My Grandmother's Daughter.
An intergenerational reckoning and a love made maternal.
Surprise! I have the distinct honor and pleasure of announcing that my new essay, “My Grandmother’s Daughter,” is now available for you to read. Periphery has very kindly published it, so simply click this link here to read it. I have excerpted below its opening lines as a sneak peek for you, and you can find the rest on their website. I hope you enjoy it!
It’s a nondescript Sunday when my grandmother calls me, as she does every week. When I pick up, I pause to check if she’s dialed me by accident. I know that she occasionally sits around with her smartphone open to my contact page, frequently accidentally clicking the call button; it cheers me to know that she’s always thinking about me.
She claims to call because she misses the sound of my voice. Each time, it’s the same set of questions, a ritualistic dance of words choreographed for us two. She inquires if I’ve already eaten, if I’ve not been neglecting my nutrition. Even if I’m famished, I’ll invent the meals that I say I’ve had in response, and I always reply that I’m fine—I never want her to worry about me. She notices the noises underlying my voice, the whirring of vehicles passing by or the chatter from my television, and asks if I’m outside, perhaps with my friends. To keep things simple, I confirm. I don’t like to explain why I’m at home alone.
Periphery was launched as a collective for Asian writers, aiming to change the mischaracterization of Asian people as meek or timid, pushed to the margins, and houses a directory of our writing. By providing a platform for writers of Asian heritage from all around the world, Periphery challenges the myopic stereotypes that continue to persist and creates new avenues for sharing Asian writing. In effect, this is about self-determination, and allowing Asian writers to exercise our creative agency empowers us to seize control of our own narratives. This is why I chose to submit “My Grandmother’s Daughter” to Periphery, and I hope that my work can serve as but one of many innumerable, illustrative voices, demonstrating that we’re a colorful mosaic of cultures and peoples.
In addition, I’m also proud to report that “My Grandmother’s Daughter” has been featured in Memoir Land’s Memoir Monday! Memoir Monday is Memoir Land’s weekly roundup of curated personal essays from all over the internet, and I’m so thankful to be included.
I wrote this piece sometime last year, in the process addressing a single-word prompt: longing. If you haven’t read it yet, I suggest pausing here to do so before reading the rest of this entry to avoid spoilers because I’ll be discussing some of its elements from this point onward.
I decided to open this essay with a photograph I took of “Ibu dan Anak (Mother and Child)” by Semsar Siahaan in 1982, one of Indonesia’s progressive art movement’s seminal figures. Later fleeing to Canada, Semsar’s work riveted the public and art establishment alike for his defiant and outspoken political commentary. I first came across his work, “Ibu dan Anak,” at the National Gallery of Singapore, where the wood sculpture was placed by curators in a quiet, solitary corner.
As I descended the stairs from the upper level galleries, I passed by a small landing upon which a human silhouette was mounted. I was in a hurry because I had about an hour left to view all the art on display, so I initially brushed past the statue. But, it persisted in my mind’s eye, and I felt immeasurably drawn to it. Rather than waste precious time fighting desire (I’ve learned from some of my mistakes), I decided to sate my curiosity and I doubled back to where it stood.
Even before learning the work’s name, I was immediately struck by the implications of its posture. The adult figure, stoic, holds up the child figure, but the hands aren’t placed solely for support: one adult hand grasps the child’s torso while the other closes around the child’s neck. The child figure’s expression is, accordingly, distressed.
Discovering that this work depicts a mother and child hit me with great emotional heft. “My Grandmother’s Daughter” was already in its final phase of edits, but “Ibu dan Anak” seemed to achieve the balanced complexity for which I strove, chiefly in the context of the relationship between a mother and their child because my essay is about, in effect, two mothers and two children. With one hand, the ibu uplifts the anak; with another, the ibu strangles the anak. It was a stark, direct representation of everything I felt, and I saw my relationship with my own mother portrayed in it. Thus, by opening the essay with this photograph sans a discussion of the statue itself, I sought to prime the reader for unease without biasing or spoiling them. As well, for the visually-inclined, I hoped that my picture would assist their imagination as they read. I should note here that I’ve toned down the image’s brightness but left it otherwise unedited, bringing out its darker undertones without overly interfering in its message.
