me, a little too indulgent. It's perfect for me. And then there are variations. There are boiled dumplings that, the classic one with pork and chives, love that. I think it's the pork and chive combo. That's my number one. And the chive and shrimp combination. That's number two.
And on this last trip, we went to dim sum with my aunt, and we tried a place that had kind of updated their menu and they had like three kinds of gao choi gao, which is, that's in Cantonese for chive dumpling, which is one of my husband's favorites. So chives with shrimp, chives with pork, in different kinds of wrappers. And it has to be a delicate wrapper, right? It can't be like that thick, chewy wrapper that overwhelms the filling. No. The wrapper’s essential, but it's really a vehicle for conveying the filling, so. Oh, my God. I'm getting hungry.
Roshni:
Yeah, where are the dumplings?! You just brought up memories of, you know, I went to NYU, and when I was in nursing school, I did clinicals around Chinatown. I remember almost every Tuesday, I was religiously looking forward to Vanessa's on Eldridge Street, that was my “must”.
Rebecca:
Oh, yes!
Roshni:
And you know, yeah, Rebecca studied in New York too, in downtown.
Charlene:
So cheap!
Roshni:
Yeah! And like, and I can imagine, like, what you're describing, you know, that was such a source of comfort for me. There was some good Indian food, but I felt like Chinatown just felt so home like. You know, with all the bitter melon, and the greens and, you know, like Hong Kong tea style tea, black tea, you know, with the evaporated milk and
Charlene:
And the boba?
Roshni:
Sometimes even condensed milk. The boba, yeah, but like all those textures, smells to me, just, you know, even though it's a world away, it felt, you know, I was lonely, like 21, and I survived on dumplings for a very long time.
Rebecca:
Well, dumplings have this magical quality of being able to really fill you up, but in this way, where you still want more. it's so, it's so comforting in that way. Like it grounds you and makes you feel full and cozy and at home, But you still have space for more. I love that about dumplings.
Charlene:
Yeah, there's such a phenomenon, right? I'm like, how did I just eat 20 dumplings in one sitting?
Rebecca:
Seriously!
Charlene:
But it's also like, such so affectionate, right? You can definitely see how you might call someone my little dumpling. It's so cute and self-contained…
Question for you: Do you think a Bao is a type of dumpling?
Rebecca:
I think of it more like a bun than a dumpling.
Charlene:
Yeah. Yeah. When I eat bao or buns, like I don't eat the bread. Again, it's really about the filling. So I just eat the filling.
Rebecca:
Really?
Charlene:
I just do a little nibble. But I was just reminded of good memories with that too, where my mother, or my uncle, or my grandmother would pick me up from school in Chinatown. We would go across the street to the bakery and I would get a steamed bun with the pork filling, and like the one memory of like the very sad moment when we're waiting to cross the street. And my mother grabbed my hand and pulled me forward, and I, and I lost my grip on my bao.
Roshni:
Oh, no. A trampled bun!
Charlene:
I just remember, you know, like my little kid voice going, “bao bao!”, You know, I'm just like, Oh, my God, that's so sad. I lost my bao!
Ah, childhood, you know, understandings of loss. Yeah, I think I really felt the loss of that bao in a way that I didn't understand the loss of my grandmother, interestingly.
Like losing my grandmother, I was, five. I, that was my first encounter with the death of someone and I remember my mother really struggled with trying to explain what happened, where she had gone. And she tried to use the “it's like she's sleeping” kind of thing. And that just confused me more because I was like, “Oh, so she's sleeping?” and she had to back up and say, Well, no, she's not coming back. And it took me quite a while to understand the reality of that, and what that actually meant. And to even, I don't even know if I really… What does grieving look like for a five year old? But I think back to that bun, and I can feel like, oh, the pang, the pain, the grief of losing the bun. That's so strange, isn’t it?
Roshni:
Yeah. And the idea that it was a treasure that was lost, right? That was especially made, or gifted to you.
