Not Every Story Wants to Be Told—And That’s Okay
How honoring silence can be just as powerful as uncovering the truth.
By Rev. Dr. Lauren Lisa Ng, Senior Program Officer at Berkeley School of Theology.
In a small, dilapidated house situated in the city of Taishan in Guangdong province, China, a room on the second floor—accessible only by a rotted and crumbling staircase—sits locked and untouched for over forty years. This was my grandparents’ house, and when they last lived there in the 1940s, it was the most modern home in their village. In 1947, my grandmother and uncle pulled the door shut behind them and set sail for America to join my grandfather, who had just returned from Germany, having served as a corporal in the U.S. Army during World War II. The contents of their abandoned house remained relatively untouched for decades until my own father visited in 1982 and, for the first time, walked through the structure his father, mother, and older brother had once called home. Gingerly, my dad picked up bowls, spoons, and decorative vases. He carefully opened closets and drawers to see well-worn clothing and other keepsakes. He sifted through his brother’s homework assignments, marveling at the Chinese characters written by hand in perfect form. And on the upper floor, he found his mother’s bedroom just as she had left it in 1947. He collected some items to bring home to Pennsylvania and then closed the door behind him.
It wasn’t until sixteen years later, in 1998, that I had the opportunity to visit this family home with several of my family members. Once we made our way up the rickety staircase and over to my grandmother’s bedroom, we encountered a locked door. Who had locked it, we did not know. And with only little time to spare and no locksmiths in the village, we could not access the room. We left the house wondering what was behind that bedroom door, vowing to get inside the next time we visited China.
We live in a time and place in which the act of disclosure is highly valued. Ours is a “tell-all” culture, and we work tirelessly to mine for every piece of information there is to find. Digging, sleuthing, and uncovering what desires to remain unseen, we feel that to trust someone, we must know everything about that person. We may even believe we have a right to know these things, that it is owed to us. In our current cancel culture, people relish in everything being hung out to dry on the clothesline of public opinion, especially if it leads to a newsworthy downfall.
We do value disclosure for less scathing reasons, too. Stories about our families and histories can inform who we are today and how we approach the world. There is learning to be had in sharing narratives, so we seek this information eagerly. Consider the popular company Storyworth, which provides customers with an easy way to collect stories from their relatives by sending them weekly prompts, compiling their answers, and containing them all in a printed book—a memoir to pass down to future generations. Storyworth’s website states:
Everyone has a story worth sharing. Preserve meaningful moments and memories in a keepsake book. Then, share the experience with loved ones and discover stories you never knew.
I love to discover stories and have done extensive research into my own family history. I even found a quote from my grandmother when she was interned at the Port of San Francisco’s immigration office in 1947, and it was tattooed in Chinese characters onto my arm. Her courageous words were recorded in official transcripts from her immigration hearing for me to find as a young adult, eager to understand my family’s past: When one must do something, one just has to do it.
Mining for these nuggets of information can be invigorating, but the exercise can also be riddled with obstacles. We find gaps in recorded history, dots that don’t seem to connect, and, at times, obstinate refusal by persons to disclose something from their past. While coming across these silent stories can feel like a setback, I wonder if we might allow ourselves to see it as a gift.
Our Scriptures, while overflowing with sound and clamor, also, at times, underscore the value of silence. The author of Ecclesiastes—largely believed to be King Solomon—writes of the appointed cycles of God’s order, poetizing that there is “a time to keep silent and a time to speak.” The king writes in Proverbs 10:19, “When words are many, transgression is not lacking, but the prudent are restrained in speech.” After his Transfiguration, Jesus instructed his disciples to keep silent about the things they’d seen. On at least two occasions, Mary, mother of Jesus, witnessed her son’s divine nature, and rather than speaking about it, she “treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.”
In all these examples, silence is an act of thoughtfulness, caution, or care. The decision not to speak is made with faithful intention. In this way, silence is not a subtractive response to an event, nor is it one of indifference; it is additive in that it tells a story of its own, threading a soundless narrative into the larger tapestry. These silent stories may seek to protect others in the moment and hearers in the future. They may seek to soften a painful memory, not erasing it from existence, of course, but lessening its audible blow. They may simply seek to remain turned into themselves in reverence of the possibility that some stories are given to us, and only us.
