I was in my mid-twenties, visiting my parents, when my mom sat down next to me and said in Cantonese: “If I don’t have to worry about you, I’m happy. And you don’t have to worry about me. You take care of your own business, and I take care of mine.” She cracked up as she said this and then nudged me on my shoulder, asking repeatedly, “Isn’t that right?” I remember I felt discomforted by her laughter but I had little will to counter her claim. She was right. We never needed each other.
Then, my maternal grandfather suddenly got sick and died in April 2021. He was our last remaining relative still living in China who had not died or immigrated to America. Because of coronavirus and the travel restrictions to China, my family couldn’t attend my grandpa’s funeral. A distant relative, an uncle, was our host body, broadcasting the event over a live WeChat video call for us while we watched it in the living room, thousands of miles away in San Leandro. The camera panned to a small group of grieving relatives, almost none that I recognized, dressed casually in baseball caps, puffy jackets, and denim jeans. They were fake crying for him while covering their eyes. It seemed strange to me but I assumed this was being done out of respect. My dad was holding the camera on our end of the call. He held it in front of my mother’s face so that the funeral-goers on the other side could watch her, the dutiful daughter, deliver a bout of tears.
At the funeral, I wanted to show my mother I cared for her. I reached out my hand while she was weeping and touched her shoulder, hoping this gesture would offer her solace. It took a second for her to notice, and for a moment, she was no longer a daughter but my mother again. Her eyes flickered at me—reminding me of her potent rage, which was often buried in silence or rung through in expressions of contempt. I was used to her scoffs, her dismissive remarks, but I was rarely the object of her full-blown rage. Some of my family members have confided in me about this part of my mother—her hands that beat and her accusatory words. Their warnings have taught me not to be vulnerable with her but still I try. That day, I learned that showing my mother tenderness would not be rewarded, and so I pulled my hand back quickly, as if retracting my kindness. When the funeral was over, we were all eating at the dinner table, and I noticed my mom’s mind was elsewhere. She tilted her face towards the ceiling. She looked towards the light.
I have wondered if my mother’s unhappiness is rooted in having three daughters, which in a traditional Chinese family meant my parents tried unsuccessfully three times for a son. I have also wondered if my mother’s unhappiness, evidenced by her inability to make friends or learn English after being here twenty plus years, is because she hated America and was only here for us—to make enough money to give her family a comfortable life —and maybe she resented us for it.
A few weeks after the funeral, she returned to China. She survived quarantining for two weeks in a hotel room in Shang-Hai. Time flew for us while she experienced a comfortable version of imprisonment. Then, after she made it to Fuzhou, I heard from my dad and sisters that she did not book a return flight. She had no plans to return home. My suspicions of the source of my mothers unhappiness felt confirmed. I told my friend Sachi this who said, “Damn,” and then paused and then asked me, “How do you feel?” I felt somewhat absurd telling them that I felt good. I felt like a bad daughter for being happy that my mother was finally gone. In her absence, I remembered how little we shared, how estranged we had become to each other.
. . .
This past Christmas, four days after my birthday, I decided to text my parents “Merry Christmas” because I didn’t want to feel guilty for not doing so. I was feeling a bit of resentment from not hearing from either my parents on my birthday and especially from my mom because I had made some effort this past year to celebrate hers. To make myself feel better, I thought of how little time I’ve made to call or to visit them this past year, and so I reasoned, perhaps, I didn’t deserve a birthday wish from them at all. My parents did end up reciprocating my “Merry Christmas” text, and even though the exchange was dry and clearly obligatory, for most of the day I felt satisfied, like I had done my duty.
When I write about my mom, I often return to specific scenes in my early childhood—usually, I revisit the dinner table where my mother and I ate together, and sometimes when my dad was closing the family restaurant that night and my sister was at orchestra practice and it was just the two of us, she fed me crab like a mama bird. She would crack open the shells with her molars and spit out the sharp edges, saving the meat in her mouth. Then, she’d purse her lips, and as if I had been trained for it, I’d put my lips on hers, and between our mouths, she would transfer the crab meat through a kiss, and I would accept it, chew it, and taste the sweet meat of her labor.
