Exploring and exploding all the ways Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders experience, appreciate, embrace, fear and/or are intimidated by mothers and mothering. A storytelling project of Asian Women United.
About the author: When Kashiana is not writing, she lives to embody her TEDx talk theme of Work as Worship into her every day. She currently serves as Managing Editor for Poets Reading the News. Her newest full-length collection, Woman by the Door is coming out in 2022 with Apprentice House Press.
My mother (right) and I during our last trip together. Seattle will always hold a special place in my heart.
Someone close to me told me right after my mom was diagnosed with cancer to get ready to see the beauty that life has to offer. It sounded ridiculous and insane at the time, as all I could see was the fear and pain of preparing to lose my mom, but I listened. I found that after I heard his messaging, I realized that the beauty of life is overlooked because we are so busy in our lives and we don't allow ourselves the time to see the lessons that the world is trying to teach us. The most beautiful moments in our lives live within the brutal moments of the pain, loss, and loneliness that we experience, but we forget to look for them. This reflection has allowed me to look at my life in completely different eyes and has allowed me to view the events in my life as beautiful and full of life's greatest lessons.
Everything changed for me in August of 2016, when my mom was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. My heart sank with fear and devastation, but I sucked up my tears and told her, "Head up, heart strong, everything will be ok." I knew at that moment that I needed to become her caretaker as she had been for me and that the road of our relationship was coming to a drastic change.
The months following were filled with chemo treatments, oncology appointments, tests, and blood transfusions. Those months were hard for all of us, but I kept singing our mantra, "Head up, heart strong, everything will be ok." After 8 months of chemo, my mom decided that she could not continue with chemotherapy, and her oncologist agreed that her body was not tolerating it well. The following month, my mom went in for surgery to attempt to slow the progression of her disease. Her surgery took over thirteen hours as they kept finding more and more cancer.
The following two months, I stayed by my mom's side as she lived in the hospital. Her recovery was brutal as she seemed to get better and worse each day. I stood up for her when she needed something and learned to care for her from the nurses that stayed with us. They taught me to change bandages, give IV medications, and how to report the things that the doctors needed to hear. They taught me to mother my mother.
On July 19th of 2017, we received the news that my mom's cancer was everywhere in her body despite the months of recovery after her surgery. Cancer had spread to her liver, her kidneys, and even the fluid around her lungs. I stayed with her that day, and we talked about what this news meant to her and how I could support her, but her weakened state made talking difficult for her. I decided to go home for the evening and come back in the morning so that I could take some time to process all the news without affecting her own processing. At 3 am my phone rang with the news that my mom's body was starting to shut down. Had I known that cancer would begin to take her life so quickly, I never would have left her side. I was upset with myself for leaving her, and I cried the whole drive to UCSF. When I arrived, she was on a ventilator, and her hands were already cold. I told her I loved her, and I kissed her as they took her off the machines allowing her to go peacefully. This moment was beautiful, but every bit of anger, sadness, and loneliness tried to take it away from me.
I choose to look at the months leading up to my mom's death with the lesson that my friend gave me of looking for the beauty of life in the most brutal moments that we experience. If I let the anger of losing my mom overwhelm me, I forget the color of nail polish that she chose the last time I took her to have her a manicure. If I let the sadness of watching her die overwhelm me, I forget the way her laugh made rooms of people smile. If I let the grief and sorrow overwhelm me, I forget the way she would say, "I love you." So I don't let these feelings overwhelm me and instead remember to look at the beauty of all the lessons that she taught me. I am thankful for these lessons as they have only been the stepping stones that I needed to continue to push my life towards that positive and love-filled life that I am living now.
As I balance my life of both working and school full-time, I know that I am continuing to make my mom proud of the passion I gained for caring for others through her life as I work towards my nursing degree. I will continue to remember the lessons that I have learned when life throws hardships at me so that I can remain thankful that I can see the absolute beauty that life has to offer.
About the Author: Meg Naughton is a nursing student at De Anza College pursuing the field of oncology to give light and hope to those surround by the darkness of cancer. In her free time she frequently travels and hikes to see all that the world has to offer. Meg lives with her husband Chris, her son Tristan, and a zoo of animals in Hollister, CA.
I wonder if my mother is disappointed in me for not wanting children. I wonder if my grandmother and her mother and her mother's mother would be disappointed in me for not choosing the life they have chosen. I wonder if they would understand my desire not to ever get married or, at the very least, not to have children. And if they cannot understand, then would they allow me to at least explain why?
My name is Alexandra Torrez. Alexandra Kailani Torrez. It’s a good name. A strong name. But a deceitful name.
I am not Greek, as Alexandra suggests, but then again, hardly anyone is ever what their given name suggests nowadays. I can trace my roots to the shores of Hawaii, but only as far as my middle name will allow. And although by the look of it Torrez - spelled with a “Z”- indicates Portuguese descent, I am actually Hispanic. So how did I get this name?
You see, I got this name many years ago when my maternal great-great-grandfather, an aristocrat from Japan, immigrated to Hawaii to avoid war and married a picture bride. I am told he was a musician, someone who entertained the military on the islands and who was a solid tower well above six feet. I am told I owe any chance at height to him.
I got this name from one of their children, my great-grandmother, a small bony woman who gave birth to her children in an internment camp. I am told she smoked cigarettes too often, and that her fine fingers are what allowed many of us great grandchildren to span piano keys with ease, not that I ever took up either habit.
I got this name from my maternal grandmother, who manifested into this world from the lady with fine fingers. Only instead of fine fingers and an affinity to breathe in what was bad, she gave my grandmother the ability to spin gold out of words with each breath. She gave my grandmother a quick tongue and a writer's mind. I have yet to inherit any of these quality attributes.
I got this name when my maternal grandmother married my grandfather, a Maui-born Filipino who found himself at San Jose State. A man whose skin was so deeply stained by the sun, the color of which I once thought was melting off in the a hot tub when I saw him without an undershirt for the first time. I don’t know if I will ever live up to who this man is because he gave so much with so little, I can only be grateful because no act would ever repay his service.
I got this name from my mother, although I did not inherit any of her beauty. My mother is a beautiful Filipino-Hawaiian-Japanese woman who has fair skin, and thick, straight, coarse jet black hair she only gave to my brother- the lucky bastard - but whose ability to dissect a text may have given me some hope in life.
I got this name from my paternal Danish great-grandmother who married a Mexican man. I grew up on stories of how she would knock down the door of any mother who called any one of her twelve children bastards just because they were a shade darker than my grandmother. And, although I can’t imagine the shriveled lady from my childhood knocking down any doors I’m inclined to believe her strength of will never left our family line over all these years.
I got this name from her daughter, my grandmother, who married a Mexican-Native American man. I have no memory of his face but whose native blood gave me the right to claim the land as my refuge if I should no longer have a place to sleep.
I got this name from my father, whose high cheekbones and earth-colored everything hide the fact my sister got her blue eyes from his bloodline but decidedly skipped over me.
And so my name is Alexandra Torrez. Alexandra Kailani Torrez. A name which carries enough confusion even before one brings their eyes to meet my face. You see, I do not look like my mother or her mother or her mother's mother. I do not look like my father or his father or his father's father. Instead I am a product distinctly American and, at the same time, not American at all.