Asian Americans are caught between clashing cultures of silence and sound. Our Asian ancestries often value deference, respect, and honor, while white Euro-dominant American culture tends to value individualism, unfettered disclosure, and brazenness. With the latter resounding louder in our psyche, viewing it as the better, more virtuous choice is easy. In so doing, we may reject the notion of silent narratives in our personal and collective histories and, therefore, refuse to leave any story of our own untold. Additionally, we may resent our ancestors for what they chose not to tell us of their lived experiences, and in response, we do everything we can to mine those stories to the surface. Story-finding and storytelling are valuable endeavors that help us understand who we are in our current context; therefore, I am not advocating ending these activities. Instead, I suggest that when we encounter a silent story, we needn’t automatically view it as an omission to be mourned or reclaimed but can see it as telling in and of itself, brimming with meaning.
Our teenage daughter struggles significantly with her mental health. This past summer, she had to recount a problematic experience she’d had with a first responder who had been sent to our home in my daughter’s moment of crisis. I sat with her on our couch, her hand in mine, as she did the necessary work of reliving her trauma for the sake of her healing. Her story needed to be told, as painful as it was. A few minutes in, as the first responder and I listened to her every word with compassion and attentiveness, my daughter squeezed my hand and said, “Momma, can you leave the room for this next part?” I looked at my daughter and said, “Sure, honey, if that’s what you want.” She nodded and replied, “I don’t want you to have to hear what I have to say next. I don’t want it to hurt you.”
It’s hard—strange, even—to not know the stories pertaining to you and the people you love. As a parent, I have often withheld words, thoughts, and entire narratives from my children as an act of love—to keep them safe or to remove even a few rocks from the existential backpacks they’re forced to carry. But this was the first time I experienced my child doing the same for me. While silent stories can indeed be wrought from trauma and pain, they can also be wrought from mercy, selflessness, and wisdom.
As colonized peoples continually come to the realization of how far-reaching oppressive dominant culture is upon our identities and existence, Asian Americans may want to ask questions about the role silence plays in the transmission of our stories. Could the overwhelming distaste for silence make way for appreciation of that same silence if we were to analyze it under the microscope of decolonization? As Asian American Christians, we know that God knows us completely, even in the absence of spoken words. Acknowledging this divine truth, we may encounter the possibility that the silence so valued by many of our Asian American cultures is imbued with meaning and tells a story of its own.
In 2026, my family will return to our ancestral home in Taishan, China. I think about the treasure of stories waiting for us behind that mysteriously locked door. On some days, I imagine the profound experience we will have unlocking it, gingerly walking into my grandmother’s bedroom, carefully brushing decades of dust off the furniture, the objects, and the heirlooms, and weaving together everything we find into a story of our heritage, no longer hidden and unknown. And, on other days, I imagine what it would feel like to leave the door locked, to keep what’s inside undisturbed, to be okay with not knowing, to walk away understanding that the silence within those walls is a story in and of itself.
The Way We Tell It (A poem by Lauren Lisa Ng)
There are no glass walls in our homes, no porous materials for things to seep in or out, no telescopes, no microscopes, no apertured instruments admitting the kind of light we find to be unbearable. What you expose, we clothe. What you divulge, we swallow. What you publish, we carve into memory. Our tales wait a generation to be told, if they are ever told at all. If this is true, you ask, how do we learn? How do we keep from making the same mistakes? I say to you: silence is not always violent; it is tender, shielding and still honest in its way, like the chrysanthemum flower steeping at the bottom of the teapot, its petals unfurled and agrestal beneath the closed porcelain lid.
The Rev. Dr. Lauren Lisa Ng serves as Senior Program Officer at Berkeley School of Theology where she directs the Arc Initiative—a program that helps Asian American congregations and leaders to thrive by engaging stories that form, inform, and transform for the flourishing of their communities and the world. Lauren has earned degrees from Oberlin College, Berkeley School of Theology, and Central Seminary. She is ordained within the American Baptist Churches, USA.
Thank you for this beautiful reflection that reminded me of the many stories people like us who are pastors carrying people's stories to the next life because only God needs to know.