#motherofallstories

[moastories]

Distinctly American

By Alexandra Torrez

I wonder if my mother is disappointed in me for not wanting children. I wonder if my grandmother and her mother and her mother's mother would be disappointed in me for not choosing the life they have chosen. I wonder if they would understand my desire not to ever get married or, at the very least, not to have children. And if they cannot understand, then would they allow me to at least explain why?

My name is Alexandra Torrez. Alexandra Kailani Torrez. It’s a good name. A strong name. But a deceitful name.

I am not Greek, as Alexandra suggests, but then again, hardly anyone is ever what their given name suggests nowadays. I can trace my roots to the shores of Hawaii, but only as far as my middle name will allow. And although by the look of it Torrez - spelled with a “Z”- indicates Portuguese descent, I am actually Hispanic. So how did I get this name?

You see, I got this name many years ago when my maternal great-great-grandfather, an aristocrat from Japan, immigrated to Hawaii to avoid war and married a picture bride. I am told he was a musician, someone who entertained the military on the islands and who was a solid tower well above six feet. I am told I owe any chance at height to him.

I got this name from one of their children, my great-grandmother, a small bony woman who gave birth to her children in an internment camp. I am told she smoked cigarettes too often, and that her fine fingers are what allowed many of us great grandchildren to span piano keys with ease, not that I ever took up either habit.

I got this name from my maternal grandmother, who manifested into this world from the lady with fine fingers. Only instead of fine fingers and an affinity to breathe in what was bad, she gave my grandmother the ability to spin gold out of words with each breath. She gave my grandmother a quick tongue and a writer's mind. I have yet to inherit any of these quality attributes.

I got this name when my maternal grandmother married my grandfather, a Maui-born Filipino who found himself at San Jose State. A man whose skin was so deeply stained by the sun, the color of which I once thought was melting off in the a hot tub when I saw him without an undershirt for the first time. I don’t know if I will ever live up to who this man is because he gave so much with so little, I can only be grateful because no act would ever repay his service.

I got this name from my mother, although I did not inherit any of her beauty. My mother is a beautiful Filipino-Hawaiian-Japanese woman who has fair skin, and thick, straight, coarse jet black hair she only gave to my brother- the lucky bastard - but whose ability to dissect a text may have given me some hope in life.

I got this name from my paternal Danish great-grandmother who married a Mexican man. I grew up on stories of how she would knock down the door of any mother who called any one of her twelve children bastards just because they were a shade darker than my grandmother. And, although I can’t imagine the shriveled lady from my childhood knocking down any doors I’m inclined to believe her strength of will never left our family line over all these years.

I got this name from her daughter, my grandmother, who married a Mexican-Native American man. I have no memory of his face but whose native blood gave me the right to claim the land as my refuge if I should no longer have a place to sleep.

I got this name from my father, whose high cheekbones and earth-colored everything hide the fact my sister got her blue eyes from his bloodline but decidedly skipped over me.

And so my name is Alexandra Torrez. Alexandra Kailani Torrez. A name which carries enough confusion even before one brings their eyes to meet my face. You see, I do not look like my mother or her mother or her mother's mother. I do not look like my father or his father or his father's father. Instead I am a product distinctly American and, at the same time, not American at all.

So I wonder; is my mother disappointed in me? Is she disappointed in me for not wanting to continue this unique cocktail of traditions? Am I not the physical manifestation of what it means to be American? Am I not the product of the struggle to find solidarity between communities or the fight for the freedom to define one’s own self? I wonder if my ancestors would be disappointed in me. Disappointed that I, the combined total of their communities’ struggles, do not want to birth children who are so distinctly American that they cannot find a face similar to their own.

About the Author: Alexandra Torrez is an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. She is majoring in Political Science with an emphasis in International Relations and minoring in Global Poverty and Practice. In her free time, Alex enjoys hunting down the best coffee spots in the bay and getting a good dose of chlorine at the pool.

[patriciascellphoneblog]

SUBMIT TO MOA

Ok so I’ve been meaning to talk about this page for a while so here it is!!! 

Mother of All Stories: http://moastories.tumblr.com/ 

In a weird time of transition & with just everything going on, I wanted to share this AWU tumblr page because it's filled with precious and wh0lsum3 stories about Asian American mothers. 

It's honestly a great read because it explores the way Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders experience, embrace, fear and/or are intimidated by mothers and mothering.

If you just want something senti to read in your free time, I suggest browsing through it BUT ALSO if you or someone you know wants to submit a story, please do!

If you want to be a mother, don't want to be a mother, have stories to tell about your mother, please do share. There's a certain strength that comes with storytelling.

Just email motherofallstories@gmail.com. It's still growing, so be one of the voices you want to hear. Let me know if you have any q's! 

[cecitranslations]

The bestie reunion officially happened this week when my mom and I came to stay with her friend Tot in Kinh Nam a few km outside of their hometown. To be honest, I’ve been really worried about whether or not the reunion would pan out the way my mom has expected it to. It’s been so long, people change, I know my mom has, and there’s only so much you can know about someone by phone or video chat. I didn’t want her to be disappointed and felt like the protective mom– big time.

We were given the instructions to get dropped off in front of the market where Co Tot (auntie Tot) would meet us since her house is on a narrow path. When we got there it was such a surreal moment. Co Tot, whose name means “all things good,” totally froze. She and my mom just stared at each other for a time, as if in shock. My mom being my mom broke the silence and began squealing and hugging her and talking a mile a minute and Co Tot’s solemn face broke into an enormous grin. And like that, 35 years disappeared.

Those first moments entailed a lot of rapid fire chatter and I quickly learned that Co Tot and my mom are equally big talkers. There was a presentation of gifts where my mom showed her what she brought: 5 chewing gum, perfume, spam, BB cream, tiger balm, chocolate foot by the foot and a whole host of other things. Co Tot called the neighbor to bring a giant bowl of noodles to the door for each of us and gifted my mom a purple bedazzled shirt and a giant bag of fruits. Besties forreal.

