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Growing up in Winnipeg, Linda Trinh participated in her family’s Buddhist faith without question. It was one way of finding stability within her family’s life as Vietnamese immigrants in Winnipeg’s West End, especially after the death of her father when she was only seven years old.
At the same time, something nagged at the back of Trinh's mind, a feeling of emptiness that she carried into adulthood. Now, the local author has processed those feelings in a new collection of essays entitled Seeking Spirit: A Vietnamese (Non) Buddhist Memoir, which traces the connection between life events, spirituality and trauma.
Even though the West End was a diverse place to grow up, Trinh always felt that her family’s intense spirituality was an outlier. “I think it was just seeing around me friends who were Christian, friends who were Jewish, there was more of an anchor for them,” she recalled in an interview on Morning Light. “While we would go to Buddhist temple once or twice a year... I wasn’t necessarily explained the traditions, why we do the things we do. It was just, ‘This is the way we practice. These are the traditions.’”
Trinh realized that she wanted a faith that she could authentically practice, not just one that existed as a comfortable ritual. With a busy single mother trying to provide her family, Trinh decided as a young adult to travel the world and research different faiths and spiritualities on her own.
“I read a lot as a child,” Trinh remembers. “I was really interested in different mythologies from around the world. And then... in my 20’s, I was privileged enough to be able to travel to those spaces that I read so much about.”
Those travels took Trinh to Greece and Egypt, but also to China and, ultimately, to Vietnam. One of the biggest commonalities Trinh found between these places and her own lived experience was the shared desire to understand what happens at the end of our lives.
“I talk throughout the book [about] perhaps getting in my own way and not realizing how change is different from transition,” Trinh says. “Change is external, and transition is internal.”
Another way in which Trinh describes that distinction between change and transition is the journey from becoming a passive believer to an active seeker. It’s an experience that she believes readers of any background can relate to. “I hope by sharing my unique story that it becomes relatable,” she says. “Faith is a foundation for a lot of people and that means different things to different people. Through the book, it’s the search for something more. It’s the search for spiritual nourishment, and for me... it was just trying to find my own path through spirituality and having the enrichment of being open to so many different ways about doing that growing up in Canada.”
Seeking Spirit: A Vietnamese (Non) Buddhist Memoir gets its official launch at 7 p.m. on April 10 at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location. More information can be found at their website.