Echoes of My Ancestors

I have practiced Chinese medicine for more than twenty years.

What I didn’t fully understand — for much of that time — was that I was practicing the medicine of my own blood.

I was born in Saigon in 1972, three years before the war ended.

My mother was Cao Kim Ngoc. My father, I have been told, was French. They may have been married; they may have separated before I came. I have never met either of them. I was adopted, and I was raised far from the country of my birth.

My name, before it was LeTa, was Cao My Chau.

Cao is a family name — a Chinese family name, carried by the Hoa people, ethnic Chinese who settled in Vietnam across centuries.

My means beautiful.

Chau means diamond.

A beautiful diamond of the Cao family. My mother’s people.

I like to say it out loud sometimes. Cao My Chau. It sits in my mouth like a stone I have been carrying without knowing.

Cholon

My mother’s family lived at 63 Binh Tay, in the Cholon section of Saigon. Cholon — its Cantonese name means “big market” — was the Chinese heart of the city. My grandparents kept a clothing stall at the Binh Tay Market, one of the oldest and largest markets in the country. My maternal grandfather was born in China. My maternal grandmother was born in what is now Ho Chi Minh City. They were, by every indication, Hoa — ethnic Chinese who had made Vietnam their home for generations.

The Hoa were, for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the backbone of southern Vietnam’s private economy. Before 1975, Chinese-Vietnamese families in Cholon operated an estimated seventy to eighty percent of the country’s privately-owned businesses. They were merchants, herbalists, traders, tailors. They were the middle class. They were the quiet engine of a city.

After the fall of Saigon in April 1975, everything changed.

The new government moved to nationalize private business, and the Hoa — visible, successful, ethnically distinct — became a target. Properties were seized. Savings were confiscated. Between 1978 and 1982, hundreds of thousands of Hoa fled Vietnam by boat. They went to Hong Kong. To Canada. To the United States. To France. To Australia.

My mother’s family went to Australia.

My father went back to France.

And I — already carried out of the country before everything came apart — began a different life on the other side of the world, under a different name, with parents who loved me fiercely and a lineage I would not fully understand for decades.

What I know, and what I don’t

It’s been difficult in some ways to not know my bloodline.

Many do not.

Some do, and wish they did not.

I carry what I have pieced together over decades. A neighbor’s memory of the street where my mother’s family lived. A note about a woman named Miss Zhou, who cleaned shoes in the factory near the drugstore and may have worked in our house. A city I have visited only as a stranger. A face I do not know. A voice I have never heard.

There are things I will likely never recover. My mother’s hands. The smell of her kitchen. Whether she wondered about me, and for how long, and whether she still does. Whether my father ever asked after me. Whether anyone ever told them that I became a healer, half a world away, on a continent they did not expect me to land on.

I have made peace with most of it. But peace is not the same as knowing. Peace is what you build in the space where knowing cannot live.

The medicine that was already in me

I came to Chinese medicine in my twenties — not because I knew anything about it, but because my body recognized it the way a body recognizes a language it has forgotten.

I sat with my first acupuncture teacher and felt something drop into place that had been crooked my whole life.

I learned to read a pulse and felt like I was remembering something, not being taught it.

I learned the points. The meridians. The five elements. The theory of the organs. The patterns of disharmony. The classical formulas my teachers traced through centuries of lineage — and I kept having the strange, quiet feeling that I was walking a path that had been walked, somewhere, by someone who shared my blood.

I don’t know if my mother’s family practiced medicine. I know they sold cloth in a Cholon market. I know they were Hoa — Chinese by ancestry — and that Chinese medicine has been the medicine of that people for two thousand years. Not an imported tradition. Not a foreign wisdom. The medicine of the culture. The medicine of the kitchen. The medicine of the elders. The medicine of the body.

Whether they practiced it formally or not, the knowledge would have been in them. In their food. In their seasonal rhythms. In what they drank when they were cold and what they cooked when someone was sick. In the way they moved through the year.

That knowledge — ambient, inherited, uncredentialed — would have been my inheritance.

Instead, I found it again through the front door. As a student. As a patient. As a practitioner in training.

The medicine came home the long way.

Turning 54

I will be 54 this year.

In Chinese medicine, we say that a woman’s body moves through a new phase every seven years. Fifty-four is well into the years of deepening — the years where the body begins to let go of the demands of reproduction and turns toward wisdom, toward integration, toward what the tradition calls jing: the essence that has been accumulating, quietly, the whole time.

It feels like the year to finally write this down.

To say out loud: I am Cao My Chau. I am the daughter of Cao Kim Ngoc. I am granddaughter to people whose names I have not yet found — who sold cloth in a market in a neighborhood called “big market” in a city that was Saigon before it was anything else.

I am a Hoa woman. A Vietnamese woman. A Chinese-Vietnamese-American woman. A healer. A practitioner of the medicine of my mother’s people.

I do not need to meet my ancestors to honor them.

I can honor them by continuing.

What I have learned about ancestry, without meeting mine

If you have your bloodline — cherish it. Ask every question you can while your elders are still here. Collect the recipes. Record the voices. Take the photos. Know what you are carrying.

If you don’t — if you were adopted, or displaced, or estranged, or orphaned, or cut off, or lost — know this: the body remembers what the mind does not.

You can meet your ancestors without meeting your ancestors.

You can meet them in the foods that taste like home before you’ve ever tasted them.

In the music that moves something old inside you.

In the practices that feel like remembering.

In the land that calls you even when you’ve never set foot on it.

In the medicine that recognizes you when you sit down to study it.

The echoes are real. They travel through blood and through time. They find you when you’re ready to listen.

A blessing

To my mother, Cao Kim Ngoc, wherever you are: I turned out well. I am a healer. I carry your people’s medicine.

To my father, wherever you are: I know very little of you. I carry your half of me without anger.

To my grandparents in that clothing stall at Binh Tay: I think of you often. I wish I had known you. I hope I have made you proud in ways you cannot see.

To all the Hoa who left everything in 1975 and built again somewhere else: I am still here. We are still here. The medicine is still moving.

To every adopted child, every displaced person, every wanderer trying to piece together a bloodline they never knew:

The echoes are enough.

Dr. LeTa Jussila (Cao My Chau) is a Doctor of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, a Licensed Acupuncturist and Herbalist, and a Licensed Natural Medicine Facilitator in Colorado. She has been in clinical practice for more than twenty years and shares her time in Santa Cruz, California and Boulder, Colorado.

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