Sense of Soul - Healing the Past for a Better Tomorrow

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

Today on Sense of Soul we have Richard Perkins Hsung, he was born in China in 1966 and was one of the first teens to leave China legally after Mao’s Cultural Revolution. He earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Chicago and became a professor at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, retiring in 2022. Richard spent ten years editing and completing Spring Flower (Earnshaw Books) by his mother, Jean Tren-Hwa Perkins, MD. The three-volume memoir chronicles her life as an adopted child of American medical missionaries, survivor of China's brutal communist regime, ophthalmologist, immigrant, and mother. The series hold the memories and story of one woman’s journey from poverty to privilege to persecution, and her determination to survive as history and circumstance evolved around her. She was born in a dirt-floored hut along the Yangtze River in Central China during the catastrophic floods of 1931. Her father was so upset she was a girl, he stormed out of the hut, and she was given up for adoption to a missionary couple. Spring Flower is both eyewitness history and the eloquent memoir of a young girl growing up during the brutal Japanese occupation and the communist takeover of China.   https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-perkins-hsung-2378752ab?original_referer= Order on Amazon https://a.co/d/a0hciSx 

Hello, my soul-seeking friends. It's Shanna. Thank you so much for listening to Sense of Soul Podcast. Enlightening conversations with like-minded souls from around the world. Sharing their journey of finding their light within, turning pain into purpose, and awakening to their true sense of soul. If you like what you hear, show me some love and rate, like, and subscribe. And consider becoming a Sense of Soul Patreon member, where you will get ad-free episodes, monthly circles,

and much more. Now go grab your coffee, open your mind, heart, and soul. It's time to awaken. Today on Sense of Soul, we have Richard Perkins Shung. Born in China in 1966, Richard was one of the first teens to leave China legally after Mao's Cultural Revolution. He earned his PhD in chemistry from the University of Chicago and became a professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and the University of Wisconsin-Madison and retired in 2022. He spent over a decade editing and completing Springflower, which was written by his mother, Dr. Jean Trenois Perkins, beginning as being born a girl during the time of a brutal Japanese occupation and communist takeover of China. The three-volume memoir chronicles her life as an adopted child

of American medical missionaries, survivor of China's brutal communist regime. She was an ophthalmologist, an immigrant, and a mother. Richard is joining us today to tell the story of his mother's journey from poverty to privilege to persecution and her determination to survive as history and circumstance evolved around her. I was very inspired by Richard's story and his passion to share his mother's story and give her a voice. So please welcome Richard. I'm super excited to learn about this amazing journey that you've had. Kind of reminded me

a little bit of, I've been on an ancestral journey for years. I learned so much about my family and about history that had gone untold and it helped me along my own path and my own journey, understanding who I was and the patterns that I had and the strengths that I really didn't know that was in my DNA that I could tap into. And it was a healing for the past, present, and future. Yeah, I feel similar. Yeah. Yeah. If you want to, Richard, just to start off, you know, tell everybody who you are and, you know, where you came from. Kind of like, what is the root that birthed this beautiful spring flower, I'll say. Yeah.

So I guess foremost, thank you for having me on your show. I appreciate that, Shona. So about myself, I guess I, thank you for having me on your show. I appreciate that, Shona. So about myself, I guess I was born in China in the mid-1960s. And then I came to the States with my mother. My mother brought me with her in the early 1980s. And so I guess I've been in this country almost half a century. And I recently retired from teaching chemistry at University of Wisconsin. Between Minnesota and Wisconsin, I guess I taught almost for a better part of the

decades, I guess. And I actually writing, trying to complete my mother's memoir, Play the Rome, ending my teaching career slightly earlier than I had expected it. Yeah. Yeah. I kind of feel that right now I've been writing a book for a while

and everything seems to be getting in the way. I'm about to end everything so I can finally get it finished. Yeah. It surprised me what toll it can take. I i'm a person and the amount of energy one had has to exert into writing a memoir a book of any kind i i guess if i were lucky i i will find that zone maybe every a few days or once a week and so i guess writing a book takes a long time well you were a little lucky because you already had most of your contact And so I guess writing a book takes a long time.