So I do want to talk a bit about, you know, your definition of grief in your sort of, the Grief Gallery lens. And also, so much of your work is so intensely, deeply personal, right. You're literally opening up your home, your parents home, your loved one's home, and smelling it and touching, you know, their clothes. You're walking into the kitchen and, you know, the sense of smell that holds, you know, in nan Indian home, it's like asafoetida or hing, mixed with a little bit of curry leaf. Add a little dash of turmeric. Yeah, like, I want to hear how you know, how you describe grief in your lens and also how can we, yeah, reach into those, like, smells and sights and textures to inform our grieving process? Because I think a big focus for us at Marigolde, and with Rebecca and I in the conversations we have, is that grief is intellectualized so often. It's like you're saying, you know, so-and-so is sleeping, they're gone. We use these words that are sort of like euphemisms with the hopes that it's somehow gentle on you. But I think physically there's this deep reaction, you know, to losing the bao. You're screaming, you know, maybe you have a stomach ache, I don't know. And certainly a lot of people have very real physical manifestations of their grief. And I feel like curating that experience can be so grounding and nurturing.
Charlene:
I'm just thinking of the smells in my mother's house where her house had a definite smell, and it's one of those I-can't-define-it kind of things, where if I open up a box that still has a textile that's in a plastic bag, I can still open it ten years later and get a whiff of her house. And I don't know what it is. I don't know what that combination is. I don't know if it's Tide detergent mixed with something else, but it's very much her house and my mom. And of course, a lot of people talk about the smells and worrying about the smell fading.
And to your point about how we understand grief, when I decided to help other people, it really did start off as such a personal process, right. Telling my story. And sometimes I say I crack my heart open and share my loss and my story as an invitation for other people to share. And I also think now my heart healed with hinges. So it's not like I crack it open, and it's raw and weeping and vulnerable. Yes, it's vulnerable, but I'm not in pain. It's more like it's on hinges that just swing open really easily for people now.
And, when I decided to help other people, it was really important to me to get grief training. Because I recognize that my experience was not the same as other people's. Other people grieve in a different way. They had different circumstance. She died so suddenly from a stroke that I really needed that time to process what happened and try to make sense of things. And her death was sudden, other people have been dealing with a family member with an illness, so it's a very different kind of experience. So it was very important to me to, one, get grief training to understand more about our understanding and what the research says about how we grieve, and to understand why taking this approach of curating and being creative was so effective for me and why it works for my grief coaching clients. I know it works. I know when I tell the story of curating that people are touched by it, and it shifts the way that they see the grief and the way that they see the belongings. So I really, really wanted to understand that. My background includes journalism, so I really wanted to be able to cite sources.
And, now there's also a broadening of my approach of, yes, I understand some of the theory, the grief theory, what we understand about how humans grieve now. There have been so many advances in the last couple of decades, and there's more that has not been explored.
There really isn't research out there, right, into how the things that we're doing— why does it work? Why is taking such a human approach, why is it taking such a holistic approach that's so necessary to help guide people through grief?
But I think it's improving.
Last week I attended a conference led by Mary Frances O'Connor. She's the author of The Grieving Brain, and she's a neuroscientist, and she actually put the grieving people through an MRI to see how their brains responded to grief. But I really love how she defined grief. Or reminded me of how to define grief. Usually when we think of grief, we think, oh, it's an emotion, the emotion of grief.
And she reminded me that grief can also be thought of as a response. A response, a natural response to losing anything that we're attached to. So that can be a person, that can be a pet, that can be a place, that can be a flavor, that can be a food. Anything that we're attached to in that response, that grief response includes emotions. It includes thoughts, it includes behaviors, and it includes physiological responses in our bodies.
And I loved being reminded of that, because that makes so much more sense to me and I think probably makes so much more sense to you, too, that, of course, grief is a full body, all senses, world-encompassing, sometimes world-shattering experience.
And she also reminded me that grief is a noun and to grieve is a verb.
I say that often to clients, and in my talks, grieving is an active process. I've plenty of people in my life, in my family, who have carried grief for decades, and never actually taken the action of grieving. And I've seen how that's weighed them down, the impact on them. And I think that's why I love this approach of grief coaching, because coaching is active. It's often, it may not be as active with grief coaching as in other kinds of coaching, but there is the implication of movement, there is the implication of something that is being processed, something that's active, that's happening.
