The Legend of Yuliang

Religion in my family

Several generations past, an ancestor on my father’s side worked in the Chinese city of Suzhou as a merchant.  His family lived in the countryside, but he had gone to the city to make a living.  He lived in tumultuous times, in an empire weakened by corruption and European colonization.  He lived during the Taiping Rebellion of the mid 19th century, when many Chinese people feared for their lives.

One night, he had a dream.  In that dream, a woman — a goddess, to him — informed him that the city of Suzhou would soon be attacked, despite it being surrounded by a wall.  Many people will be killed, she said.  You will be unlikely to survive, unless you escape now.  She told him where to find a rope to use to climb the city walls.  She told him when and where would be the safest to climb.  I know this feels risky, she said, but it is your only way.  

So my ancestor followed the woman’s instructions, climbed the city walls, and escaped Suzhou, shortly before the city saw a horrendous massacre.  He returned to his familial home in the countryside, where his family received him gladly.  He told them the story of his escape and recounted the dream and the goddess who saved him.  

This goddess was named Yuliang and is very special to my family.  After my ancestor returned to the countryside, he became the leader of a family religion centered upon worship of Yuliang.  This religion continued on for several generations, until the Chinese Communist Party began to suppress religion at about the time my grandparents were small children.  Almost all remnants of folk religions eventually were destroyed, and within a generation no one in my family worshipped Yuliang any longer.  This story is the only thread left of the tapestry of this family tradition.  

It is unclear to me if Yuliang was already a recognized deity before my ancestor dreamt of her, and if so, what spiritual powers or associations are attributed to her.  My father does not even know the meaning of her name, nor how it would be written in Chinese characters.  The best guess I can make for the meaning of her name is “plentiful goodness.”  

And that is my hope for my family as it struggles with the lasting harms of colonization and cultural destruction— and my hope for all of Earth.  

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I grew up in a mostly nonreligious family, the only one of my relatives having a confirmed faith being my Christian maternal grandmother. But I’ve always been spiritual, and since around age eleven I have been fascinated by religions of all sorts. When I was in high school, I asked my parents if I could visit various religious services out of curiosity. They did not permit me to do so. My mother even forbid me from meditation, fearing that if I engaged with Buddhism, I might want to enter a monastery, as some of her college classmates had done.

Today, things have changed in my family. Both my parents began to turn towards aspects of religion to soothe their souls in the past few years, when both their children faced moderate to severe mental health issues. My mother obtained prayer beads and used them to pray to Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, hoping that my brother and me would heal from our illnesses. My father dove even more deeply into religion, reading the entire Old and New Testaments and watching TV mass on Sundays, even trying to evangelize to my mother. Both my parents are now more receptive to my engagement with Quakerism, but still critical and prejudiced towards my curiosity about religions such as Islam.

The different ways that we engage with religions and spirituality reflect our personalities and our varying psychological needs and capacities. My spirituality is closely tied to my bipolar inspired states; to appropriate a Christian metaphor, I am far more the shepherd than the sheep, more inclined to follow my own spiritual leadings and fits of inspiration than the teachings of any religious authority. It makes me wonder if I have the temperament of a religious leader, like my ancestor who spoke with Yuliang.

There is nothing in my family’s legend that suggests that this ancestor could be diagnosed with any mental illness, but mental illness itself is in many ways a cultural phenomenon. Similar intense experiences can be labelled as divine or as unwell depending on one’s cultural context; for example, according to a 2014 study, voice-hearing in the U.S. is labelled as, and thus is usually experienced as, negative and a sign of illness, while in parts of India and Ghana, the voices that people hear tend to be experienced more positively.

If you believe in the legend as I have told it, my ancestor appears to have experienced extra-sensory perception (ESP), which is a concept often scoffed at in the scientific community. Even if it wasn’t ESP, there was likely some sort of non-normative psychological experience that motivated the creation of this legend and the worship of Yuliang. So maybe, regardless of what really happened, this ancestor has a psychological connection to me.

Who are you, my ancestor? And who are you, Yuliang? Do you live amongst the stars? Does a remnant of your spirit, your Madness, course through my blood?