This video was taken a minute after the trifecta was complete when Co Mai took the bus down from her neighborhood to Co Tot’s house. My mom always told me that Co Mai was the gentle, easygoing one while she and Co Tot were the troublemakers with the mouths. Co Mai doesn’t have internet at her house and would regularly take the bus down to Co Tot’s house just so they can video chat with my mom. She’s adorably chipper and sweet and has two dimples that always show because she’s constantly smiling. She tells me that they have been looking for my mom for years.

In the video, they’re laughing because when Co Mai came into the house she had a big hat and face mask to prevent inhaling street dust and my mom’s reaction was to shout “Hey Tot, why is this lady in your house?” It was all hugs and smiles. Being blunt is almost synonymous with being Vietnamese and so it was cute when Co Tot and Co Mai agreed out loud with each other that my mom is way cuter in real life than in her Facebook pics. They sat around talking about everyone they’re in touch with still from the village days. Occasionally they take turns going “Am I dreaming? Who would have thought this could ever happen.”

So much more the share about and so many warm fuzzies. To be continued!

[moastories]

In the image of my mother

By: Kashiana Singh

In the image of my mother

I can bask in the sunshine of

of watching my mother halt

her day—

after she was done carving

meaning into our lives

as she etched our days

with syntax

of lunch boxes

with storytelling

under whirring fans

with petulant warmth

of a fresh casserole

with newly learned

dessert platters, sweet

with nights offered on

her lap, birth scents

with lessons crafted

from filigree of aches

with mystery found

in garnet drops, shapely

with clicking tic tac

of long knitting needles

with bookshelves

encased in first words

I remember relishing a few moments

of crying into her diaphragm

listening—

her voice a clasp around our lives

her hair swirled in a prosaic bun

shaped like a cloud, introspecting

she came alive, play-acting scenes

from famous silent movies

I half remember relishing her voice

sashaying into our bland rooms as

it hummed, sang, scolded or stayed

just stayed. silently.

I indulge, in remnants of her fading image

palpable, the pot boils over as if rebuking

me, I roll up my

hair into a rare bun

her syllables inhabiting me

from an unnamed distance.

About the author: When Kashiana is not writing, she lives to embody her TEDx talk theme of Work as Worship into her every day. She currently serves as Managing Editor for Poets Reading the News. Her newest full-length collection, Woman by the Door is coming out in 2022 with Apprentice House Press. 

[moastories]

Release your emotions

By Vivian Fumiko Chin

I don’t think I’ve ever heard my mother laugh out loud, although I could be wrong because a few years ago she must’ve seen a PBS special, and she said she liked watching George Carlin, even though she hates cursing. But I didn’t watch it with her so I didn’t hear anything. I am fairly certain that she’s never told a joke, but I asked her just to make sure. “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said as I stopped myself from saying or asking anything worse.

A few years ago my mother told me that I was obachan’s baby. I’m not sure exactly how that makes sense – was I meant to be a replacement for my grandmother who died before I was born? Was I meant to be her reincarnation, even though my mother is a diehard Christian? How do I belong to my obachan? She told me this as I tried to explain how I had felt responsible for her happiness when I was little, growing up being told that I was an extra child, that she only wanted two children. “Oh, and you were the third,” she said, as my throat tightened.

My mother knit me a pair of socks in grey and bright orange variegated wool. They’re easy to find and they keep my toes warm. Thanks, mom.

When my father was dying he said he dreamed that his mother, my mother, and I became the same person. I smiled. I’m not sure what he said next. His mother was married at 16, had bound feet, and was the second wife to a man who had two wives at the same time. My father’s mother never left China. When I went to visit her and she asked me to hand her the vinegar from the cupboard, she was so pleased that I understood her that she hugged me and told me something simple enough for me to understand. She was so glad that I had come all the way from America and could hear her and understand her. I could understand enough to give her the vinegar but not much else, like understand if her life was better, worse or just different since 1949.

My mother’s grandmother – really her step-grandmother -- traveled in a palanquin in the old days. It couldn’t have been comfortable to kneel in a box as it swung back and forth. But my mother recites this as proof of her high social status.

Obachan gave up one of her babies, a daughter, for her stepmother to raise in Japan while she returned to the US. She went back later, but things didn’t work out and they came back to California. As a widow, how was she to raise four children on her own? She worked in people’s kitchens, she taught Japanese. She had to get remarried.

My mother used to say that she married my father because he was assertive. He wouldn’t let anyone push him around.

Lying not laying on a hard twin bed next to my mother who is in another twin bed, sleeping, I listen to her breathing. Later I will think that it reminded me of the calm of my son’s breathing, sleeping deeply when he was a baby. An ignorance-is-bliss peaceful breathing. A body at rest. Like sitting on the beach, seeing dolphins gently gliding through the water. Wanting to bind myself, wrap my limbs, become that strange unknowable animal whose experience I cannot understand. Dolphins sleep with one side of their brain alert, to allow them to surface for air and to be aware of predators. My mother is as unfathomable to me as a dolphin.

Standing on the steps of a neighbor’s house in Alameda, holding one of the babies that died, my grandmother wore a hat and button up shoes. In 1922 she was pregnant with my mother, and beautiful.

My mother is all dressed up with no place to go, wearing a dress she sewed herself. I wish I had it now: it’s a cotton print with flowers, quarter sleeves, a collar, and it gathers at the waist. She is wearing lipstick and she is also beautiful, posing in front of a tarpaper barrack in Heart Mountain, Wyoming in 1944.

The other day I was telling my mother about the crazy stripes on my legs. I used some stick sunscreen and put it on all unevenly and sat on the beach looking for dolphins. First there were red stripes of all widths, running up and down my legs. Then they turned brown. My mother chuckled.

About internment, my mother has said, “I tell people that I’m not bitter – my daughter is the one who is angry.”

About the Author: Vivian Fumiko Chin taught at Mills College for many years and is now teaching at SFSU. Vivian identifies as abc, sansei, and queer in the largest sense of the term.

[moastories]

Head Up. Heart Strong.

By Meg Naughton

My mother (right) and I during our last trip together. Seattle will always hold a special place in my heart.