So it makes so much more sense to me to think of grief as a full body, full life process.
Rebecca:
I would love to know how you guide people through curating when maybe they don't have experience with it, but they're interested in approaching their own processing of grief in this way. And how do you kind of walk them through it and bring it alive for them so that they understand what curating is and what is what they will come away with.
Charlene:
So I define curating as choosing with intention. And to me, that really helps to explain why I believe that we are all curators in our everyday lives, and especially after we lose a loved one,
in that we're always making choices. Yes, I had a gallery space that I could work with in London that I had done exhibitions in, but you have wall space, you have shelves, you have bags, even you have drawers, you have spaces in your life that are filled with stuff and you choose what goes into those spaces. So that's how I define curating, that we get to choose with intention. One, what goes on a shelf, what takes up visual space, what takes up physical space, and also what takes up emotional space.
And then sometimes I like to use that analogy of a bag too, because sometimes what we carry with us when we're thinking about grief is not just in our homes. We carry it with us throughout our days. Right? And sometimes clients will often describe their grief as heavy. And to me that means something is weighing them down. So really the first step is to unpack, to look at what are we carrying?
We can't make choices until we really know what we're carrying. And there's some similarities there, right, with how professional organizers might help people to sort through things. We have to take everything out and look at it first. So that's really the first step. I start with helping people to unpack. What are all the things? How do you remember your person? What are you thinking of when you look at your person? What are all the things in the house? Sometimes people are actually going through the house or the storage unit as we're working together. I don't go there with them. Again, I'm not a professional organizer, but they are surrounded by the actual physical stuff.
Other people are carrying, emotional stuff that they've been dragging behind them for decades.
And when they come to me, they're feeling ready to actually look at it to see what's been so heavy. Or maybe they haven't even realized until now, that it has been weighing them down. So we start by unpacking and looking at what's there, and then we can start to choose.
I ask people, how do you want to remember your person? If you were to choose items, what would you choose? So that question about if you were to do an exhibition about your person, what would you choose to display? That's really saying, okay, what stories are standing out to you? What memories, what things feel significant or meaningful to you? And some people can easily name, Oh, this object. Great. This is a meaningful object to you. What does it mean to you? This is a significant object. What does it signify to you? And if you remember the soy sauce with all the things attached, then we can start to see what else is attached. It's not just the physical object. It's all of it. Is there resentment there? Is their guilt, is their shame, is there regret? And it's a process of loosening some of those ties for things they don't want to keep.
And then we can start to choose. We can start to curate. And then if people feel like they are ready to create something, some people will actually curate an exhibition for their person as a memorial, for instance, the memorial they really wanted to give them. Maybe it's the ten year anniversary or a significant date, and for other people that exhibition might look like a book. Maybe they choose stories and they choose objects for their family, answering that question, how do I want to remember my person?
So you don't need a gallery space, this one to make that clear. You don't need a gallery space. You don't need to be a curator. If you are a human being, you are making choices all the time. Let's help you to make those choices with intention.
Rebecca:
Gosh, that's so beautiful. I'm just imagining that, the metaphor of the bag and what you're carrying. I think that when, just in my personal experiences, when it comes to unpacking that bag, that's when all the voices come in that are like, don't get rid of that. That was her favorite thing or so and so will be mad if I let this go, or we've had this for 40 years, we can't get rid of it now. And so therefore, you're just by default, carrying around all of this weight that may not belong to you. And I love that the clarifying and transformative aspect of choosing what you want to carry. And you know, you may not have that bottle of soy sauce, but you do have the flavor, you do have the memory and every time you go out to eat, you can choose to dip back into that memory or include it in the way that you cook for yourself or your family. I mean, those sort of subtle essences of the tastes and smells and memories, that is what you carry with you every day. But in this way of lightness and remembrance rather than, you know, resentment and an obligation.
Charlene:
Yes, like obligation feels heavy,
Rebecca:
Yeah.