Well, you were a little lucky because you already had most of your contact. Yes. When I inherited my mother's writing, three boxes and with all the typed manuscript, typed chapters, handwritten chapters or notes. There were over a thousand pages. That was a starting point. But the way she wrote her memoir, it was much less a memoir, it was more of a chronology or archive. So she left plenty of gaps and unfinished stories. And sometimes she would have a photograph scotch taped on a piece of paper and with an arrow point to one of the faces on the photo. And she said, I got to talk about this person. And for me, it was, who was that? Right?

Anyway, so yeah. Okay. So Richard, I must tell you. So me and my best friend, we kind of have like this deal that if one of us dies, I take your journal and I burn it. Okay. I like that. Yeah. But, you know, so these were like her, like you said, her personal journals of the things that she felt close to that she wanted to put down on paper. And so tell me about your mother. Were you surprised when reading these?

Was it a different part of her that you didn't know? I'm sure that my children, you know, when they're listening to if they ever decide to listen to my podcast, because right now they don't, but if they ever did, they'd be like, whoa, mom's funny. Or no, they may not think I'm funny at all. They might see a different side of me. Yeah, I definitely did. To put it bluntly and in short, reading her writing about herself, about her childhood, about some of the struggles that she went through as a young adult, I realized, oh my goodness, my mother was human. I thought she was a goddess. She was so perfect

and she held me to some of the loftiest, most unreasonable expectations. And then, of course, she was brilliant. She was sharp and fast and smart. Seemed to be capable of many things and just seemed perfect. And so I always just looked up to her and she presented the side of her she was cold, aloof and incapable of showing warmth or a smile and which was very different side of what she would show other people

which I would witness from time to time. And then reading all the stuff, it's like, oh, wow. She's just as scared as the rest of us, as me. And I made plenty of mistakes as I have over the course of my life. And I'm glad I saw that. That was good for me. That was healing and redemptive for me. So, yes, that's sure. You know, and I think that for women, you know, oftentimes we hear more about

men, you know, not showing emotion and not being sensitive, but women also had to be very strong. And I know I look back at the women in my family. I wanted to be just like them because they were able to raise seven children with a smile on their face. And I'm like, I had four and I about lost my shit. I mean, it was, I need to be medicated for this. Yes, it's much easier sitting down. They made it look easy, right? So, you know, my mother wasn't always like that. And it was after being separated from her adopted American parents at the height of a Korean conflict, which was the proxy war in China.

And so my American grandparents-war in China. And so my American grandparents had to flee China. They were medical missionaries in China at the time. And so my mother was left behind. I think from that point on, 1950 to about the time she returned to America, she called home. So it'd be a good 30 years. It was atrocious during those three decades.

So I think personality changed over the course of that period of time. Yeah. And you as a child didn't know what she was going through internally. Yes, I know. Yes, I was too young to understand the bigger picture of what she was going through. And I didn't know anything about her past being adopted by America. Wow, that was a shock. America because I was born in China, right? It's a totally different environment. And so I didn't know any of that. I didn't even know that she spoke English. English was pretty much her first language or native language.

She was adopted when she was about 10, 11 months old. And only when I got older, I realized she actually spoke Chinese kind of funnily, or maybe like me, right? I have a bit of an accent, American accent, speaking Chinese. But no, because I was part of that process where the entire nation endured through Mao's so-called infamous proletarian cultural revolution between 1966 and 1976. And I also had an older sister, six years senior to me. But she was suffering, and she still is, I guess. She has cerebral palsy. So I was a man of the house because my father was in jail,

being persecuted by the communist government. And so my mother essentially was a single mother raising two kids with a career in, she was an ophthalmologist, a surgeon in the hospital. But at the same time, she was also being persecuted, right? Because she had an American religious background. So I was the man of the house starting at the age of two. So I knew quite a bit, but I didn't know nearly enough. And I was never strong enough to really help her out. That was more of a problem than a solution for her.