Someone close to me told me right after my mom was diagnosed with cancer to get ready to see the beauty that life has to offer. It sounded ridiculous and insane at the time, as all I could see was the fear and pain of preparing to lose my mom, but I listened. I found that after I heard his messaging, I realized that the beauty of life is overlooked because we are so busy in our lives and we don't allow ourselves the time to see the lessons that the world is trying to teach us. The most beautiful moments in our lives live within the brutal moments of the pain, loss, and loneliness that we experience, but we forget to look for them. This reflection has allowed me to look at my life in completely different eyes and has allowed me to view the events in my life as beautiful and full of life's greatest lessons.

Everything changed for me in August of 2016, when my mom was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. My heart sank with fear and devastation, but I sucked up my tears and told her, "Head up, heart strong, everything will be ok." I knew at that moment that I needed to become her caretaker as she had been for me and that the road of our relationship was coming to a drastic change.

The months following were filled with chemo treatments, oncology appointments, tests, and blood transfusions. Those months were hard for all of us, but I kept singing our mantra, "Head up, heart strong, everything will be ok." After 8 months of chemo, my mom decided that she could not continue with chemotherapy, and her oncologist agreed that her body was not tolerating it well. The following month, my mom went in for surgery to attempt to slow the progression of her disease. Her surgery took over thirteen hours as they kept finding more and more cancer.

The following two months, I stayed by my mom's side as she lived in the hospital. Her recovery was brutal as she seemed to get better and worse each day. I stood up for her when she needed something and learned to care for her from the nurses that stayed with us. They taught me to change bandages, give IV medications, and how to report the things that the doctors needed to hear. They taught me to mother my mother.

On July 19th of 2017, we received the news that my mom's cancer was everywhere in her body despite the months of recovery after her surgery. Cancer had spread to her liver, her kidneys, and even the fluid around her lungs. I stayed with her that day, and we talked about what this news meant to her and how I could support her, but her weakened state made talking difficult for her. I decided to go home for the evening and come back in the morning so that I could take some time to process all the news without affecting her own processing. At 3 am my phone rang with the news that my mom's body was starting to shut down. Had I known that cancer would begin to take her life so quickly, I never would have left her side. I was upset with myself for leaving her, and I cried the whole drive to UCSF. When I arrived, she was on a ventilator, and her hands were already cold. I told her I loved her, and I kissed her as they took her off the machines allowing her to go peacefully. This moment was beautiful, but every bit of anger, sadness, and loneliness tried to take it away from me.

I choose to look at the months leading up to my mom's death with the lesson that my friend gave me of looking for the beauty of life in the most brutal moments that we experience. If I let the anger of losing my mom overwhelm me, I forget the color of nail polish that she chose the last time I took her to have her a manicure. If I let the sadness of watching her die overwhelm me, I forget the way her laugh made rooms of people smile. If I let the grief and sorrow overwhelm me, I forget the way she would say, "I love you." So I don't let these feelings overwhelm me and instead remember to look at the beauty of all the lessons that she taught me. I am thankful for these lessons as they have only been the stepping stones that I needed to continue to push my life towards that positive and love-filled life that I am living now.

As I balance my life of both working and school full-time, I know that I am continuing to make my mom proud of the passion I gained for caring for others through her life as I work towards my nursing degree. I will continue to remember the lessons that I have learned when life throws hardships at me so that I can remain thankful that I can see the absolute beauty that life has to offer.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

About the Author: Meg Naughton is a nursing student at De Anza College pursuing the field of oncology to give light and hope to those surround by the darkness of cancer. In her free time she frequently travels and hikes to see all that the world has to offer. Meg lives with her husband Chris, her son Tristan, and a zoo of animals in Hollister, CA.

[moastories]

Note to readers: For the sake of maintaining the original structure of this submission, we decided to combine screenshots even if it meant sacrificing some of the visual quality. Thanks for understanding!

By: Melinda Luisa de Jesús

[moastories]

On Being Raised by a Single Mother

By Trish Broome

This story originally appeared in Mixed Nation on July 30, 2014.

The most recent picture with the author and her mother.

Every time that I get the urge to buy something, I think about the wise words that my mother told me years ago when I went off to college: “Credit cards are bad. Never use one unless it’s for an emergency.” At the time I thought that she was being a typical frugal Korean, but now that I’m older and have a mortgage and bills, I am grateful that she gave me the advice. I literally have one credit card that is fully paid off, and I refuse to use it unless I’m in dire need. I didn’t always appreciate the advice that my mother gave me when I was growing up. I was in middle school -- at the peak of my anti-adult phase -- when she and my father divorced in 1992. I didn’t want to be told what to do and how to live. I refused to believe that my father had abandoned us. But he had, and he had left an immigrant woman with only a high school education to raise two kids on her own. She worked tirelessly making computer and video parts during the week, and spent the weekends selling fake jewelry and hair accessories at the fleamarket. I blamed my mother for the divorce because she was the only one I could blame. I actually blamed her for many things. I was angry that I couldn’t ask her for help on homework because she didn’t understand the material. I was upset that she never came to any of my softball games because she was always working too late. I despised spending weekends with her at the fleamarket. And although I loved eating rice and kimchi at least five times a week, I wished that she would make more American meals and learn how to bake cookies, but she didn’t. She just always seemed so tired.

When I left for college, I wished that she would send me care packages or letters, but it never happened. Even on the phone I had to be the one to say “I love you” first because she was never a physically or vocally affectionate person. I never understood anything about her until after I graduated college and got my first job and apartment. I finally understood the value of her years of hard work, and why she had to have two or three jobs just to pay the bills. I understood what it was like to come home after a hard day of work and not have the energy to cook a full meal or bake a batch of cookies. Most importantly, I understood that my mother had done her absolute best raising her children alone for so many years. When I visited her in Virginia several years ago, she helped me to fully understand who she was. She had stood in line for rice rations during the Korean War and was left an orphan when both of her parents died. She had dreams of being an actress in the theater, but then she met my American father during the Vietnam War and moved to his hometown of Oklahoma, where she experienced racism from locals. She raised my brother and me alone for months on end while my father traveled abroad for the army. When my father was around she had to deal with his alcoholism, and that lasted over 20 years until they finally divorced. Hearing her story in its entirety made me feel lucky to be my mother’s daughter, and grateful that she trusted me enough to open up and show a side of vulnerability. The woman I had never seen cry as a child finally did, and we cried together. It was a bonding experience that I will never forget. Today, I would not be ashamed to tell my now 2-year-old daughter that her Korean grandmother used to work at a dry cleaners, because my mother taught me the value of hard work, and I'm going to carry on that tradition. I’m proud to say that I have no credit card debt when I hear others talk about filing for bankruptcy or owing thousands of dollars. I’m glad that I buy things on sale or from a clearance rack because that’s what my mom did with me, and I don’t need to spend a lot of money to be happy. The only thing I’m still a bit upset about is that I never learned how to bake, but luckily I have a husband who does that for me! I thank my mother for being an inspirational example for all immigrants who come to this country alone, and for being a strong mother and independent woman.