. . .
With my mom gone, I felt more inclined to visit my dad, the parent whom I had always felt closer to because he is the one who tells stories. We all knew about his childhood, where in abject poverty, he still learned how to play and find joy. Delight spread on his face as he recalled summertime swimming in the deep watering holes with his brother and friends, making all of his toys from foraged wood. I think my father’s storytelling encouraged my sisters and I to tell stories back to him, which meant, when it felt appropriate to, we confided in him about our feelings and troubles. Meanwhile, my mother’s upbringing was a mystery, kept folded inside her as she chewed and swallowed and if she said anything, it would be bitter cautionary advice. If we asked her about her childhood, she would either be intentionally vague or refrain, saying it was too long ago and that she had forgotten. The absence of stories from my mother tranferred into a sense of not knowing who she really was. While my father had a reputation of reverence—he was seen as someone who helped others selflessly, who persevered despite his physical disability—my mother appeared socially stunted, awkward, and if I’m allowed to admit this—annoying. A couple years ago, when my cousin was visiting, my mother was pestering her, asking my cousin the same question she asks me whenever I come home: does it look like I’ve gotten older? I felt surprisingly validated when my cousin, after reassuring my mother that she looked very young, rolled her eyes and whispered to me, “Ugh! I hate when your mom does that.”
So, when my mother left for China and decided not to come back, a part of me looked forward to the time I could spend with my father, now that he was alone.
I drove down the 880 to San Leandro in my parent’s 2007 Lexus, now mine. The routine to visit dad repeated itself. He prepared dinner while I walked the new dog, a replacement to our family’s previous dog Nikki, who my mother had become the sole caretaker for and who passed away six months before grandpa. My dad tried to cook vegetarian for me, even though I had already told him I returned to eating meat again.
“Baba, how have you been?” I asked him in Cantonese.
“Bored, nothing to do here,” he said. “You should call your mother.”
Through my dad, I learned that a few days before her flight, my mother got up bright and early and pulled a large suitcase from the closet. Throughout the week, she had been getting ready, packing little by little her year-supply of beauty products and her favorite clothes. On the day before her flight, my father walked down the hallway to use the bathroom and peered inside the bedroom and cried, “How long are you trying to go for? Why are you bringing such a big suitcase?” She hid a smirk and let out a chuckle. My dad dismissed her, calling her dumb.
Then on the morning of the flight, crossing the San Mateo bridge, my mother sat in the backseat of my father’s blue Prius, looking out the window, facing the vast endless bay. “I’ll never return here,” she said. My dad, in the driver seat, shot her a look in the rearview mirror and said, “Don’t say those things!” My oldest sister sat in the passenger seat and glanced up from her work phone—“Why would you say such things?” My mother stayed silent, avoiding their questions.
Whenever we talked about my mother, my father spoke between furious bites of food.
“So she’s not coming back?” I asked him. He shook his head and told me that she gets angry anytime someone asks her about her return date.
“Tell your mother to come home,” Baba said. “And don’t tell her I told you to say that to her. Message her or call her and say, ‘Mommy, when are you coming home? Come back. Daddy needs you.”
I could tell he was desperate; he had never asked me to do anything like this. Perhaps he already begged my two older sisters and they either refused or had tried and failed. I obliged and told him I would call her, even though I felt, as the youngest, I had the least power to convince her. I was uncertain whether anything I said would have an effect on her; my mother often moved through the world with her own authority, I had never convinced her of anything before.
“She might come back if you talk to her,” he said. “She’s a very strange person and she might listen to you. You never know. You have to try for me. Try to talk to her.”
His insistence was making me believe she really was better off in China by herself than here in America stuck with our dysfunctional family—my father and his family’s constant criticism, the constant measuring against unrelenting beauty standards. But the key element of dysfunction was the way family members were expected to remain silent about abuse and to forgive without apologies. It makes sense then if removing oneself seems to be the only option.
