Forty-four.

There are mothers everywhere for willing eyes to behold.

I was thirty when I came out to my aunt.

In the lead-up to my thirty-first birthday, my biological sister and I planned a trip to a portion of the Sinosphere. We would make stops in Taipei, Fuzhou, Changsha, Chongqing, Kunming, Lijiang, Shangri-La, and Dali, taking advantage of a lull in work that would allow us to travel unimpeded and celebrate not only my birthday but hers as well.

Our parents had meticulously planned my sister's birth, timing it to occur about a week after my birthday. It was true that they wanted to save money in the near future, rationalizing that the proximity allowed them to combine our two celebrations into one, but they also had an eye on further horizons. They wanted us to be lifelong companions.

For the first two decades, I loathed her for the favoritism I thought they bestowed upon her; nowadays, I think she's slowly coming out of her shell and discovering her own person. Whether their wish will come to fruition remains to be seen, but the relationship between her and me has improved over time. Still, I continue to distinguish her as my biological sister from Cornelius, who has long functioned as my actual sister.

As we organized that trip, we made the fateful decision to include our mother because it had been decades since our last family vacation to her birthplace. I remember thinking that it would be nice to accompany her there as adults, wondering how our newfound maturity might color that experience. That trip did indeed end up being fateful, but for unforeseen reasons altogether, the most pivotal event of which I later chronicled in "My Grandmother's Daughter." I left Taipei as described, but not for my home in New York City—instead, I made my way to Shanghai and then Changsha.

After the fallout with my birth mother in Taipei, I was in full-on avoidant mode. Part of my residual not-trauma (because I don't feel right describing something so trivial as trauma) from my breakup with Jun was that I wanted to be more avoidant of conflict. It persisted throughout my failed relationship with Henry, wherein I would walk away from him after any argument because I wanted to first cool off my head so that I could later return and calmly revisit the issue at hand, but that resulted in an even more calamitous breakup. So, when it came to my mother, I had had enough. I wanted no more to do with her; I didn't even want to be in the same city as her. I refused to immiserate myself.

With a return flight to New York City booked via Hong Kong, I phoned my aunt, Jiang, on WeChat. Although the trip was intended in part to spend ample time with her in Changsha, because it's her hometown too, I apologized for needing to cut my travels short. I had decided to permanently sever ties with my mother, and I just wanted to go home.

Jiang convinced me to stay in Asia. She talked me out of my panicked state of mind, rationalizing that I was just a short flight away from my favorite noodles and stinky tofu in the world. A day later, I finally acquiesced, and I boarded a plane bound for Hunan.

When I say that I spent part of my upbringing in Changsha, I mean that I spent alternating years throughout my childhood living and even attending school there. My mother's four sisters swapped among themselves as my stand-in maternal figures, playing the role so well that I often confused them for her whenever they were all gathered in the same room. I frequented Jiang's home the most, preferring it literally because hers alone, out of all four, had a working toilet. (I, a spoiled American brat, was terrified of the holes in the bathroom floor over which I would have to squat because I feared falling into them.) Further, I thought her household was the most balanced between responsibilities and fun: one aunt placed strenuous emphasis on being studious, while the youngest aunt was still child-free and, therefore, carefree, but Jiang was a happy medium between them all. It made sense—Jiang's the middle child of five.

Jiang had a daughter, my cousin. She was just a couple years younger than me, and it was she who first introduced me to Spirited Away, Super Junior, and Girls' Generation, all the media of East Asian youth before the Internet Age because my life in America was, well, rather uncultured. She was vivacious, animated, and later moved to California after completing college in Oregon. One suburban night, she was struck by a wayward driver and lost her life. She was still in her early twenties.

Losing her daughter, her only child, irreversibly changed my aunt; all her crying shifted the contours of her eyes. She regretted every scolding she'd ever given her, and she despaired at the gravity of her loss. Although we couldn't fill that void, my sister and I tried to be more present for her—after all, she'd had a hand in raising us (albeit predominantly me), too.

Stepping off that plane in Huanghua International Airport for the first time in a decade, at almost midnight, I breathed in the local humidity. I've often wondered throughout my life whether the way I look in a humid, as opposed to arid, climate is how I'm "supposed" to appear, given how it affects my hair and my skin; it's an extended metaphor for how I would exist in a culture where I look as though I fit in, opposite my existence in the United States as a permanent minority (Asian Americans currently number approximately 7% of the population). Jiang and her husband picked me up at the airport and immediately whisked me away, not back to her home to decompress and sleep but first to a local restaurant for grilled skewers and garlicky oysters—宵夜, or nighttime snacking, a fourth meal of the day, is practically an everyday occurrence in Changsha.

When Henry and I broke up in 2022, some of my relatives asked why I seemed so distraught. Because I had only just come out to my parents, I told my extended relatives that I had just separated from my girlfriend who I had wanted to marry, choosing to avoid the finer details; I wasn't in the mood to upend those relationships. I could weather losing my actual parents, to whom my connection was already fraught, but I couldn't risk losing the relatives that I actually liked. Jiang, of course, was one of them.

Over our 宵夜, I explained to my aunt why I could no longer tolerate my mother, her sister. I knew she would understand, given that her own relationship with her is twice as lengthy as my own. Jiang didn't judge me for my decisions. We sat there together, a mother who'd lost her daughter and a son who'd lost his mother.

I think, if I were to really psychoanalyze myself, that I've gone through life looking for family everywhere and in everyone. My closest friends became my trusted confidantes and even adoptive siblings, supplanting the one I had because I plainly didn't feel connected to her. Each time my friends' parents showed me kindness, a bit of me withered away inside because my own parents never spoke to me in the same way—it's no wonder why I waited so long to come out to them, for a point in time wherein I would be insulated from any consequences should that go awry. I'm not delusional: I don't mean to conflate and equate well-mannered hospitality with actual parenting, but I think I've spent a lifetime mourning a nuclear family that I never had. I had one mother who spurned me, but then again I had surrogate mothers everywhere as I invented mothers out of everyone who extended me grace, from my aunts to my friends' mothers to even Erika Jayne. Maybe I'll never know what it's like to have a real mother, or maybe I do and this is it.

In the forthcoming days after my arrival in Changsha, I knew my biological mother would arrive too—after all, I had had a hand in planning the itinerary. She was due to stay with Jiang for a few days before returning stateside, and I had zero interest in meeting her. Jiang, who I hated that I was inconveniencing, arranged for me to stay elsewhere, effectively hiding out for those days. Instead, her friends would keep me company as I avoided my maker, and I spent that intervening time on noon-to-midnight mahjong games where I gambled, won, and lost modest sums of renminbi. I did a little bit of sightseeing too, touring gargantuan street markets and eating my fill of Changsha’s famously black stinky tofu.

But, that night, as we walked the sidewalk opposite her apartment complex after having finished our meal, searching for a convenience store where I could purchase some contact lens solution because I'd forgotten to pack mine, I wondered aloud to my aunt what it would've been like had I grown up having family in such close proximity instead of being separated by the planet's largest body of water. I asked whether she thought I'd have become any different as a person. Then, as I tried to explain to her why I no longer cared what anybody thought of me, in the aftermath of my biggest breakup and with the start of my actual maturity, standing on a street corner somewhere in the Furon District, I officially came out to her.

She didn’t reel from my unexpected admission. Instead, she asked me to teach her what it meant. How did I know for certain? Would I ever come around to dating women? These were questions I could answer with ease, and I did. LGBTQ people have existed in China throughout time immemorial; all I had to do was piece together how it related to me. As my surrogate mother, the most realistic of them all, she simply accepted me as I was. It was all that I needed.