[moastories]

미인  “A Beautiful Woman”

By Christine Seung-Eun Chai

The author’s oma: Lee, Sang Shin (c. 1964)

My mother didn’t learn about beauty, femininity, Korean 10-step skincare regimens, or even womanhood from her mother. Instead, she gleaned snippets of beauty advice from her father.  Haraboji (grandfather) believed that make-up deterred from real beauty and that the best enhancement to a fresh face was to accessorize with “a single, pure white flower” (insert eye roll).

My oma (mother) met my apa (father) through mutual church friends. Against her family’s wishes they were engaged and moved to California. After following apa to San Francisco, her life was no longer privileged and pampered, despite the fact that she migrated from a post-war third world country to the dream that was the U.S. Through the years, she retained her beauty but also aged more quickly from the rigors of new immigrant struggle: hard work, long days, a stressful marriage, and raising two “American” kids.  In the mid-1960s San Francisco, as a young Asian woman with no English skills or work experience, she labored through several different jobs in factories, as a coat check girl, a dishwasher, a manicurist, and eventually owned her own small businesses. My mother, who came from wealth, was now serving rich, white San Franciscans and was even, and offensively, proposed marriage twice: once by an elderly white man who knew she was married and second, by a couple looking to find a caretaker for their mentally disabled son.

After four miscarriages, I was born on Father’s Day. I was a Chai (pronounced more like ‘chwe’) inheriting all the unfortunate Chai features, and thus was considered an unattractive baby.  However, having survived a fragile pregnancy, my parents[ts1]  were grateful for a healthy daughter. My only redeeming physical attribute was my fair skin. Because of my sleepy monolids and turned up nose, I was quickly nicknamed ‘piggy eyes’ and ‘pug nose’  - (ahhhh…Koreans and their nicknames). 

In other words, I was not a pretty girl.  

In contrast, I have very clear memories of my mother’s stories of her beauty. As a child, her narrative and words were fact and for many years, I believed there was no woman who compared to her looks. I remember challenging a girlfriend of mine, honestly thinking my mother was more beautiful than hers, simply because it was an actuality.

Though she was and still is everything to me, our temperaments clashed. I never doubted my mother’s love, and to her credit, her devotion made up for insecurities I might’ve adopted from being the ‘ugly duckling’ of the family. Regardless, it was my conflict with Korean standards and their complicated internalization of white supremacy and my more Americanized social upbringing that affected my perceptions of beauty.

As the typical Korean mom, she never hesitated to inform me of when I looked fat, that my legs were too short and my feet too wide, that I had acquired the Chai family monolids, that I ended up being flat-chested, that my nose was turned up… whew! What else?  In any case, I later came to understand that my mother was neither boastful nor necessarily critical - that Koreans described physical features as a matter of fact. In my twenties, one of my MALE cousins had the nerve to mention that I was regarded as a ‘dragon’ – akin to the ugly duckling story in Korean folklore – unattractive at birth, then developing into one’s true beauty.  Um…back-handed compliment???

Ironically, though Koreans are by and large proponents of plastic surgery; my mother and most in our family are not. I was reminded of my physical deficiencies, but I wasn’t allowed to alter them, if given the opportunity. Again, my naturally beautiful oma, who never needed enhancement and whose beauty routine consisted of soap, water, moisturizer, foundation, rouge and lipstick, was vehemently opposed to cosmetic surgery or experimenting with make-up and skincare regimens, regarding them as frivolous and superficial. 

On the other hand, she valued femininity (a value my haraboji impressed upon her) and equated a made-up face with vulgarity. So for me, altering my face with colors and lines and false add-ons became tools of rebellion and  symbols of a desperate desire to be ‘pretty’. Eventually I learned to make peace with the way I looked,  but became confused when (mostly) white men began noticing me – feeling flattered and more comfortable with my physical self, and then having that newfound confidence crushed with the realization that men were really attracted to “Suzie Wong” or “Lucy Liu” and not Christine Chai.

For a while, as I became more and more politicized around race and feminism, I defied, refused, adapted and tried to live by my own standards. I learned to filter my mother’s observations of me and at the same time, her maternal attentions seemed to relax with age. But, seven years ago, while pregnant with my son, my oma casually commented that she hoped this baby would inherit his mixed-race father’s eyes and though I sarcastically reacted with laughter, my heart sank.

Because I grew up believing I was unattractive by western standards, and possibly, even more so by Korean ones, my protective motherly instincts were alerted and I worried about how I would shield my child from offensive expectations and judgments that he would inevitably internalize. I reminded oma how amazing her grandbaby already was. She nodded and agreed. 

When my son was born, he indeed had large double-lidded eyes with his father’s long and curled eyelashes. And as his facial features developed, he went from looking like his father to looking like none other than my mother!  Her grandson is validation of her genetic contributions and her legacy. It’s as if she birthed him through me! But, recently, people have been likening Roshan’s appearance to mine. “Really?” I question. I take it as a huge compliment. And recently, I’ve been noticing that I, in my late forties, and my mother, in her late seventies, are looking more and more alike.

I find this greatly satisfying.

About the Author: Christine Seung-Eun Chai teaches ESL, English and Asian American Studies at De Anza College.  She is a proud Bay Area native and strives to be a stronger social justice warrior.  She’s privileged to live with fellow warrior, Tony, their son, Roshan, pup, Nari along with her ultimate champions: oma and apa.

