Tai Ji Men Qigong Academy

Family Reunited

Having been striving as a businesswoman in the United States for a decade, I have encountered many unexpected happenings. Unfortunately, many of those weren’t pleasant, such as the contention for equity and involvement in cross-border lawsuits. I had to arm myself with aggressiveness, and so I became very difficult to get close to. I think I was an overly strict supervisor in the eyes of my colleagues. I always assumed that others personally had something against me whenever they were offering a suggestion, and so I would fight back with either an excuse or a satire because I couldn’t stand listening to it. I became a person that was hard to deal with. Worst of all, my co-workers were all my relatives because I worked in a family-run company!

My long-lasted belief that one always had to strive for life in order for success had to do with my experiences as a child. As I recall, my family was pretty well off financially when I was very little. My parents used to run an appliance shop that carried highly priced televisions. They also kept a safe box in the store for keeping the cash that was made from the good business. Imagine how the only safe in the whole village attracted the villagers’ attention. They started to ask my parents to help store their valuable belongings in our safe—until one afternoon when the safe was stolen. That made my parents debtors to the villagers. It totally changed the destiny of my family. My parents had to go out and work to pay the debt, and I was sent away to live with my grandparents. I was only a month old at that time. After Grandpa passed away, I then went with Grandma to seek refuge from Uncle’s family at the age of two. From then on, Grandma and I started to live in Uncle’s factory and helped keep watch over the factory.

I already knew the feeling of being looked down upon when I stayed in Uncle’s factory as young as two. Uncle ran a company with his wife’s relatives and led a wealthy life, while Grandma and I came from a poor countryside, which made our lifestyles very incompatible. I started to realize that in order to change how people saw me, I would have to work hard and be a successful person in my own career. All those experiences caused my insecure senses toward life and relationships with others, because I was so afraid of being hurt. Gradually, I became a difficult person. After Uncle’s family moved to the United States, I finally moved back to live with my own family when I was in middle school. However, after being apart with my parents and siblings for a long while, I could not call them "Father" and "Mother" without feeling awkward. I felt like a stranger even though we were supposed to be familiar with each other. A year later, I was admitted to a high school out of town, then attended a college about 60 miles away from home, and even later came abroad for more education in the U.S. Home seemed to have become farther and farther away...

Years later I returned to work for our family business after graduation. Since I didn’t feel very close to my family, I thought it would be really easy for me to separate business from personal affair. I would be really strict toward co-workers even though they were my own siblings. I firmly believed that whoever made a mistake should be accounted for, and that was how I showed them that I was able to be in charge and my family ought to be looked up to among my relatives. For this reason, going to work was like going to the battlefield every day, which made me very exhausted at the end of the day. As for the rest of my family in Taiwan, I only made calls when there was something urgent to discuss. Indifference would be the right word to describe the relationships between my family and me. A lot of times I thought about showing my care for them, but I didn’t know how and where to start. The distance between us made our relationships even more remote. At that point, it seemed that it didn’t really matter if we made an effort to call each other or not.

Last year, I tiredly returned to Tai Ji Men Qigong Academy in Los Angeles. When Shifu saw me, he said to me with a smile, "You’re back!" That made me feel at home and teary. Shifu encouraged me to adjust my temper, and I decided to change myself. I started with trying to listen when others spoke and let them finish what they wanted to say. I have to admit that at first I had to make a big effort to restrain myself from interrupting others. After a few months of practice, I became more patient. I also started to think to myself, "If I could love Shifu like a father, why couldn’t I love my own father with my whole heart? If I could get along with other dizi at Tai Ji Men, why couldn’t I get along with my own siblings?" I couldn’t come up with the answer right away. The other Tai Ji Men members were patient listeners, which encouraged me to share my thoughts naturally. Every time I shared my stories about my family members, it was like playing an old movie, and the confusions in my heart had been resolved one by one. The other Tai Ji Men dizi also encouraged me to try to love my own family. After hearing many dizi sharing their self-reflections in the academy, I realized that everyone here has their own stories and that they eventually found their genuine love toward their families when they let go of hard feelings from before. It was then I saw myself clearly as if I was seeing myself in the mirror. I wanted to reunite with my family.

Shifu once told me, "To love is to see the efforts from each other." In the past, I only thought of my miserable childhood without parents by my side. Now I know how painful it must have been for them to have to send me away. I was also surprised to know that they felt guilty for doing that after I thought it all through. I was once blinded by the thought of wanting to be a successful businesswoman, but now I see the hearts and feelings of my dear family.

Now I am able to call my parents "Father" and "Mother" with sincerity. I make phone calls to them once a week to greet them and chat. I know we are always on each other’s minds no matter how far away we are from each other, even separated by the Pacific Ocean, especially now that I have my own children. I also keep good relationships with my siblings by showing my true care for them, and gradually, we talk more and more about everything. I believe this is just a beginning of an even more caring and closer relationship between my family and me as long as I keep working on it.