So I wonder; is my mother disappointed in me? Is she disappointed in me for not wanting to continue this unique cocktail of traditions? Am I not the physical manifestation of what it means to be American? Am I not the product of the struggle to find solidarity between communities or the fight for the freedom to define one’s own self? I wonder if my ancestors would be disappointed in me. Disappointed that I, the combined total of their communities’ struggles, do not want to birth children who are so distinctly American that they cannot find a face similar to their own.
About the Author: Alexandra Torrez is an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. She is majoring in Political Science with an emphasis in International Relations and minoring in Global Poverty and Practice. In her free time, Alex enjoys hunting down the best coffee spots in the bay and getting a good dose of chlorine at the pool.
“Every woman has a grave deep inside her.” – Michelle ‘Mush’ Lee
When we buried my father, my mother buried her feelings for him. When she did, we all did. To this day, she hides telling my brother, William, and me of the history of her love with and for him. I can tell. She smiles in response when I ask her questions about my father’s personality. She leaves our conversations for the bathroom when I wonder out loud about her life in the Philippines. She grunts when I tell her to tell me something, anything. She laughed and petted me when I told her, at age twenty-five, that I was learning Ilokano so that I could understand her better. My mother seals my father from us, especially from me – her daughter, the inquirer, the writer, the one who makes her speech tiptoe – as though her secrets and our questions keep him at bay. This secrecy might be for her what keeps him alive. For me, it’s why I write, ask questions, read, and research.
I feel for this woman, my mother.
I think their love was forbidden. But it’s not the kind of forbidden that stays in one place, no, it’s the kind that multiplies and moves on. I think I’m not supposed to know, much less write about, how our family – her parents and siblings who are my grandparents and uncles and aunties – did not approve of their courtship for reasons I can only imagine from their collective silence. I think they met in the Philippines before she immigrated to the United States in 1978. I think he served in Saudi Arabia for the U.S. Army during the time of their courtship. I think that I cannot simply ask my mother about my father without watershed and flood and drowning; that I am actually asking her to fasten a nail to the wall of a dam that holds him behind it, that constructs her safety. I think that I am asking about shame. I think my asking her to open up is a breach, is asking her to re-live what we both grieve but cannot yet accept. And because I empathize, because I know that my questions require her, this woman, my mother, to undo a silence that’s kept us afloat, then I think this is how shame multiplies. How can I ask my mother to unravel this silence? What are we both afraid of? When will we heal?
I write extensively, privately, publicly on what happened when my father passed away twenty years ago. I was six years old. This meant that I was so young that I didn’t know what was going on. Could you imagine a little girl smiling at her father’s funeral? My second book, Like a Solid to a Shadow, was incited by the memory of taking this photo. There are pictures as proof in my family photo albums from that year. My brother remembers running away from the burial site as he saw our father being lowered into the ground, our oldest cousin chasing after him. I remember my mother’s guttural bawls, calling back for my father in Ilokano. I remember remaining silent, everyone looking at me, their eyes just above the ground where I stood because I thought that was what I was supposed to do for my family at that time. Can you imagine a little girl not saying anything at her father’s funeral? Now, I cry, remember, bury and uncover my feelings when his death anniversary comes. My father dies every time I tell someone new that I am fatherless this way. He lives every time I think about him. I write to respectfully remember, but also to resurrect his stories.
“Have you ever heard a butterfly scream?” – youth poet
When she pretended to choke herself with her necklace in French class, I knew something was wrong. My best friend in middle school, Gladys, sat next to me, pinching and pulling the back of her necklace to press its front against her throat. “Hey dude,” I think she called to me, “what would you do if I killed myself?” Keeping my eyes on the instructor, I whispered, “What’s wrong?” I was familiar with these thoughts. She replied, “I don’t know. Just wondering.” I couldn’t bear to look at her because her words mirrored my own insidious ones that arose years before I had ever met her.
Our close girlfriend of our trifecta, Patricia, also contemplated self-injury. Patricia’s family troubles continued with us through high school right into when I left San Jose, CA for college in La Jolla, CA and up until our friendship ended when I graduated. In fact, it wasn’t until I was a student at UC San Diego where I majored in Ethnic Studies and minored in Urban Studies & Planning that I acquired a language for the injustices I’d seen and the ineffability I’d felt as a young Pinay. I was acquiring a language for my rage. I actively sought out Asian American History classes and seminars, worked with professors and made appointments with counselors and staff in order to seek answers to questions that had erupted from me. I began my own research projects with Ethnic Studies Professor Yen Le Espiritu as my advisor. I thought the affect of my heart needed to match the rigor of my intellectual work. These questions, “Why don’t I know myself? Who am I? Why can’t I talk about the things that have been on my mind for years?” had always been inside me.
We Pinays, we were screaming butterflies. It wasn’t until college that I learned that Pinay contemplation and Pinay suicide rates were a public health issue of my generation. In so many phone conversations, text conversations, and women’s healing circles, and within myself, there was always an understood and accepted silence where we worked through our problems, our traumas and histories in a private space. We worked and thought together, alone and in our writings. I worked in a way that Patricia did not, could not. While I was at school five hundred miles away from home and from the roots of some of my familial problems, Patricia, and even Gladys, were around the city of theirs all the time.
In many ways, I still feel a little girl inside me asking questions, seeking answers, hating being shushed, working towards understanding and critically remembering and writing in her diary. My little girl, she is safe with me. She is my anthology, my empowered sense of self, my father’s daughter, my mother’s interpreter, and a source of friendship. In many ways, I still feel a little girl inside me asking questions, seeking answers, hating being shushed, working towards understanding and critically remembering and writing in her diary. My little girl, she is safe with me. She is my anthology, my empowered sense of self, my father’s daughter, my mother’s interpreter, and a source of friendship.
About the Author:
Janice Lobo Sapigao is a Pinay poet, writer, and educator from San José, CA. She is the author of two books of poetry: microchips for millions (Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc., 2016) and Like a Solid to a Shadow (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2017). She is also the author of two chapbooks: you don’t know what you don’t know (Mondo Bummer Books, 2017) and toxic city (tinder tender press, 2015). She is a VONA/Voices Fellow and was awarded a Manuel G. Flores Prize, PAWA Scholarship to the Kundiman Poetry Retreat. She is the Associate Editor of TAYO Literary Magazine. She co-founded Sunday Jump. Her work is also published in online publications such as The Offing, NBC Asian America, KQED Arts, CCM-Entropy, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, and AngryAsianMan.com, among others. She is the Associate Editor of TAYO Literary Magazine. She teaches English at San José City College.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard my mother laugh out loud, although I could be wrong because a few years ago she must’ve seen a PBS special, and she said she liked watching George Carlin, even though she hates cursing. But I didn’t watch it with her so I didn’t hear anything. I am fairly certain that she’s never told a joke, but I asked her just to make sure. “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said as I stopped myself from saying or asking anything worse.
A few years ago my mother told me that I was obachan’s baby. I’m not sure exactly how that makes sense – was I meant to be a replacement for my grandmother who died before I was born? Was I meant to be her reincarnation, even though my mother is a diehard Christian? How do I belong to my obachan? She told me this as I tried to explain how I had felt responsible for her happiness when I was little, growing up being told that I was an extra child, that she only wanted two children. “Oh, and you were the third,” she said, as my throat tightened.
My mother knit me a pair of socks in grey and bright orange variegated wool. They’re easy to find and they keep my toes warm. Thanks, mom.