[moastories]

Full/filling

By Uyen Hoang

Uyen, her siblings, and her mother at Trung Tâm Công Giáo in Santa Ana. She is the closest to her mother, perhaps in more ways than is pictured. Recently, I have been missing my mother. I don’t find her love in embraces and kisses; it exists within stainless steel pots and pans. It is a more full/filling kind of love.

Today the gnawing at my stomach eats at my soul and whispers to be fed. So I embark on a journey to recreate memories and feelings in a swirling pot of soup. Today I am making canh chua cá, sweet  and sour fish soup.

A perfect balance of flavors, whose vibrant colors painted my childhood with light green slippery okra, a taste on my tongue that was so similar to falling down playground slides. That golden pineapple was sweet as sunshine on Sunday and the softness of stewed catfish reminded me of my mother’s breast, the nest where I would doze listening to the sounds of her cải lương. The wispy clouds of steam from the pot were just like the sound of her singing lullabies in that Vietnamese opera style, the notes reaching higher and higher, dancing from her lips to the ceiling. All of the parts of this the soup she had made with ingredients grown from the garden of her life, soil given to her by her mother.

This soup was the one that I desired to make.

Determination, desperation, and trepidation guided me to a 99 Ranch, familiarity in any strange place. Standing bathed in fluorescent flickering lights, I strained to hear my mother’s voice in my mind for direction to lead me to the ingredients that she uses. Instead I hear her proud voice declaring that no one can cook like her. None of her daughters can coax the flavors out like she can.

I search for her recipe in the catacombs of my mind, but the memories are inaccessible. Armed with Internet recipes, I weave through crowded aisles, finding everything I need. Except fresh pineapple.

Shit.

I guess canned pineapple will have to do. But will it?

I lean back to hear stern chastising from my mother, but I hear nothing.

Back in my lair, like a witch and her brew, I peer into my pot. Could I concoct some magic that brings me closer to my mother, memories, and soul? Can I recreate the love that I have been raised on? A fearful tasting of broth, moment of truth and… damn. Another miss. But I had found the tamarind and rau răm! Was it the canned pineapples?  Was it the fucking canned pineapples? Was it…?!

I don’t really like my soup. Or any Vietnamese cooking that I do. It is always just so… subtly off. It is maddening to seek flavors I can’t describe but can’t live without.

So is this Vietnamese food? Or am I a Vietnamese woman who cannot make Vietnamese food?

Tired of my offbeat flavors, I feed my lover my soup. Not just to finish off another stock of mistakes more quickly, but because I have been taught to love through food by the queens in my life; my mother, aunties, and grandmas.

Although, if I am completely honest, it is also partly because I don’t want to reminded of my deficiency at every mealtime for an entire week because, just like those queens in my life, I cook enough to raise armies. I sit in nervous silence watching my lover raise the spoon to her lips. She turns to me and smiles.

“It’s really good!”

I ask again just be sure. A gentle kiss and clean bowl was the response, everything consumed. Everything except the canned pineapples. And not because she knows about my problematic canned pineapples, she just doesn’t like fruit.

The soup was no good to me, but it nourishes her. The cries from my heart, the gnawing at my stomach grew quiet and content, purring, beaming with satisfaction. And even though I am still hungry, I am brimming with this full/filling love.

About the Author: Uyen Hoang (she/hers) is currently a graduate student pursuing her Masters in Asian American Studies and Masters of Public Health at UCLA.  Hailing from Garden Grove, Orange County, she is the middle child of five in her immigrant Vietnamese American family.  She likes puppies, peonies, and is not lactose intolerant, which is important because she lives for cheesy puns.

[moastories]

Real Life: Love, Loss, and Kimchi

By: Michelle Zauner

This story originally appeared in the online Food and Recipes section of Glamour Magazine on July 13, 2016. 

The author, at then years old, and her mother in Eugene, Oregon.

I’m so tired of white guys on TV telling me what to eat. I’m tired of Anthony Bourdain testing the waters of Korean cuisine to report back that, not only will our food not kill you, it actually tastes good. I don’t care how many times you’ve traveled to Thailand, I won’t listen to you—just like the white kids wouldn’t listen to me, the half-Korean girl, defending the red squid tentacles in my lunch box. The same kids who teased me relentlessly back then are the ones who now celebrate our cuisine as the Next Big Thing.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, in a small college town that was about 90 percent white. In my adolescence I hated being half Korean; I wanted people to stop asking, “Where are you really from?” I could barely speak the language and didn’t have any Asian friends. There was nothing about me that felt Korean—except when it came to food.

At home my mom always prepared a Korean dinner for herself and an American dinner for my dad. Despite the years he’d lived in Seoul, selling cars to the military and courting my mom at the Naija Hotel where she worked, my dad is still a white boy from Philadelphia. He’s an adventurous eater (ask him about steamed dog meat), but his comfort foods are meat and potatoes.

So each night my mom prepared two meals. She’d steam broccoli and grill Dad’s salmon, while boiling jjigae and plating little side dishes known as banchan. When our rice cooker announced in its familiar robotic voice, “Your delicious white rice will be ready soon!” the three of us would sit down to a wondrous mash-up of East and West. I’d create true fusion one mouthful at a time, using chopsticks to eat strips of T-bone and codfish eggs drenched in sesame oil, all in one bite. I liked my baked potatoes with fermented chili paste, my dried cuttlefish with mayonnaise.

There’s a lot to love about Korean food, but what I love most is its extremes. If a dish is supposed to be served hot, it’s scalding. If it’s meant to be served fresh, it’s still moving. Stews are served in heavy stone pots that hold the heat; crack an egg on top, and it will poach before your eyes. Cold noodle soups are served in bowls made of actual ice.

By my late teens my craving for Korean staples started to eclipse my desire for American ones. My stomach ached for al tang and kalguksu. On long family vacations, with no Korean restaurant in sight, my mom and I passed up hotel buffets in favor of microwaveable rice and roasted seaweed in our hotel room.

And when I lost my mother to a very sudden, brief, and painful fight with cancer two years ago, Korean food was my comfort food. She was diagnosed in 2014. That May she’d gone to the doctor for a stomachache only to learn she had a rare squamous cell carcinoma, stage four, and that it had spread. Our family was blindsided.