And so over the years, over that entire decade, plus a couple more years before I came to the States, I think I understood a lot. But I also didn't understand nearly enough. So you never knew that she was adopted at 11 months old to an American family. So she lived here until when? When did she return? Yeah, so I'm sorry. So she was born in 1931 in China during a catastrophic flood, the river flood. The river's name is Yangtze River. I think Chinese people call it a different name. But anyway, be that as it is, it killed upwards of 4 million people.

So my mother was one of the lucky ones that survived, mainly owing to the kindness of this American medical missionary couple who had to build a hospital across the river to set up these refugee camps. So her biological mother was looking for milk and food and ran into this refugee camp. And that's how they ultimately gave her up for adoption to this American couple. I didn't know any of that. And then, of course, it was during World War II, after Pearl Harbor, America then was at war with Japan.

And so the Americans, all the personnel, business people, diplomats, or missionaries in China or in any of the Japanese-held territories will have to return, being repatriated to the U.S. And my mother was officially adopted in the U.S. Supreme Court of China in Shanghai, stationed in Shanghai in 1940. So she had the proper documentation, the passport, to come to the States with them. So then she spent her elementary school, some of her elementary school years and junior high in

New York. That's where they lived during the war. And then they went back to China. Because my grandparents wanted to continue their medical missions. So they were diehard on serving Chinese people. They probably were Chinese

in their previous lifetime. But anyway, so the Korean War separated them. My mother told me all these stories while we boarded on an airplane on our way to JFK in 1980. So I didn't know any of this. I didn't even know why we were going to America

until she was telling me all these things. And how old were you then? I was 14. And then shortly after we got to the States, I turned 15. Did you get to meet them? All my grandparents? No, they passed away in the late 1950s and 1960s, respectively. I never met them.

But I met all the extended families, Perkins families. I went off to college in Michigan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and lo and behold, there were a family there. They were also missionaries in China and incidentally worked in the same hospital that my grandparents had established and built. And they were nurses. And so they sort of adopted me as an 18-year-old going to college. One of them, they have nine sisters and brothers, and one of them was very close to me. It's almost like my adopted mother. She happened to take care of my American

grandmother during my American grandmother's last days in the 1960s. What? Yeah. That was just a coincidence? Coincidence. In some ways, coincidence. In some ways, they sort of knew each other because of this relationship back in China, right?

So I'm rambling on. But the point is that my grandmother, American grandmother, bestowed onto her a well-traveled metal suitcase that contained 2,500 photos. And then so this family or this person, I call her aunt, just said, okay, Richard, it's all yours now. It's your family heirloom, right? So then from those photos, I saw what they looked like and all of that. And I learned about their history and their stories and beyond what my mother,

well beyond what my mother even knew. Tell me. Yeah, or even knew. Yeah, right. So I had actually more materials on my hand than she did at one point.

Did they have lots of pictures also of your mother when she was young? Yes. Yeah. Right. And then every photo spoke a thousand words right it all made sense to me gosh i love old pictures i mean that has been i think one of the small

blessings when i'm able just to eat even if it's just one old black and white picture that's fuzzy and you can't really see everybody but you're like this is them look at what they're wearing and you know and most of them didn't smile in their pictures they're like you know like why is that mom looking so mad and then you're like oh because she had 18 children i like that yes i i feel the same way. Yeah, and again, every photo spoke a thousand words because it fixed a moment in time in history, right? It's frozen in time, right? So then you can sense from their expressions or expressionlessness and their background, and you can tell yourself,

oh my goodness, A, what were they thinking. And you can tell yourself, oh my goodness, A, what were they thinking? And B, where were they? What's this about? And so, yeah. And I'm so lucky that my American grandmother happened to be an amateur photographer in those days, right? Talking about early part of the 20th century, even though the technology for cameras had improved, but still.

