Tag: family

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Mother’s Day

I never asked her to work nights in a restaurant and go to school during the day. I never asked her to prepare my favorite fruits and vegetables with my favorite dipping sauces as my daily snack. I never asked her to turn down her big business opportunity to stay at home with me.

The debt you can never repay, the debt that makes you owe more than you can ever accomplish in your entire life, is the debt you owe for the stuff you never asked for. I never asked my mother to love me, or to give birth to me, and now I owe a debt impossible to repay.

How do you pay back that kind of love? Is it one of those divine conundrums where everything’s impossible except through grace?

Luckily, my mother told me how to pay it back. She said, “You simply owe it to me to become as amazing as you can. Also, promise me you’ll break up with that boy.”

I didn’t listen to my mother in many things, and I can never deserve everything I have, but I’m really trying to earn back my debt by making something good out of my life. It’s impossible to be worthy, but you try to be a better person.

I want to try as hard as I can because I owe a million debts like that. It’s impossible to repay all the innovators who birthed our amazing world, the scientists and artists. We didn’t ask for it and we can never deserve it- the past asks things of the future, but not the other way around. We just have to try our hardest. We pass on our best attempt so that when our children inherit our earth we have some right to ask them to make something even better.

To all the moms whose only wish is we do something good with the gifts we got without asking, happy mother’s day.

hua mom and dad!

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F*ck Death

Someone died on the trail while we were hiking up the White Mountains in New Hampshire. They were giving him CPR for ages while his daughters leaked tears on a log nearby. When he was clearly and truly irreparably dead, we hiked past and I saw his pale, hairy leg with a scrunched up sock and hiking boot peeking out from the foil sheet. Hikers who’d helped give CPR later remarked, “I could feel his ribs cracking underneath my hands.” It was a sobering incident although a few hours later I still made a joke about the hike being a death march due to my vibrams.

Death is gross and terrible. I told my dad we should get cryogenically frozen and he said he’d look into the paperwork- my good old dad. I feel immense guilt it never occurred to me to freeze Mom even though I knew freezing existed. I think I was in a state of denial about the likelihood of her death since she’d been getting better for a long time and got worse quite suddenly so my dumb brain didn’t weight the new information correctly. Dying, like, goes against her identity as a cool Mom, right? The brain doesn’t handle affronts to identity very well.

Dying is deeply disgusting. Picture ragged roadkill or other dead animals you’ve ever seen flopped over stiff and grimacing- that’s what people are like when they’re dead too. I’d like to imagine death as one peacefully drifting off, looking as though one were sweetly asleep, but death is not like that. Death is ugly and repulsive. Mom was probably seriously dying for a good 6 months or so and I wish I could erase all of that from my memory. Is it wrong that I wish I could have frozen her before her organs started to rot inside her still-breathing body? I don’t want to think about her like that- I didn’t then and I definitely don’t now. But I did, and I do. I think about her and her death all the time. I wanted it to stop, and although she’s dead now it hasn’t stopped for me because it still happened- Mom being dead never stops.

Although Mom believed in heaven and her church friends were always with her, she didn’t want to die. She wasn’t in peace; she was in pain. I feel bad we didn’t try everything. I could’ve done more research but I didn’t want to get closer to it. I wanted it to stop and leave, a weak and contemptible reaction that proves I’m shamefully unworthy of stuff, like being a great samurai, or being a good daughter.

If I found out I had incurable cancer, I wouldn’t get the haphazard treatment that weakens you everywhere while you suffer and stall in waiting rooms that reek of poison, everyone pathetically shuffling around, or sadly staring, or desensitized and businesslike, or just normal- pragmatically ignoring doom. If I had cancer, I’d go to sleep on an ice floe and float out into the Arctic among the icebergs and the sea lions like an old, useless Eskimo. I’d wander alone towards my ancestral graveyard like an elephant matriarch and collapse on my knees in a pit of ancient bones. (Years later a lion king will play in my rib cage.) Or maybe there’d be some project I could do like fix a nuclear reactor that’s too dangerous for healthy people to approach, although they probably have robots or something for that.

It doesn’t hurt anybody for us to get frozen and the main reason against it is because people will think you’re weird. Whatever- the “weird” ship sails whenever it sails. Now that Dad said he’d do the paperwork, the main deterrent for me to do it was actually the clangy jewelry you’re supposed to wear at all times that says to send you to Alcor so they can put you in your freezing pod or whatever. Does anyone know if medical people will still realize it’s medical information if I get a cuter version made? I don’t wear jewelry typically and the thought of going from bare to ugly jewelry horrifies me.

Friends, let’s all get frozen. That way when I wake up in 1000 years in my robot body you’ll all still be there and we can all battle the evil Galactic Empire together and learn to control our psychic powers and flirt with hot aliens.

I hate death and maybe that’s why I think about it a lot. Animals are almost lucky because they can just die like it’s nothing, like it’s supposed to happen, an instinct encoded in their DNA. Animals live and die and nothing they do can be Wrong- their wars and murders, suicides and unstoppable sex, their patricide and eating of their cubs are all All-Right. I wish I could die by letting my million spider offspring explode from and then feast on my delicious, bulbous torso. Or I could die by having my ferocious mate bite off my puny head after sex- whatever, it’s natural, everybody’s doing it, it gives meaning to life, it’s a stitch in the tapestry of the universe woven by the Fates, it’s a poem, it’s destiny.