I moved back to Oregon to help my mother through chemo­therapy; over the next four months, I watched her slowly disappear. The treatment took everything—her hair, her spirit, her appetite. It burned sores on her tongue. Our table, once beautiful and unique, became a battleground of protein powders and tasteless porridge. I crushed Vicodin into ice cream.

Dinnertime was a calculation of calories, an argument to get anything down. The intensity of Korean flavors and spices became too much for her to stomach. She couldn’t even eat kimchi.

I began to shrink along with my mom, becoming so consumed with her health that I had no desire to eat. Over the course of her illness, I lost 15 pounds. After two rounds of chemo, she decided to discontinue treatment, and she died two months later.

As I struggled to make sense of the loss, my memories often turned to food. When I came home from college, my mom used to make galbi ssam, Korean short rib with lettuce wraps. She’d have marinated the meat two days before I’d even gotten on the plane, and she’d buy my favorite radish kimchi a week ahead to make sure it was perfectly fermented.

Then there were the childhood summers when she brought me to Seoul. Jet-lagged and sleepless, we’d snack on homemade banchan in the blue dark of Grandma’s humid kitchen while my rela­tives slept. My mom would whisper, “This is how I know you’re a true Korean.”

But my mom never taught me how to make Korean food. When I would call to ask how much water to use for rice, she’d always say, “Fill until it reaches the back of your hand.” When I’d beg for her galbi recipe, she gave me a haphazard ingredient list and approximate measurements and told me to just keep tasting it until it “tastes like Mom’s.”

After my mom died, I was so haunted by the trauma of her illness I worried I’d never remember her as the woman she had been: stylish and headstrong, always speaking her mind. When she appeared in my dreams, she was always sick.

Then I started cooking. When I first searched for Korean recipes, I found few resources, and I wasn’t about to trust Bobby Flay’s Korean taco monstrosity or his clumsy kimchi slaw. Then, among videos of oriental chicken salads, I found the Korean YouTube personality Maangchi. There she was, peeling the skin off an Asian pear just like my mom: in one long strip, index finger steadied on the back of the knife. She cut galbi with my mom’s ambidextrous precision: positioning the chopsticks in her right hand while snipping bite-size pieces with her left. A Korean woman uses kitchen scissors the way a warrior brandishes a weapon.

I’d been looking for a recipe for jatjuk, a porridge made from pine nuts and soaked rice. It’s a dish for the sick or elderly, and it was the first food I craved when my feelings of shock and loss finally made way for hunger.

I followed Maangchi’s instructions carefully: soaking the rice, breaking off the tips of the pine nuts. Memories of my mother emerged as I worked—the way she stood in front of her little red cutting board, the funny intonations of her speech.

For many, Julia Child is the hero who brought boeuf bourguignon into the era of the TV dinner. She showed home cooks how to scale the culinary mountain. Maangchi did this for me after my mom died. My kitchen filled with jars containing cabbage, cucumbers, and radishes in various stages of fermentation. I could hear my mom’s voice: “Never fall in love with anyone who doesn’t like kimchi; they’ll always smell it coming out of your pores.”

I’ve spent over a year cooking with Maangchi. Sometimes I pause and rewind to get the steps exactly right. Other times I’ll let my hands and taste buds take over from memory. My dishes are never exactly like my mom’s, but that’s OK—they’re still a delicious tribute. The more I learn, the closer I feel to her.

One night not long ago, I had a dream: I was watching my mother as she stuffed giant heads of Napa cabbage into earthenware jars.

She looked healthy and beautiful.

About the Author: Michelle Zauner is a writer and musician based in Philadelphia. She performs under the moniker Japanese Breakfast and recently released an album entitled "Psychopomp" that navigates grief and the loss of her mother. 

[moastories]

Lay Down My Heart

By: Indra Thadani

Yoko Thadani in 1956 with her daughter Indra

Mother, there are moments I cannot remember but still hold in my heart. I'm sure my three-year-old hand held yours many times on the ship from Yokohama, Japan to San Francisco. My father wanted a “better” life for us and sent you and me on a journey to this new country while he conducted business in Japan.

I'm sure I had delicious Japanese food and spoke to you in Japanese at that time. Those were the days when I went to the bilingual school near Japantown. This was before I turned five and we moved to Cole Street, and I had to go to an American school where no one spoke Japanese.   

I remember the lemon meringue pies you used to make because we had so many leftover packages from closing that grocery store you and dad fought about. You would bake yummy, moist yellow or chocolate cake, sometimes decorated with sprinkles, so I could have a piece after school. Making food was how you showed your affection and love! It was the 1960s then, and I remember teaching you dance moves and watching you fix your hair in that ratted-up, poof style.

Then you left for Japan. I’m still not sure why you left—perhaps because of visa issues—but my life changed afterward.  I got into trouble for shoplifting clothes. I was seeking attention and wanted to do daring and exciting things to see what I could get away with.

When you returned to America, Dad's infidelity had finally pushed you to find your own happiness outside our family with a man from Okinawa. Dad had been unfaithful many times, but it hurt you the most when he slept with your sister while she was staying with us. You had been pregnant with my sister at the time.

When you divorced him, he kidnapped my younger sisters and me. 

I remember the day my sisters and I stood by the ocean liner to wish him farewell. I became suspicious when I saw that our half-brother had packed so many suitcases. I confronted my father after seeing that they contained our toys. He said that he was taking us with him because you had deserted us and were an unfit mother.  I don’t remember how I felt then—perhaps Dad’s comments put a stone on my heart. We did not see or make contact with you for three years while we were in Japan and later in India with him. I do not remember thinking about you or missing you.

After Dad’s death in India, I returned to America because you found a sponsor family who let me live with them. We saw each other sporadically over the years. I know your husband could not take care of your daughters so we stayed with American families who often did not understand us, personally or culturally. You cared for us through homemade California rolls, futomaki, tempura, gifts and money that you sent to us.

It was during that time that I began to put on weight as a teen. I hated my body, and you amplified my feelings by the shame you displayed about my weight gain. You did not know it then, but an older cousin in India had molested me and it put another stone on my heart. It would take me years to recover. In fact I’m still recovering as I reach 60. I remember that when I told you, 30 years after it happened. You became very angry with my father who you felt was responsible for letting this happen.

