Today we’d like to introduce you to Camellia Lee
Camellia, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
我是李道玲。I am Lee Dao-Ling.
In the footsteps of my healer ancestors, I work to hold space for collective healing from the margins to the center.
I was born on Kumeyaay land, raised middle class, and educated on Occaneechi-Saponi, Tuscarora, Tongva, Wampanoag, Narragansett and other Native people’s homelands. Before my family settled unceded indigenous territories, we were blacksmiths, physicians and medicine people. The tribal lands of my most recent ancestors are An Cabhán, An Longfort and 福建省 Fujian Province. Our names were 李 Lee, 林 Lin, Mac Gabhann, Mac Diarmada, and Llwyd.
My family has lived on the indigenous land of 台灣 Taiwan for centuries. My great-grandmother had bound feet. My great-grandpa 林呈祿 Lin Cheng-Lu wrote against the Japanese occupation by editing the resistance paper Taiwan Youth. My grandpa Lee Ting-Chien and his father Lee Chao-Shun were both medical doctors. Grandpa was a pediatrician through WWII and 白色恐怖 (White Terror) martial law. According to oral tradition, we come from practitioners of esoteric folk medicine before we became medical doctors.
They sent my father Dr. Lee Tsung-Liang to Taipei American School, where a guidance counselor told them that their children couldn’t be bilingual. In my father’s household, English language and western culture were valued as social capital to escape from martial law. Our ancestral folkways were backwards; the West was modern.
Like many other diasporic families, my grandparents chose assimilation in order to keep their bloodline alive. In the context of Kuomintang martial law, WWII, the Cultural Revolution, and the Chinese Civil War, Lee Ting-Chien and Suchin Lin Lee saw English and “modern” medicine as the strategy to survive. Our folkways were a liability. Their sacrifice gave me everything I have, and I am profoundly grateful.
I came through my mother’s womb on my due date during a new moon meteor shower. Born in the year of the golden horse, I came with a calling to face unhealed intergenerational traumas and my lineage’s complicity with racialized capitalism. I am a rainbow spirit who loves regardless of gender assignment and is not quite a woman. My pronouns are she or they. I embody femme in homage to Chinese warrior women like 花木蘭 Hua Mulan and 林默娘 Lin Moniang.
I have lived the truth that ancestral healing can unlock purpose and joy even in the most painful, tragic ancestral histories.
My vision this lifetime is to return at least 5 acres and $1 million dollars to the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation and Indigenous Memories. This transforms the mitochondrial legacy in my cells and shifts the relationship of my bloodline with the land where my parents were born.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
As a biracial kid in a predominantly white environment, I was constantly answering the question, “What are you?” Being a bookworm, I turned to texts like The Color of Wealth at fourteen years old. My formative memories of being asked to categorize myself based on others’ inability to identify my ancestry led me to Africana Studies and racial justice organizing. By studying history, I understood that “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free, since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression” (Combahee River Collective).
Like many high-performing Asian kids, my mental health challenges went undetected. During my first year of undergrad, centuries of intergenerational trauma erupted within me. My and my ancestors’ grief and rage overflowed through my soma. I dropped out of college and went no-contact with my family of origin.
Desperate to remedy the ache in my bones and spirit, I sought out the ancient mysteries of my paternal lineage in rural Taiwan. My astrological birth chart clearly shows that my life path is about ancestral reconnection and healing, and I’ve gone about it with varying degrees of skill and care. At twenty years old, I was newly aware of myself as a queer and non-binary person. The culture clash between a US-raised gender and sexual minority with Taiwanese religious structures was intense.
Long story short, I left Taiwan deeply traumatized and full of shame. The weight of generational pain was so unbearable that I couldn’t sleep through the night. As a college dropout, I struggled to meet my basic needs for food and shelter. Ifá, Thien Hau Temple, and recovery communities carried me to the point of re-applying to college in 2015.
At Brown, I was blessed to learn closely from the brilliant Dr. Keisha-Khan Y. Perry (my advisor), Professor Elmo Terry-Morgan, and the late great Professor Anani Dzidzienyo. Along with rest of the incredible Africana Studies faculty, they trained me in critical Black Studies knowledge and methods. This helped me understand the current world system and learn from the best practices of freedom fighters across time.
With an undergraduate degree, I was then able to begin Chinese medical studies at Yo San University. Along with my Daoist healing training through the College of Tao and Parting Clouds Daoist education, I have been filling my toolbox with medical and energetic strategies to address the embodied and spiritual trauma of systemic oppression.