When my father was dying he said he dreamed that his mother, my mother, and I became the same person. I smiled. I’m not sure what he said next. His mother was married at 16, had bound feet, and was the second wife to a man who had two wives at the same time. My father’s mother never left China. When I went to visit her and she asked me to hand her the vinegar from the cupboard, she was so pleased that I understood her that she hugged me and told me something simple enough for me to understand. She was so glad that I had come all the way from America and could hear her and understand her. I could understand enough to give her the vinegar but not much else, like understand if her life was better, worse or just different since 1949.
My mother’s grandmother – really her step-grandmother -- traveled in a palanquin in the old days. It couldn’t have been comfortable to kneel in a box as it swung back and forth. But my mother recites this as proof of her high social status.
Obachan gave up one of her babies, a daughter, for her stepmother to raise in Japan while she returned to the US. She went back later, but things didn’t work out and they came back to California. As a widow, how was she to raise four children on her own? She worked in people’s kitchens, she taught Japanese. She had to get remarried.
My mother used to say that she married my father because he was assertive. He wouldn’t let anyone push him around.
Lying not laying on a hard twin bed next to my mother who is in another twin bed, sleeping, I listen to her breathing. Later I will think that it reminded me of the calm of my son’s breathing, sleeping deeply when he was a baby. An ignorance-is-bliss peaceful breathing. A body at rest. Like sitting on the beach, seeing dolphins gently gliding through the water. Wanting to bind myself, wrap my limbs, become that strange unknowable animal whose experience I cannot understand. Dolphins sleep with one side of their brain alert, to allow them to surface for air and to be aware of predators. My mother is as unfathomable to me as a dolphin.
Standing on the steps of a neighbor’s house in Alameda, holding one of the babies that died, my grandmother wore a hat and button up shoes. In 1922 she was pregnant with my mother, and beautiful.
My mother is all dressed up with no place to go, wearing a dress she sewed herself. I wish I had it now: it’s a cotton print with flowers, quarter sleeves, a collar, and it gathers at the waist. She is wearing lipstick and she is also beautiful, posing in front of a tarpaper barrack in Heart Mountain, Wyoming in 1944.
The other day I was telling my mother about the crazy stripes on my legs. I used some stick sunscreen and put it on all unevenly and sat on the beach looking for dolphins. First there were red stripes of all widths, running up and down my legs. Then they turned brown. My mother chuckled.
About internment, my mother has said, “I tell people that I’m not bitter – my daughter is the one who is angry.”
About the Author: Vivian Fumiko Chin taught at Mills College for many years and is now teaching at SFSU. Vivian identifies as abc, sansei, and queer in the largest sense of the term.
Note to readers: For the sake of maintaining the original structure of this submission, we decided to combine screenshots even if it meant sacrificing some of the visual quality. Thanks for understanding!
I hate the idea of starting a story about my mom with her being dead. But she is. And for the past ten years, that fact is the first thing that’s come to mind whenever anyone—whether they know this fact or not—has asked about her.
The consensus at her wake and celebration of life was that my mom was vivacious and the life of every party. So it feels almost irreverent to be fixated on her death. But even when I recall the moments when she seemed most alive to me—when her puppy made her laugh and her eyes crinkled into sparkly crescent moons, when she bestowed a new piece of tsismis to her circle of kumare and found herself at the delightful center of their attention, when she turned up the sound system in our living room and ignored my pleas to lower the volume so she could turn our carpeted sala into her personal disco—I end up remembering that I’ll never again hear her chuckle, or marvel at her comfort in the spotlight, or watch others admire her on a dance floor.
Knowing this doesn’t make me ache the way it did the first nine years after she left us. In fact, now that I’m at the age when it’s no longer alarming to hear of a friend’s parent’s death, and it’s become unexceptional to hear about friends helping parents decide between assisted-living homes or a live-in nurse, arrange advance directives, and make other end-of-life decisions, it’s occurred to me that maybe my sister and I got lucky?
Don’t get me wrong: It will never seem fair that she crossed the rainbow before I could collect her recipes, make more recordings of her doing mundane things, or ask her the right questions (Do we have diseases that run in the family? What were you like at my age? What can you tell me now about yourself that you couldn’t tell me when I was younger?). It still stings when I remember how, the year after her death, my motherless-ness seemed amplified every time the salesperson at a bridal shop asked, “When will your mother be joining us?” or “What would she think?” And I still wonder: Would my father have survived more than three years after her if he hadn’t become so heartbroken and disoriented after her passing? Would I have been more open to bringing a new generation into our family if her presence meant I could still access the repository of mothering knowledge that was lost when she became the last of her sisters to go?
But now I also ponder: Would I want the answers to those questions, or more time to observe her in the kitchen, or to film her dancing, if it meant having to see her inescapably bedbound, or unable to retrieve things from her memory, or to recognize who I am? Could I stand myself if I thought it was revolting to have to wipe her, or tedious to visit because she could no longer leave her room, or hold a conversation? What if one day something ugly flew out of my untamed mouth, and wreaked damage I could not repair?
In a parallel life, our final conversation—when she rushed off the phone with me, distracted, and eager to return to entertaining my visiting boyfriend, a man I wanted her to love, the partner she would never see me wed—would be unremarkable. I might not ever recall how splendid our small apartment seemed that afternoon, when all seemed so still after our noisy call, and every corner of that home seemed suffused with an extraordinary golden light. I wouldn’t have become terrified of late-night phone calls, would never have cried so endlessly that my eyes grew parched and my tear ducts had to be sealed. It never would have occurred to me to wonder if St. Anthony, patron saint of lost things, could help people like my father, who became entirely lost without his wife.
But who knows what would have happened after that parallel week? That parallel year?
What I do I know now is that my mother’s death wasn’t just an abrupt amputation of histories I still had to unearth; it also severed me forever from that alternate future we might have had together. But a decade of mourning that lost future has also sharpened my senses, and made it clear that it likely would have been far less untroubled than I used to imagine.
So, I’ve learned to see my mother’s departure as a peculiar good fortune. As plainly as I now discern her hand in the hummingbird hovering outside of my window, and the butterfly perched on my shoe in the garden, I recognize now that she spared me from a different kind of sorrow that she, who lost her mother at half my age, was never equipped to prepare me for. So I no longer feel trapped, but grateful. Because in the world I dwell in, neither of us will ever watch her grow so old that we consider which of us is really the parent; her voice, opinions, and recollections will never diminish, her face remains eternally creaseless, and her steps and shimmies will always remain graceful and in-time.
This story originally appeared in Mixed Nation on July 30, 2014.
The most recent picture with the author and her mother.
Every time that I get the urge to buy something, I think about the wise words that my mother told me years ago when I went off to college: “Credit cards are bad. Never use one unless it’s for an emergency.” At the time I thought that she was being a typical frugal Korean, but now that I’m older and have a mortgage and bills, I am grateful that she gave me the advice. I literally have one credit card that is fully paid off, and I refuse to use it unless I’m in dire need.
I didn’t always appreciate the advice that my mother gave me when I was growing up. I was in middle school -- at the peak of my anti-adult phase -- when she and my father divorced in 1992. I didn’t want to be told what to do and how to live. I refused to believe that my father had abandoned us. But he had, and he had left an immigrant woman with only a high school education to raise two kids on her own. She worked tirelessly making computer and video parts during the week, and spent the weekends selling fake jewelry and hair accessories at the fleamarket.
