I wrote the following story while I was doing a creative writing course in uni ("Narratives on the Self"). In April this year, part of it got published in The Star newspaper--it was heavily edited, but I won't gripe since it made me some much-needed pocket money!
When I think of my mother, I see her features softened with love. The lines of her face are youthful, and she is always smiling down at me. Her words—I cannot hear them; I am only aware of how her lowered murmurs have me awash in a sense of contentment and security, and how I have no need to try so hard to love myself any longer…no need, because here holding me is someone who does it so consummately.
Perhaps my mother did look at me that way when I was a child too young to consciously remember—after all, those wistful images I have of my mother must have come from some remnant of truth, much like the way clichés must have stemmed from a reality.
Perhaps my mother did look at me that way when I was a child too young to understand “the hard things”. Too young to question anything besides what was on the surface.
Too young to hurt her.
Reading at least a few of those storybooks aimed at (angst-ridden) youth, one would think that almost every adolescent female has a horrible “I-hate-her-she-doesn't-understand-me” relationship with their mothers. The truth of the matter is—and here is the biggest secret held by all women who have once been young—that it's all down to sensationalism, and the fact that it's such a romantic, tortured image of the mother-daughter idea. Uncertain, sitting on the cusp of everything and nothing all at once, neither child nor adult, neither here nor there, teenage girls have the opportunity to play martyrs; we are celebrated when we voice our conviction of victimisation, of being grievously wronged by mothers everywhere. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose. Such self-absorption is excused—nay, accepted—if there are enough of us who are “documented” feeling that way, much like the way a religion is made official if enough people claim to practice it in the census.
My mother used to kiss me all over my face, declaring that I was “too adorable” and had to be kissed. She was indulgent, grading my childish colour pencil drawings with lavishly drawn stars and “very good's”…Sometimes there were hearts as well, if my attempts were especially brilliant. At bedtime, I was bundled up in one of my father's oversized T-shirts (because I was Wee Willy Winkie) and wedged between my parents on their bed, surely the safest place in the world. I would fall asleep to the muffled sound of my parents talking into the night.
There wasn't a sudden change in her behaviour towards me. It was so gradual that I almost forgot that she had ever loved me so fiercely. But I remember now. God forbid that I ever forget again. I almost forgot. I almost forgot to remember the beautiful things. And now I am glad for age, for I am blessed with a different way of looking at things, and a different way of understanding.
Once, my arm was dislocated. The maid dragged my whole body up the stairs by my hand—she'd just been dumped by her boyfriend. My mother cried when she came home and found me prostrate on the floor, my eyes glazed with shock. The fever stayed for a week, and my mother treated me with such tenderness that even my 2 year old heart was sure could not last forever. After all, who could hold so much love for so long? Now, really.
I don't know when it began, her constant harping, my quick and bitter replies, all designed to hurt her as she hurt me. I still wonder when it all began, or rather, when it all ended - the time when a child loves her mother as a mother should be loved. I suppose my mother aches for the time when I was a child who loved her unconditionally, as much as I do the time she made me feel that I brought her happiness. So we have both lost. For, in moments of weakness, she sometimes asks me what happened to the child I was.
I always found it hard to breathe when her mask of authoritative, controlled parent slipped.
Why are you like this? You were darling. Why can’t you go back? I loved you. Go back.
Implying, of course, that it was only I who had changed, I who had left the old sweetness behind, I who had rejected her overtures of affection. She was never very good with words, my mother.
I, on the other hand, was unfortunately sensitive; easily hurt by my double-edged sword of a talent for reading between the lines and hearing what silences say. This difference in our natures resulted in the too-frequent offending of my adolescent sensibilities, and in me trying to inflict the same pain her careless words wrought—a futile attempt at teaching her to “do unto others”.
***
I always wanted a mother like my best friend's. She never raised her hand or her voice at her children. She encouraged them no matter what, always sensitive to the fragility of a child’s heart. She had the kind of soft presence that you could not help but love and revere. But I suppose it is too much to expect of an old-fashioned Chinese woman (a typical tong yan, my mother admits), much less one who has not yet learned to accept her own disappointing childhood. Which is why Laura turned out the way she has, and I turned out the way I have. She is best friends with her mother—together, they were all gossamer and silk and sparkling dew. I used to envy that, for I am not even friends with mine. But my mother and I …we are bound forever by a stronger, more substantial bond. It is alright now; I no longer ache for things that can never be. Our hearts are too different to be able to forge a gentler relationship.
Many years ago, I went up to my mother’s room in the middle of the afternoon, still in my uniform and my socks. (She tried for years to get me into the habit of removing my socks and going barefoot around the house, as it was the polite thing to do. I still require that certain disapproving look from her to be persuaded into overcoming this act of congenial petulance.) I was supposed to be doing my homework, and she was watching the latest Cantonese soap that caught her fancy—I have noticed only children have that disconcerting ability of picking the most inopportune moments to ask the important questions.
