Coming Full Circle: A Chinese-American's Return to Her Grandmother's Sleep Traditions

Sarah Chen grew up in two worlds, and for a long time, she chose only one of them.

She was born in San Francisco to parents who had immigrated from Guangdong province in the 1980s. Her childhood was a careful negotiation between the Chinese world of her home — her grandmother's herbal teas, her father's Taiji practice in the backyard, the particular rhythms of a household organized around Chinese concepts of health and rest — and the American world of her school, her friends, and her ambitions. By the time she left for college at eighteen, she had made her choice: she was American. The Chinese stuff was her parents' world, not hers.

She became a software engineer. She moved to New York. She worked seventy-hour weeks, ate at her desk, slept when she could, and built a career that her parents admired and her grandmother quietly worried about. She was thirty-four years old, successful by every metric she had been taught to value, and she had not slept well in six years.

The American Sleep Crisis

Sarah's insomnia was, in many ways, a quintessentially American story. The long work hours, the screen exposure, the irregular schedule, the caffeine dependency, the ambient anxiety of a high-achieving professional life in a city that never fully quiets — these are the conditions that have produced an epidemic of sleep disorders in the United States, where approximately one in three adults reports regularly not getting enough sleep and chronic insomnia affects an estimated 10-15% of the population.

She had tried the American solutions: sleep apps, white noise machines, weighted blankets, melatonin gummies, a brief and unsuccessful trial of prescription sleep medication that left her feeling worse than the insomnia. She had read Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep and felt simultaneously more informed and more anxious about her sleep. She had tried cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, which helped somewhat but required a consistency of practice that her schedule made difficult to maintain.

"I was doing everything the internet told me to do," she says. "And I was still waking up at 3 AM every night, lying there for two hours, and then dragging myself through the next day on caffeine and willpower. I was so tired of being tired."

The Phone Call

The turning point came on a Tuesday evening in November, when Sarah called her grandmother in San Francisco — Nai Nai, eighty-one years old, still sharp, still practicing Taiji every morning, still sleeping eight hours every night without fail. The call was supposed to be a routine check-in. It became something else.

"I don't know why I told her about the insomnia," Sarah says. "I think I was just exhausted enough to be honest. I said: Nai Nai, I can't sleep. I haven't slept properly in years. I don't know what to do."

Her grandmother's response was immediate and practical. "She said: 'I know. I have been watching you not sleep for six years. Come home for a week. I will show you what to do.'"

Sarah went home for Thanksgiving. She stayed for three weeks.

Nai Nai's Kitchen

The education began in her grandmother's kitchen, where Sarah had spent countless childhood hours watching Nai Nai prepare the herbal teas that she had, as a teenager, dismissed as old-fashioned and unnecessary. Now, at thirty-four, she watched with different eyes.

Nai Nai's evening sleep tea was a formula she had been making for sixty years: sour jujube seed (Suan Zao Ren), longan fruit (Long Yan Rou), wolfberry (Gou Qi Zi), and a few jujube dates (Da Zao), simmered together for twenty-five minutes. She prepared it every evening at 8:30 PM with the unhurried attention of someone performing a sacred ritual — which, Sarah now understood, she was.

"She explained each herb to me," Sarah says. "Not in TCM terminology — she doesn't use that language. She said: the jujube seed is for the worried mind. The longan is for the tired heart. The wolfberry is for the depleted body. The dates are to make it sweet and to hold everything together. She learned this from her mother, who learned it from hers. She doesn't know how far back it goes."

Sarah drank the tea every evening for three weeks. By the end of the first week, she was falling asleep within twenty minutes of lying down — something that had not happened in years. By the end of the second week, she was sleeping six hours without waking. By the end of the third week, seven hours, with a quality of rest that she had forgotten was possible.

The Morning Practice

Nai Nai's second gift was the Taiji practice. Every morning at 6:00 AM, she woke Sarah and led her to the backyard — the same backyard where Sarah's father had practiced when she was a child, where she had watched from the kitchen window with the mixture of affection and embarrassment that children feel for their parents' unfashionable habits.