And only people with money. Yes. Oh, totally. Totally. Yes. You had to know how to operate one, let alone taking 2,500 photos. Right. It'd be like us, you know, handed a computer back.

You're like, what? Yes, right. If they had these pictures and they were nice pictures and they were clear, and usually you could tell they were dressed nice, you knew they had money. And then you had these other pictures that were fuzzy and they're like, you know, in rags. But you could tell kind of, you know, in that period what was happening in their lives a little bit and what class they were. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. From that, you can actually write articles, essays, and stories. Just look at the photo. You start to imagine, you know, their lives and their stories. And when I was talking about how I had this great healing from it, it was through whether it was the stories that were written in newspapers or passed down or the pictures that I connected directly with them. I almost felt like I was time traveling back into a space and time I never knew existed.

Did you feel that way? Absolutely. I couldn't have put it better. Yeah. It was like time travel. Sometimes I would stare into their eyes and thinking, what are you thinking? What were you thinking at the moment? That could be bad too for myself emotionally. But the point is that I learned a lot by just looking at, again, their expressions or background. I felt like I was there sometimes, right? Occasionally. And then now I can come up with stories to illustrate or describe what this photo actually meant.

You know, I also learned that, you know, it was really hard to live back then. And, you know, we complain about the world that we're in now often, you know, they don't like this about the world and they don't like this about the government. They don't like this about, you know, all these things. And yeah, there's lots of horror going on for sure. But back then it was far worse. They didn't even have a global structure or a system that would protect like women or, you know or certain laws that would protect children, stuff like that. Yeah, so therefore, I think my mother's memoir,

it's really about China, but it's really about China and America, maybe almost not quite half and half. It's like a compendium, a history compendium, marking a period of extreme growth in humanity in the modern history, or if not in the history period.

And that would be the 20th century, the first part of the 20th century, or the most part of the 20th century. Two Great Wars plus Korean War, Vietnam War, and other conflicts. And then, of course, like what you just mentioned, right? We treated minorities, women and children, right?

And all of that, some civil rights, women's liberation movement, and then later on children's liberation movement as well. So we've come a long way and it was a great learning period, but we seem to forget how painful, how terrible that period was. And then we're doomed to repeat them if we don't learn. Well, Richard,

I think it's because we haven't been told the truth about our history. We've been told small, I feel like intentional a narrative that only is good for what they want us to know here we haven't been told the truth i mean in my ancestry journey i'm from louisiana so i'm frenchole, which makes me from slaves and masters. And so it was a journey that I never knew existed. And I never learned in school.

We get a filtered form, a filtered version or a cleansed version of history in classroom and and i'm not just talking about china no in america especially so yeah so i think uh someone told me and i love that statement that the history is written by the uh the winners and i would add that written by the victors and winners with selective memories. That's a problem. Because once I was able to learn the truth, then I was able to see from a different perspective.

And then the healing was able to come. But I had to know the root of it. I had to understand where this came from. Where did racism come from here in this country so deeply rooted within people? And I had to know that history. I had to go through it. It was painful learning some of the things.

But even, and I'll be honest, when Tucker Carlson went and interviewed Putin, who, you know, I don't agree with Putin whatsoever, but when he gave the background and the history, and it was important that he did that. And for those who gave ear to that and maybe even did their own research, I had done research, I had fallen into that way before. So he was kind of validating some of the things that I had heard before. And I was surprised that he cared enough to share that. is a part of people's ignorance about conflict, any conflict, even conflict in their relationships. You know, this came from somewhere. Right. Yep. You know, back to what you were alluding to, right?

So looking at your ancestry, history. And so for me, I think if we don't acknowledge our history in its truest form, and if we don't accept our history, good or bad or ugly, we will never, how do we move on? How do we not repeat?

