The Tightrope of My Life

When you have an Asian mother, your life is meticulously and constantly judged, and for me at least, I seemed to fluctuate between being an utter disappointment or making her immensely proud. It's a weird ability, to be able to walk on the tightrope of motherly approval, and despite my balance throwing me off completely, catapulting me into self doubt, elevating my insecurities, and making me feel small and worthless, I keep going back, a true masochist, always seeking my mom's approval.

And yet, now, as an adult looking back, if I had to attribute my confidence and self worth to one person, it would be my mom.  My mom, the one who always reminded me I was a diamond in the rough, and that I was beautiful on the inside and out, even in the midst of reminding me to watch my weight, to take my skincare seriously, and to dress a certain way, as if appearance was the only thing that mattered.  My mom, the one who always told me I am smart enough, I am good enough, I can try harder, I can do better, and who pushed me into after school programs, extracurriculars, and always pushed me to give back and be kind, but who was also the one who told me my crafts looked cheap and ugly, my clothes were unflattering, my make-up was ill done, and my home cooked meal was just okay.  Never enough. And yet, when anything big happened, anything traumatic like a car accident or a boy dumping me, my mom was the first person to support me, to lift me up, to tell me it would get better, and to be on my side.  She never undermined my huge emotions and was always there to support me.  And that's what I remind myself now when I feel criticized because she's telling me I'm not feeding my kids well enough, not making enough homemade soups or preparing fresh cut fruit for them, or teaching them Chinese at home.  I know she's just pushing me to be better, but I have to get off the phone and take a break, even if for a moment.

As a mother now, my son often yells back at me, "you just want me to be perfect!  There's no such thing as perfect!"  I politely disagree with him, and then go on to explain that I want him to try to be better, but that doesn't mean he has to be perfect.  And in that moment, I realize maybe I am becoming more like my mom than I ever envisioned.  I began to understand that her hope for me to be better was guised under the premise of an overly critical Asian mother.  Because love from my own mother was never expressed in the form of direct praise until I had a specific accomplishment measured by an accolade or title, I never understood the love she did have for me because it got lost in translation.

The other day at my children's swim class, I heard another mother praise her young daughter, telling her, "you did so great!  I am SO SO proud of you!" And I scoffed quietly from the side, wondering what her daughter actually did to make her proud.  And in that moment, I realized, I am becoming my mom.  But maybe that isn't so bad.  Maybe it's okay for my kids to want to work hard and do well because of themselves, and not because I'm on the side cheering them on every single moment of their entire life.  I plan to be there to hug them and be physically able to communicate my love to them unlike my own mom, but I also plan to mirror my own mom by pushing them to continue to work hard despite failure again and again. 

Maybe part of growing up is realizing the bad you once thought tormented you about your own mother wasn't really so bad, and then you start to think about the qualities you definitely want to embody in your own motherhood journey, even if those are similar to your own mother who you once swore you'd never be like.  It turns out it's the same, in a different way. 

Obligatory Grocery Store Trips

A good Asian daughter goes to the grocery store with her mother a lot.  And is happy about it.  Helpful even.  I know, because I was that good Asian daughter.  I was never taught what any of the stuff was we were buying, I can recognize it all now by smell or touch, packaging if it hasn't changed yet (which most asian stuff hasn't, even after all these years), but beyond that, I'm as clueless as a white person.  I was merely a shadow of a presence there in case my mother ran into anyone she knew, in which case I'd transform into a trophy of honor, an indication that my mother had done something right.  Also, I was a helpful hands there to shuttle the groceries from cart to home, including all the movements in between.

I remember my mother telling me about the other dishonorable and rebellious children who refused to go on grocery trips with their moms.  We'd hear about them from the other moms we ran into at the store who were without child.  She never said it outloud, only offered simple condolences of empathy, but I knew the truth.  It was shameful.  I was evidence that my mother had done something right.  Like when a child says thank you without being prompted, my mere presence in the grocery store was exactly that.  My willingness to accompany my dear mother to the store.  To promptly request double bagging (because it was the late 90s after all, and we didn't seem to care about our environment as much, just our ease of moving big bulky grocery bags). I never minded it.  Any of it.  I rather enjoyed my moment in the sun whenever we ran into someone we knew.  I was actually a little bit disappointed when we didn't run into anyone.  My good deed had gone unnoticed, and I wanted the confirmation that I was indeed a good Asian daughter.  As I grew older, I started to ask questions.  My thirst for knowledge of my own culture and traditions went unanswered.  She seemed annoyed I was asking all these questions.  Why didn't I know?  Like when I asked for a recipe and she's just respond with, "some of this, some of that," giving no precise measurement.  I think my mom grew increasingly more annoyed, and stopped asking me to accompany her to the store.  She rather preferred my younger brother six years younger, more innocent, big eyed and silently representing her status as a good mother once more.