Back then, I dealt with the pain through drugs and food. I remember you visited one morning after I had been up all night free-basing cocaine. You were compassionate. Somehow it seemed like you understood my pain.

I know you experienced your own trauma—a fatherless childhood, surviving World War II—that led you on journey like mine. I know what attracted you to our father, a man from India with a warm spirit but also a dark side that collided with your own.  

Since your stroke three years ago, I have seen you cry and ask for forgiveness from your three daughters. I know without a doubt that had you been given the love and support that you needed while you were growing up, you would have been a different mother to us. I know now that your daughters are loving, accomplished women because you never stop thinking about us, though you may have not been there physically. That spiritual connection was always deep. I truly forgive you as you lay down your heart. And I continue praying that you move towards light and love.

About the Author:  Indra Thadani has received more than 30 awards for service, education and innovation, she is most proud of keeping her family together and raising a loving and worldly African American son! Indra is grateful for her masters' education at UCSF which prepared her for leadership in health care, especially for the underserved!  

[moastories]

Saigon Radio

By Yvonne Tran

Yvonne and her mom Christine circa 1990

There is one part my mother’s routine that she has kept over the years. Before she enters the kitchen to begin her culinary creations, she always turns on the portable stereo to station 106.3 FM, Saigon Radio. It wouldn’t matter that I was in the middle of my favorite Lizzie McGuire episode, or that my dad was about to vacuum the entire house. She would turn it on even when all these other noises drowned out the announcer’s voice.

Sometimes my mom would perk up from peeling carrots and sing along to a Khánh Ly song. On other occasions, she would laugh hysterically at the oblivious woman whose husband was obviously cheating on her. “This is like Jerry Springer!” she would comment. I was used to having cups of milk forced into my hand by my mother because the bác sĩ on the radio said I would surely die if I didn’t drink enough of it.

The Vietnamese-language radio station became the soundtrack to my childhood, and I hated it. It drove me insane that in the age of sleek iPods, my mom still had bulky, stereo cassette players littered in every corner of the house to play her beloved station. Saigon Radio was this old-school, crackling medium with more advertisements for medicinal herbs and plastic surgery than actual programming. I would never comprehend the lightning-fast language the announcers conversed in, nor did I enjoy the constant wailing of Cải Lương, Vietnamese folk opera. To westernized ears like mine, it sounded like parrots attempting to sing. What were they singing about that was so sad? Why didn’t the song have a melody? When does it end? These questions would torture me, so I always got up to change the station to what I thought were more sophisticated, American tunes.

15 years later, I am driving my mom home, and I turn on the radio in my car. Coincidentally, I left my pre-settings on Saigon Radio, so the station blares out of the speakers. At this point in my adult life, I had already gone through the period of soul-searching in college where I came to accept my identity and wanted to relearn the language I had lost. I would listen to Saigon Radio to mimic the speech patterns of the announcers. Every so often, I actually danced along to the cha cha cha music that played and found the crazy callers entertaining.

Although I didn’t understand every single word of it, I finally appreciated the journey and culture that the station represented. Fleeing Vietnam as a refugee of war was an experience that left an indelible hole in my mom that could be temporarily filled by the comforting sound of her mother tongue. The radio was also a surefire way to drown out the memories of abuse she suffered at home and humiliation she faced as an immigrant in America. She was able to laugh, meditate, and learn new things about the world when she listened. Perhaps even the white noise reassured her that she wasn’t alone in the world. She told me once that when she was younger, her parents were very strict and even prohibited music, so she secretly bought a radio and hid it under her covers. It was one of the most precious things she had ever owned because it was hers.

My mom stared at the speakers, baffled.

“I didn’t know you listened to this station. I thought you didn’t like it.”

“I’m trying to practice my Vietnamese, Mom.”

I turn the volume up so that we could both listen together.

Yvonne and her mom Christine at the University of California, San Diego graduation in 2011.

About the Author: Yvonne is an Orange County native who is always on the lookout for good stories to tell through multimedia and opportunities to highlight issues she cares about. She received her Bachelor’s in Communication from UC San Diego and Master’s in Communication Research at Boston University. She is currently on the Board of Directors at the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association (VAALA).

[moastories]

To Remember Her

By Jean Okamoto

The author’s mother’s hands. 

My mother hated udon. She said it was because of the gluten that gave her headaches, but it was really because it was Japanese. It used to be her very favorite food.  She would beg Bachan to make it when she was growing up. But after Pearl Harbor, suddenly being Japanese American meant that you were on the wrong side. My mother was sent to the camps and then to New Jersey, always further and further away from that little house in Los Angeles, and suddenly udon gave her headaches.

Not that she ever told me much about this. I learned about the camps from my Bachan, my mother’s mother who stayed with us for half of every winter and told us stories of barbed wire and dust storms, of how outsiders’ fear created a community of those on the inside. My mother became even more silent about this when Bachan stayed with us, magnified by Bachan’s pride about being Japanese and her desire to show us the victory in the loss and the redemption in the lives of the children. In us.

I was eight when I caught sight of my mother’s face during one of these grand storytelling moments. I couldn’t read what her eyes were saying then. I couldn’t hear past her silences. It was only later, after my father had passed away, my eldest brother had moved across the Pacific, and my best friend’s baby girl had stopped breathing – it was only after I looked into the mirror and saw it in my own eyes that I could recognize the loss in hers. And it was only much later, after I had children of my own, that I began to grasp what she was trying to protect us from, why we never moved back to California, why our cousins all had middle names like Keiko and Aiko and Kimi while mine was just Joy.

Bachan told me that America had stolen from both her and my mother, but that my mother had lost much more. She never said she was sad or disappointed or hurt when my mother refused to ever eat udon again. But when Bachan stayed with us and my mother had work or meetings and didn’t have time to cook dinner, we ate homemade udon. And we loved it.