And how do we move on? So yeah, so I think it's back to sort of more on a personal level, right? So it's understanding where my mother came from and her upbringing, her American religious background, and what my American grandparents unselfishly did Chinese people, also from dire poverty back in the 20th century, early part of the 20th century. And I started to feel like, oh my goodness, if I understand all of that, I can accept what I have become or who I am am today oh at least that's a good starting point you know so yeah i mean a huge part i'm sure i mean to know that even your what your mother as a woman who was chinese adopted in america was able to do all the things that she did and raise an amazing human like you. Thank you. I appreciate that. I hope she thinks the same way. But anyway, yep. Yeah. I've had a lot of, I've even had dreams because I think in my waking hours,

I don't allow myself to go there. But some of the things that I've exposed had dreams because I think in my waking hours, I don't allow myself to go there. But some of the things that I've exposed about my family, especially about my great-grandfather, you know, I wanted to understand what someone or why would someone have to do the things that she did. And that, to me, that journey of trying to connect with empathy, having that empathy for the life that she lived, and in the end came compassion. At first, I was mad. First, I was angry. I'll be honest. I was mad. Did you go through that? Because I feel like it was an up and down roller coaster of emotions.

Yes, I did that over a period of maybe two, three, four decades. I was really mad on that Pan Am flight from Tokyo to JFK when she was telling me all of this. I was just completely overwhelmed. I am just saturated. It's like, what? And where are you taking me? I mean, China was decimated by Mao's Cultural Revolution at that point. revolution movement. But China reopened to the West, to America. That's how my mom had an opportunity to return.

And China was working hard to rise from the ashes of its own making. And I think the education system, schools were sort of being gradually stabilized and normalized. And so I had become really interested in literature, history, and fancy myself as a writer.

And I wrote really well, Chinese. And so then I'm on this plane. And by the time we landed, I didn't understand a word people were saying. I was mad. I was like, couldn't you have told me this earlier? And so, yeah. But then, you know, I struggled trying to become American. And I realized halfway through the struggle, about 20 years, and the next 20 years, I realized I'm not really American.

And I'm now also not Chinese. I forgot how to speak Chinese. And I forgot about their culture and history. And to write this memoir, I had to relearn all those things. And it took another 20 years, so basically a U-turn. And so now I'm trying to reshape myself in some ways, much like how you feel in some ways, I guess, right? And just like, okay, I'm both. But when you say you're both, meaning you're really none. When you tell people you can speak

two languages, I mean, you really have zero, right? So you can't really speak either well enough. So yeah, so it's a continue. It's an ongoing struggle, but I have evolved my perspectives and reshaped my thinking process of perspectives over the years.

Sometimes I'm still mad. I'm still mad at her thinking, especially compiling this memoir. Multiple times I sit down, I will look up to the sky and go, why don't you just come back down here, finish it yourself? At least, at the very least, you were educated in American. This is your first language. If not native language, you can write significantly better than I would have or be able to do. So, yeah.

And you never knew that, and you did not know that. You thought for sure, you didn't even know that she had English as her first language. Yeah, that was pretty amazing. I knew she was being recruited as a translator those year or two before we came back or before we came to the States, before she returned to her home, I guess. Right. So I knew she, I was dumbfounded where she got this ability. But at that time, to me, you know, speaking English could be just speaking any other language.

It could be just an alien language. It didn't matter to me. That's so amazing. Is it right that I saw there's three books? Yeah, there are three. It's a trilogy. And I'm going to use my mother as a human shield here. It's all her fault. You know, she told me a book needs a million words.

I don't know where she got that. And I just followed her literally and blindly. And neither of us consulted people who wrote books or memoirs or any books, right? So it was by the time we combined together over 600,000 words was when I realized, oh my goodness, all you need is a 10th of this. And so I, I, I'm incredibly grateful that I have found awesome, brilliant editors and some gen most generous publishers.