When I went off to college and returned to visit on the weekends, the first thing my mom would ask me was to go to the grocery store with her again, as if she forgot of my constant badgering about this or that.  Now she welcomed it.  And now, as an adult, when I call her to ask about certain ingredients, I've never witnessed such patience, even follow up calls to make sure I purchased the right thing.  I think she recognizes that her culture is slowly slipping away from her grandchildren, and that the bridge is her own daughter, so she better help out or forget about any preservation of her posterity's culture.  As an adult now, I often wonder how much value she got just from spending time with me in the grocery.  Sure it's easier to go alone, but with your daughter stuck there, it's an opportunity to talk, to spend time together, to just be.  And maybe I didn't annoy her as much as I believed, maybe that was just my interpretation of it, because of a bad day or a long day.  Maybe I was an annoying teenager.  Maybe I was rolling my eyes too much, or checking my pager too often.  I often wonder how the reel plays in her memory versus mine.

History has a funny way of rewriting itself though.  As I take my kids to the grocery store with me, I see how quickly I am happy when they are well behaved, as if I've just been rewarded mother of the year, and then one tantrum, one misstep, and I feel like an ultimate failure of a mother who is snarky and annoyed.  And yet, I keep going back with them, because I have to, and because I can.  Is that how it was for my own mom too?   

What Mom Says, Daughter Do

The first time I was pregnant, I carefully abided by the rules laid out by my mother.  I avoided scissors.  Stuff that was too cold.  Hammering nails into the wall.  Moving furniture.  All superstitions that she gravely informed me of, of the consequential dread and doom that would become of me if I didn't listen.  On the outside, I laughed about it with my more American half husband.  But on the inside, I carefully avoided scissors, put the nails away, let the furniture sit until my husband came home, and meticulously planned what I ate.  

The Chinese daughter tries hard to escape the constant reminders of a concerned and persistent Chinese mother.  I think back to when I was younger, a sophomore in high school when I had hurt my ankle after spraining it while leaping into the air to grab the phone, but landed over a contraption that moved my mom's ankles and was supposed to help her lose weight.  I'm not sure if I was more mad at the idiotic Chinese contraptions my mom purchased because all the Asian ladies were doing it, and swore it made a difference, because if you can't exercise, a machine that moves you is just like exercising, or if I was more mad at myself for leaping into the air with excitement that I hadn't yet used all three of my daily phone call allotment and was about to go pick up the phone and talk to a friend.  

But when the pain came back in college as I was ballroom dancing in heels, my mom did what any asian mom would do.  She took me to the Asian doctor, not because she didn't trust the white Western doctors, but because the Asian doctor would have a quicker and more natural remedy.  And I'm not even sure we had an American doctor after we stopped getting shots and going to the American pediatrician, who was surely dead by the time I was in high school.  Dr. Green was quite old when we went to him, and shortly after, we switched to an Asian doctor, who glossed over my lack of period and said whatever would make my mother happy.  I wonder why I have a weird relationship with doctors and why I still do not have a regular doctor for myself.... I digress.

The doctor we went to for my ankle used wet cabbage and weird oils and stinky aromatic herbs and I smelled once more, like an Asian science food project.  I wondered when I could take the cabbage off of my foot which didn't seem to be improving.  It didn't help that my skepticism at the doctor's abilities were reduced by my then Asian college boyfriend who quickly told me he had also done the same to his injuries in high school when his Mom took him to an Asian doctor.  "It's weird, but it works," he had told me.  If it worked, it wasn't permanent.  The pain came back.  The swelling came back.  But I smiled and agreed, like a good Chinese daughter and girlfriend would, that it was definitely improving, wondering if I could one day be an actress with these manipulative good lying and smiling skills I was inadvertently gaining.  

