disappointment as love, or, on having an asian mother
This Week in Reading:
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
I reread The Joy Luck Club this week and cried the whole time. Probably the most famous book about Asian American women, by an Asian American woman, The Joy Luck Club follows the lives of four Chinese mothers and their four Chinese American daughters. Each chapter is told from a different perspective, describing each woman’s secret hardships and unknown traumas. It is a book about being a daughter, about the ways we have failed to understand the things our mothers so fervently tried to teach us, about the ways we fail to understand each other.
Pride is not an emotion readily dispensed in Asian households. I genuinely don’t know what it would take to make my mother proud. It’s not as tragic as it sounds— I have almost entirely divorced my own pursuits from my parents’ unspoken, unknowable expectations of me. My parents hate my blue-collar job, hate that I’m not using my brain and my fancy, expensive, college degree for something more. But if I had one of the respectable, lucrative professions so prized by Asian mothers (doctor, computer programmer, business consultant), I’m sure she would find a way to turn up her nose at that too.
To be raised by an Asian mother is to be constantly needled. Everything you accomplish could be done better, could be done more. A ninety-five percent on a calculus exam could be a ninety-eight, each chess victory could be won more quickly, more efficiently. The goal posts always seem to be moving— perfection, when achieved, is only a sign that the game is broken, the rules too easy. At a parent teacher conference my high school art teacher told my parents I was one of the best students he had ever worked with. “I’m sure he tells that to all of the parents” dismissed my mom when they returned home that evening. A failing report card is out of the question but achieving success in the American school system is meaningless— the standards are so low, the classes so easy, there is so much extra credit and so many field trips, everyone is graded on a curve. I often feel as if I am being judged along opposing principles: I am not strong enough, not tough— but when I show some bite I am criticized for failing to be empathetic. Somehow, I am not independent enough, but also fail at invoking the bonds of family.
I am constantly disappointing my Asian mother, but disappointment is its own kind of love. White parents tell their second graders “good job,” tell them that their handprint art is “beautiful”, say “I’m proud of you, son”. Asian mothers say “you would be better if you practiced more”, say “this part is ugly”, say “next time you do better, make less mistakes.” Asian mothers love you so much they believe you can be better, believe you can be the best. It is not that they see you as untalented, rather they believe you are so talented you could play a grand piano in Carnegie Hall and go to Harvard Med school and be the number one chess player in the world if only you practiced harder and studied more and stopped being lazy like all of your gum-chewing video-game-playing white classmates. They aren’t going to tell their seven year old daughter that she did an amazing job at her piano recital because they don’t believe the best she can be is a choppy rendition of Ode to Joy. Praising Ode to Joy would imply that they don’t think she can do Beethoven’s 9th. Where I once heard endless failure, I now see an unfailing belief in my potential. What, do you want me to lie to you, was a favorite refrain of my mom throughout my childhood. Like those white moms who hand out trophies and say everyone is a winner? Yes, I would think, I want you to lie to me, I want you to tell me that my best was good enough. I want to be enough, as I am now. But she won’t give up her belief of a better version of myself— a nebulously defined, glittering Good Daughter that extends beyond what even I imagine I am capable of. Is that not love? The boundless vision of her daughter’s capacity?
Under the steady deluge of criticism from an Asian mother, it is easy to conclude that their love is conditional, an unwinnable prize that can only be earned by comprehensive achievement and unquestionable perfection. But of course, they love their children fiercely. To watch your child fail, to watch them disappoint you, and to love them anyways— is that not the most unconditional of loves?
My mother tells me that I’m white all the time. She means it as an insult. Whitegirl over here she says. At Thanksgiving she told me she couldn’t believe I got an art commission that centered around being Vietnamese American— you cheated she said, have they seen you? It hurt, to have my mother deny me my heritage— to push me away from the biggest thing she gave me. How could she not see that being biracial has informed every single aspect of my life, that straddling two worlds has been the thing that has shaped my identity most? But of course she’s right. I am white. Not because of my freckles and my SPF 50. Even if my hair was darker and coarser and my eyelids single lidded, I would still be white. As Amy Tan puts it, I am a girl who has swallowed more Coca Cola than sorrow. I do not know if I am white because I have forgotten how to be Asian, buried the cultural legacy born in my bones with goldfish crackers and Disney movies, or if I never learned how to be Vietnamese in the first place, didn’t listen to the lessons my mother was surely trying to share with me. Us second generation kids, we listen to the stories of the hardship our mothers endured, the wars and the abuse and the suffering. We know this life of field trip permission slips and soccer practice is a gift, a pearl. And still we ask for gummy bears and Legos, sulk when we aren’t allowed to stay out late, dare to resent the women who gave us everything.
The Joy Luck Club is about the ways we are our mothers, and the ways in which we and our mothers remain unknowable to each other. I have inherited my mother’s volume, her frame. From my mother I have learned never to admit when you are telling a joke, how to tell that a persimmon is ripe. We both have strong personalities and the unlucky knack of always knowing what words will hurt most. Between shadowed mimicry and oral history, I have internalized the majority of the skills I have needed to be a person in the world from her. I know her on an instinctual level because I know the part of me that is a mirror of her. Yet in so many ways she remains unknowable. The main character, June remembers “ A friend once told me that my mother and I were alike, that we had the same wispy hand gestures, the same girlish laugh and sideways look. When I shyly told my mother this, she seemed insulted and said, "You don’t even know little percent of me! How can you be me?" There is so much I do not know, so much I have never asked.
And I have become unknowable to her too. At one point in my young life my mother knew me better than anyone else in the world. She knew what snacks I liked, she knew why I was crying. Now I have grown into someone quite different than the person she believes I still am. How disorienting it must be to be a mother and watch the child that was once, quite literally, a part of you become less and less of you. Become more mysterious, moving off into the distance. Maybe motherhood is watching a version of yourself start walking away from you from the very moment it enters the world.
Further Reading
Other books by Asian American writers that I enjoyed: The Wangs vs the World by Jade Chang, Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, Goodbye Vitamin by Rachel Khong