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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 vulgar names, 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.

I think it was lucky that you decided that I’d live alone in Canada at 16, while you and dad returned to China to pick up the life you had there. You told me that you found me pitiful, that I was 寄人篱下 — living under someone else’s roof — something only pitiful kids from broken families did, but you didn’t have a choice. I was actually quite happy and grateful for the independence, but I guess you wanted me to miss you. I didn’t.

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.

Towards the end of university, your divorce from my dad was getting so toxic, when I called grandpa (your dad) he asked me to relay a threatening message to my dad, when I called aunt (your sister) she talked shit about my dad, when I called my cousin (dad’s niece) she complained about you. I was in Canada trying to get through my semester and really didn’t want to deal with all of this. Also I was scared of you. I really wanted to stop contacting you. So I asked my then boyfriend to relay you a message expressing that I didn’t want to contact you anymore, and you immediately contacted my school, my friend and my upcoming internship employer to report that I’d been kidnapped by my boyfriend.

Then you just repeatedly contacted me and reminded me that you were the only person who loved me in this world and that you were my safe harbor in life. It didn’t help that the internship was in a city where I knew no one, and it didn’t help that my boyfriend broke up with me because I was driving him crazy.

It probably was very obvious to you that I craved a home, and that I was excruciatingly lonely — not that I didn’t have friends, but I never really know where to go during the holidays. But you were so good at giving me a dose of love after I pushed you away, so that you could draw me close again, make me feel happy for a bit, then tell me something like I should dress up nicely and hang out near university libraries so I can pick up a nice educated guy.

I was weak, and you were really good at this. So my first attempt to cut you off failed. You criticized me, again and again, for damaging the harmony of our family. You re-emphasized that men didn’t like women from broken homes, so not only should I be nice to you, but also never tell anyone I dated — or anyone outside of the family, really — the details about your (now over) marriage with my dad. It was the same consistent message I got from you throughout my life: to mold myself to a shape that rich successful men would find appealing, correct the imperfections I could correct and hide the ones I couldn’t correct, and try to hitch myself to someone who could give me a better life.

You didn’t know where I lived after I moved to New York. You knew the company I worked at, so on my birthday you sent me a watch, without telling me beforehand. I didn’t want the watch, I didn’t want anything from you. You didn’t have the correct mailing address, though, so the package was never delivered to my office’s mail room. You asked me if I liked my birthday gift, I told you I didn’t receive anything. You sent me the mailing address you put on the order, I realized that you had the wrong address. I was annoyed and told you that this wasn’t my problem and I didn’t know how to track down a package like this. You told me how much money you’d spent on this watch — an obscene amount. You were never forthcoming about your financial situations, but when I was a kid you beat me up for wasting money, buying extra pens because I already have too many pens, so I always had the impression that we didn’t have much and I should respect every dollar. If I didn’t go track down the package then all this obscene amount of money would be wasted, and I couldn’t stand to let it happen to you, especially after you’d guilt-tripped me all of my life. So I took the time to track down the package. When I asked you for the address to return the package to, you tried to persuade me to accept this gift. I contacted the merchant directly and returned the package.

You asked me to call every other week or so. I noticed that whenever you called me, I felt really bad afterwards. It would usually take me days to recover.

Then COVID happened. My cousin (your niece) asked me for my address; she said you wanted to send me some masks from China, and said that you promised you wouldn’t use my address for any other purpose without my permission. When I opened the package a few weeks later, I felt trapped — on the one hand I could use some masks; on the other hand, you now had my address.

Three years later, after I’d went cold turkey on our contact and moved out of that apartment, I got a phone call from a local number. I picked up, expecting it to be a business call. I heard your voice instead. “This is mom, where are you?” I froze. “I’m downstairs at your apartment, are you home? Let me in.” I hung up in a panic, and went to the nearest friend’s place. I got a steady stream of calls and texts from the current tenant of my old apartment, telling me that you knocked on her door, distressed. She said that you told her that you didn’t understand why I stopped talking to you, that I was mad at you for divorcing my dad, that you had a special gift for me, that you wanted to talk to the landlord to learn more about me. Did I have a boyfriend?

I contemplated calling the police.

The year I turned 29 I had a series of crises: the boyfriend who I expected to propose to me broke up with me instead; I realized that my career was stagnant and my job was not good for me and I needed to quit; a medical procedure didn’t go well; I received a diagnosis of a chronic condition; I lost my visa to stay in the US and had to leave. In my desperate pain I had the idea of reconciling with you — I’d make one last attempt to see if we could finally talk about our past like adults, and to have a relationship as adults. If it went well, I’d have a mom again; if not, then I could have closure and move on with my life.