Now she stood in the backyard herself, following her grandmother's slow, precise movements, feeling the cold morning air on her face and the dew-wet grass under her feet, and experiencing something she had not felt in years: the simple, grounded pleasure of being in her body without agenda.

"I was terrible at it," she says. "I kept losing my balance. My mind kept jumping to work problems. Nai Nai would tap my shoulder and say: 'You are in New York. Come back to San Francisco.' And I would laugh, and for a moment I would actually be there — in the backyard, in the morning, with my grandmother. Those moments were the beginning of something."

By the end of the three weeks, Sarah had learned the simplified 24-form well enough to practice independently. More importantly, she had experienced, in her own body, the quality of present-moment awareness that Taiji cultivates — and she had felt its effect on her sleep. The evenings after morning Taiji practice were noticeably calmer. The racing thoughts that had kept her awake were quieter. The transition from wakefulness to sleep was smoother.

The Reckoning

The three weeks in San Francisco produced something beyond better sleep: a reckoning with the choices Sarah had made about her identity and her inheritance. Watching her grandmother move through her days with the unhurried competence of someone who had never lost touch with the wisdom she had been given, Sarah felt the weight of what she had discarded in her rush to become American.

"I had thought of the Chinese stuff as backward," she says. "As something my parents and grandparents did because they didn't know better, because they hadn't had access to modern medicine and modern science. And then I started reading the research on sour jujube seed and GABA receptors, on Taiji and heart rate variability, on the gut-brain axis and herbal medicine. And I realized: they knew. They had always known. They just knew it in a different language."

This realization was both humbling and liberating. Humbling because it required acknowledging that the tradition she had dismissed contained genuine wisdom that her modern, scientific education had not given her. Liberating because it meant that the solution to her sleep problem — and perhaps to other problems she had not yet fully named — was not something she needed to find or invent. It had been waiting for her, in her grandmother's kitchen, all along.

Building a New Practice in New York

Sarah returned to New York with a bag of herbs, a clay teapot, and a commitment to practice that she has maintained for two years. She practices Taiji every morning — twenty minutes in her apartment, following a video of the 24-form that she watches on her laptop with the sound off, in the quiet before the city wakes. She prepares her evening tea every night at 8:30 PM, following Nai Nai's formula exactly. She is in bed by 10:30 PM.

She sleeps seven to eight hours. She wakes naturally at 6:00 AM. She has not used an alarm in eighteen months.

"My colleagues think I have become a different person," she says. "And in some ways I have. But in other ways, I have become more myself — the self that was always there, underneath the exhaustion and the anxiety and the performance. The self that my grandmother always saw, even when I couldn't."

What Nai Nai Gave Her

Sarah calls her grandmother every Sunday. They talk about the tea, about the practice, about the small adjustments Nai Nai suggests as the seasons change. Last autumn, Nai Nai told her to add a few chrysanthemum flowers to the evening tea to help with the Liver heat that autumn's dryness can generate. Last winter, she suggested adding a small piece of aged tangerine peel to support the Spleen during the cold months.

"She is teaching me," Sarah says. "Slowly, the way she does everything. Not overwhelming me with information, but giving me what I need when I need it. The way the tradition was always meant to be transmitted — person to person, generation to generation, adjusted for the individual and the season."

She pauses, looking at the clay teapot on her kitchen counter — a gift from Nai Nai, the same style her grandmother has used for forty years. The herbs are in glass jars beside it: the reddish-brown sour jujube seeds, the dark caramel longan, the bright red wolfberry, the wrinkled jujube dates.

"I used to think that choosing between my Chinese heritage and my American life was necessary," she says. "That I had to be one thing or the other. Now I understand that the best of what I am comes from both. The ambition and the drive from one world. The wisdom about rest and restoration from the other. I needed both. I just took a long time to figure that out."

She lifts the teapot. Outside, New York is doing what New York does — loud, relentless, magnificent. Inside, the tea is simmering. In two hours, Sarah Chen will drink it slowly, in the quiet of her apartment, and sleep.

Nai Nai would be pleased.