How a Tibetan Turquoise Pendant Keeps Me Close to Home

In giving me her pendant, was my mother not only wishing me well on my journey but handing over our family’s story?

On a hot summer afternoon in California, bees buzzing in the lavender and the air fragrant with the scent of eucalyptus trees, my mother presented me with a turquoise pendant. A delicate sky-blue stone on a gold chain, the necklace had been a gift from her father when she left Darjeeling for medical school in New York; now, as I prepared to leave for college, she wanted me to have it.

Over the many years since that day, I’ve imagined the story of the pendant: my grandfather stopping at a jewelry store in the Darjeeling bazaar as dusk fell, on the way home from his work at the district court as a magistrate. A meticulous, thoughtful man, he would have studied the selection of necklaces at length, intent on choosing just the right one for his daughter, the first in the family to go to college and the first to leave home. I see him giving the pendant to my mother late on a December evening, hours before her departure for America.

I’ve wondered where the turquoise in my mother’s pendant originated. Maybe the Gangchen Mountains in western Tibet or, I like to think, the mountains in Kham, eastern Tibet, home of my Tibetan ancestors. In old family photos of Losar New Year celebrations, the grannies are seated in the altar room wearing heavy silver earrings inlaid with turquoise, and turquoise-and-gold ga’u charm-box necklaces. Turquoise is believed to possess special power, changing color according to the owner’s physical, emotional, and spiritual state; it lends protection on a journey, whether from one country to another or from birth to death.

The blue of the pendant my mother gave me brings to mind Namtso (“Sky Lake”), a saltwater lake northwest of Lhasa, Tibet that lies at an elevation of 15,000 feet. A pilgrim destination for centuries, the lake has meditation caves, a monastery, and islands used for spiritual retreat. Stories about Namtso have been handed down over the generations in my family. “One monk we knew,” my grandmother recalled, “he sat by the water for meditation and all sorts of animals he saw swimming. Seahorses, seayaks, seasheep. It was their dwelling place.” In the 1800s, my great-grandmother traveled to Namtso and saw deities and spirits. Sometimes at sunrise, the handprint of Guru Rinpoche—the eighth-century Indian saint who brought Buddhism to Tibet—appeared on the water and the sacred syllable Om could be seen written on the surface that mirrored the vast sky, the brightly colored prayer flags strung along the shore. These stories of the lake as a site of revelation are the ones that come to me when I look at the pendant.

*

I went to Darjeeling after college to stay with my recently widowed grandmother, and that’s when I first began hearing our family lore. Indifferent to my Tibetan heritage as a girl, I found a connection to that part of me in my mother’s hometown, after years of feeling like I didn’t belong in the predominantly white American suburbs where I grew up. I’ve now spent over three decades exploring and writing about my family history.

A delicate sky-blue stone on a gold chain, the necklace had been a gift from her father when she left Darjeeling.

In giving me her pendant, was my mother not only wishing me well on my journey but handing over her story, our family’s story? I was a “troublemaker” as a child—inclined to what she called “American backtalk” and a belief in autonomy—yet she sensed I would care. It could be the pendant was a way of giving me a story she herself hadn’t wanted to hold on to, impatient to leave behind the old world and plunge into her new life in America. Also, as a divorced mother of four and the sole provider, she had little time to think about the past.

My mother’s face-forward perspective allowed her to not only survive but prosper. Still, she wanted her story to be remembered and told. She saved the hundreds of letters her father wrote to her and the letters she sent him from America, as well as the letters I wrote to her after leaving home. She’s preserved photos, with place, date, and people’s names recorded on the back in her neat handwriting. And she was the one who encouraged me to go to Darjeeling after college.

*

The pendant my mother gave me is tear-shaped. A long time after that summer afternoon in California, she told me how hard it had been for her when I left. Somewhere inside I’d known this, even though there had been no weepy goodbyes (she always said that because of her Asian cultural background, she didn’t go in for “demonstrative” behavior). I also knew that, wanting me to set forth into the world as she had, she wouldn’t have dreamed of trying to hold me back. The morning of my departure, fog cloaking the eucalyptus trees, she helped me load my luggage into the trunk of her VW Rabbit and drove me to the San Francisco airport, just as thirty years earlier, her parents had taken her to the airport in the misty dawn for her journey to America.

