There Are Giants in the Sky by Natalie Chih-lu Hung

One chilly February evening, my 4-year-old and I sit on his bed, our eyes locked in a playful stand-off. ​He​ has just requested Goldilocks and the Three Bears as his bedtime story for the 21st time in a row and I can’t take it anymore. In a last-ditch effort to save my sanity, I play it cool and casually suggest Jack and the Beanstalk instead. He relents, and beaming from my small victory, I start reading off my glowing phone screen.

The dread quickly sets in as I recall how dark the story is. I wonder about the age appropriateness of animal slaughter, theft, and a brutish giant who doesn’t appreciate his female partner’s labor and eats people, to boot. I persist, however, buoyed by the wisdom from my graduate training in psychology: fairy tales help children metabolize difficult truths about life, and give them confidence to be in the world.

As the plot careens toward the Big Bad Giant meeting his demise, my eyes freeze on the words “and died,” the linchpin between Jack’s potential catastrophe and his happy ending.

I’m riddled with indecision about whether to include or omit the giant’s death. After a long day, I just want to go to sleep and get on with it already. But a rather officious psychologist voice reminds me of what is “best for the child.” If I left it out, would he learn that he is fragile and cannot bear the weight of the world? As his mother, I must embody his container—stalwart, steadfast, and nurturing, and able to hold all the things alongside him with grace. But I’m so tired, the other part of me insists.

My toddler pleads with me, “Then what happened?”

I make a game-time compromise: “The giant fell, and died,” almost whispering the last two words so maybe he won’t notice, while still performing my duty to preserve his psychological health. Then, with confidence: “Jack and his mother were now very rich, and they lived happily ever after.” I hold my breath. “Well, what did you think?” in a falsely cheery tone. 

“That story was too scary.” Goddammit.

Crestfallen, I try to act curious: “Oh yeah?” A pregnant pause. Then the cascade.

“Why did the giant die?” Fuck. Deep breath. I muster up my courage, but I’m all sorts of frightened.

“Because he fell from a high place.”

“But why did he die?”

“If you fall from a really high place then you can hurt your body and die.”

“How did A-Gong die?”

A-Gong, Taiwanese for grandfather, is what we call my dad who died when I was six. We know him as one of our ancestors, and that his spirit is often with us. We’ve pored through the same photographs I cobbled together as a kid to fill in the mysteries of​ his life story​​​. The sepia-toned pictures emerge from another world, depicting my dad as a shirtless, barefoot boy baking in the tropical summer heat, a wistful college student, and full of possibility with my mother in the final family portrait with their parents before leaving Taiwan in 1968.

In America, the snapshots turn color: my mom and dad posing on the Brooklyn Bridge as chic architecture graduate students, the explosion of family photos in suburban Maryland and Texas, and my favorites—few and far between—where my dad’s face has broken out into a magnificent smile that lights up his eyes.

What my son doesn’t yet know is that A-Gong died by suicide at age 44. I’ve always known I would have to tell him, but I’m not expecting it to happen so soon. I can’t find the words to explain suicide to a preschooler; I can barely explain it to myself. Perhaps sensing my hesitance, perhaps not ready to hear the answer, he moves on, and I’m relieved.

“But I don’t want to die.” Welp, this is even worse. 

“I know, baby. I don’t want you to die either.”

“I’m not going to high places.” Shit. Now I’ve instilled a phobia. 

“It would have to be a really high place, and if you were at a high place, we would keep you safe.”

“Are you going to die?”

“Yes, one day.”

“Why do people die?” Gut punch. I ponder the philosophical implications of this question, and coming up with no answers, decide it’s prudent to stay concrete. I clutch a stuffed bear to my racing heart and lean in closer. My son awaits the answers he knows he is entitled to.

“Something has to happen to your body. Most of the time, people die because they get very, very old and their body just stops working right.”

“Is Dada going to die?”

“Yes. One day, a very long time from now… probably.” 

***

When my dad died, I didn’t get any answers about why people die. I just thought people routinely vanished without a trace or a reason while the survivors were left behind to guess, to try to survive their own feelings.

Five years later, my mother finally found the courage to tell me about my dad’s suicide at the dining table one night. I felt everything and nothing. Switching into autopilot, I floated to the freezer, hid my face behind the open door, and cooled my burning cheeks. Once I could move my body again, I walked upstairs to my room where I could be safely alone with my anguish. The truth was incomprehensible yet made sense of so much, ​and left me with even more questions.