I blamed my mother for the divorce because she was the only one I could blame. I actually blamed her for many things. I was angry that I couldn’t ask her for help on homework because she didn’t understand the material. I was upset that she never came to any of my softball games because she was always working too late. I despised spending weekends with her at the fleamarket. And although I loved eating rice and kimchi at least five times a week, I wished that she would make more American meals and learn how to bake cookies, but she didn’t. She just always seemed so tired.
When I left for college, I wished that she would send me care packages or letters, but it never happened. Even on the phone I had to be the one to say “I love you” first because she was never a physically or vocally affectionate person. I never understood anything about her until after I graduated college and got my first job and apartment. I finally understood the value of her years of hard work, and why she had to have two or three jobs just to pay the bills. I understood what it was like to come home after a hard day of work and not have the energy to cook a full meal or bake a batch of cookies. Most importantly, I understood that my mother had done her absolute best raising her children alone for so many years.
When I visited her in Virginia several years ago, she helped me to fully understand who she was. She had stood in line for rice rations during the Korean War and was left an orphan when both of her parents died. She had dreams of being an actress in the theater, but then she met my American father during the Vietnam War and moved to his hometown of Oklahoma, where she experienced racism from locals. She raised my brother and me alone for months on end while my father traveled abroad for the army. When my father was around she had to deal with his alcoholism, and that lasted over 20 years until they finally divorced.
Hearing her story in its entirety made me feel lucky to be my mother’s daughter, and grateful that she trusted me enough to open up and show a side of vulnerability. The woman I had never seen cry as a child finally did, and we cried together. It was a bonding experience that I will never forget.
Today, I would not be ashamed to tell my now 2-year-old daughter that her Korean grandmother used to work at a dry cleaners, because my mother taught me the value of hard work, and I'm going to carry on that tradition. I’m proud to say that I have no credit card debt when I hear others talk about filing for bankruptcy or owing thousands of dollars. I’m glad that I buy things on sale or from a clearance rack because that’s what my mom did with me, and I don’t need to spend a lot of money to be happy. The only thing I’m still a bit upset about is that I never learned how to bake, but luckily I have a husband who does that for me!
I thank my mother for being an inspirational example for all immigrants who come to this country alone, and for being a strong mother and independent woman.
My mother didn’t learn about beauty, femininity, Korean 10-step skincare regimens, or even womanhood from her mother. Instead, she gleaned snippets of beauty advice from her father. Haraboji (grandfather) believed that make-up deterred from real beauty and that the best enhancement to a fresh face was to accessorize with “a single, pure white flower” (insert eye roll).
My oma (mother) met my apa (father) through mutual church friends. Against her family’s wishes they were engaged and moved to California. After following apa to San Francisco, her life was no longer privileged and pampered, despite the fact that she migrated from a post-war third world country to the dream that was the U.S. Through the years, she retained her beauty but also aged more quickly from the rigors of new immigrant struggle: hard work, long days, a stressful marriage, and raising two “American” kids. In the mid-1960s San Francisco, as a young Asian woman with no English skills or work experience, she labored through several different jobs in factories, as a coat check girl, a dishwasher, a manicurist, and eventually owned her own small businesses. My mother, who came from wealth, was now serving rich, white San Franciscans and was even, and offensively, proposed marriage twice: once by an elderly white man who knew she was married and second, by a couple looking to find a caretaker for their mentally disabled son.
After four miscarriages, I was born on Father’s Day. I was a Chai (pronounced more like ‘chwe’) inheriting all the unfortunate Chai features, and thus was considered an unattractive baby. However, having survived a fragile pregnancy, my parents[ts1] were grateful for a healthy daughter. My only redeeming physical attribute was my fair skin. Because of my sleepy monolids and turned up nose, I was quickly nicknamed ‘piggy eyes’ and ‘pug nose’ - (ahhhh…Koreans and their nicknames).
In other words, I was not a pretty girl.
In contrast, I have very clear memories of my mother’s stories of her beauty. As a child, her narrative and words were fact and for many years, I believed there was no woman who compared to her looks. I remember challenging a girlfriend of mine, honestly thinking my mother was more beautiful than hers, simply because it was an actuality.
Though she was and still is everything to me, our temperaments clashed. I never doubted my mother’s love, and to her credit, her devotion made up for insecurities I might’ve adopted from being the ‘ugly duckling’ of the family. Regardless, it was my conflict with Korean standards and their complicated internalization of white supremacy and my more Americanized social upbringing that affected my perceptions of beauty.
As the typical Korean mom, she never hesitated to inform me of when I looked fat, that my legs were too short and my feet too wide, that I had acquired the Chai family monolids, that I ended up being flat-chested, that my nose was turned up… whew! What else? In any case, I later came to understand that my mother was neither boastful nor necessarily critical - that Koreans described physical features as a matter of fact. In my twenties, one of my MALE cousins had the nerve to mention that I was regarded as a ‘dragon’ – akin to the ugly duckling story in Korean folklore – unattractive at birth, then developing into one’s true beauty. Um…back-handed compliment???
Ironically, though Koreans are by and large proponents of plastic surgery; my mother and most in our family are not. I was reminded of my physical deficiencies, but I wasn’t allowed to alter them, if given the opportunity. Again, my naturally beautiful oma, who never needed enhancement and whose beauty routine consisted of soap, water, moisturizer, foundation, rouge and lipstick, was vehemently opposed to cosmetic surgery or experimenting with make-up and skincare regimens, regarding them as frivolous and superficial.
On the other hand, she valued femininity (a value my haraboji impressed upon her) and equated a made-up face with vulgarity. So for me, altering my face with colors and lines and false add-ons became tools of rebellion and symbols of a desperate desire to be ‘pretty’. Eventually I learned to make peace with the way I looked, but became confused when (mostly) white men began noticing me – feeling flattered and more comfortable with my physical self, and then having that newfound confidence crushed with the realization that men were really attracted to “Suzie Wong” or “Lucy Liu” and not Christine Chai.
For a while, as I became more and more politicized around race and feminism, I defied, refused, adapted and tried to live by my own standards. I learned to filter my mother’s observations of me and at the same time, her maternal attentions seemed to relax with age. But, seven years ago, while pregnant with my son, my oma casually commented that she hoped this baby would inherit his mixed-race father’s eyes and though I sarcastically reacted with laughter, my heart sank.
Because I grew up believing I was unattractive by western standards, and possibly, even more so by Korean ones, my protective motherly instincts were alerted and I worried about how I would shield my child from offensive expectations and judgments that he would inevitably internalize. I reminded oma how amazing her grandbaby already was. She nodded and agreed.
When my son was born, he indeed had large double-lidded eyes with his father’s long and curled eyelashes. And as his facial features developed, he went from looking like his father to looking like none other than my mother! Her grandson is validation of her genetic contributions and her legacy. It’s as if she birthed him through me! But, recently, people have been likening Roshan’s appearance to mine. “Really?” I question. I take it as a huge compliment. And recently, I’ve been noticing that I, in my late forties, and my mother, in her late seventies, are looking more and more alike.
I find this greatly satisfying.
About the Author: Christine Seung-Eun Chai teaches ESL, English and Asian American Studies at De Anza College. She is a proud Bay Area native and strives to be a stronger social justice warrior. She’s privileged to live with fellow warrior, Tony, their son, Roshan, pup, Nari along with her ultimate champions: oma and apa.
Uyen, her siblings, and her mother at Trung Tâm Công Giáo in Santa Ana. She is the closest to her mother, perhaps in more ways than is pictured.