They helped me whittle it down, help us whittle it down to a couple hundred thousand words. I'm becoming a parcel of them into three books or three volumes after having some time to reflect, right? Because the third one came out almost a year ago you know i actually don't regret i mean an ordinary human being doesn't sit down not that many of them will sit down write their stories right write their life let alone an ordinary human being to write a trilogy right so but I don't regret because the three volumes really stand for three distinctly

different periods, A, for her life, but also representing, again, three distinctly different eras in human history or at least in history of China and America. Again, I'm maybe repeating myself, I'm hoping it can become a compendium of some sort to remind both countries the wonders peace can do for people on both sides. I see the importance, Richard. I 100% do, and I feel like it's through the personal stories

that will actually connect with the world. It's through that vulnerability, that rawness of a personal experience, rather than hearing it from a politician. Unfortunately. Whenever there's a conflict, I always see that both sides can have a point, maybe to a different extent, but they have a point. But both sides tend to

miss a point because their respective leaders would love to see this conflict and not try to resolve it. And then leading them being at odds with others, unfortunately. And whenever there's a war there's a conflict civilians are always collateral damages the children too children I know I

I always I think about there was Jimmy Carter who was president when I was born in the 70s I can date you now you will not find peace by killing each other's children yeah beautifully that's simple yeah and yeah it stuck with me and it just hits me especially in

a time right now you know and i think about i thought a lot about this year something you said just now like what i see is good i see this is so good it is good yes it's tea or not coffee well i like I like shots. Ah, okay. Sure. Yeah. No, I thank God for coffee. But somebody else, right, across the world may see this as evil, right?

They may see it as so evil. It's terrible. It'll kill you. You know, so what I'm saying is that what I see as good, someone else might see as bad. So does it make it either? Oh, I like that. Yep. Yeah.

Yeah. And that often is the premise or the basis for many of these so-called conflicts. Yeah. Right. Respect for you believe this way i believe this way but yet we're all of the same race are we not yeah you you know it it's it's amazing to me that in 2024, that there are wars like this happening around the world. Like you said, have we not learned from history of the lives lost? And now it's like, well, my bomb's bigger than your bomb. Yeah, I think I get this really annoying feeling, paranoid feeling that the human race is getting antsy again after more or less peaceful for half a century.

Besides small pots of fire here and there. But now, regional conflicts can degenerate, devolve into much bigger ones. I know. And then you think about how technology may have a play in this and how it's a double-edged sword in many ways. I mean, when I was younger,

I had to wait to talk to my friends the next day at school, or I'd have to sit on the counter with a cord in front of my whole family talking. There was no taking selfies all day long and editing and all of those things. And I also didn't know about the pain that was happening on the other side of the world too. So in that way, and I think about my older children, I have children from 27 to 11. They, because they can see like this in two seconds, what is happening around the world have formed a sense of empathy and compassion for humanity that my generation was not prone to seeing. We didn't see it.

We heard, maybe. Yeah, they've got information at the tip of their fingertips. So that's a very good thing in terms of technology or digital technology for today's world versus the 1970s and 80s and even 90s.

Because you could have just told our classroom, this is what happened across the world. And we're like, oh, okay. And just believe it. You know what I mean? You can't do that with them they'll be like yeah right let me see what's really happening fake news yeah you know also also fact checking is much easier right so you can't even if you try to give a some form of filtered history yes you know now we have access to, if you're willing to spend the time, to true documents, to true scriptures, to true ancient texts that was not available before. So you can kind of, for yourself, experience what you want your beliefs to be rather than just be told. Exactly. Yeah. And I think from that perspective,

it was like a dark age, right? Back in the 1970s, 1980s. But now it's, it's more, if you want to be enlightened, it's available to you.

Right. If you want to learn true history, it's easier to obtain. And I feel in the same, women have a voice. So your mother, who probably couldn't have wrote her book in her time, it wouldn't have been received. And even though you helped her in this way, is your mother still around? She passed away in 2014. She died of dementia.