Charlene
Right? Being able to carry our loved ones and our memories, and our flavors, and our heritage in a way that feels light, that does feel portable, that feels uplifting rather than like a burden that's weighing us down. That's my goal. And I think a helpful question can be, what are you really trying to hold on to when you feel compelled to hold on to an object?
A bottle of soy sauce. This is not my mother's brand of soy sauce. It does look familiar to me, but I don't know if it was actually her brand or a lot of, a lot of Asian families have this where it's like, No, no, no. Our family, this brand of soy sauce, there's this brand for the light soy sauce. There's the dark soy sauce. Other people have a fish sauce. They have like the XO sauce, the oyster sauce. And they are very particular about their brands.
And I asked my aunt, “what was my mother's favorite brand?”, and she sent me a name, but I looked it up and I'm like, that was not the bottle that was in her cabinet.
Roshni:
Do you even know your mom?
Charlene:
Right? But I was like, eh… but that's the thing. Right, my aunt knew her in a different way. Maybe when they were growing up, that was the brand. Or maybe my mother changed. Who knows?
Roshni:
She invested in the cashmere of soy sauce.
Charlene:
She’s like, I upgraded.
Roshni:
Barrel aged only.
Charlene:
Yeah, but like, I could obsess about it, right? I could say, No, no, no. I need to go back and, like, forensically look back. Let me go through hypnosis and try to, like, conjure up the vision of what was the soy sauce brand that was in my mother's kitchen cabinet. But when I think, what am I actually trying to hold on to? It's not the brand of soy sauce. It's not like, Oh, no, I have to go and seek out that specific brand here in Lisbon in order to honor my mother's memory.
That’s not it. What I want to hold on to is her love for people, our shared love for food. How proud she would be of me that, like I am a much better cook now. That's the silver lining of the pandemic. I learned how to cook, and she would be so impressed. And that's what I'm holding on to. It's not the soy sauce itself,
Roshni:
As we come to a close, I am thinking, it'll be holiday season really soon. I think we're already in the holiday season and, I love the idea of curating for the sake of remembering through lightness, through joy. It brings this idea of altars. And altars are such a big part of the holidays for us, and even daily practice as a seasonal practice, you know, decorating it, having little, you know, textiles or fruits. And, you know, I think fruit is very much a shared love language in Asian cultures of, you know, we would totally judge people if they didn't bring us the right kind of fruit as a gift, like, oh, my gosh, look at that.
So I wanted to ask you if your mom could join you, you know, at your holiday table. Like, what would that be like and what would you feed her? What would you feed your loved ones, and how would you both celebrate, but also reflect and honor the losses, you know, you've all been through.
Charlene
The traditional foods. It's a really interesting one to me because. Yes, I'm Chinese-American, I'm proudly Chinese-American. (At least I am now.) That was a journey, too. And my mother was proud to be Chinese-American, but I think mostly to protect me. She didn't really teach me much about what was traditional. A lot of Asian Americans are taught to assimilate as a way to succeed and a way to fit in. So I don't have a lot of those traditions.
Other people that I've met, I did this residency in Toronto and the head of that residency, she was telling me about how, oh, when her grandmother died, they had this whole procession in Taiwan, and all these traditions and altars. And I did feel a pang of loss there because I realized, oh, I don't know what any of those mean. I've seen altars in different Chinese stores and in restaurants. I know that there's some incense. I know there's the foil things that they burn, the joss, the paper money. We didn't have that in our home. And I only know what it looks like. The offerings of fruit to different kinds of food. But I never did that. I don't know the significance other than if I Google for that information. I remember I thought the joss, which is this paper that has this foil on it, was so pretty and I used it to do like a decoupage project when I was in elementary school. And my mother was horrified.
Roshni:
Oh no, is it a really big no no. The ancestors are not happy.
Charlene 2 49:53
I think so. I don't know if it’s because it's associated with death, but I think maybe you burn that for your deceased ancestors or something? But she was horrified. I don't know if it was a dishonorable thing. Most likely it was a superstitious thing. There's a lot of superstition in Chinese culture, which definitely affected my experience of grief. But that's, that's another topic.
