Here is a story I carry about my mother: When she was in her early twenties, she worked in the sales office of a garment manufacturer in Kuwait. She was petite, dark haired, feisty, and a Kuwaiti man fell in brief lust or attraction with her, finally giving up after a week, when he realized she would not be his fourth wife. He gave her a necklace with the letter “L” on a thin gold disk. Growing up, I thought that it was for her last name, Liao, but later found out that the L was for her American name that she chose for herself – Lolita.
*
My parents got divorced when I was very young. My father got full custody of my sister and I, but I was too young too really remember the details, but I have created this memory out of stories told to me by my grandmother, and out of a hazy recollection. It may not be true, but I have accepted it as such. I am sitting on a chair in a dining room, my legs are too short to touch the ground. My mother is wearing a red polka dot dress, and kneels in front of me.
“I’m going away for a little while,” she says.
I nod, eager to get back to the playground, the sunshine.
“I’ll see you very soon, I promise.”
In the existing narrative, I ran outside and played in the sun, not registering what happened. Then, my sister and I are in a new house, across the country, with my grandma around to help us out. My mother becomes an entity on the phone, a voice that I speak to every weekend, before passing the phone to my father, where he stretches the cord to its limits and sits on the stairs of the basement, so we don’t have to hear them argue.
*
On our way to the Thai temple for lunch one day, my mother is picking lemons from a stranger’s tree. We are in Berkeley, the sun is shining and my mother has found a lemon tree that she is helping herself to. Never mind that we have a lemon tree in the yard at home, though technically it might be the neighbors’, its heavy branches hanging over the fence, never mind that we are in California, land of citrus fruits and fresh produce readily available. My mother will steal these lemons, pushing the sun-warmed fruit into our hands.
“Put these in the car,” she says. Dutiful daughters, we drop them in the front seat and close the door. We walk to the Thai temple and eat plates of steaming curry and sticky coconut rice. My mother eats slowly, methodically, working through plate after plate, picking bits off of our dishes, even though she has plenty in front of her.
*
The Loma Prieta earthquake hit during the 1989 World Series between the Oakland A’s and the San Francisco Giants. I was 7, and my sister Jenny was 5, and we were watching the game with our father in New York. I am a baseball fan because my mother is a baseball fan. I keep my jewelry on a Jose Canseco collector’s edition plate on my vanity, something my mother gave me when I was little. When the quake hit, and the broadcast went off the air, we called my mother frantically, the busy signal reverberating in our ear. When we finally heard from her, she was fine.
“I was baking cookies with Tessa,” she told us. “We went under the table, and I broke a plate! No big deal, it’s just an earthquake.”
I picture her now as she must have been then, baking almond cookies while the earth starts to shake around her. I imagine nothing more but irritation furrowing her brow, less concerned than annoyed that she has to wrangle my sister Tessa, and take cover under the kitchen table. Tessa probably cried, but my mother most likely just scooped her up and plopped her under the table, waiting for the earth to stop moving. Maybe she was scared, but really, not much scares Sui-fen.
*
When I was in high school, my mother gave me a jade bracelet. I had always admired hers, sliding up and down her tiny wrist, and finally, I had one of my own. I broke it in dance class one day, smashing it against the barre, and came home with it in pieces. “Can we super glue it?” I asked. She simply sighed, and, before I graduated from high school, gave me another one. I wore it all through college, but it broke when I tripped over an uneven sidewalk in Chicago. My friends helped me pick up the pieces, but I kept my head down when I burst into tears. Three months later, she gave me another one, this one bright green and very tight, forced over my balled fist by the two of us. It has not broken yet.
*
English is not her first language, but she speaks it remarkably well, lightly-accented and lilting with the same intonations as her native Mandarin. Her grasp of American idioms is shaky, but she has coined her own phrases. “Damn, Sam” she’ll say when she hears a bit of news that is troublesome, but not major — her car needs an oil change, or she left her sweater at work. “He didn’t do a diddle” she says when giving her take on my fathers parenting contributions when I was a baby. When she met my best friend, Greg, he was sunburned. “You look like a cooked shrimp!” she crowed, coining a nickname that is ten years strong.
