When I see myself in the mirror I catch a glimpse of your face. Throughout my life I’ve received a steady stream of comments about how I looked just like you. I wish this wasn’t true.
When I was growing up, you often told me I was ugly. My eyes were too small and my nose was too flat; you had bigger eyes and taller nose, and that I’d inherited my dad’s ugly features, you often pointed out. It got worse after puberty, when more things started appearing on my face: acne, braces, glasses. “You’re so ugly,” you’d often say, with a smile on your face, “which you’re so ugly, which men on earth would want you? I think you’ll be stuck with me forever, I’m the only person who doesn’t detest you!” Invariably I’d panic or get mad, and you’d laugh, “I was joking! Not ugly, not ugly.” You seem to really like making this joke, though, because you did it over and over again, I feel like you must have done it hundreds of times.
I have inherited your ambition, your tenacity, and your intelligence; the worst inheritance I got from you, though, was a steady diet of shame and fear. I’ve made my own share of mistakes in my forays into the world, and got hurt plenty of time in ways big and small. But even the damage of all of them combined was not as insidious as the damage you gave me.
As I write this I’m sitting on a porch with my friend, who runs a coffee shop and works as a nanny. Those are jobs that you would never approve of, you look down on people who are lower on the social pecking order. But when she was asked to watch a toddler while the toddler’s mom went to the bathroom, she picked up the toddler, looked into her eyes, and these words came out so naturally, “you’re beautiful and I love you.”
I’ve only heard you tell me those things a handful of times in my life. After you slapped me repeatedly as you unleashed your rage on me, while I sobbed inconsolably on the couch; after I broke down crying after yet another joke of “you’re so ugly, which men on earth would want you?”; after I finally grew a backbone, packed my stuff and left your house.
When I say the word “mom” people usually have this mental image of someone loving, nurturing, saintly. I find myself compelled to give concrete examples of how you’d treated me whenever I mentioned you to other people, because I was so worried that people would not believe me, that they’d think I was some spoiled brat who made things up for attention — maybe it was because you’d told me so. It drove me insane that I felt like I lived in a world where my experience was so far removed from the mainstream narrative and also that this meant I was uniquely defective, that I must work hard to fit myself into the mold of perfection to salvage my life, that if I couldn’t see the board at school it was because I didn’t work hard enough to protect my eyes, that you and dad fought because I wasn’t making you happy enough, that I left underwear with period blood in the laundry room meant I was disgusting. If anything went wrong, or merely imperfectly, I could be shamed. It. Drove. Me. Fucking. Insane.
There was an ubiquitous Chinese nursery rhyme:
世上只有妈妈好 有妈的孩子像个宝 投进了妈妈的怀抱 幸福享不了 世上只有妈妈好 没妈的孩子像根草 离开了妈妈的怀抱 幸福哪里找
In this world, only mothers are good. A child with a mother is like a treasure. When you fall into your mother’s arms, Happiness has no end. In this world, only mothers are good. A child without a mother is like stray grass. When you’ve left your mother’s arms, Where can happiness be found?
I was brainwashed by this rhyme since before I could remember, and you’ve quoted it plenty. Over and over, you told me that no one in the world really had my interest at heart, except you and my dad — and even my dad actually cared more about his parents and siblings than you and me. When you’d found out that I’d been not only dating someone you didn’t approve of, but also telling them about your fights with my dad, you sternly warned me against airing dirty laundry. No one likes a girl from a bad family, you said. Men would judge me, you said. My friends were only friendly to me as a facade but actually didn’t want me around, you said. I was mixing up people who really cared about me and people who wanted to exploit me, you said. 世上只有妈妈好 — in this world, only mothers are good — you said.
I understand that you’d had it worse than me. You grew up in a small coal-mining city, and if it wasn’t for grandpa’s insistence (or shall we call it coercion?) you wouldn’t have studied hard to test into the best high school. Then you went to Hangzhou for teacher’s college, where you saw a world much bigger than that small coal-mining town. You had a college boyfriend, but he was a Hangzhou native and you weren’t, so the 户口 — residency registration — system forced you apart after graduation. You were allocated a teaching job back in the small coal-mining town, and your parents thought at 23 it was time to marry you off. Everything that happened after was a disaster. My first memory in life was my dad threatening you with a kitchen knife: you were backed into a corner, dad held up the kitchen cleaver in his hand, forcing you to say something; you held me in your arms; I was perhaps too stunned to feel anything. Or that time on my 4th or 5th or 6th birthday, you were just beaten up by my dad in the morning, and you sat on the floor, cross-legged. I was in your arms, your tears dripping on my face. Somehow that afternoon the three of us went to the cake store as if nothing had happened. Or when I was 10, you were beaten unconscious by my dad. Enraged, my dad started to slap your feet, while cursing profanities, accusing you for faking it, demanding that you wake up. I begged my dad to stop; he left our home in a huff. I sat next to you, petrified. After a while, you let out a primal yelp for your mother, a sound with more agony and despair than a cry. Grandma was half a country away — you and I moved to Hangzhou as you wished, dad moved to Shanghai, for better opportunities and a better environment for me to grow up. We were an immigrant family, detached from any extended family or even close friends. 举目无亲, so to speak. You were helpless in getting beaten by my dad, and I was helpless in watching all this happen, over and over and over again.