So I don't know all the specifics of altars, but I make my own versions. I definitely like filling a bowl with oranges. That's something that a lot of Chinese do. I know it's considered lucky for the Lunar New Year. And Portugal grows a lot of oranges. The Algarve produces a lot of oranges. You can get fresh squeezed orange juice everywhere and I think about, Oh my gosh, my mom would be so delighted by all this fresh squeezed orange juice, which is typically very expensive and you only have it and you splurge when you go to brunch or for a special occasion or something. And here you can get it in every grocery store. And so we would have bowls of oranges.
We would have fish, because my mother loved fish. I still have not tried how to steam a whole fish with ginger and scallions, which is the classic way to do it and was her favorite way to do it. But I have learned how to cook filets of fish, so I would make that for her, and she would be very proud, and she would say, Oh, you're so smart, you did such a great job. And I would know that it actually is not that difficult to pan fry some fish filets. And I would be very pleased at the praise, which is very much that the dynamic that we had. Right, that she would say, I'm so proud of you. That's so amazing. And I'm like, Oh, it's just a salad dressing, but thanks, Mom! So that was very much our dynamic, so I can totally imagine her doing that. And then duck. Oh, Roast Duck is also one of my love languages.
Roshni:
It's Rebecca's favorite. Her mother in law is the duck queen.
Charlene:
Oh! let's go visit!
But like, roast duck in Chinatown is a big thing. and we don't really do a big Christmas anymore. So, when we would go home to visit my mother, I would always ask for roast duck for Christmas. So I love duck in many, many forms. The Portuguese also love duck.
There's like arroz de pato, which is like with shredded duck, and you can buy duck breasts here at the local butchers for a very affordable price. So I've learned how to cook duck breast. Again, she would be very, very impressed. But they also sell whole ducks and that is beyond my scope and knowledge. So I mean, it's very fatty, right? It splatters everywhere. Yeah, I've read up on it and I'm like, you know, I think I don't even know how to use the oven here. Again, that's a very Chinese thing we don't necessarily use the oven.
Rebecca:
It’s an art.
Charlene:
Right!? And I’m like, I haven't learned that part yet. So I would ask her to roast a duck or to teach me, how do you cook a whole duck? Because I know it can be delicious. I know that just like the turkey that she would make for Thanksgiving, that you can make congee with the bones, and the leftovers. And Thanksgiving congee is way more delicious than the roasted turkey. So I know that we could make duck congee and I would ask her to teach me. Show me. Teach me.
Rebecca:
It's been so heartwarming and special to spend this hour with you and your mother and your grandmother and all of these inspirations and memories. Thank you so much for bringing us into a little slice of your life.
Charlene:
Thank you for having me, and your questions. And your questions about the tastes and the smells and all the senses, right, that help to surface memories that we don't necessarily access all the time, right? I believe the objects can help us to anchor the memories that we want to keep. And it's a really great reminder of different ways to surface memories that we didn't have on the surface, but we might want to keep.
Rebecca:
How can people find you if they want to check out your work, or even work with you?
Charlene:
They can go to my website www.curatinggrief.com. From there, they can check out the Grief Gallery, which is where I do exhibitions about grief and loss, featuring the objects. And they can also find out more about grief coaching and my Curating Grief approach to helping people to feel lighter and less burdened @curating_grief. And I hold a free monthly gathering for the Grief Gallery that's on the last Wednesday of every month, and people are invited into this virtual gallery space where they can share objects that remind them of their person. So I'd love to hear, What are you eating? What are you keeping? Like you said, what you craving, what are you longing for?
Roshni:
I went to one of Charlene's Grief Gallery gatherings during The Dinner Party, and it was so beautiful and stunning just to see the collage, because everyone chooses this amazing platform where you put up images and you know what you're craving, literally, how you're feeling. And to see sort of that visual tapestry, it's so uplifting. Left me, you know, it was about grief, but I left there feeling so inspired and it was so beautiful. So Charlene, I think it's such a beautiful practice. So thank you for bringing into the world.
Charlene:
Thank you so much.
Rebecca:
Thank you again. Charlene. It was amazing having you here today.
Charlene:
Yeah. Obrigado.
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