I'm so sorry. Oh, that's okay. Thank you. Were you in the first book at that time? Second book? Where were you? I would be in the second book, yeah, towards the end. So yeah, so the first book essentially just covers her.

I mean, she was born on a dirt floor, in a mud hut with a dirt floor. Her parents were in dire poverty, plus the flood, plus the way China treated the baby girls, even today, let alone alone back in 1930s. And then she suddenly flipped, right? And she lived in an idyllic childhood with her adopted American parents. So that's the first period ending in a career war where she was separated from her parents. She was 19 years old, a freshman at college, far away. She couldn't be reunited with her parents to come back to the U.S. together. So then the second one, basically splitting the 30 years of, I guess, hell, living trapped in China, but witnessing everything that around her ongoing in China as a, looking like a Chinese, but really a foreigner in her own birth country, right? From a sort of more Western American perspective, finding all of this is very strange why they would do this.

And then until, of course, she brought me to the States in 1980, which is where the book ended. I added an epilogue to summarize the next 30 years of her struggles after coming back home to the U.S., her parents fled China in 1950. She was 19. And when she brought me with her, she would be just 50 or 49. And then she passed away at the age of 83 in 2014. So she ended up living a good 35 years in America after coming back to returning to the US,

but spending her first 10, 12 years writing a memoir, the next five years struggling with deep depression. And then once she came around with it, and she was better, and then suddenly diagnosed her with early dementia. So she struggled with that for about 15 years before her path. So that's why she never was able to finish her own book. And I made a promise that I would help her finish this book.

Oh, you weren't such a bad boy, were you? It was a foolish. It wasn't casual, but it was it was foolish on my foolishness on my part because i didn't know what i was getting into not at all i mean how do you feel now that you know now you're talking about it at all out there i mean is there more in you you're like well now what do i do with my life? I've been writing for so long. Yes, you already spoke several of my emotions or thinking. And I guess now that it's done, I think about things a little differently.

But the process was grueling. So it took me about 10 years. Between my mother and me, we spent probably a good 20 to 25 years putting all this together. And so I don't think I want to write another book, definitely not a memoir, and definitely not tell myself a memoir requires a million words. So I learned all of that. So right now, I'm definitely enjoying settings like this and talk about the book and talk about the process and meeting people, meeting people such as yourself, present company included, in terms of not just promoting the book, but learning from other people, their experiences and their experiences writing their life. Like my mother said once, everyone's life is book-worthy. Although not everyone will sit down and write about their life. True.

I agree. I love to hear people's stories. That's one of my favorite things in the world. And I think that vulnerability is what has been lacking for so long. Just like how you didn't know, been lacking for so long just like how you didn't know right for so long i didn't know so many things either vulnerability was a bad thing the word vulnerability i mean my mom told me you don't tell people your business and now i'm telling everybody's business yeah no from that that generation. To add on to that, I think when my mother was suffering from depression, she didn't go out and seek help.

Yeah. She just tried to work it out on her. A, it took a long time, but B, it took a toll on her. It would lead to something else, right? So I think that generation of people, my mother included, view vulnerability as a weakness and as something that you don't want to tell people that you're weak about. But that is so wrong. That destroys a lot of people.

They call them the silent generation. That's what they're called. And I think that I've learned being a body worker and I do Reiki and other energy modalities. I've taken lots of stuff like that and it is those things that we hold in that make us sit yeah yeah it's part of the human nature it's innate to us right we tend to bury all those emotions and all those painful memories and the past uh the events that painful events in our past. And then the more we

bury them, the heavier we become. And then it's like putting a brick at a time into a bag you have to carry for a baggage you have to carry for the rest of your life. But journaling was very healthy for her. Yes, absolutely. So, you know, I will tell you, because I just wrote an article in one of the e-magazines about this. When I took over my mother's three boxes worth of manuscripts, over a thousand pages, alongside there was a stack of 60 journal books, pocketbooks, filled with tiny words. And dated from 1988 to 1992, the period she was depressed. And that was what she took herself out of that depression, is to write those.

