Review by Celia Jeffries
“Throughout my journey of motherhood, there have been moments when I wanted to check out. That’s it. I’m done. These were moments when I was sleep-deprived, I was seeing stars behind the actual objects I was looking at.” (185)
This admission comes late in Trinh’s book, after she has achieved everything she thought an immigrant woman should want: motherhood, career, and security. After she has taken the reader from her Buddhist upbringing through her travels to sacred sites around the world, her marriage and her struggle to combine motherhood with career and her sense that something was missing. It comes at a time when everything she has been seeking has brought her back to her beginnings.
Trinh’s parents lived through the American War in Vietnam and moved to Canada when she was three. Her father passed away only a few years later and “My mom, my sister and I cocooned ourselves within the world we knew.” (23) It was a world of Buddhism that was never explained to her and which she tried to piece together. “Cúng is the ritual through which we connect with the spirit world; by making offerings, we symbolically share a meal with those who are no longer with us. In doing so, they remain with us.” (22) “This is what I grew up knowing. Knowing is not the same as believing.”
In her late twenties Trinh sought answers in Vietnam, Egypt, Greece, and China and brings those sacred spaces alive for the reader. Her travels also bring up more questions: What is my origin story? “To self-identify as belonging to a race—to check a box—oversimplifies the complex and rich nature of cultural background.” (58) Trinh was born in Vietnam and raised on the Canadian prairies, but in her travels and her reading of history and mythology she finds herself relating to places where the need to connect to spirit is universal.
In a fascinating chapter about the Sumerian Goddess Inanna, who had to remove a piece of her clothing at each of seven gates in order to enter the netherworld, Trinh tells the story of what she had to remove in her quest to seek spirituality in the society she grew up in. At her first gate—attending Buddhist temple from the age of nine to twelve— “At the first gate, I removed the religion of my birth.” (65) At her second gate—reading about the divine feminine—“I removed my male-centric concepts of faith.” At her third gate she discovers the goddess Quan âm and removes “the notion that spirituality was all-or-nothing.” (69)
At her seventh gate she becomes a mother. “I lost myself, and also lost my way on my path. I felt lost in the ordinary, I was no longer contemplating great goddesses.” (76) Then, one Monday afternoon, as she was putting her daughter down for a nap and reeling from a week of ‘emotional landmines’ at work, she rocks her baby to sleep and “My spirit suddenly overflowed with emotion, with awareness. I became aware of a deep hum at the base of my navel, the centre, vibrating, listening to it, feeling it.” (77) “I removed the notion that spiritual experience needed to be grand, that it could not exist in the quiet moments.”
Trinh’s spiritual beliefs are tested further when she suffers a miscarriage and struggles to put her life back together. That deep hum that she became aware of at her seventh gate is what seems to reappear when she wants to ‘check out’ on page 185. By then, she has stopped looking outside for goddesses and mythological direction, and has returned to explore her Buddhist education, particularly to the practice of mantras. Here she finds a way to connect life events, trauma, and spiritual practice by creating her own mantras. “Dig Deep” she intones as she deals with the multitasking of motherhood. “Things are bad. They will Change. Things are good. They will Change.” She repeats to herself in the workplace washroom as she deals with corporate restructuring. (187)
In an interview Trinh said in her quest for spirit she discovered that she didn’t want to be numb. I want to feel life fully and engaged, for me that is seeking the extraordinary in ordinary moments, she said. I went all over the world looking for outside direction, but I had to go back into my own world. In writing Seeking Spirit Trinh has created a remarkable guidebook for any woman who has reached adulthood and found herself asking “Is this it?”
Seeking Spirit: A Vietnames (Non) Buddhist Memoir
MiroLand Publishers, 2025, $21.95paperback
ISBN 9781`771839549
Celia Jeffries is a writer, editor, and teacher whose work has appeared in numerous newspapers and literary magazines and has taken her from North America to Africa, and many places in between. Her debut novel Blue Desert, won silver in the May Sarton Awards.