“Mummy, why don’t you bake cinnamon cookies like Mrs Davis does for Laura? You only cook tong sui. Do you know how to make cookies? Laura says her mum is real nice, so she’ll teach you how.”
The expressions flitted across her face: she was irritated (the heroine had gone missing), then mildly affronted (she made mat foong biscuits too—they are a kind of cookie!), then annoyed (her 9 year old daughter was comparing her culinary skills to those of a kwai loh woman). With the benefit of hindsight, I imagine she was trying hard to be patient with me, which explained the pained expression on her face when she tried to explain that she could make cookies, but preferred that we ate healthier desserts, so she only prepared tong sui the traditional way, using my great-aunt’s recipe.
I had her attention. Ah, how happy I was—she was not angry with me yet—perhaps she was in a good mood. So, foolishly, I decided to milk her moment of tolerance for all it was worth, and pursued the conversation to its crux.
“Mummy, why don’t you treat me the way Mrs Davis treats Laura? Laura says her mum has never scolded her before, even when she was bad.”
I don’t even remember what she said, just the angry snap in her voice and the impatience in her eyes. I believe the answer had something to do with the fact that it was because Mrs Davis was kwai loh and she was not—and neither am I, so stop coveting their way of life.
So.
I revel in the freedom of the West, but my beliefs are heavily tempered by the values of my home--I am undeniably tong yan, hua ren, deng nang. Chinese. Said in different languages, but basically the same thing.
I speak perfect English, but I also speak three different dialects of Chinese; I think pizza is gorgeous, but I also love my mother’s culinary concoctions; my mind, my body, is a mix of tong yan and kwai loh. I don’t know who to emulate: am I supposed to be the (overly-serious?) Asian girl who marries young and devotes her life to her husband and children? The modern-day powerhouse woman who brims over with confidence—any man’s equal—and just happens to have black hair and slanting eyes? Or the in-between? Do in-betweens even exist? More importantly, are in-betweens acceptable?
I grew up in an Asia which opened its arms to the western touch, yet tenaciously clung to its orientalism. It seems like my mother internalised this Asia. And now, it seems, so have I. That is all there is to it.
***
She seems to hate my grandmother. Although I felt afraid of the unnaturalness of such a thing and tried to close my eyes to it, intuitively, I knew it was true, knew it was her greatest hurt. I wielded this knowledge like a secret weapon, my very own trump card.
I only used it once. I cannot remember what she did, or what I did, but I remember the intense anger we both radiated at each other. I took pains to warn her that she shouldn't expect a good relationship with me if she hated her own mother.
“Practise what you preach, if you please.”
She opened her mouth to retaliate, and began one of her blustering spiels.
Disrespectful daughter. Know your place. Don’t forget you are tong yan by blood. Filial piety. I am your mother. You don’t know anything.
But I knew more than she thought. Completely ignoring her, I continued my charade, looking coolly away into the imagined horizon. When she stopped, awaiting some humble apology, I jumped slightly, shaking my head as if to clear from it the earth-quaking revelations which dawned on me as a result of her speech.
A calculated pause. A supposed quizzical smile.
Now.
“Funny, I always assumed that you didn't want to end up just like grandma. But I guess I was mistaken.”
An indrawn breath. Hers.
Then she slapped me, not hard though, because her shock was too great. I never said anything along those lines again, for I did not want to experience again that ugly mix of smugness and horror I felt in knowing my power.
***
While I had lost the innocent, unquestioning love I had for my mother a long time ago, there exists a different sort of love; an unshakeable, compulsory love that I believe all of us have for our mothers. The kind where you love your mother just because she is your mother. It is much like the way my mother will always love me because I am her flesh and blood, the way I know that I will always have a place in her life if ever I am floundering.
When it came down to it, it did not matter that we disliked each other. It did not matter that I was infuriated by the shrillness of her angered voice; her refusal to see things from a different perspective; her persistent dismissals of my youthful—clumsy—attempts at bridging the yawning space between us, by offering my confidences, and asking her for hers. And, I suppose, it did not matter to her that I refused to be moulded to fit her timeworn ideas of the perfectly woven Chinese daughter; that my actions more often than not mocked her status of mother; that the words that slipped past my lips were often designed to wound her—poison, they were. What mattered was that we were inexplicably tied together by the strings of familial love.
For us, there are no giggles, no shy confessions about the boy-next-door, no swapping of shoes. No idolisation. No gossamer, no silk, no sparkling dew. But there is a solid, unwavering bond that generations of women are gripped by that is, I believe, not a consolation prize, but simply the only prize worth having.
***
I thought I understood my mother.
My vision has cleared, and all those wasted years of rivalry have been but a misunderstanding on my part: because I thought I understood my mother.
Now I content myself with the knowledge that I am merely at the beginning of the slow unravelling of the workings of her soul. And that perhaps one day, my mother will be understood.
