When we were young, so many of our parents were gods, towering over us as protectors and nurturers. We saw them as our everything. And eventually, as we grew into our teenage years, they became as simple as mother and father figures, people who have some authority over us that we may or may not bend to. We always see our mothers as just that— mothers. It’s not until adulthood that we see them as women, as girls who grew to become mothers. People ripe with dreams, some achieved, and many not.
Once upon a time, your mother was as young as you, a girl who was filled with youth and hopes. In Jia Ling’s tender and magical realist film, Hi Mom (你好，李焕英), the daughter, Jia Xiao Ling, feels that she has not been a good daughter in her mother’s lifetime. While her mother, Huan Ying, is on her deathbed, Jia Xiaoling goes back in time to befriend her mother and change things in hopes of making her mother happy. She even sets her mother up with the factory owner’s son, because she’d rather her mother be happy without her than be her mother’s “unhonorable” daughter. In that moment, I felt Xiaoling’s pain, and I was also incredibly touched— to sacrifice yourself for your mother’s happiness is an incredibly selfless act. It’s also a stupid act, and not at all what her mother wanted, but it spoke to a kind of purity in Xiao Ling’s heart, in how much she cared for her mother’s well-being.
How many children have felt that? Wanting nothing more than to make your parents proud. All my life, my own mother had toiled for me and my brother, and I’ve only met her as someone who has done nothing other than to serve me, to care for me. I’ve thought: has my mother ever been really proud of me? Seen me and my achievements as anything other than child-like, burdensome, or ordinary? But the struggle persists the other way too: have I really seen my mother as anyone other than my mother, as a middle-aged, unimpressed woman?
I get blips of my mother’s and father’s youth through the stories they tell. My mother, who traversed the city by bike. My father, who turned over rows and rows of crops in his village. They seem like memories distanced from me by privilege, geography, and culture. And sometimes, their past selves feel more like stories than living, breathing people.
It’s extra complicated as a woman, seeing what your own mother went through— how she’s had to outgrow girlhood so fast, how she was once so innocent and untoiled— and yet not realizing the magnitude of it all until you move away from her. Not seeing her for someone who struggled as much as you did, and doubting that she could know exactly what you’re going through. There’s all the pain she had to bear in her lifetime, and then there’s the pain that you add to her back by ostracizing her from your own existence— the very existence she’d broken backs over to protect. I tear up every time I think about this, how little we see our parents sometimes, truly see them or try to see them, when they try to be everything to us.
But really, back then, my mother was so much like me. Lost, but determined to pave her path in the world. To become a part of history. She too, was someone so full of dreams before she had to sweep her regrets under the bed. The her then is one I’ve imagined and even crafted stories about. She was 23 once, a young woman ready to bloom anywhere. I could feel how free she was. On her bike, pedalling to the library, to jian bing food stalls, to meet her lovers.
When I think of her and my father, I’m filled with so much emotion. To remember what they’ve endured to bring me here, I wish that I could take some of their burdens away. Like Ling, I want to remedy their regrets.
When Ling’s mother says that all she actually wanted was for her daughter to be healthy and happy, Ling doesn’t believe her. All this time, both mother and daughter only ever wanted to see each other joyous. Ling, drunk then, even proclaims that she’ll be Huan Ying’s mother in the next life.
I know that no matter what my mother says or does, she wishes the same for me. To be healthy and happy. It’s a warm reminder I have to tell myself to go back to, even when we’re arguing or angry. I wonder if I’d be friends with my parents if I met them in their youth. I’d like to think yes. To think that we have a connection that isn’t bound alone by blood and sacrifice.
I’ve been thinking of what to center my future novel around, and it always comes back to family, to my parents. It’s so hard, after all. To move here and feel separated from your country, a new language, different people. Sometimes even your own children feel alien. After watching this film, I want to dedicate my novel to my parents. As a kind of love letter to them.
Things I love about my mother: her high standards. Her genuine want of what’s best for us, even if she doesn’t say it. How hard she works. Her bluntness. How she saves money like no one’s business. The way she sits while eating sunflower seeds. The delicious dishes she cooks. How she carries her regrets like credit cards, buried in just a few layers. How hard she worked at the Chinese restaurant to get my father through grad school and me to America. Her recallings of the young me. How she decorates and makes a home.
Things I love about my father: His daily runs. How intelligent he is. His determination, his perseverance. How much he believes in me and my brother, long before we’ll be successful. His optimism. The music he blasts from Chinese opera, how he sings along as if he were onstage. His quiet affections, though never subdued. How he always does chores without complaining. His witty sense of humor. His unwavering belief in family.
Letters to No One 