She wrote everything down. Every day. Not many people actually write in their journals anymore. You know, they're typing their journals out, or I have my notes in my phone, right? Sometimes I speak my journal or all the things, but I do have handwritten journals. In fact, I'm a big doodler. I mean, everywhere you go, you'll find me doodling everywhere. It's all over.

But depending on the mood, my handwriting changes. If I'm mad, I'm more heavier, right? Yeah. For some reason, I just knew that I should because we're the only family that moved to Colorado. We moved far away from Louisiana. My mom's one of seven. Everyone else stayed. So I would get letters from my mom, you know, because, of course, we didn't have cell phones and all that stuff,

computers. So she would write me letters and I saved them all. And my dad, I'll show you right here. I kept so many things of his handwriting, right? This one was from 1975. So this was before I was even born. And I, you know, some of these things were so shocking, but he, he wrote a lot of people only think they're doing big things in their lives, but it's the little thoughtfulness and kindness and small favors that really bring joy to the lives of people. And that really give them an uplift of body and soul. I was like, I didn't even know my dad had that language in him. That's very deep and insightful.

Yeah, I love that. But in those moments with a pen and a paper, you're able to connect on a level that's, I mean, he wouldn't have been telling his friends about body and soul is my point. But yeah, but I think you also made a lot of point that the handwriting would tell you a lot about the person and the state they're in. Yeah. Different handwritings throughout different times and in different moods. I'm sure you saw that with your mom's shirt. Yeah. So after I read a few pages, I immediately

threw them back into the box and I wrote a note. I said, the title for this next book maybe will be Diaries of a Deeply Depressed Human. Wow. Man, I really feel what you're doing is very important and I just, I honor the work that you've done for your mother and for two countries that seem to be both very powerful, wonderful countries. But, you know, we're always, it's almost like, I don't know, like the Broncos and the Raiders or something. Yeah, or Broncos and the Patriots. Oh, yes. That's actually a pretty good comparison, right?

They've had their ups and downs. They are not rivalries, but yet there are rivalries at the historical, if you count all the games they played against one another over a period of half a century. And I feel that way about America. I feel like right now we're divided. We're the divided states of America, and the country cannot be so strong, divided within itself.

And so other countries will feel the instability of the oneness of people. And I think that's part of the problem as well, unfortunately. People around the world, they look up to us. We're the beacon on the hill, right? We're this democratic society that everyone will love to become part of. And when they see we're having problems, we're divided, then suddenly this beacon on the hill is not beaming so brightly. And then so this helps some of these countries turn their backs towards us.

And then all these electing these so-called, still in election, but electing these people really all turn out to be autocrats. So, that's very unfortunate. And I think we're in some ways we're responsible for that because you know, I mean, it's part of the price of being a model.

Of being a model citizen of this world. Like this sign says, I believe the Dalai Lama said it, the planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, and storytellers of all kinds. Yeah.

I wholeheartedly agree. Yeah. Well, thank you for becoming a storyteller and a peacemaker. We definitely need more. Thank you. Well, tell everybody where they can find your amazing books. And yeah, if you have any social media you want to share, you know, that you want to share with anybody.

Yeah. So Amazon.com or Barnes Noble will have my mother's books. And then I think if just typing her name and then the spring flower will pop up. Let's see. I have a LinkedIn page, which would just be Richard Perkins. And then my last name, which is H-S-U-N-G.

Shum. Thanks, Richard. It was such a pleasure to meet you. Honestly, I honor you and your work. Pleasure is also mine and honor is also mine. Thank you so much, Shauna, for having me. Thanks for listening to Sense of Soul Podcast. And thanks to our special guests for joining me.

If you want more of Sense of Soul, check out my website at www.mysenseofsoul.com where you can work with me one-on-one or help support Sense of Soul Podcast by donating to my coffee fund. Thanks for listening.