Recently, I have been missing my mother. I don’t find her love in embraces and kisses; it exists within stainless steel pots and pans. It is a more full/filling kind of love.
Today the gnawing at my stomach eats at my soul and whispers to be fed. So I embark on a journey to recreate memories and feelings in a swirling pot of soup. Today I am making canh chua cá, sweet and sour fish soup.
A perfect balance of flavors, whose vibrant colors painted my childhood with light green slippery okra, a taste on my tongue that was so similar to falling down playground slides. That golden pineapple was sweet as sunshine on Sunday and the softness of stewed catfish reminded me of my mother’s breast, the nest where I would doze listening to the sounds of her cải lương. The wispy clouds of steam from the pot were just like the sound of her singing lullabies in that Vietnamese opera style, the notes reaching higher and higher, dancing from her lips to the ceiling. All of the parts of this the soup she had made with ingredients grown from the garden of her life, soil given to her by her mother.
This soup was the one that I desired to make.
Determination, desperation, and trepidation guided me to a 99 Ranch, familiarity in any strange place. Standing bathed in fluorescent flickering lights, I strained to hear my mother’s voice in my mind for direction to lead me to the ingredients that she uses. Instead I hear her proud voice declaring that no one can cook like her. None of her daughters can coax the flavors out like she can.
I search for her recipe in the catacombs of my mind, but the memories are inaccessible. Armed with Internet recipes, I weave through crowded aisles, finding everything I need. Except fresh pineapple.
Shit.
I guess canned pineapple will have to do. But will it?
I lean back to hear stern chastising from my mother, but I hear nothing.
Back in my lair, like a witch and her brew, I peer into my pot. Could I concoct some magic that brings me closer to my mother, memories, and soul? Can I recreate the love that I have been raised on? A fearful tasting of broth, moment of truth and… damn. Another miss. But I had found the tamarind and rau răm! Was it the canned pineapples? Was it the fucking canned pineapples? Was it…?!
I don’t really like my soup. Or any Vietnamese cooking that I do. It is always just so… subtly off. It is maddening to seek flavors I can’t describe but can’t live without.
So is this Vietnamese food? Or am I a Vietnamese woman who cannot make Vietnamese food?
Tired of my offbeat flavors, I feed my lover my soup. Not just to finish off another stock of mistakes more quickly, but because I have been taught to love through food by the queens in my life; my mother, aunties, and grandmas.
Although, if I am completely honest, it is also partly because I don’t want to reminded of my deficiency at every mealtime for an entire week because, just like those queens in my life, I cook enough to raise armies. I sit in nervous silence watching my lover raise the spoon to her lips. She turns to me and smiles.
“It’s really good!”
I ask again just be sure. A gentle kiss and clean bowl was the response, everything consumed. Everything except the canned pineapples. And not because she knows about my problematic canned pineapples, she just doesn’t like fruit.
The soup was no good to me, but it nourishes her. The cries from my heart, the gnawing at my stomach grew quiet and content, purring, beaming with satisfaction. And even though I am still hungry, I am brimming with this full/filling love.
About the Author: Uyen Hoang (she/hers) is currently a graduate student pursuing her Masters in Asian American Studies and Masters of Public Health at UCLA. Hailing from Garden Grove, Orange County, she is the middle child of five in her immigrant Vietnamese American family. She likes puppies, peonies, and is not lactose intolerant, which is important because she lives for cheesy puns.
This story originally appeared in the online Food and Recipes section of Glamour Magazine on July 13, 2016.
The author, at then years old, and her mother in Eugene, Oregon.
I’m so tired of white guys on TV telling me what to eat. I’m tired of Anthony Bourdain testing the waters of Korean cuisine to report back that, not only will our food not kill you, it actually tastes good. I don’t care how many times you’ve traveled to Thailand, I won’t listen to you—just like the white kids wouldn’t listen to me, the half-Korean girl, defending the red squid tentacles in my lunch box. The same kids who teased me relentlessly back then are the ones who now celebrate our cuisine as the Next Big Thing.
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, in a small college town that was about 90 percent white. In my adolescence I hated being half Korean; I wanted people to stop asking, “Where are you really from?” I could barely speak the language and didn’t have any Asian friends. There was nothing about me that felt Korean—except when it came to food.
At home my mom always prepared a Korean dinner for herself and an American dinner for my dad. Despite the years he’d lived in Seoul, selling cars to the military and courting my mom at the Naija Hotel where she worked, my dad is still a white boy from Philadelphia. He’s an adventurous eater (ask him about steamed dog meat), but his comfort foods are meat and potatoes.
So each night my mom prepared two meals. She’d steam broccoli and grill Dad’s salmon, while boiling jjigae and plating little side dishes known as banchan. When our rice cooker announced in its familiar robotic voice, “Your delicious white rice will be ready soon!” the three of us would sit down to a wondrous mash-up of East and West. I’d create true fusion one mouthful at a time, using chopsticks to eat strips of T-bone and codfish eggs drenched in sesame oil, all in one bite. I liked my baked potatoes with fermented chili paste, my dried cuttlefish with mayonnaise.
There’s a lot to love about Korean food, but what I love most is its extremes. If a dish is supposed to be served hot, it’s scalding. If it’s meant to be served fresh, it’s still moving. Stews are served in heavy stone pots that hold the heat; crack an egg on top, and it will poach before your eyes. Cold noodle soups are served in bowls made of actual ice.
By my late teens my craving for Korean staples started to eclipse my desire for American ones. My stomach ached for al tang and kalguksu. On long family vacations, with no Korean restaurant in sight, my mom and I passed up hotel buffets in favor of microwaveable rice and roasted seaweed in our hotel room.
And when I lost my mother to a very sudden, brief, and painful fight with cancer two years ago, Korean food was my comfort food. She was diagnosed in 2014. That May she’d gone to the doctor for a stomachache only to learn she had a rare squamous cell carcinoma, stage four, and that it had spread. Our family was blindsided.
I moved back to Oregon to help my mother through chemotherapy; over the next four months, I watched her slowly disappear. The treatment took everything—her hair, her spirit, her appetite. It burned sores on her tongue. Our table, once beautiful and unique, became a battleground of protein powders and tasteless porridge. I crushed Vicodin into ice cream.
Dinnertime was a calculation of calories, an argument to get anything down. The intensity of Korean flavors and spices became too much for her to stomach. She couldn’t even eat kimchi.
I began to shrink along with my mom, becoming so consumed with her health that I had no desire to eat. Over the course of her illness, I lost 15 pounds. After two rounds of chemo, she decided to discontinue treatment, and she died two months later.
As I struggled to make sense of the loss, my memories often turned to food. When I came home from college, my mom used to make galbi ssam, Korean short rib with lettuce wraps. She’d have marinated the meat two days before I’d even gotten on the plane, and she’d buy my favorite radish kimchi a week ahead to make sure it was perfectly fermented.
Then there were the childhood summers when she brought me to Seoul. Jet-lagged and sleepless, we’d snack on homemade banchan in the blue dark of Grandma’s humid kitchen while my relatives slept. My mom would whisper, “This is how I know you’re a true Korean.”
But my mom never taught me how to make Korean food. When I would call to ask how much water to use for rice, she’d always say, “Fill until it reaches the back of your hand.” When I’d beg for her galbi recipe, she gave me a haphazard ingredient list and approximate measurements and told me to just keep tasting it until it “tastes like Mom’s.”