So I went to stay with you for a few months and tried to reconcile. We both know how that went: after a couple months were my boundaries were constantly getting violated — I asked you to not put your hand on my butt and you got mad at me and started to say mean things about my friend, you came into my room when I asked you not to, you grabbed the steering wheel from the passenger seat because you didn’t like how I was parking — when I told you that I was moving out to my own apartment, you told me that you could not live on anymore without me in your house, dropped down on your knees, begged me to stay. I wasn’t sure if that was a legit suicide threat, so I called the police. You told the police that you were perfectly fine and I was overreacting. After they left you berated me for everything: for damaging our fragile family relationships, for damaging the public image of our family, for quitting my job, for not having a boyfriend, for not being married already, for actively sabotaging my own life, for not being like my cousin who married a rich American guy.

“Why do you hate me so much?” You asked, as I packed my stuff. I almost wanted to laugh.

That evening, after the mover and I had moved everything to the driveway, he asked me if everything was okay. I wasn’t sure how to answer, then he said, “your mom came out to take a photo of my license plate, and gave me this—” he handed me a piece of paper, folded up. I looked at him, confused. He told me to open it.

It was a handwritten note, with your phone number and a sentence, “give me a call when you arrive. I’m the girl’s mom.” There was a 50 dollar bill with the note. You tried to bribe my mover to give you my new address because you knew I wouldn’t give it to you.

The mover told me that my address would be confidential, and that he didn’t want your money, and didn’t want you to think that he took your money. He asked me to hand the notes back to you. I had hoped that I could just leave this on the shoe shelf next to the door and get on my way, but you’d already locked the front door. When you opened the door you looked surprised that this note had ended up in my hands, and when I handed it back to you, you didn’t want to take it. I held my hand out until you finally reluctantly took it, and I left.

The days after I fled your house, I was elated. I was elated despite that I slept on a chair cushion on the floor every night. I found myself physically tense when you were around, and once I moved out that tension was gone. I always find myself happier, freer and lighter, when I don’t have your voice in my head telling me that I should be ashamed instead. When I venture into the world to chase what I want, even when I fail, I feel happier than hiding in my fear.

I want to tell you that I’m lucky to have your ambition, tenacity and intelligence, because I think this combination has saved my life. But I’m afraid of giving you credit, because you really like taking credit for my work, and use that to make me concede things to you. At this point I just feel a visceral tension whenever I think of anything nice about you. You’re too good at using my vulnerability to nudge me to do what you want, you probably aren’t even conscious that you do this, it’s second nature to you.

It took me so many years to just start making sense of this whole mindfuck — you’ve instilled in me that my family of origin was shameful, and that I looked ugly, and that my existence was wrong, and I needed to transcend all of this by achievements, and ultimately marrying well. You never accepted me for who I am, always planning out my life for me, always molding me into the perfect trophy daughter you want — and let’s be honest, you think your own marriage was a failure, so you want me to achieve your romantic fantasy.

You’re really good at this. Eventually I realized that how people behave depend a lot on what they think they could get away with in a context. You unleashed your outrage at me whenever I deviated from your expectations, so that before I made any decision for myself I always wondered if my decision would set you off. When I was a little kid you beat me; once I was a teenager you slapped me while calling me shameless, until that one time, shortly after we’d moved to Canada, you shoved me for coming home after sunset because I was trying to save a bus ticket by walking 45 minutes — a bus ticket was expensive given we were spending RMB savings; then once you realized that I was strong enough to fight back, you switched to telling me that people I considered friends secretly hated me and that men would all be repulsed by my bad attitude, or you send me “gifts” that I really didn’t want. You succeeded. You’ve hijacked the software running my life over the first three decades of my life, and I’ve fought tooth and nail to preserve some semblance of self. You’ve been surprised over and over again at how stubborn I am. I think I got that from both you and dad.

I went on to navigate the world with the assumption that people by default did not want me to exist unless I earned myself a place, by default would not believe me unless I had a bulletproof case, by default would hate me unless I gave them a reason to like me. Existence was never my birthright; I had to earn it through perfection. The problem, though, was that I was way less than perfect, because my blueprint for how to navigate life was from you. So, I screamed at my classmates, bullied my crush, pulled on my best friend’s hair in middle school when she got a better grade than me in art class. I lashed out in professional settings, and made my romantic partners scared. It’s been a reckoning, of who I actually was as a person. I remember feeling alienated and baffled for a long time whenever things like this happened, because I thought I was acting normally, until I realized that what I thought of as “normal” growing up with you was considered “dysfunctional” in the actual world I lived in. Then I hated myself. I hated myself for a long, long time.