Eventually I expressed to my father that maybe my mom was happier alone, and it made my dad so mad that he almost hyperventilated. He said, “How could she be better there by herself? She’s there all alone. How could she be better off alone?”
. . .
For months, I followed my mother’s WeChat posts closely. On WeChat, there was a new video of my mother at the burial site, grey marble stone atop a green mountain. The aunties surround her, stand beside her, comforting her. I imagined this was what she needed after all these years, decades spent away from her homeland. I watched her wail into one of the auntie’s shoulders and then blow her nose into a white handkerchief. I could sense, possibly from her face, how it was flushed and torn apart by her cries, that she was finally letting go of herself, allowing herself to heal. The porcelain urn lowered to the ground and my grandfather was laid to rest next to my grandma. I felt relieved somehow, like the world felt softer. I was surprised by how spiritual this symbolic moment, how returning a body to the earth could provide a sense of peace.
The photos on WeChat suggested my mother was living her best life. She was going on outings to the sea, to hikes and rivers, in a group of middle-aged women like herself. There was a woman that my mother posed with frequently, who wore short hair and a stylish cap. For all the time she lived in America, my mother didn’t have a single friend. But over there, she was surrounded by a community, she was truly home.
I noticed my father still liked her photos. He was angry with my mother but his name was always under her photos, beside a heart-shaped icon, and often, he was the only one who liked her posts. I heard the other side of the story when I visited him.
“Your mother is out with all these women, she doesn’t even care about her family anymore. If she wants a divorce then let’s just get a divorce. But she doesn’t want to sign papers. I don’t understand what she’s doing in Fuzhou. She says she needs to take care of grandpa’s dogs. His cats. Why doesn’t she just hire someone to take care of them? Your mother doesn’t make any sense.” My father tipped the bowl over his face and finished the last bit of rice before getting up.
“Do you want more rice?” He asked.
“I’ll call mom,” I said.
. . .
“Mommy. I’m not telling you to come home. I’m telling you to do what is best for you. Take care of yourself. I just want you to be happy.”
I was rebelling against my father’s wishes. I felt like a trickster for completing half of his request; I agreed to call her but I did not intend to tell her to come home. I was certain that my mother being gone was the best thing for not only herself but also my father. I fantasized about their new lives as people who could chase their dreams, who would find someone more compatible. It was like seeing an abusive person leave a toxic relationship and thinking good riddance. I have since come to understand that I actually have no idea what is best for my parents, or who is the abuser and who is being abused, or if abuse is too extreme of a word. I have learned in my own experience of long term relationships that people need each other for various reasons that outsiders will never know. But at the time, I empathized more with my mother than my father—I understood the feeling of wanting to get away from the family, needing space to process one’s own grief, and desiring a period of independence and freedom. And so, on this call, I was attempting to show my mother that I supported her. I wanted to give her permission to go away, leave forever if she wanted to, and find her happiness outside of this family. But it wasn’t working. I was growing frustrated by the conversation. My mother wasn’t hearing me. She was defending herself even though I was trying to tell her that she didn’t need to, that I supported her decision. I was trying to tell her that I was on her side—to enjoy herself now that she was free. She didn’t hear me.
“Your father just wants me to come home so I can take care of him. Well he needs to be independent. He needs to learn how to take care of himself. And what about me, who is going to take care of me? Your sister just wants me back so I can take care of her kids. I’ve been taking care of everybody since I was a child. Can’t I get a break?”
. . .
I was reading Ocean Vuong at the time and emulating his use of the epistolary form in his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. I admired how devoted the narrator was to his mother despite their complicated relationship. Both Vuong and I were raised by mothers who don’t speak English. I tried to reach my mother this way too.
Dear Mother,
It’s the middle of the work day and I’m driving down the freeway with two dogs in the backseat. I’m a dog-walker now. I didn’t tell you. I quit my full-time non-profit job the same month you left, the same month that the Atlanta spa shooting happened—a hate crime that devastated me. It was accidental to time my quitting so perfectly so that you wouldn’t find out. I wouldn’t have told you anyways. You didn’t like my job anyways.