As mentioned above, this essay was written about and to address longing. To me, longing is a desire that remains unfulfilled or is never realized—conveniently, longing is also a twin sibling of yearning, the primary thematic of A YEAR WITHOUT WATER, so it’s an emotion with which I am intimately acquainted—and I wanted to produce something that was multifaceted yet honest. My first drafts were about my love life and a certain ex-boyfriend, which did end up figuring into the background context as the reason why I eventually came out to my mother, but I thought the subject matter would be too facile. (I’m still slowly unwinding that saga, unspooling its many threads as is the original purpose of A YEAR WITHOUT WATER—if you’re interested, it begins here.) Honestly, I felt it would have been rude of me to offer up a middling, reductive piece of writing for publication because there are only so many different dimensions that such a topic can traverse, and the narrative arc would have been too predictable and, therefore, boring. Specifically, on the longing leitmotif, I wanted to prove to the world that I had more to offer than yet another story about how heartbroken I once was. Thus, I cast my mind around for inspiration and ultimately settled upon the other unfulfilling relationship in my life: the one with my mother.
Below are some of the excerpts (from various points in time) I pulled from my personal journals as I began to outline the essay.
TO BELONG
My therapist said I was yearning, longing for family and also for him [Henry] and you know I think they're interrelated because I wanted him so that I could start my own foundation for stability that I never felt from my parents.
How much grace to show the ones that made you? Generational/familial longing?
I’m describing her but I’m also describing me; as much as it's her voice in my head, it's also become mine
Longing to belong
I know normalcy is an illusion but couldn’t my family just be a little more average
Coming out as a vehicle to explore generational longing and trauma
Saturday, February 13, 2010
So we just sent Grandmother to the airport. [The] thing is, when we finished having the luggage loaded she had disappeared. Mom found out that someone wheeled her into her wait room and so we left without saying goodbye, which is really a shame. I had a pang of regret right then when I realized we were going to leave sans goodbye.
During the drive home, Mom started crying and telling me about how it's terrible having to watch your parents grow old, and how when Grandma sent Mom to the train station [back when Mom commuted between Changsha and Beijing for college] every time she'd cry for her, and now my mother's the one doing the crying.
I hate this. It's terribly sad. I hope she has a safe flight.
I chose to chronicle the dynamic between my mother and me because it’s a subject about which I harbor many mixed and intense feelings, which is usually a signal to me as a writer that I can capably create something about that subject matter that is neither fluff nor contrived. Writing, for me, can also be an exercise in catharsis: the essay format gives me space to properly reason out what I’m feeling and why and what I want to do about those feelings. I’ve always been driven primarily by appeals to logos and I resent coming across as irrational—which is probably a holdover from past arguments with my ex-boyfriends—so it brings me great comfort to puzzle out my emotions through writing. (I’m not saying I am or it is right! I acknowledge that the desire to appear logical can also be a fallacy, and that emotions can’t always be reasoned out.) Like many other people, my relationship with my mother has always been complex; ergo, “My Grandmother’s Daughter” is my attempt to make some sense out of chaos or at least to give the mayhem meaning.
To begin with the lighthearted, to soften some of the more heavyhearted moments so that the essay isn’t a total sob story and to ensure that the essay spoke with my natural voice, it was important to me that I preserved the sort of wordplay that can typically be found in my writing. Homophone puns are one of my tools to that end. Where I wrote about testing ‘mettle’ against my skin, I’m clearly referencing the ‘metal’ of the knives. Both words capably slot in here, one more literal than the other but both equivalent in the meaning they individually impart because it is equally true that I was testing the metal of the knives as well as their ability to slice—and my own willingness to follow through.
Elsewhere, I attempt to acquit my mother’s ‘mistakes’ while balancing that forgiveness against the need to validate my indignation in knowing that I am not one of those ‘mistakes.’ It’s one of many moments in this piece that exemplify another habit of mine, which is simply closing loops I’ve earlier opened. The actual topic itself might be dark, but I strongly believe that the experience of reading—and writing—can and should be fun. Humor and play exist, whether in the real moment itself or in hindsight as a coping mechanism; humor and play have always helped me to parse my life experiences.