I remember in 2017, when both you and dad wanted to come visit me in my college town, but you just had an episode where dad threatened you with a knife again, so you weren’t talking to each other, so I had to find you separate accommodations. I wanted you to get some help. I talked about this with my counselor at the university, and she miraculously found me a referral to a Chinese-speaking therapist in the college town. When I brought this up, you were offended, because only crazy people with serious problems needed therapists, and you were a normal person, just with a bad husband. You also told me that all psychologists were scammers, that they make up problems and convince people that they were actually psychologically unhealthy in order to make money from it. You told me to stop being reliant on therapists and talk to you instead, because you were the only person in the world who really had my interest at heart — 世上只有妈妈好.

I feel a little embarrassed writing these words out, because you and dad sound like children. Whenever I tried to tell you the ways your actions had impacted me, you either start blaming my dad and your dad, or criticize me for not being grateful for the positives and only focusing on the negatives, or derail the conversation by acting surprised by a new imperfection on my face.

You had really high expectations of me all of my life, but now that I think about it, you don’t seem to ask the same of yourself. The world scares you; you’re not even very comfortable speaking English. It’s much easier to watch your daughter venture into the world and “remote control” her (literally your words) than to have some skin in the game yourself. You often told me that I should take the easy path in life; only fools would make life harder for themselves for no reason. I don’t think this approach to life has been fulfilling for you.

To this day I feel obligated to push myself to see your perspective, because I keep hearing people saying that they forgave their parents and had a deeper connection with them and that was the best thing ever in their lives. But I’ve tried the same and it basically blew up in my face. Now I’m not sure if I’ve cursed myself to a lifetime of misery because I couldn’t get this right, or if you’re just a lost cause and I can move on with my life without worrying about you anymore.

I never understood precisely how you think about dignity or freedom. Whenever I tried to talk about them with you you seemed uncomfortable, perhaps a little displeased. You would tell me that I was wasting time on useless things, that girls shouldn’t think of these grand things, and you were worried that I was depressed. It’s interesting because you totally cited the concept of “dignity” when you told me I was a whore for wanting to hang out with a boy I knew from university (you didn’t like his ethnicity). But whenever I tried to live according to the values that I really believe in that you didn’t approve of, you’d mock be for being dumb and naive; whenever I tried to reach for exciting things that were a little risky, you tried to stop me by telling me how worried you were that I’d fail. I was obedient, I looked up to you a lot — that was my problem — the sociocultural structure that we lived in granted you immense authority over me, and instead of living up to what that power asked of you, you used that power on me.

The first time I heard the Benjamin Franklin quote “those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety,” I thought about you.

I didn’t understand how narrow your worldview — and thus the worldview that I’d inherited from you, the only world view I started with — was, until the end of my 20s. Before things soured between us in your house, you told me, bewildered, that you sent me to Canada only to “get an education,” that you had planned for me to move back to China after I graduated, that you had written a life script for me. Grandpa had warned you, all those years ago, to not plan ahead so much because “things might change,” and you didn’t understand what he meant until I picked a major you didn’t approve of, dated people you didn’t approve of, apply to internships in the United States, cut you off, and moved to New York. “I never expected you’d do that,” you looked genuinely baffled, “I didn’t know you’d make your own decisions. I always looked to my dad for important life decisions.”

An education, to you, means a credential. From your perspective, the world is a hostile place, the competition for survival is fierce, and people need to do whatever they could to get ahead. When I turned 30 I finally saw clearly how this had shaped my own hitherto worldview: that if I worked hard then I could earn success, and if I earned success I could exchange that for love. That I had control over my life outcomes, that the world was fundamentally just. That if I had career success and loving marriage and started my own family, I could finally earn myself a place in the world, I’d finally qualify to have happiness in life, I could have it all.

And OH MY LORD have I tried to have it all.

After I moved to New York I hung out with some friends who were parents themselves, and what I learned about parenting in other families blew my mind. I didn’t know that some parents told their children that they were proud of them, on a regular basis. I don’t remember you ever telling me that you were proud of me, not even once. If I had to make a guess, I don’t think you’re proud of me — I think you’re impressed with what I’d managed to do, but I’m not living a life that you approve of. I certainly don’t think you like me as a person.

After I fled your house into my own apartment, my former roommates from New York sent me flowers. There was a card, “we’re so proud of you!” It made me sob uncontrollably so many times; I’m tearing up as I write about it.

The world that you’d created for me was chaotic and unpredictable, in which I could be punished for anything. I learned to perfect myself, to anticipate criticism, to pre-empt risks… being hard on myself just to have some semblance of control. I’m honestly just sick of this worldview, and tired of steeping in shame and fear. In a happier world, I wouldn’t have grown up living this way; in this world, I’m not going to live like that anymore. Fortunately, in my experience, the rest of the world is not like you.