A few days after my mother left, my grandfather wrote to her: You must have been upset to see us all in tears at the airport—that we could not help and as for me I lost all interest in food and everything. I have started feeling normal again after consoling myself that we have sent you for a good cause and for your own good.

Expecting my mother to return after medical school, my grandparents never dreamed they wouldn’t see her again for twelve long years, and only then when she came for a visit with her American husband and two little girls.

My mother settled in the US, her siblings in Canada, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and England. Wanting the best for their children, my grandparents didn’t realize the risk of letting them go: They might not come back. My grandfather especially found it hard that none of the children returned. “It’s their life they’ve got to live,” my grandmother would tell him, worried he was ruining his health with his sorrow. “We’re not going to live for them and we’re not going to live forever!”

Still, he grieved. In a letter to my mother, sent not long before he passed away, he wrote: We have missed you much amidst us over the years, but we have done everything for you: we offer a khada scarf on your photograph, keep tea and food on your table and usual place in the altar room and pray very hard for you.

In 1980, he suffered a heart attack and died a few days later. My grandmother said, “The sadness overcame him in his old age.”

*

In Paris last spring to teach a writing workshop, I overheard a conversation on the bus. A Spanish-speaking couple seated next to me was chatting when the man’s mobile rang. With a rueful smile, he held out the phone so his wife could also hear as an elderly man began speaking.

– ¿Dónde estás, mi hijo? (Where are you, my son?)
– En París.
– ¿París? ¿Cuándo regresas a Lima? (When are you returning to Lima?)
– Ya estoy diez años a París. (I’ve been in Paris ten years now.)
– Okay. Bye.
– Bye.

This exchange made me think about what Hawthorne wrote: “Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil.” My mother went from studying by candlelight in Darjeeling to soaking in her hot tub in California, from saying things like Thank you ever so much to Don’t lay your trip on me. I was born in Spain, my children in Japan, where I’ve lived for a long time now. Where will my children’s children be born? And their children? We don’t have to worry about worn-out soil, but is there a reverse effect, an exile caused by constant planting in new ground?

Turquoise lends protection on a journey, whether from one country to another or from birth to death. 

Maybe unease about this is what led me to travel south to Andalusia while working in Paris the year after high school. I wanted to go back to where I’d been born, to see and feel the place that had been my first home. I searched for the villa in Jerez de la Frontera where we lived when my father was stationed at a nearby naval base; my parents had told me about the jasmine-wreathed patio, the wrought-iron balconies looking out over an orange grove and vineyard. But the house had vanished, swallowed up by roads and housing developments. Or anyway, I couldn’t find it.

In my thirties, I went to the house in New Jersey where we’d last lived as a family, before my parents divorced. Again I saw the simple two-story structure with yellow shingles, the birch trees my brother and sisters and I had climbed and fallen from, the front walk where we played “Mother, May I” in the long summer twilights. But even though I was standing right in front, and the owners let me come inside and look around, I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

On a visit to Darjeeling in 2008, my mother and I lit incense in the family altar room for my grandmother, who’d passed away a few years earlier. My mother swirled her joss stick in front of the golden statues of Gautama, the historical Buddha, and Maitreya, the future Buddha. In that room, my grandmother had prayed for her mother; my mother now was lighting incense for her mother; when my mother was gone, somewhere, in some way, I would do the same for her; and when I was gone, my children for me. This, I realized, was the continuity I’d been searching for, the place where home lies.

The turquoise of the pendant my mother gave me is the deep blue of the sky arcing over the Tibetan plateau, over Darjeeling, over California. The blue of the late-summer sky on the afternoon I dropped my daughter off at college in the US and, not long after, my son. I look at the turquoise pendant, feel its weight in my palm; like a talisman, it reassures me of the constancy I felt that day in the altar room with my mother, of the thread that connects the generations no matter where our journeys take us.