Memories of earlier visits to the Asian doctor who would remedy my random periods which came four times a year flooded into my mind.  The bitter aroma of medicine I would swallow down immediately, every day, with fresh hopes of seeing blood once a month in my underwear as a result of the disgusting medicine, but make me normal like all the other girls struggling with pads and wings and tampons, festered in my mind.  My mom eventually gave up and let me have random periods or no periods throughout my high school life, simultaneously treating me to every single acne face wash and medicine over the counter, and starting me on the extraction part of monthly facials beginning at 16.  I would not receive the spa portion, aka the actual relaxing portion of the facial until I was 18, but by then, I had secretly gone to the college medical doctor and obtained a prescription for birth control, which would not only rectify my lack of periods, but help regulate my hormones, which shockingly, were the reason for my acne.  Mother would never know of these things.  She would swear my monthly facials were the cure, and continue to pay for me to get a monthly facial until I was married and with my first child.  I would gladly oblige and figure out this way the way to a successful relationship with my Asian mother.  

To this day, she believes that birth control is the reason all my friends are struggling to get pregnant, not because they are trying in their mid to late 30s.  I do wonder if she ever wondered what that patchy thing on my skin was, if she thought I was smoking, or if she knew birth control had evolved into a sticker. She never saw me with pills, so she must not have realized it. Though if memory serves itself right, I remember a flicker of her finding some pills she thought were birth control but was actually gum, and in that instant, I knew I would alway stick with the non pill forms of birth control forever, if not to escape the ridicule and scrutiny and judgment of my Asian mother.  

Never Good Enough

I was in elementary school when The Joy Luck Club came out and my mom and aunt took my cousins (my age and one 4 years younger) and me to go see it.  We didn't understand the significance of the movie, or even the cultural impact it had on my mom and aunt as they cried throughout the entire movie.  We didn't even notice that most of the cast were Asian, just that they spoke some Mandarin here or there that we didn't need to read the subtitles to understand.  My mom and aunt both raved about the movie.  It was such a pivotal time for Asian Americans.  Or so I heard.

When I got to college in 2000, I would watch The Joy Luck Club again and have a deja vu moment as I cried profusely throughout the entire movie.  How did the movie know that I also felt like I was never good enough?  How did the movie pinpoint the oddity of random Chinese American struggles so well?  It wasn't even a recent movie by the time I was watching it in college.  It was almost a relic with the hairdos and 90s outfits all the current daughter were wearing.  And yet, I got it.  It all made sense to me now.  Something between the first time and second time I watched it, I had grown to understand the significant of the movie.  The exploration of a cultural struggle to adapt and preserve one's identity.  The desire to please your mom, not understand her fully, and to love her all the while. And even though I'm now a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and have been counseled not to watch rated R movies, I have to keep The Joy Luck Club in my collection.  I just have to.  It's symbolic of an entire generation of American born Chinese girls disappointing their immigrant moms, and when I need a good cry, I'll watch it again.

My Buddhist Culture

When we were in Hong Kong visiting the many Buddhist temples there, I had a flashback of my childhood.  Not because we were Buddhists, but because as a Chinese immigrant child, you experience a lot of the cultural Buddhist stuff that is hard to distinguish between religion and tradition.  As we walked up the steps in one Buddhist temple, we saw different Chinese Buddhist believers in the middle of the temple grounds on their knees, praying, shaking a cylinder can of incense sticks, holding incense sticks and ke-tou-ing or bowing reverently with their heads touching the ground.  These are all things I mostly knew of, because of my Chinese upbringing.

I remember when I was about 6 or 7, my mom told me a God was coming to live in our home.  She kept talking about this Shen (Chinese word for God!) who was going to come and bless our lives, bless my Dad's business dealings, and help us to be happier.  We would be able to pray to him daily, and pray for our ancestors too.  Our entire home had to be clean for when this God would arrive, including our dump room which usually had big black gardening trash bags of clean clothes and paperwork stashed away so the rest of our home appeared completely neat and orderly while this room housed all the junk.  It was a big feat to get ready for the God to come.  Only when he came, I realized, for the first time, He was just an acrylic figure of a Chinese God that is everywhere.  He has a long beard, looks like Confucius, and stands with two fingers held propped up, and wears an elaborate long teal robe with red accents.

When he first got to our house, there was a shelf my dad had created for him to go on top of.  The incense pot would also go there.  It took some trial and error for our family to figure out we needed to line the ceiling above with foil since the burning incense would create a big black hole on the ceiling above it.

My mom burned incense for the God morning and night.  Sometimes, she would offer me three sticks of incense to pray for my ancestors, my family, and bow three times while standing, before being able to insert the incense sticks.  I don't know why the tradition exists, only that I obliged and followed along when needed.