After my mom died, I was so haunted by the trauma of her illness I worried I’d never remember her as the woman she had been: stylish and headstrong, always speaking her mind. When she appeared in my dreams, she was always sick.
Then I started cooking. When I first searched for Korean recipes, I found few resources, and I wasn’t about to trust Bobby Flay’s Korean taco monstrosity or his clumsy kimchi slaw. Then, among videos of oriental chicken salads, I found the Korean YouTube personality Maangchi. There she was, peeling the skin off an Asian pear just like my mom: in one long strip, index finger steadied on the back of the knife. She cut galbi with my mom’s ambidextrous precision: positioning the chopsticks in her right hand while snipping bite-size pieces with her left. A Korean woman uses kitchen scissors the way a warrior brandishes a weapon.
I’d been looking for a recipe for jatjuk, a porridge made from pine nuts and soaked rice. It’s a dish for the sick or elderly, and it was the first food I craved when my feelings of shock and loss finally made way for hunger.
I followed Maangchi’s instructions carefully: soaking the rice, breaking off the tips of the pine nuts. Memories of my mother emerged as I worked—the way she stood in front of her little red cutting board, the funny intonations of her speech.
For many, Julia Child is the hero who brought boeuf bourguignon into the era of the TV dinner. She showed home cooks how to scale the culinary mountain. Maangchi did this for me after my mom died. My kitchen filled with jars containing cabbage, cucumbers, and radishes in various stages of fermentation. I could hear my mom’s voice: “Never fall in love with anyone who doesn’t like kimchi; they’ll always smell it coming out of your pores.”
I’ve spent over a year cooking with Maangchi. Sometimes I pause and rewind to get the steps exactly right. Other times I’ll let my hands and taste buds take over from memory. My dishes are never exactly like my mom’s, but that’s OK—they’re still a delicious tribute. The more I learn, the closer I feel to her.
One night not long ago, I had a dream: I was watching my mother as she stuffed giant heads of Napa cabbage into earthenware jars.
She looked healthy and beautiful.
About the Author: Michelle Zauner is a writer and musician based in Philadelphia. She performs under the moniker Japanese Breakfast and recently released an album entitled "Psychopomp" that navigates grief and the loss of her mother.
In this monologue excerpt from, “I Heart Lola,” Nicole Maxali makes us laugh and cry as she paints for us a poignant picture of her journey with her grandmother from when she was in diapers to college to her grandmother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease. The piece was performed at the LA Women’s Theatre Festival and, most recently, the NY International Fringe Festival.
About the actor: Nicole Maxali is a native San Franciscan and Brooklyn based writer, producer and actor. She writes comedy, acts in film and loves her Lola (Tagalog for grandmother).
Lola Encar standing with her 1956 Cadillac in 1960
Lola Encar dancing the night away with her husband Marmerto in 1985
As an Asian American parent who is proud of being culturally Chinese American and racially Asian, I consciously aim to be socially progressive and pass those values on to my son. Naturally, it offends and pains me to hear my 6-year-old boy say or do things that signal a rejection of his identity. Sometimes this happens in obvious ways like when he says things such as, “I don’t want to speak Chinese,” or rejects eating Asian foods outside of rice (preferably white), nori seaweed sheets, and Vietnamese lemongrass pork. He also refuses to eat most vegetables, which crushes my Asian sensibilities.
However, sometimes there are less obvious behaviors that I find deeply unsettling including a longstanding battle of wills I’ve recently engaged in with my son over his refusal to participate in his swimming class.
A brief history: since he was two years old, we have tried children’s swim classes at popular pricy facilities, including La Petite Baleen and the San Francisco Presidio YMCA. Each time, we hit a wall after he made only incremental progress in his swimming skills: he refuses to participate and cooperate with the lessons once he is asked to put his head underwater.
After he started kindergarten, we took a hiatus from swimming, when team sports like playing soccer and basketball with his friends held more allure. But when summer approached, my sense of motherly duty to ensure that my child has the skills to swim to the surface and safety should he fall into a body of water kicked in.
Before we started a travel-packed summer to Lisbon, Vietnam, and Taipei, I signed him up for two weeks of swimming class at a San Francisco Parks and Recreation pool facility, to begin after we’d returned home. During our travels, he had about five opportunities to go into beaches and pools. Every time, he eagerly enjoyed it and at our final pool outing in Taipei he made a major leap in progress—he voluntarily put his head below water and flapped his arms and legs underwater for about 5 seconds at a time. My spirits were as buoyant as his body.
However, only six days later, back home in San Francisco, when we started Day 1 of the swimming lessons, Kai was timid and wary. He weepily refused to even approach the pool. I was beside myself with frustration and all my reasoning with him went nowhere. He would not budge. I caught myself escalating my threats, adding to the list of privileges I would revoke if he did not participate in the lessons not (“no iPad. No screentime. No playdates”), as my anger boiled.
When I finally calmed down and traced the source of my anger, I realized that it came from my fear that my son was not just rejecting swimming, he was rejecting his identity and manifesting internal racism. You see, about 95% of everyone in and around the pool was racially Asian, and mostly ethnically Chinese. That includes students, the swim instructors (who are high school city swim team members), the staff, and parents.
And then I remember that when I was 9 years old, my mother enrolled my brother and me in summer swim lessons at the local high school in our L.A./San Gabriel Valley suburb of Hacienda Heights. The first summer, I went into the water, but then fearfully and silently refused to let go of the side of the pool or participate in lessons. The summer after that, we were enrolled again in swim lessons with two other kids who were the children of parents my mother had met in her job as our school district multilingual liaison. The kids, a brother and his younger sister, were recent Chinese Taiwanese immigrants and spoke very little and heavily accented English. They wore uncool swimsuits that screamed “F.O.B” to Chinese Americans like my brother and me. They smelled different.
We ostracized them and said cruel things about them under our breath. We laughed scornfully at them in public when they did or said things that revealed their cultural ignorance of American suburban protocols. Later, this boy would become one of my brother’s best friends (they are still good friends to this day) but I cannot forget our initial cruelty towards and rejection of them. And then I realize: my anger towards my son’s rejection of his swimming lessons at the San Francisco pool and the people there is anger towards my younger self. Swimming lessons for me have painful associations with being both the timid mute fearful Asian girl, a negative characterization of being Asian that I have worked hard to leave behind, as well as the shame of having once been the internalized racist who disdained “FOB” Asian immigrants because of the fear of being associated with them.
When I step back, I can see that there are other, non-racial, factors that lead to my son’s fear and discomfort—he was never asked if he wanted to take these swim lessons and his indignation at being forced to participate fuels his resistance. The pool is very big and even the shallow end looks deep; many kids are in the pool and the scene is a bit chaotic with students of different levels splashing, kicking, and swimming; besides the instructors in the water, there are additional instructors outside the water hovering over the students, animatedly pointing or demonstrating techniques, and speaking or yelling loudly.
In these calmer moments, I can remember that my son loves his Chinese relatives as well as many of my Asian (recent immigrant, international, and Asian American) students he’s met and interacted with; he enjoyed being in Vietnam and Taipei. But inside me, there is still a deep-seated feeling of hurt, rejection, and resentment that is hard to shake, and I am not willing to give up battling my son’s stubborn will. We have gone back on Day 2 and Day 3 of swim lessons and despite my cajoling, threats, and even attempts by kind staffers to help my son feel more comfortable, he has continued to resist and refuse to even dip his toe in the pool.
