Today’s newsletter doesn’t contain much interesting or original thought. It’s more of a love letter than anything else. Sorry for the sappy writing but it’s the holidays, what did you expect?
Normally, my writing functions as a way to resolve some underlying tension or conflict that I’ve been wrestling with. The act of putting pen to paper unlocks a kind of cognitive clarity only afforded by forcing oneself to sit and type one’s muddled thoughts into language. Alas! The types of issues I’ve been working through lately require no real cerebral resources to address; they won’t be solved by reading Adorno or Trotsky or Marcuse. (I’ve name-dropped some theorists whose contributions I can barely recall just to assure my readers that, were my problems indeed of the intellectual variety, I’d be adequately well-equipped.)
The tasks which most challenge me these days are the ones which require simple willpower, motivation, and discipline. Can I wake up by 7:30 and sleep by 11 so I can maintain a reasonable set of working hours? Will I bring myself to practice Cantonese for at least thirty minutes a day? Do I love my mother, ostensibly the most important person in the world to me, enough to give up a morning of doing nothing to wash the looming stack of dishes so she won’t have to? It’s all so mundane and unchic. Totally unliterary.
For some, the process of loving someone naturally leads to great or captivating artistic output. Music, books, an eyebrow-raising essay about an open marriage. Unfortunately for my imaginary literary career, it’s the exact opposite. Indulging in anything more intellectually demanding than reading on the weekends now seems like a distraction from doing whatever might make my loved ones most happy. (Strange!) Cooking a family meal, doing the dishes without being asked, keeping my parents company — when I have free time to think, I increasingly choose to spend it trying to anticipate my mother’s needs rather than tending to my own intellectual interests.
With each passing day, we become more and more devoted to each other. The more significant she becomes to me, the more significant I become to her, the more that I want to invest in the things I know that only I can do which will bring her joy. There are thousands of very talented writers crafting gorgeous, insightful essays right now. There is only one person in the world who can prepare a plate of soft tofu smothered in black bean sauce, ready on the table for my mom to devour after she’s had a long day at work. (Hint: it’s certainly not my dad, whose culinary repertoire consists of oatmeal and toasting bread.) I’ve become the most ineffective altruist in the world: there’s only one person whose QALYs I care about.
A week and a half ago, I felt very close to my lowest point since I moved home in April. The details don’t really matter; like most of the anxious crises I go through, there wasn’t much purely rational justification for this feeling. I’ll describe it for you anyway, though. In short, I felt as if like everything I had done this year — moving back to the suburbs, starting a new job — had all been a massive mistake. I felt lonely, incompetent at my job, and devoid of purpose. And so I confessed these feelings to my mother when she came home that evening. I told her I felt like a complete failure, that maybe I would be fired and lose my means of supporting her, that I knew I had fucked up and would try harder next time.
She listened, asked me a few questions about whether I had done this or that to meet the work deadline (I had), and then leaned back in her chair and sighed. I expected her to tell me how stupid I was, how I should’ve listened to her gentle suggestions to focus more during working hours. Instead, she was silent for a moment. Then she told me that she trusted that I had learned from my mistakes, that she was confident that I would be able to get another job if I were laid off, and, most surprising of all, that I would always be one of the most disciplined and resilient people she knows.
A few days later, my mother sat me down, our positions somewhat reversed. Months ago, she had temporarily lapsed in her financial record-keeping and was now unsure if she was thousands of dollars in debt to her sibling. This sibling had just called her and was demanding the money back — otherwise, she threatened to come and kill my mother. (To lend this threat some credibility but only in the vaguest of terms: years ago, this sibling was actually responsible for the loss of someone’s life.) My mother was torn about what to do, but in the short term, she felt compelled to apologize repeatedly to me by the shame of her error and how it could have put our family in danger. As the tears streamed down her face, I hugged her and told her that she had no need to apologize to me and everything would probably be fine. (We still changed the garage door code, though.)