Bachan taught me how to make udon once when I was young, one bright winter afternoon, light bouncing off the scrubbed wooden table and catching the deep wrinkles of her hands. I asked her that day if she could be my mother instead. Her love was easier for me to understand. But she just laughed and said my mother needed me too much.  It was the answer you give a child, but there was some buried truth within. I didn’t understand then. I still don’t know if I understand everything she had to teach me, the deep wisdoms of those softly lit afternoons and our flour-covered hands.

Bachan loved udon.  I made it for her wake. It wasn’t exactly traditional, not for a funeral.  I knew Bachan didn’t care much about things like that. Funerals are for the living, she told me near the end. When you come to see me in that wooden box, I won’t be there anymore. So it wasn’t that I was making the udon for her. I was making it for us. To remember her.

My six year-old Jessie creeps into the room and peers over the edge of the counter where I am kneading the stiff dough, turning it over and over until it becomes malleable, soft but strong. Udon is her favorite, too, despite my imperfect technique, my uneven noodles. And someday soon it will be time to teach her this recipe -- passed down to me -- of patience and redemption, of bending but not breaking. Of remembering.

About the Author: Jean Akemi Okamoto is a fourth-generation Japanese American currently studying at UCLA. Her creative works, both film and writing, are influenced by her family, faith, and (usually) food.

[cecitranslations]

Writing to you tonight from the Me Kong Delta dehydrated and itchy laying under a mosquito net while listening to party animal neighbors singing off-key karaoke and reeking of tiger balm because everyone insists that’s the best thing to put on my massive bites. And that, my friends, is a proper run-on sentence.

Today was a big day. We took my mom back to her village and to meet her cousin, the only relative who still lives in Kinh Bay, which is so small it literally means river section number 7. As you can tell she’s still a motorbike newbie and is clutching the seat for dear life while sitting on a neck travel pillow but props to her for even getting on. About a week ago she wasn’t sure if she could cross the street bc of the motorbike traffic, but I digress.

It was a hectic time for us to come because her cousin is a rice farmer and this is peak harvest season. Still, Vietnamese hospitality being what it is we were greeted by their daughter in law who planned a list of meals like we were going to be here for months instead of a day and a half.

I think the experience has been a mixed bag for my mom in the same way that it was for my dad when he first went to his hometown. My mom seemed really disappointed that she didn’t recognize anything here anymore. People who recognized her she had a hard time recalling, her old house was torn down and nothing of the property looks the same, and she had to admit that she (we) missed some of the amenities she’s become used to in the States.

She left when she was 18 and she’s in her fifties now so, in many ways, it makes perfect sense. Still, it’s got to be strange to feel (and also be labeled) “too Vietnamese” in America for so long and then feel too American in Vietnam.

Despite the pictures she’s gotten over the years or the stories from others who go back, I think it’s hard to really let it sink in that the place of your childhood doesn’t really exist anymore until you see it for yourself. And when you do, it’s almost like those memories you’ve been sharing with your kids all these years might not be real anymore either. I’ll never really know how that feels but I imagine it’s like being forced to let go of old photographs you take out now and again when you miss the way things were and need some comfort.

It reminded me of how, four years ago, my dad said that the only two things he recognized in his hometown was the beach and an old ice factory. He didn’t want to go back again after that trip.

There were some really good moments though including my mom being a kid again and running into the street to enjoy the downpour (it’s rainy season here). We also completed one of the main missions of this trip when we visited her parents’ graves in the afternoon. It was incredibly emotional. They both passed away before she left Vietnam, her mother when she was less than ten and her dad when she was sixteen. Fittingly, we were drenched through and through by some intense rainfall while in the cemetery that was heavy even by Me Kong standards.

Some massive butterflies followed us to church, which was terrifying for me because I have a serious and inexplicable phobia of butterflies, but my mom’s cousin’s wife insisted it was my grandparents’ souls visiting my mom. I think she really liked hearing that.

[moastories]

Last Time I Saw Mama

By Annabelle Marcelo

The author’s mother, Magdalena Aglipay circa 1930 at age 16.

I cannot remember the exact last moment I saw my mother, but I know where.  We were at the airport in Manila.  Mama and a sizable coterie of kin stood in a fenced area for watching travelers depart.  I was by myself on stairs leading to the door of a Pan American World Airways airplane, dwarfed in size by its blade propellers.  I was only 11 that early January in 1959. 

As a mother myself now, I grasp the enormity of what Mama must have felt. I was off to the United States, where I would live with my mother’s younger sister. I was not being sent away or leaving home because of any misfortune. Quite simply, I was a child enamored of going wherever, giving scant thought about leaving and what that would imply. 

The notion of my going to California was hatched the prior year, 1958.  My aunt, who had emigrated from the islands, came home for a visit.  She may have casually said, “Maybe you could come see me someday.” The gadabout in me interpreted Auntie’s sentence as, “You must come and live with me soon.”

My mother, who had never been off Luzon Island, gave me an affinity for the global. Mama was a typist for the Philippine government’s Bureau of Plant Industry.  Her job had occasional international contacts, many through the mail. Beginning from when I was in kindergarten, Mama would clip cancelled foreign postage stamps from envelopes and bring them home to me.

Her colleagues from the bureau’s ornamental-horticulture section gave Mama greenhouse flowers native to foreign lands. Vases of these brightened our living room. Once in a while, she went beyond postage and flowers:  Mama brought home people from other countries to dine with us.

In this age of incessant electronic communication, it may be hard to fathom that my mother and I did not – as in never – talk on the telephone after I left her side.  Overseas calls at the time were prohibitively costly; they were not a regular part of life for ordinary people such as us.  We wrote letters too infrequently.  As children do, I adjusted quickly enough to my new world in Southern California.  I coped with homesickness by being immersed in school and friendships.  My Americanized adolescence was normal for this country but became incomprehensible to my mother.  Yet through the years, she expressed satisfaction that I was healthy and stayed on the academic honor roll. 

Circumstances prevented my traveling back to the Philippines, while my mother remained there for the rest of her life. She died after a stroke in 1969, in Manila, at age 52. 

Sometimes when I look into a mirror, I recognize my mother’s facial features or expressions in my own reflection.  Oh, what I would give to truly see Mama again!

About the author: Ana Marcelo is a freelance writer and editor.  Born in the Philippines, she grew up in Southern California. She lives in Sacramento.