I hope that now recognizing this will make it easier for me to be a compassionate parent if my son again refuses to participate in Day 4 and more of swim lessons. But it won’t be easy, because for now, I stubbornly can’t let go of my hope and vision for the outcome of these lessons: That he will relent and agree to descend the ladder into the warm pool, and trust the young teenage Chinese American swim teacher. That he will not be discomforted by the many Asian bodies around him. That he will discover and be delighted by the buoyancy of his body and the miracle of his ability to float and propel himself in the water, free of the burdens of his mother’s disappointment and shame of her past.
About the Author: In addition to being the mom of a 6 year old boy who delights and challenges her (sometimes all at once), Karen Chow is a professor of English, Women's Studies, and Asian American Studies at De Anza College. When she's not teaching, hanging out with her family, reading, cooking, doing yoga, and going on long walks, she is board president of the Richmond District Neighborhood Center, serves on the editorial board of Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies, and is a member of Asian Women United.
5 Things I Learned Watching My Mom's YouTube Cooking Show
By Sahra Vang Nguyen
This story first appeared as a guest blog post on Angry Asian Man.
Mrs. Nguyen with her daughters, Sahra Nguyen (middle) and Jennifer Nguyen (right), in Boston, MA circa 1987.
About a year ago, my mom called me and said (in Vietnamese), "I want to make a cooking show for YouTube. I heard there's a lady who's teaching people to make pho using canned chicken broth -- NO!"
I was delighted by my mom's enthusiasm. It was the first time I heard her talk about starting a passion project purely for herself. Growing up, my mom never pursued any hobbies or personal projects. Her entire life was dedicated to providing for her family. Every morning, she woke up early and got the kids ready for school, dropped us off at the bus stop, worked 10-12 hours in the laundromat, ran errands, came home and made dinner, did the dishes, cleaned the house, got the kids ready for bed, watched a little TV, went to sleep, and did it all over again the next day.
Now, with all three kids out of the house, she finally has time to do something for herself. Together, we started my mom's YouTube dreams: "Cooking With Mrs. Nguyen." I helped film and edit her cooking videos, and she shined naturally and effortlessly on camera. I never saw this side of my mom before -- carefree, charming, a student to the craft of performing. Watching my mom pursue something outside of her comfort zone and embrace the camera with such confidence and courage, I was inspired.
In addition to cutting onions and egg rolling techniques, here are 5 things I learned from watching (and filming) my mom's YouTube cooking show:
1) It's never too late.
My mom lived 50-something years, escaped Vietnam by boat, lived in a refugee camp, came to America with no money, met + married my dad, raised 3 daughters, and worked in a laundromat for 20-something years before she decided to start her YouTube show.
When I hear people in their 20s, or 30s, or 40s and beyond, complain about how they feel it's "too late" to start XYZ project or pursue a new career path or make a simple change, I immediately say, "Stop." The more time and energy you spend talking about how you feel it's too late to do something, the more precious time and energy is wasted. Life is long. There's no race. When you say, "it's too late," whose timeline are you comparing yourself to? Goals don't have expiration dates. But lives do. Focus less on the life other people are living, and focus more on the life you are living (or not living).
2) Authenticity trumps social media metrics.
My mom has no Twitter, no Instagram, no Facebook, and she's never paid for any advertising or optimization. She has over 500 YouTube subscribers and her "Pho Bo" video received over 16,000 organic views in the first 9 months. She currently has only 5 videos published. Yet, earlier this year, an agency working with The Huffington Post reached out to us about signing my mom as one of their talents for a Huff Post platform. The trick to her growing success? Authenticity. There is something singularly special about my mom that's resonating with people -- and that's her voice, her style, her passion, her food, her culture, her identity.
We're living in a digital age where influence, opportunities, validation, and marketing economies are heavily driven by social media metrics and quantifiable impressions. Sure, these things matter in some contexts, to some people, and to some extent. But as this cultural economic path evolves, so will the tools to optimize and too often imitate this perception. Meaning, this type of value system may implode as it proves to be less impactful than anticipated. The only true way to stand out is not through the number of followers, it is through your unique voice. Because honestly, it's not hard to build your numbers given all the tools to do so these days. But only you can be you. Focus less on numbers. Focus more on being you.
3) Following your dreams is a luxury.
Growing up, my mom always pressured me to take on traditional careers like doctor, lawyer, or pharmacist. She didn't understand me when I talked about pursuing my dreams as an artist or creative person. At the time, I didn't understand that my mom never had the opportunity to pursue her own dreams, because she was focused on survival. Within her unique experience and circumstance, a better life came from financial security -- so she encouraged the jobs that she believed would provide me with that.
If you have the means and the opportunity to pursue a dream or passion, know that it is a luxury. Some people, like my parents, never had the chance to. So don't take your position for granted. Make something happen.
4) There will always be an excuse to not do it.
Once, my mom told me that when we had (English-speaking) friends over, she refrained from conversing at the dinner table because she felt insecure about her limited English skills and Vietnamese accent. Now, she's the star of her own YouTube show! It's still not easy for her; during recording, my mom would get stuck on certain words and phrases. She would get frustrated with herself on set. She practices and practices until she gets it right. It makes me proud to watch my mom overcome an insecurity and work through her challenges.
In addition, my mom doesn't know how to use an internet browser. She's never had an email or YouTube account. She doesn't know how to film or edit video content. These could've all been excuses in my mom's mind like, "I want to make a YouTube show but..." None of these things stopped her. Whatever it is you want to do, there will always be an excuse (or 20) to not do it. But if you're focusing on the excuses, then you're already failing. Failure is not trying. Don't focus on failure. Focus on the goal, and what you need to do to meet it.
5) Take charge of telling your story, before someone else does.
My mom has been eating and cooking Vietnamese food her whole life. I grew up on fish sauce, pho, shrimp paste, cha gio, goi cuon, banh cuon, thit kho, bun thit nuong, and every other delicious Vietnamese food you can think of before Anthony Bourdain called Vietnam his favorite country in the world. My mom is finally overcoming her insecurities and stepping into the spotlight to share her personal story of family, cooking, and Vietnamese culture.
Vietnamese food and culture is hot right now in the mainstream culinary world. Who will be the biggest profiteers of this culinary "trend"? Is it the people who have the money and networks to fly to Vietnam on a food tour and broadcast it on TV like they're the American purveyors of ethnic culture? Or is it the Vietnamese family who has been running the mom and pop pho restaurant for over 15 years? Culture is a hot commodity. The people who are best equipped to share a specific culture are those who live it. Otherwise, you run into western-centric headlines like "Ube is the New Matcha," and "Pho is the New Ramen." So whatever your story is, your passion, your ideology, your mission -- write it, speak it, and share it because no one can tell your story better than you.
Click here to watch episodes of "Cooking With Mrs. Nguyen."
About the Author: Sahra Vang Nguyen is a writer, creative producer, and entrepreneur focused on telling underrepresented stories at the intersection of diversity, culture, and the human potential. She's currently working on a new documentary about deportation for NBC News, an indie film about Vietnamese graffiti writers in Ho Chi Minh City, and growing her restaurant brand, "Lucy's Vietnamese Kitchen." Connect with her on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Mother, there are moments I cannot remember but still hold in my heart. I'm sure my three-year-old hand held yours many times on the ship from Yokohama, Japan to San Francisco. My father wanted a “better” life for us and sent you and me on a journey to this new country while he conducted business in Japan.