I have been trying to access our traditional medicine since 2010, when a white man in Taiwan told me that “Chinese people don’t accept [TLGBIA] people.” (This is false.) At every juncture, I have encountered cultural appropriation and Orientalist exotification, gatekeeping and structural harm. To reclaim my inheritance, I am now tens of thousands of dollars in debt.
It is excruciatingly painful and unjust to know my family lost access to our Old Medicine due to white supremacy, and then have to navigate a price-gouged, inaccessible system characterized by orientalism, entitlement, gatekeeping, exotification and cultural appropriation. Yet I understand that my challenges are connected to systems far larger. White supremacist settler colonialism harms everyone and everything, threatening all Life on Earth.
I persist because this is the work of my lifetime. My grandmother gave me the name 李道玲 Lee Dao-Ling, which she translated as the “way of ingenuity.” With the strength of the 午 horse and the clever resourcefulness of the 子 rat, I honor my ancestors’ sacrifices and keep going.
With everything I am and all that I have, I follow the leadership of Black, African, and Indigenous peoples as a project of radical love. This is my offering to my ancestors, my descendants, and my communities.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Epigenetic Alchemy catalyzes ancestral healing for collective liberation. This is the only place where ancestral healing is rooted in Africana liberation theory and practiced through Daoist somatic and energetic medicine.
The problem: gifted change agents are isolated, carrying heavy intergenerational trauma that makes it hard to do their sacred work.
The solution: ancestral healing as collective care! Ancestral work is the key because it unlocks patterns stored in the body that play out interpersonally. Epigenetic Alchemy catalyzes embodied transformation that empowers progressive leaders to fulfill their purpose.
Who we serve: Our work serves creative people with sensitive bodyminds, courageous hearts and radical politics. They are deeply passionate about climate justice, trans and queer rights, and reparations for historical injustices. They are driven by a desire to create a more equitable and just world. They believe in progressive values and are actively engaged in causes that align with these beliefs. This passion stems from a strong sense of empathy and a commitment to leaving this planet better than they found it. They are willing to face patterns and legacies that previous generations denied, and looking for community to do this work with together.
What we do: Epigenetic Alchemy facilitates ancestral reconnection that empowers changemakers to alchemize hard histories into sustainable, purposeful action.
Epigenetic Alchemy community members consistently experience these outcomes when they work with us:
– Greater safety within their own skin and in the Epigenetic Alchemist community
– Access to more energy (physically and spiritually)
– A sense of belonging after being isolated for their principles and sensitivity
– More confidence in their gifts, purpose, and power
– Unblocked channels to their ancestors, their inner vitality, their intuition, and community
So they can do things like…
– Make art that celebrates Black divinity
– Provide holistic care to frontline land defenders
– Organize a presentation of the Gaza Monologues
– Set boundaries with loved ones to enjoy the time we have together without collapsing into enmeshment and codependence
And more!
This is the place to experience data-driven, somatic, spiritual ancestral transformation to free our communities. Join us at www.epigeneticalchemy.com
Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
I have studied martial arts my whole life. From Taekwondo to Judo, Capoeira, Pinay stick fighting, kung fu, and aikido, I have consistently trained my body in the warrior healing modalities of our ancestors.
I do healing work because radical, life-affirming love saved my life and sustains my heartbeat. Yet to love this beautiful, sacred world also means to reckon with grief and anger. The same gift of sensitivity and attunement that allows me to heal exposes me to the excruciating violence of racial capitalism. All the healing I do is the result of opening myself to be a channel for forces of Love far greater than myself to pour through me to those whose lives I touch. I love across all borders, so the unjust suffering of my fellow beings breaks constantly on the cliffs of my heart in thundering waves of shared pain. My soul shivers with the cold of unsheltered neighbors and cries out at the agony of genocide. As my instrument and sacred vessel, my body speaks the truth of my spirit and soul through somatic messages.
In order to be effective rather than incapacitated, I have learned to shield my energy and channel my emotions. By studying with martial arts masters who themselves have studied with their elders, I weave relationship with generations of what Capoeira Batuque calls “peaceful warriors.”
Audre Lorde taught us that “hatred’s… object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.” She continues, “anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification.” Martial arts allow me to feel my grief at the terrible injustice of our world and allow the anger to empower me to “shape change,” as Octavia Butler taught us. When I practice martial arts, I am following ancestral protocols for guiding intense energies through and out of my skin in ways that are life-giving rather than destructive to myself and/or others.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.epigeneticalchemy.com
- Instagram: @_wholesoul
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/epigeneticalchemy/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/camelliadlee/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@epigenetic-alchemy
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@epigeneticalchemy
Image Credits
Isabelle Dao-Ahn McDermott Lee
Trifari White