When I graduated from university you sent me a long email, titled “congratulations.” After congratulating me for finishing my degree because you were worried that I couldn’t do it, you spent the rest of the email listing out all the ways everyone in the family had wronged you: your parents for not being vigilant about who they matched you with; my dad’s family for not being forthcoming about everything; my aunt for being evil. In that same email you blamed me for enabling my dad to funnel money out of your marriage because I chose to pay for school myself. Your logic was that if I had him pay for my school — a hefty sum given that my tuition was in Canadian dollars and my dad made Renminbi — he wouldn’t have had money to gift his sisters, nieces, and the other women in his life.
You also told me, that you didn’t understand how contraception worked before you got pregnant with me. I never worked up the courage to ask you if having me was your choice, but I think I know your answer. You’ve beaten me plenty of times, called me names that’s too vulgar for me to repeat, and in those moments I always saw something in your eyes: contempt. I will never forget those looks.
I remember talking to a family friend, someone you know, about my dissatisfactions with my upbringings. “But you turned out pretty well,” she said, “and you should thank your parents for that. Without the obstacles to build your character, how could you have turned out so well? You should be grateful to your parents instead of being so harsh on them.” I shot back, “if this were true, then why don’t people advocate for beating and berating their kids as good parenting?” She rolled her eyes. Now that I think about it, in conventional Chinese folk wisdom we do have 不打不成器 — spare the rod and spoil the child — and 棍棒底下出孝子 — under the stick come filial sons.
China did not have law that recognized domestic violence until 2016, and I suspect that enforcement is non-existent in most places to this day. The New York Times published a post in November last year titled, “In China, Victims of Abuse Are Told to ‘Keep It in the Family.’” I don’t need to read it, we’ve had the police and ambulance called into our home plenty of times, I’ve seen their indifference.
When I say “Chinese culture” it’s a little ambiguous what I mean, because the Chinese people I’ve met varied a lot. But the culture in our family — and also among many Chinese people I know when I grew up in China — promised a structure, where the fundamental unit of society was the family: the father is responsible for the whole household, the mother is responsible for the child; for women, the rules were clear: 未嫁从父，既嫁从夫，夫死从子 — before marriage, follow one’s father; after marriage, follow one’s husband; after the husband dies, follow one’s son. It’s a strict structure, where the men punished the women for deviance, and parents punished children for defiance. Chinese people are proud of their long cultural history, and our rich culture has lots of pithy quotes that people use to justify their cruelty in the name of tradition. But such a structure has no contingency plan for when things go wrong. The women and the children have no recourse if the men and parents in their lives did not live up to what the role demanded of them.
Our culture has failed you, and in turn failed me.
In university I had a lot of trouble with my courses. But whenever I thought of the idea of going to my professors’ office hours, a scene would start playing in my head: my professor being furious upon learning that I didn’t understand such an elementary concept, sardonically asking me why I was there if I was so stupid, then scream at me to drop out. I tried really hard to fight this fear — I’d drag myself out of my room, show up to my professor’s floor, walk past their open door, but ultimately fell short from walking in.
Eventually, I learned enough about PTSD to understand what was going on. I have a memory from 4th grade, after you’d explained a math problem to me and I still didn’t understand, you lost it, “my marriage is miserable and my kid is a disappointment, I think soon this family will disintegrate!” I cried, and you were angry.
It was an unfortunate cycle. Math was already all-around emotionally charged for me when I started university, and you had told me plenty of times that I would not only fail out of the program, but also intimidate all the men who might want to date me, because no men liked a women who was too smart. You told me to hide my intelligence — major in accounting, and use my intelligence on marrying well instead. So when I encountered problems in my courses I hid in my room or the library in shame, which only snowballed the problems. I know how much I could’ve done better if I didn’t fall into this spiral, but in the end I barely passed my courses, and got a degree instead of mastery. It’s my biggest regret in life.
I was very lost in life. I messed up my sleep during finals of my first semester in university, and slept through an exam. When I told you about this on our video call, you screamed at me, and the first thing you said was, “did I give you so much money that you’ve forgotten how to work hard?” I was too stunned to remind you that my first year was covered by scholarship. Maybe it was the egregiousness of your words that finally made me realize that I couldn’t expect you to behave like an adult the way I expected myself to behave, now that I was also an adult. I think that was when I finally started to give up on reasoning with you, and therefore losing my respect of you.
Across different cultures and eras, there always seem to me a mainstream life arc for those who are considered successful in life: something about a happy family, meaningful work, belonging in community. But for those who are less lucky in life, they still need to answer the question: given that I’ve found myself ejected from the mainstream life narrative, how do I lead a good life, from here?
In Oedipus the King, after Oedipus stabbed his own eyes in agony, he cried out to his daughters:
I weep for you — I cannot see your faces — I weep when I think of the bitterness there will be in your lives, how you must live before the world. At what assemblages of citizens will you attend? To what festivals will you go and not come home in tears instead of sharing in the holiday? And when you’re ripe for marriage, who will he be, the man who’ll risk to take such infamy as shall cling to my children, to bring hurt on them and those that marry with them? What evil is not there? “Your father killed his father and sowed the seed where he had sprung himself and begot you out of the womb that held him.” Such insults you will hear. Then who will marry you? No one, my children; clearly you are doomed to waste away in barrenness unmarried.
I couldn’t help but note that the narrative that I got from Chinese culture in the 21st century had not progressed much further from 429 BC.
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