The point of these two stories is this: even when we bare the ugliest parts of ourselves to each other, our bond remains intact. My mother and I are human to each other these days. We are flawed and forgetful, sometimes comically so. We share a deep form of paranoid insecurity that few others seem to fully grasp or understand. Contrary to the norm of Asian parents never hugging their children, we often find ourselves entwined in a long embrace. My mom will sigh theatrically and say: 你太好了/ nei tai hou le. 點辦 / dim baan? You’re too good to me. Ah, what do I do? I reply: 冇辦法 / mou baan faat. There’s nothing you can do to stop me.
And so my mind has given way to my heart, bit by bit. It used to upset me that my mom didn’t seem to respect my interests. That is, until she realized it caused me pain, at which point she started making an effort to respect my interests more. (Writing this, I realize that sounds completely unimpressive if you don’t know how stubborn Chinese mothers can be, how they often don’t care to mince words to soothe their children’s egos.) Stupidly, paradoxically, witnessing her make a little more space for what I care about has made me care less about those things and more about her. If someone begins to whittle away at their most deeply ingrained behaviors just to make your life slightly more bearable, how can you focus on anything other than reciprocating that form of love?
I spend Christmas with my cousins on my father’s side of the family. It is the first time that we have reconvened like this since COVID began nearly three years ago. You might expect I would be sentimental about it, but I’m not: I always approach these gatherings with the mindset I’ve adopted from my mother, which is that my dad’s side of the family is evil, undereducated, and not to be trusted. During the pandemic, she was mostly relieved to not have to show her face at these yearly holiday parties, full of Hong Kongers she thought were a bit classless and annoying.
This gathering is different in one respect: it’s been convened by my cousin Sarah, which makes this the first holiday gathering to be initiated by the second generation rather than the first. A few hours into the potluck, Sarah clangs a spoon against a metal cup until everyone quiets down. Another cousin (who almost became a monk) says grace, which is followed by Sarah introducing the meal. Then something happens that surprises me: Sarah starts to tear up. She and her husband have spent the whole year remodeling the house, and six months ago, Sarah gave birth to a baby daughter. Her eyes wet, she describes how meaningful it is to her to have everyone gathered here in this space. Actually, she doesn’t say “everyone,” she says “my loved ones.” I am taken aback by that phrase. Emotionally, we have not been much a part of each others’ lives, and the only cousin I think that I have ever spoken to outside of a family function isn’t even here. Am I really one of Sarah’s loved ones?
Granted, I’m a huge narcissist, and Sarah was probably referring to her parents and brother and her closest friends more than she was referring to me. Still, the love she’s talking about feels like it genuinely emanates to everyone gathered in her home. I can feel it in the preparation Sarah and her husband have done to make today feel magical: they have spent hours preparing food, making little gift bags for the guests, cleaning the house, arranging all the furniture just-so, getting everyone to-go boxes for leftovers. This kind of love, I think, is something that does not take itself for granted. Instead, Sarah expresses it through an attention to detail, her focus on making the evening go smoothly for everyone. And through this kind of deliberate, proactive care, it’s easy to discern the shape of her love for her daughter, too. I do not think the value of knitting together a group of somewhat distant aunts and uncles into a community for her half-Chinese daughter is lost on Sarah. The fact that we are gathered in this house, making small talk and smiling with each other, wasn’t an inevitable consequence of the emotional gravitational pull of our blood relations; it was manufactured by Sarah’s effort. Does that make it any less significant or real?
After the party, I sheepishly tell Sarah I don’t have any of our cousins’ phone numbers. She immediately grabs her phone and helps me put them in, one by one.
It feels kind of cheesy to make any grand declarations about love. After all, I’m 24 years old, and my first and only serious romantic relationship lasted a month. Still, I have dropped out of school, moved to a new state, and chosen to live far away from my peers, all for the person I hold most dear to my heart. I talk about her to my closest friends and to random strangers on the train.
Waking, working, cleaning, cooking, speaking, sleeping. Through all of it, at least I have the kind of love that lets me stare down every interminable hour and find a reason to try without a second thought. If this is the only love that the universe deigns to give me for the rest of my life, then so be it. It will have been more than enough.
🫶🫶🫶 this made me cry
beautiful. your words (in person and here!) always push me to think more expansively about what it means to love family and friends. <3