But I don’t feel like an animal (I can’t rape or kill or psychotically eat my young). I don’t feel like death is natural for me or for any person. Is that feeling itself wrong and unnatural? Maybe that’s part of why (in addition to our need to explain and find patterns) humans have an instinct for religion, every culture comes up with their own brand of afterlife- it’s our human nature to deny death. If you believe in an afterlife or in reincarnation, you can avoid the gut knowledge that death is DEATH. I wish I could do that, be like Henry Ford and the many people who’ve found solace in reincarnation or in heaven. Even if there’s a Zen meditation out there where you inhale the sickness and death of this world and exhale acceptance, if I tried it, I’d choke.* Maybe I’d vomit and burst into tears. It’d be gross.

I wasn’t specially nice to Mom when she was on her deathbed. When Dad had cancer I promised I’d be nicer to him going forward, but I am not at all. I guess impending death just doesn’t make me feel nicer even though I wish it did and it’s supposed to. I wish I could be the type of person who was nicer to someone after considering we’re both going to die, but I’m not. My only hope is to try to grow into a nicer person period who’d be really nice to her parents and everyone else even if we never had to die.

Sorry I’m not enlightened. Looking at everyone who’s accepted death and thinks it can be beautiful and dignified, and everyone else who doesn’t think about it and lives life never knowing death until they, well, die, I’m sorry death hurts and repulses me. I wish I were like the others, that I could ignore it or think of an afterlife, but even the idea that it’s all a plan makes me feel terrible. My mom didn’t die throwing herself in front of a bus of school children. (I wish she had. (It’s hard to die well. Many people don’t.)) She died and suffered for nothing, like an animal, and I don’t find any meaning in it.

I’m probably just abnormal but I don’t think life OR death is for humans what it is for animals. Animals are born, they look adorable as babies, they stay adorable after they’re grown or they become terrifying/ disgusting/ delicious, they may or may not learn some things, they do some work to get their food and shelter, they eat and sleep, they do some work so they can reproduce, they do some work to raise their offspring or they don’t, they interact with other creatures, objects, or places, and then they die. I can’t live my life like that. I can’t be like an animal- I can’t live like one or die like one.

It’s one thing to be stoic and mature about something inevitable. Like when some injustice occurs and someone stronger enslaves you or your legs are gone so you have robot legs or your whole family starved to death in China, you don’t let that ruin your life: you are courageous and heroic by going on to regain freedom or win the Olympics or become a scientist and say, “Shit happens- I was branded sub-human, my legs are gone, and I’m an orphan. There’s no point in dwelling on it so I have to have a good attitude going forward and be amazing.” That’s awesome. But don’t tell this person that the world is better that these injustices occurred, that their lives are more meaningful now because of suffering, that it was all supposed to happen so people could be inspired by their challenges. That stuff shouldn’t happen and we should try to stop it if we can. That’s how I feel about death, about all injustice, all suffering. If it has to happen, then I’m going to be brave about it. But I’m not going to say the world is more beautiful because of ugliness.

For millennia people had other people as slaves. Babies would die left and right. Women would die in childbirth. Sickness and disease would have no solution and people would accept it as part of life because what else are you supposed to do? How else do you cope with it? (Well, you can solve it.) (Death is the one disease everyone suffers under and everyone copes with.) People would rape and pillage their neighbors or expose their unwanted babies on the mountains, stuff animals do, but humans stopped doing this stuff because we’re better than the animals. We stopped coping with diseases because we can cure them.

That’s the gift that we humans have over the animals. We can choose to be better. If there’s a choice between good and evil, between hope and despair, between progress and complacency, we can choose the light. We can choose life.

 

 

 

* Margaret Cho wrote, “there’s this Buddhist meditation where you breathe in the world’s suffering and breathe out compassion and I try to do it and choke.”

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Mom: Just the Happy Stuff

I”ll never forget when I was 8 years old she taught me how to fight.

“What’s wrong?” she said.
“Nothing!”
My mom left the room and came back a little later with some Ovaltine. “Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s all your fault.”
“No it isn’t! Kevin Jameson is just a show off and I only challenged him because I was scared he was going to throw Chen’s book out the bus window.”
“You challenged him to what?”
“I said I knew karate and that I was going to beat him up tomorrow at the bus stop.” At this point, I burst into tears. “I wish I were dead!”
“Don’t say that! This is what you do.”
I’m not going to tell you the rest of this story about how I hilariously defeated a 5th grader because, in retrospect, instead of a triumphant story about a tiny Asian girl standing up to a bully, it sounds a little like me bullying and psychologically destroying a terrified kid. But the point is my mom always had my back.