It was one of those mornings when I felt like I didn’t want to be there. I was driving up the 580, seeing the mounds, the hills that big houses sat atop of. I felt so sad I just let myself cry as I parked, ignoring the onlookers from other cars. I told the two pitbull mixes to hop out of the car and I held onto their leashes as they eagerly pulled me somewhere to sniff, to relieve themselves.
Like most mornings, I didn’t feel like a person. I didn’t feel like a person worth loving. I hated that everyday I wore the same thing, hoodie, baggy pants, and had my hair undone. My life was finally stable but I was merely existing. I dreaded my routine. I didn’t want to walk dogs anymore. I started to notice a pattern. My life is sustained by novelty. I liked the easy feeling of starting over, of giving myself up to the unknown. I enjoyed fantasizing about how something or someone new could be the solution that I had been looking for—could push my life towards the direction it was meant to go. But always, when that novelty dies down, when the new thing becomes boring, when the new thing becomes challenging, that’s usually when I want to quit, let go, abandon, leave.
Maybe I’m just like you. I’m aware of my habit of abandonment. I’m aware of the way choosing to leave can eclipse the feeling of grief and erase responsibility. Do you remember Laura? Or Layla? Or Tenzin? They were my best friends growing up, they were my sisters, my family. All of my endings with them were caused by my actions, my decisions. I turned away from all of them. I liked the surge of power when I said no, turned away from someone or something when conflict arose. Escaped. Nothing would hurt if I was the one who chose to walk away.
When I wrote this letter, I was trying to be honest about a pattern of abandonment I had noticed in myself. Between friendships, jobs, hobbies, and partners, I learned I wasn’t someone reliable who would stay through the tough times. I’m still learning how to resolve conflict instead of jumping to abandonment, to commit to the people and things I love. Maybe I was just like my mother, who abandoned her family so suddenly, and even though I was more unfazed by her decision at first, her absence was starting to remind me of how I never really had a close relationship with her, how she had abandoned me and my sisters throughout our adolescence. The physical absence of my mother because she had to work was always understandable, but I never truly grappled with the emotional neglect, how she didn’t seem to want to know me: never asked me deep questions or wanted to spend quality time with me.
Perhaps, learning to become hypercritical and hyperindependent is why I am so quick to abandon; when I am discomforted by conflict, I am able to convince myself that I don’t need it–I don’t need my friends, my lovers, people who have loved and taken care of me at my weakest moments. I am able to treat people as if they don’t exist anymore. Maybe it’s the culture of disposability or maybe it’s my mother wound; the lack of emotional intimacy that we shared seems to be the origin to some of my deepest relationship problems.
When I wrote this letter, I was honest about my despair. It was not a letter I would ever send my mother in real life nor a letter she could read. But it helped me to recognize that I needed help.
. . .
I called her in the middle of the night. It was 3am and I couldn’t sleep and for some reason the only solution in my head was to call her, even though she was halfway across the world.
“Ma, come home,” I said.
“You’re calling me because you miss me?”
It was 3pm over there, and I could hear a woman’s voice in the background. Was it a relative, a friend or a lover? Or was it just the television?
“No,” I said. “I don’t miss you. But I wanted you to know. I’m not doing well. I don’t want you to think I’m doing well without you. Because I’m not.”
She paused. “Be careful when you drive. Be careful when you leave the house, okay?”
She kept nagging me to be careful, and I wanted to hang up the phone.
I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I think I was resentful of my mother and I wanted to make her feel responsible for me and my emotions for once. In my own way, I was trying to tell my mother that I needed her help but I was too afraid to be actually vulnerable with her. I only knew how to communicate to her in that indignant, almost bratty American daughter type of way. I couldn’t access the part of me that could speak in a tone of surrender, to plead my mother to save me. It was probably because I never thought she could save me.
But after this call, despite its apparent failure, I remember I did start to feel better. And I continued to write.
. . .