I'm sure I had delicious Japanese food and spoke to you in Japanese at that time. Those were the days when I went to the bilingual school near Japantown. This was before I turned five and we moved to Cole Street, and I had to go to an American school where no one spoke Japanese.
I remember the lemon meringue pies you used to make because we had so many leftover packages from closing that grocery store you and dad fought about. You would bake yummy, moist yellow or chocolate cake, sometimes decorated with sprinkles, so I could have a piece after school. Making food was how you showed your affection and love! It was the 1960s then, and I remember teaching you dance moves and watching you fix your hair in that ratted-up, poof style.
Then you left for Japan. I’m still not sure why you left—perhaps because of visa issues—but my life changed afterward. I got into trouble for shoplifting clothes. I was seeking attention and wanted to do daring and exciting things to see what I could get away with.
When you returned to America, Dad's infidelity had finally pushed you to find your own happiness outside our family with a man from Okinawa. Dad had been unfaithful many times, but it hurt you the most when he slept with your sister while she was staying with us. You had been pregnant with my sister at the time.
When you divorced him, he kidnapped my younger sisters and me.
I remember the day my sisters and I stood by the ocean liner to wish him farewell. I became suspicious when I saw that our half-brother had packed so many suitcases. I confronted my father after seeing that they contained our toys. He said that he was taking us with him because you had deserted us and were an unfit mother. I don’t remember how I felt then—perhaps Dad’s comments put a stone on my heart. We did not see or make contact with you for three years while we were in Japan and later in India with him. I do not remember thinking about you or missing you.
After Dad’s death in India, I returned to America because you found a sponsor family who let me live with them. We saw each other sporadically over the years. I know your husband could not take care of your daughters so we stayed with American families who often did not understand us, personally or culturally. You cared for us through homemade California rolls, futomaki, tempura, gifts and money that you sent to us.
It was during that time that I began to put on weight as a teen. I hated my body, and you amplified my feelings by the shame you displayed about my weight gain. You did not know it then, but an older cousin in India had molested me and it put another stone on my heart. It would take me years to recover. In fact I’m still recovering as I reach 60. I remember that when I told you, 30 years after it happened. You became very angry with my father who you felt was responsible for letting this happen.
Back then, I dealt with the pain through drugs and food. I remember you visited one morning after I had been up all night free-basing cocaine. You were compassionate. Somehow it seemed like you understood my pain.
I know you experienced your own trauma—a fatherless childhood, surviving World War II—that led you on journey like mine. I know what attracted you to our father, a man from India with a warm spirit but also a dark side that collided with your own.
Since your stroke three years ago, I have seen you cry and ask for forgiveness from your three daughters. I know without a doubt that had you been given the love and support that you needed while you were growing up, you would have been a different mother to us. I know now that your daughters are loving, accomplished women because you never stop thinking about us, though you may have not been there physically. That spiritual connection was always deep. I truly forgive you as you lay down your heart. And I continue praying that you move towards light and love.
About the Author: Indra Thadani has received more than 30 awards for service, education and innovation, she is most proud of keeping her family together and raising a loving and worldly African American son! Indra is grateful for her masters' education at UCSF which prepared her for leadership in health care, especially for the underserved!
This story looks at traditional confinement foods through the experiences of Annie Cok, a young mother living in Queens. After Annie gave birth, she struggled to make the rules of a traditional confinement month, especially the rules about hygiene, fit in with her modern life in New York City. This story is about how she did it. (Hint: it's all about the geung cho -- aka, ginger vinegar!)
Tradition! is an episode from the Mother Podcast, a podcast that features stories of mothers-- for anyone who’s ever had one. Mother is produced and hosted by journalists Amy Gastelum and Anne Noyes Saini.
Annie Cok and her infant son Rhys. Credit: Yiu Photography
As a teenager, I would stand with my mother in front of her mirrored closet doors and compare our physiques. I would joke that she could, if needed, completely hide behind me … On the other hand, if I stood behind her, there’d be no hiding. Instead, a perfect outline – two to three inches of human flesh sticking out in every side.
I was like a supersized version of my mother – outweighing her by almost 40 pounds, despite being only three inches taller. Her feet were smaller, her hands were smaller, everything about her was just plain smaller. The only thing she had more of than me was hair.
When I was only eight years old, a friend of hers came over and nearly jumped out of her seat when I tried to sit on my mother’s lap. “You’ll crush her,” she exclaimed. People also like to joke, “How could you come out of this tiny little thing?” It didn’t seem so funny to me.
I think my mother had a love-hate relationship with her own body. On the one hand, she knew she looked good. She wore a bikini well into her 40s, inviting whistles from boys who could have been her children on the beach. And with a mannequin-like figure, most everything looked good on her, as long as it came in a small enough size... She was like a clothes hanger. She was like a doll.
On the other hand, she’d always felt self-conscious about how thin she was. “When I was a teenager in Korea,” she said, “Strangers, old women on the bus, would come up to me and say, ‘You’re too skinny. No man is ever going to marry you’. Fatten up!”
It seemed crazy to me that in a world with Kate Moss-like models, that anyone could ever think my mother was too thin. But then they did …
Women at our church, most of them full-figured, soccer-mom types, were indignant about my mother’s size. Muttering about her needing to put on weight. My uncle, a physician, once exclaimed with exasperation – “Just eat something!”
And I got so angry. Because that was the thing … My mother did eat. She ate in abundance. In fact, she ate all the time. A whole apple pie would disappear in two days, with my having had only one slice. A pint of Ben & Jerry’s equaled a single serving. Often, after having eaten in such excess, her stomach would turn on her. And she’d be miserable and in pain with a small but bloated stomach for hours.
Mom would then “make up” for this by eating too much of “good things” – too many radishes, too much steamed broccoli, homemade vegetable juices, liquids with amino acids, pro-biotics and special pollen or seeds.
I suppose now we’d call it “emotional eating” or “self-medication,” but I didn’t have the vocabulary for that then. I had neither the words nor the distance to diagnose my mother’s eating or to understand what voids these foods were meant to fill. But looking back with adult eyes, I see the loneliness, the long mornings spent in bed. I understand the dark isolation that came after my father’s early death, and after that of a boyfriend and of a stepfather after that. But the food never did seem to fill the void. It never took. Instead all those things she hoped would bring her joy or relief just passed through her, leaving only pain and disappointment in their wake.
As my mother got older, she got smaller. And then she got sick. It didn’t matter what hormones did to others. Prednisone plumps the average person up like a prized pig, but not my mother. She just got thinner and thinner. She couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t eat, and she couldn’t breathe.
I was 30 when my mother died. She was 58. Over the phone from New York, suspicious after so many unanswered calls, I talked a friend in through the garage. I heard her call my mother’s name over the phone, and then scream “Oh God.” Then the line cut, and I knew she had died.
It was 24 hours later that I arrived, sleep-deprived and in a stupor, at the home we’d shared for so many years. And I stood in that same room, with mirrored closet doors, and stared at the emptiness around me. On the bed, someone had laid out clothes. A pink sweatshirt with matching pants – both decorated in hearts. They were, I was certain, children’s clothes – far too small for any normal woman to wear.
About the Author: Vivien Kim Thorp is the Executive Communications Manager for the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. She is passionate about connecting people with the great outdoors. When not working, she's usually hiking with her beloved pooch, Badger, or getting dirty in the veggie garden.
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