ties that bind
This Week in Reading:
The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit
I reread The Faraway Nearby recently: a book I have been describing as the best book I have ever read since I first picked it up five years ago. There is always a bit of trepidation upon rereading your favorite book—a fear that you have oversold it to yourself and all of the friends whose hands you have frantically pressed it into. I am relieved to report that this book is just as extraordinary as I remembered. Rebecca Solnit is a master of both form and structure. Each sentence is exquisite, each paragraph challenging, each chapter revelatory. It is a book that is beyond imitation, a book that can only be written by someone who has been alive for half of a century. She ties together so many disparate ideas: an overwhelming bounty of apricots, fairytales, Frankenstein, the arctic. It’s a book one cannot research their way into writing, each example is simply an artifact from a historian’s collection, accumulated over a lifetime.
The heart of the book is Solnit caring for her mother as she descends into Alzheimer’s. Their entire relationship had been contentious, but as Alzheimer’s slowly erases her memories, her mother’s long held resentments are also forgotten. Solnit’s memory of their combative dynamic remains sharp as ever, but finding herself suddenly opponent-less in their lifelong war, she lays down her own weapons to help her mother locate her misplaced keys.
Ever since my grandmother died, I have been thinking a lot about kinship. Growing up, I felt extremely constricted by the Asian family structure. So much obligation— a sense of duty that superseded all else. It felt unreasonable to be bound to eternal care for a group of people, simply because I had been born into them.
The first season of Gilmore Girls aired in 2000, when I was seven years old. I watched the show with my own mother, Lorelei and Rory an aspirational model for familial closeness. Gilmore Girls ushered in the era of “my mom is my best friend.” The Gilmores order too much takeout and have movie marathons on the couch, tell each other everything. As a pre-teen whose primary hobbies were being mean to my mom, and crying because my mom was mean to me, this relationship felt foreign to me. On Mother’s Day, my feed fills with women earnestly describing their mother as their best friend (the male equivalent seems to be describing their moms as “the strongest woman they know”). On the surface, there is something enticing about this—a mother whose ear you would whisper in at a slumber party, a mother who eats sour candy with you until you both get stomach aches and doesn’t say “I told you so.”
America conflates closeness with intimacy, and intimacy with vulnerability. When people ask me if my family is “close,” I never quite know what to say. They talk more than many other extended families I know, either white or Asian, loud incessant teasing that reveals a deep familiarity; but do they confide in each other? Are they vulnerable with one another? Those are different questions altogether.
When a reality TV contestant declares that family is the most important thing to them— as if this is the highest virtue one could proclaim— it feels reductive. Valuing family is a virtue that has simply been the status quo for millennia. All cultures revere family, but the way they approach the concept differs. Americans tend to view family as a collection of related individuals— to love ones family is to love each of them for who they are as a person— for being the strongest woman they know, for being their best friend. In contrast, the Asian family model places a greater emphasis on the family structure. You are cast in a variety of roles: a mother, a daughter, a niece, and you are respected and loved simply for fulfilling that role.
Looking back, I think the root of much of my teenage conflict with my mother was my American individualism rubbing up against the Vietnamese understanding of family; I wanted to be understood as an individual while my mother insisted that she already understood me as a daughter. I wonder if I resented being understood as a daughter because it was a way of seeing me that was impossible for me to partake in. Like many teenagers of my generation, I found solace in the concept of “chosen family”— that I was only responsible to those I had picked for myself, people that I liked and respected, people that understood me.
Lately however, I’ve begun to reconsider my earlier analysis of Asian family values. I have been thinking about my mother’s devotion to my grandmother’s care despite decades of resentment and unhealed wounds. There is something both depressing and beautiful about that. My grandmother was in many ways, a ridiculous woman— full of petty rage and arbitrary demands. My mother and aunt would snap at her, complain about her behind her back, regale the rest of the family with stories that painted her as silly and taxing and outrageous— but none of that would interrupt the pattern of their daily errand runs, the way they carefully set out bowls of potato chips for her to munch on.
I still treasure the endless empathy and support my community of friends provides for me. But I also wonder if my attraction towards “chosen family” is simply another manifestation of American individualism that uses my personal gratification as a measuring stick for community. I have curated a group of talented, kind, and interesting people that challenge and understand me, and nurturing those relationships continues to bring so much joy into my life. But perhaps centering my social enjoyment is to miss the true point of family. What if family has nothing to do with liking your family members, or even respecting them? The true power of kinship is creating bonds of obligation that are deeper than whether or not you understand or love the people you are related to. Maybe family is an exercise in unconditional care more than it is one in unconditional love— a practice in care and community and interdependence that transcends enjoyment or compatibility. This might be the most challenging form of mutual care: committing to caring for people who have hurt you most personally, rather than hypothetically.
Now, as an adult with a much less volatile relationship with my mother (I might even—boldly—describe it as “good”), the concept of “my mother is my best friend” still feels alien to me. If my child ever dares to say that I am their best friend I will be forced to sit them down and tell them to stop embarrassing me. I have many friends, and only one mother. That role is singular and special in my life, why would I want to strip her of that title? I love my mother because she is my mother, not because she is my best friend or my hero or any of the other things my classmates’ families and American TV told me a parent could and should be. I do not tell her my deepest secrets and fears. I love her—like her, even! --but that feels like a privilege, not a right. I expect her to know me as my mother, an external perspective unlike any other in my life, a singular vantage point that is beyond my own manipulation.
In The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit writes about the economy of favors: pre-currency, neighbors would barter favors to feed and clothe themselves. Each trade was inherently uneven: a goat for a blanket, three squashes for a gallon of cream— resulting in debts that shifted back and forth with each transaction. These debts were the foundation for community, obligation to repay ones neighbors keeping them in service to one another. Physical money was introduced, in no small part, to sever those messy webs of favors: replacing interdependence with a ledger of transactions.
My parents drove down to California a couple months ago, bursting into my apartment with gallons of olive oil from Costco, a cooler full of cookie dough to stash in my freezer, and half a case of hoarded Clorox wipes. They sold me the family car at well under the market rate when a tree fell onto my apartment’s parking lot and totaled mine. This is the most they can do to ensure that their only child is fed and sanitized and safe. They raised me to be fiercely independent, to see these gestures of care as attacks on my pride and liberty, but I’m trying to accept the inextricable bonds of family more gracefully than I once did.
After the dawn of capitalism, family is the one of the last vestiges of the economy of favors. Kinship: a debt so deep you will never begin to repay it, an endless well of care you will spend your life trying to fill.
Further Reading:
If you are looking for more Solnit, everything she touches in dynamite, but I would especially recommend A Paradise Built in Hell for ~these times~.
If you want to wreck yourself over Asian mother-daughter relationships, this essay by Jiayang Fan in the New Yorker really gutted me.