*
When I am in high school, Sui-fen is in college, getting her degree. I am writing college entrance essays, AP English papers, struggling through math homework. My mother is faced with countless essays and readings she needs to do, so I help her with her essays, hunched over the keyboard at 11pm on a school night. I edit by reworking paragraphs, finessing sentences, and sometimes writing new sections altogether.
“Megan, can you help me with this?” she asks.
I say yes, because if I say no, it will be an argument, and it’s late, and I’m very tired. I say yes because I know that after working all day, going to class and tearing down I-80 in a giant minivan all day, she is also very tired. I say yes because I know that I can just write the paper for her and we can both go to sleep. I say yes, because she is my mother.
*
My mother taught me the art of passive-aggressive dish washing, performed only after you’ve cooked a full meal, with a dish-towel slung over your shoulder, the water on as hot as you can stand, scrubbing with simmering irritation. I have seen her do this many times, “Sit down and eat, Ma,” we tell her, but she shakes her head, and scrubs harder. “You eat, you eat,” she says. Once every dish is done, and we have bowls that are heaped with rice, she sits down and joins the meal. When I was younger, I thought that whole charade was an attempt at martyrdom, our ungrateful selves shoveling the food she had made for us without thanks. It was only when I found myself doing the same thing at a dinner party that I realized the quiet satisfaction that comes from not having to do the dishes after you finish cooking. My sisters and I find ourselves doing the same thing now, and from behind, clad in sweatpants and house slippers, we all look like Mom.
When she is at a restaurant, or out in public, she puffs up, endears herself to the store clerk or hostess. She cracks jokes, she smiles, she laughs loud and rapid fire, slapping her knee at her own jokes. When we go to our favorite restaurant, 168, in the Ranch 99 mall, she sidles up to the hostess, and speaks rapid-fire Chinese, taking the menus herself and seating us at a table. My sisters and I, grown women well past the age of teenage embarrassment, groan in unison. This is what she calls “showing her charm,” and we all mirror this behavior in varying degrees. I see it when Tessa stops and talks to people on the street, and then turns to me after we’ve passed, and tells me that she doesn’t remember where she met them. I see it when Shaina uses her customer voice on the watiress at the sushi restaurant when she asks her for more plates. I see myself showing my charm when I find myself making fast friends at parties with people I’ve just met.
At the Gap or at Macy’s, my mother takes the pair of jeans I’ve been clutching to my chest and plunks them down on top of her purchases, hushing my weak protests and rifling through her wallet to find a coupon she clipped. “This is my daugh-terrrrr, visiting all the way from New York!” she says to an uninterested shop clerk who indulges her. I smile and nod, embarrassed but kind of proud that she is so proud of me for simply living in New York, and being her kid. Living across the country from her, and seeing her only once a year or so, the strangest things set me off. An local news broadcast about a Chinese woman killed by a snowplow featured interviews from her grieving friends, saying in accented English, “She was a good mommy” brings tears to my eyes, because of the tragedy, but also because it reminds me of my mom. Sometimes, when flipping thru the channels, my sister and I will leave the Chinese language newscast on and keep it on in the background for a little while. If I’m feeling especially maudlin, when Sui-fen texts me “LOL”, meaning “lots of love”, I get misty.
The older I get, the more of my mother I see in myself. The gnawing anxiety in the pit of my stomach when someone is angry with me makes me pester them for recognition of my remorse, the same way she calls back immediately after hanging up on me during a stressful phone call. My rash reactions to things out of my control are mirrored in her reactions to the same. My mother’s daughters are proud women. To admit defeat and accept the error of our ways is not the way we are built. My mother has a way of acting when she knows that she is wrong, a sort of frantic flailing of unreasonable logic that chases its own tail until it collapses. When I am wrong, when I have failed, defeat is hard to accept. When backed into a corner on the basis of my own faulty reasoning, I panic, my levels rise, I make frantic accusations that are naturally false. I see the error of my ways only when it’s too late.
I have learned to be a better person from my mother. I have learned from her mistakes, her actions. I have learned valuable lessons from her resolve, her strength, her immovable spirit. I am turning into my mother with each birthday that passes, but I now realize that it’s okay.