Dear Mother,
I was seventeen when Baba barged in and asked, “What is this?” He held a blunt wrap between his fingers, and I skipped past embarrassment and went straight for rage. He told me to stop using swear words, and I didn’t even realize I was cursing. Fuck. Damn. I HATE YOU. He told me to get out. I stormed down the stairs and walked out of the house. The summer night was thick and humid, and I was out of breath as I walked up that hill, the same street I walked up everyday to get to the bus stop. I don’t know where I was going but I knew I was not turning back around.
Then somehow, you reached me. You must have ran after me, followed me, and caught me before I could go any further. You reached out for me, you touched my arm, your eyes were glossy. I don’t remember what you said to me but I listened. I followed you home.
I think about this scene now because it represents something unsaid— that our bond, no matter how frayed, is simple: I want you to be here.
Sometimes, I think about the scars on your wrist, how they’re vertical, how thick the scar is despite being healed over. Mother, tell me, how many times in your life did you not want to be here?
. . .
Five months had passed. I found out my mom was coming home through her WeChat post. It was a gallery of self-portraits and the caption, translated, read: “Time is so fast, it’s been 30 years since I returned to China. My trip has been so safe and smooth. I look forward to returning to my second home in the United States soon.”
My mom booked the flight home for October, just in time for her oldest daughter’s birthday. It seemed like apologies were necessary or at least a conversation should have happened between all of us. I suggested this to my father when he broke the news that my mother would be coming home but he dismissed my idea. Said there will be no apologies, we will have to move on like nothing happened.
A part of me believes this family dynamic, although deeply flawed, is rooted in both trauma and love—that by moving on like nothing ever happened, we try to spare each other from experiencing further pain. Maybe with all that our family has been through—poverty, incarceration, famine, displacement—we don’t need anymore pain.
. . .
I haven’t confided in my mother since that phone call we had at 3am in the morning, five years ago.
We remain comfortably distanced from each other, checking in every once in a while over text. Our conversations often go like this:
Daughter, how are you?
Mother, I’m good.
Good, take care of yourself. If you have time, come home.
Okay, I will.
I feel the most emotionally stable having my relationship with my mother like this. Connected but apart. I have learned to maintain rigid boundaries with my mother so that I can live my life independently, without needing her approval of my decisions or needing to meet her expectations. It’s only when I write that I reach towards her, relishing in the few memories that I have of her—as if my subconscious is trying to tell me that I miss her, acknowledging how, in the space that we’ve made between each other, there is grief—a sad little girl who wishes she and her mother could be close. Sitting in this knowledge, made true by my own memories, I wonder, what would it take for my mother and I to feel close? Is it ever possible?
In the safety of our distance, I feel, somehow hopeful, that our relationship has the potential to grow at a pace that feels good for both of us; maybe the more I let go, forgive my mother for not being there for me when I was young and forgive myself for not showing up as a more perfect daughter, the more I can simply be in the present and appreciate the relationship we do have.
I revisited the crab scene recently and turned it into a poem. I wrote a new ending where I alluded to the knowledge of being an unwanted daughter: a child who they had wished was a son. I ask, desperately: Do you want me? Did you want me?
My writing gives me the space to grieve for the closeness and safety I wish I could feel from my mother. It has allowed me to amplify my resentment and hurt; sometimes, it allows me to surrender it, at least, for the time being. There is something very valuable to me about bringing these memories of family onto the page. It allows me to create a portrait of our complicated relationship—one that I can see with more clarity, nuance, and grace than ever before.
. . .
I am four and standing by my mother’s side, watching her study for the citizenship test, her packets of paper strewn across the table. We are in the dining room, in our townhouse in Virginia, the sun is setting, the hot summer’s day is done. The tape in the radio clicks as it makes its rotations; a chippery voice asks, “Who is the first president of the United States?”
My mother pushes the syllables out meekly. In her low voice, she says g-eorge w-ashington. Later, she combs my wet hair and tells me again, I couldn’t give you up. Mama couldn’t give you up.