I’m also a very referential writer. Insofar as I am a product of the products I consume, my writing is a reflection of the times and goings-on of the world because I am a part of the world too. I elected to characterize one of my actions as ‘a Sisyphean exercise’ not only to illustrate the degree to which I knew my action would ultimately be fruitless but also because I recently played and loved Hades, a 2020 video game developed by Supergiant Games, which features Sisyphus and his boulder. Without derailing my essay itself, it’s an oblique reference I inserted as a quiet homage. In a different section, the stinky tofu mention exists as a callback to that fateful Taiwan trip last year as well as to the Taiwanese eateries in my childhood Southern Californian suburbs, to which my mother would bring me to eat. The food itself is somewhat polarizing, but I love it.
Above all, I wrote “My Grandmother’s Daughter” to answer a singular question: For what was, am, I longing? I had some distinct answers, but I thought it would be most accessible for people to read about the relationship I (never) had with my mother because I know I’m not the only one in this sort of circumstance. I refer to her herein as my mother for brevity, not to contradict my essay’s denouement, but it is true that I do no longer consider her to be [that person] in my life. To that end, the essay is functionally a eulogy. It is my last goodbye to not just her but also the person I used to be, because identity is relational and I can’t deny that being her son shaped the first three decades of my life. As I look forward, as I come out of my shell, I’m trying to move on.
That includes accepting responsibility for my own actions. I am no longer a child and I haven’t been one for quite some time—I must shoulder my fair share of accountability where it is due. As I confronted my mother in Taipei, I had an opportunity to pause, reset the conversation, and steer us in another direction. Instead, I chose to escalate.
I did it because I was pissed off. I thought it was ridiculous that she and I were about to retread the same old arguments, repeating past mistakes, and I wanted a change to the status quo because the status quo was simply unbearable. I could see ahead of me a lifetime of umpteen iterations of the same conflict, and it would be more than insufferable—it would be boring. Thus, by stoking the flames into a full-fledged conflagration, I bid goodbye to both the impossible future wherein we’d have a good relationship as well as the inevitable future wherein I’d never be good enough for her. It was time to forge a different path forward.
Who’s to say that, had I not stood my ground and simply accepted her tirade, she (or I) eventually would not have come around? Is it not possible that, given enough time, we would reconcile? Perhaps there’s a non-zero percentage chance that that happens, but I gave up gambling. I was no longer willing to tolerate her.
It is my hope that “My Grandmother’s Daughter” does not come across as an essay about being aggrieved because I am not a victim. I strove for the essay to strike an uneasy balance between acknowledging what is and must be against what I desired because this is one of many issues over which I have little jurisdiction. I’m not interested in forcing anyone to behave differently, and I’ve little to no faith that she could or would someday become someone else.
“The more I describe her, the more I describe myself” is an admission at the emotional crux of the essay that I have taken on more of her qualities than I’d like to, well, admit, but I feel no shame in laying bare my own faults. It is also a comment on the cyclical and ironic nature of humanity: we become in some aspects that which we try to avoid. I’m doing what I can to moderate my own behavior so that I don’t echo her worst impulses. Still, I am who I am.
Equally, “My Grandmother’s Daughter” is also a meditation on maternal love. As I touched upon within the writing, I consider myself to have been raised by women, which is to say that I’ve been blessed to have had many maternal figures in my life. Those figures included my mother’s sisters and my grandmother, of course. Pictured in the title image here, itself captured sometime in the early 2000s in Beijing, is actually one of my great-aunts, not my grandmother! I just really liked the photograph because it seems to capture the essence of the relationship between my generation and theirs, and it crystallizes the symbolism of my having been raised by women since all my life I’ve been surrounded and supported by them. As well, I enjoyed the nostalgic rendering of the photograph’s faded color tones.
My decision to frame the essay around phone calls with my grandmother came to me almost by chance. She calls me (or I write) so frequently that our chats often interrupt my writing sessions, and it was during one of those when I sensed she was cautiously dancing around the topic of her daughter that I had the idea to ring-fence the essay in that way. Maternal love has appeared in my life in many different forms, and I wanted it to be known that I have always been, will always be, a grateful recipient.
As much as the essay is a eulogy for my mother, it is also my attempt at immortalizing my beloved grandmother. If or when the earth eventually reclaims both of them, I will be irrevocably shattered. “My Grandmother’s Daughter” tries to preempt some of that emotional devastation for me, but I know that that too is a Sisyphean exercise. Such is the way of life.
It's such a treat to read your process behind this piece, Sam!