The same went for when we visited grandparents at the grave site.  In fact, I remember when my maternal grandfather passed, we met religiously every weekend at his grave.  There were different ritualistic stuff we did, like bowing on our knees, touching our arms to the floor, burning incense, bringing food offerings (that we could consume later, once the incense was done burning), and then as the weeks passed, the rituals always changed and added more. We burned gold, or gold paper folded to look like gold bars, a constructed home, which would be wai-gong's house up above, and paper money which always confused me as it said Bank of Hell.  Lost in translation?  I sure hope so.  We had these black bracelets that all the grand kids wore, and we were encouraged to wear them to school everyday for weeks.  My mom finally told me I could take it off and just keep it close by and treasured, but I still never figured out the reason for it.  I thought it was all just a Chinese thing.  But then when my dad's father died years later, it was completely different.  We wore white, people came and chanted some songs, and it was entirely different. We didn't have to go back to the grave site for seven consecutive weekends, but we did the same things with burning symbolic goods, incense, bowing, and bringing food offerings. 

I never thought much of any of this.  It was just what I was used to.  About as normal as chicken feet on Saturday dim sum.  Which I suppose isn't that normal at all.  But now as a mom, I'm very particular about which Chinese traditions I want to make sure my kids understand.  They know the Chinese Zodiac better than you.  Definitely.  They might even know the order better than you.  I was consumed with which animal each of my family members was, and my kids are the same now.  Even though language is lost among them, I am doing my best now to immerse them this summer, and make sure they at least have the tones down so when they want to learn more later. I have made very conscious efforts to introduce my kids to boba, seaweed, squid, Chinese candies, Chinese bakery bread, pig ears, and stomach lining.  It actually tickles me excited that my daughter loves these as much as me.  When she had tripe for the first time, she exclaimed, "it tastes just like noodles! Yum Mom!"  My pickiest eater won't touch boba balls and even has a slight disdain for Chinese food in general, but he loves seaweed and ube ice cream.  I guess I can compromise a bit. 

As I navigate living in white Utah, I hope I can remember to continually shed light on the Chinese culture and traditions for my kids. 

Different Childhoods

Sometimes, when my husband's family play with my kids, I chuckle a bit.  Him and I have very different childhoods.  I only remember one uncle playing with us as kid, and I can recall that he was our favorite because of that.  The rest of the family, they just fed us.  Actually I lie, one other occasion, the Christmas all my cousins and I will remember, is when my uncle and his then girlfriend, now my aunt, played a game of Monopoly with us.  We know now he was just trying to impress her, because he refused to play ever again, and she also wasn't excited to play again, but that has remained a part of my good memory pile from then on.  It also sprouted my love for board games, and even though the only ones we played growing up were Monopoly and LIFE, both games I kind of sorta hate now, I also was exposed to some other games through school and friends, and in my adult life, have come unto actually legit games!  HAHA I digress.  So..., most of my family... they were all immigrants who had come from Taiwan to find the American dream in LA.  And I'm not sure why but they just knew how to work hard and shower us with gifts and food, but they didn't really know how to interact with kids.  Not much has changed in respect to my uncles and aunts.  They're still really good at feeding them.  Like constantly shoving food into their mouths, bringing bread and desserts and snacks for them, and then giving them a ton of fruit when they're stuffed.  My dad will provide them with big architect planning paper and tons of pens to draw something with.  I remember doing this as a kid a lot too.  I guess you could say they're really good at encouraging me to grow my creative side also.  Don't get me wrong, my parents love LOVE my kids, but they struggle to know how to be with them if they are not providing for them.  It is oddly reminiscent of my own childhood.  Even now as a grown up, my parents still aren't sure how to be my friend, and are still my parents. They still are in charge of me, provide me with food and shelter, and help me out financially whenever I visit.  In fact, my dad has been known to "sponsor" our trips to Disneyland everytime we visit, but both my parents would not want to go to an actual amusement park with us, which is a stark contrast from my husband's more American family, where both his parents and his aunt and uncle have been to numerous amusement parks with us.  My parents also freak out when we dine in an actual restaurant and the kid start acting up.  You know, because they have to wait for food and are bored and want to get up and walk around.  We prefer buy and sit to dine type of places, but my parents have taken us to many a fancy Chinese restaurants and then been mortified by my kids' very normal childlike behavior, which was completely appalling and unacceptable by my parents' standards (and made for a really boring childhood spent every weekend at dim sum).  But I respect the differences and it doesn't bug me.  I just find it interesting to note the differences.