Now my son is just two years shy of how old I was when I last saw my father, and at 42, I am just two years shy of how old my father was when he last saw me. My dad and I are like funhouse mirror images of one another. Raised in poverty by a single mother in Taiwan, my father may have hoped for a better life in America, dreaming of becoming a professor and providing for his family in ways he never received. What he got was a trap. Ensnared in myths about individualism and meritocracy, it was around this age that his psyche began to crumble under the weight of the missteps and indignities that haunted his pursuit of happiness—dashed career ambitions, an extramarital affair, foreclosure on our home, the insidious barbs of racism, patriarchy, and the pressure to assimilate.

Like my father, I’ve also left my (questionable) homeland behind. Just a few months ago, my husband, son, and I made the transatlantic leap to the United Kingdom to pursue a job opportunity in academia for my husband, and the promise of a better life for all three of us. Thanks largely to upward mobility and English fluency my father never had, the passage has been successful, ​but not without its baggage. 

As Sherri Mitchell writes in Sacred Instructions, the pain of a person who dies by suicide does not end, it is merely transferred to the living around them. I’ve spent decades now moving through this inheritance. During childhood, my grief bubbled up amidst report cards, school plays, and unrequited crushes. It made me feel alone, different, unmoored. When I discovered therapy in my late 20s, I realized that I wasn’t crazy or oversensitive: I was traumatized.

Now a psychologist, I devote my life to healing trauma in myself and others, and channel my hot rage into avenging the false narratives that made my father believe he was a broken man when the more complete truth is that the world failed to protect his luminous, sensitive soul. The work of healing is hard, like removing a tangled vine choking a tree—you can scarcely tell where one starts and the other begins, but you reach and hope and pull until you find release, only to find another cluster of leaves peeking out from the clearing.

These days, I have more space to breathe. The stranglehold of a sense of foreshortened future—a hallmark symptom of PTSD—has loosened, and in its place, hope and happiness have taken root. Alongside comes the mundane terror of knowing that I, too, will die one day, hopefully not in a tragic and dramatic fashion, but in a subdued and dignified one. If I’m lucky, I’ll be fulfilled and surrounded by love, with the chance to say goodbye to my beautiful son, husband, friends, and family; to trees, lakes, cats, and daffodils; to music, cities, and the din of coffee shops.

I often wonder what my dad’s last moments were like—his private goodbyes as the alcohol and sedatives in his bloodstream started to take him away…was he lying down on a carpet of leaves in the crisp fall air? Did he pick a nice spot for himself? Or was the placement for his final sleep much less romantic and more accidental—did he fall, did he get woozy, was he already woozy from the tailspin of his life, from being eaten alive by his shame? 

***

“Just give me a second,” my son says, as he absorbs the enormous fact that his mother and father will both die one day. He turns his head to one side on his pillow, hugs his stuffed chihuahua, and closes his eyes. Sleep is taking him away to comfort and safety and he looks angelic. Watching him breathe takes me back to those strange and precious newborn days when his every twitch and chirp was a revelation, a glimpse into the miracle of life. At the same time, I ache from the knowledge that in creating his life, I also created his death. My stomach lurches, my throat constricts, and I feel lost. An ocean of tears threatens to erupt and I’m not sure I can bear it.

In the stillness, I sense the generations before us coming in to bear witness, and the flood inside me slows. I feel the joy and lightness of my maternal grandmothers, full of life and laughter and cooking and smiles and the kind of overbearing love that’s just the ticket when you’re confused and don’t know what to do. It is the hug I didn’t know I needed. Just rest, they seem to say. You have a big life to live tomorrow.

My paternal grandfathers—serious, philosophical, poetic—join in. When burdened, this lineage manifests in me as neuroticism, an almost compulsive overcomplicating of matters, a temptation to get to the bottom of it with my trusty intellect. But now it appears in its healed form as a profoundly simple message: We’re okay. You’re okay. He’s okay.

Altogether, we encircle my son as his slumber encroaches, and hold the possibilities that arise around the dead giant, Jack and his mother’s new beginning, the felled beanstalk. My heart is full and breaking at the same time, stretching to allow more love and sorrow in. 

I kiss my son’s cheek goodnight and his exhausted little body receives it. I take my own weary body into my room a few feet away. As I sink into my bed, the weight of the journey over the last fifteen minutes, between realms, through decades, and nowhere at all, settles into my bones, muscles, skin. I nestle into my partner’s warmth and feel protected and loved, my soul vast and free. Sleep invites me to relax into my ordinary blessings. And in the darkness, something has healed without my noticing, a stitch in a wound across generations that will carry us into tomorrow.

Natalie Chih-lu Hung is a second-generation Taiwanese American clinical psychologist and writer. She received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from City University of New York and her B.A. in Film Studies from Yale University. Her writing has appeared in Death Studies, Psychoanalytic Psychology, and ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action.