Losing my mom to lung cancer last fall (she never even smoked!) was like losing a lung myself- I’d never really thought about what it’d be like to lose her but now she’s gone sometimes it can get hard to breathe. After years of doctors and hospitals, sometimes you don’t remember there was anything else, even though there were actually 23 years of being a normal rambunctious mother-daughter duo. So for Mother’s Day, just the happy stuff:

Because I can be really lazy and neglectful in a sleep-on-a-mattress-for-years-without-getting any-furniture kind of way, my mom always worried I wasn’t taking care of myself properly, so she got me different housekeepers and set up every room and apartment I’ve lived in (except she’s never been to my NYC apartment, which is why it’s such a mess and I’m still living out of boxes despite having moved to NYC over a year ago). She talked about me at length to these housekeepers- about how I worked so hard I didn’t have time to do laundry, how much she hoped I’d find a good boyfriend (a nice, steady, mature boyfriend from someplace wholesome like Iowa, who wasn’t too brainy and introverted or our kids would have autism because I was already rather introverted, someone from a good family whose love for his mother was surpassed only by his love of Jesus).

She cooked me so much food, always leaving me with a fully stocked fridge and freezer. My favorite food was food she made me, but I never learned to make it. When she wasn’t cooking, she was traveling. She has been everywhere. New Zealand was one of her favorites while Dubai was one of her least favorites.

My mom’s mom died when my mom was really young, so my mom worried about being a good mother to me, wanting me to avoid her mistakes, therefore I should do everything she said. For example when I told her I was thinking about getting a dog, she manipulated my friends into telling me how great a cat would be, resulting in informative calls from mitri about his cat. Later, when I told my mom I was worried about leaving my cat alone when I went to London, she came to Chicago between rounds of chemo to watch my cat Mimi. This is a photo my mom sent me of Mimi sitting on her lap:

Mom, even when I was mortified by your irrationality and emotions, I was always secretly proud of you. Even when you were being completely crazy, you were caring and charming. Because of you, and because you were never afraid of anything, I don’t fear a single thing. Even though there were times when I really could not stand you and I usually forgot about Mother’s Day and stuff like that, I really miss you.

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China

Every time I go to China, someone in my family says, “Never tell anyone what I am about to tell you,” and then goes on to tell me something absolutely terrible. Before this January, the last time I was in China was in 2006 when I got a grant to do a creative writing project. I remember the other people who got awarded this grant were doing things like building robotic arms and literally curing cancer. I took this money, went to China, and fully intended to execute my proposal on whatever, but none can oppose the Chinese forces of chaos and eating (I ate so much coagulated blood in such intensely spicy hot pots hat I got a rash). If you are a loyal reader from 2 websites ago (oh yeah, sometimes one finds it necessary to drop off the face of the Internet. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again, so read my blog while you have the chance!), you will recall the story of my uncle the pilot.

My uncle the pilot hasn’t flown a plane in almost 40 years. He and his siblings, his siblings’ spouses, my cousins, my cousins’ children, my cousins’ in-laws, and I all stayed in his properties while in Sanya for Chinese New Year’s, but neither his wife nor daughter came. He oscillates between heartily guffawing at jokes while cooking you your favorite foods and verbally abusing people who disobey his instructions by bringing up their failures in casual conversation so he can mock them, or by shouting extended, vivid insults- he can berate someone for 3 or 4 cigarettes. His wife and daughter oscillate between unabashedly nagging him for money and fearfully/angrily avoiding him.

“Don’t think too badly of him,” I was told in 2006. “When he was sixteen, he lied about his age so that he could apply to be a pilot in the air force. Back then, everybody was poor and we had nothing but one cup of white rice to eat for every meal. When he became a pilot, the only one chosen from our town, suddenly he had lots of money from this honorable job, and he bought us all beautiful things. He was still a teenager so he liked to show off. He wore a flashy watch, and we ate the best food. Then people in the town became jealous. A group of them got together and said that your uncle was making statements against the government. At that time, anyone could be put away for any reason. They sent your uncle to a mental hospital- anyone who opposed the government must be insane. He was sane going in, but he was crazy when he came out. They gave him all kinds of drugs, did all kinds of things. When we saw him again, he was a totally different person. He would fly into rages for no reason, violently throwing chairs, punching walls. We were all terrified of him. He would wander the streets, sleeping in gutters. He’s much better now. He couldn’t be a pilot anymore, but he got a ground job. You can’t imagine how bad it was; he has never been the same, saying horrible things, angry with everything. But he has a good heart, and he is a true genius.”

Is it strange that these terrible family secrets of unbearable loss somehow borne make me feel lucky? Carrying my mom’s ashes in a box to be buried in my grandfather’s graveyard, I thought that if my uncle and everyone else had to go through so many injustices and they’re still kickin’ it, then basically nothing bad has ever happened to me. Bad things happen so easily- my mother’s mother died when she was quite young, so my mother might easily have never been born- I could easily have never been born. And if I’d never been born my poor small cat would be languishing in a shelter instead of rolling on the lap of an MIT graduate (‘MIT graduate’ is how my mom still introduced me to her friends 4 years after I’d graduated and gone on to, like, do other things), and you, my dear reader, would be viewing some stupid lolcat thing instead of this superior blog.

During my time in China, my family went through all kinds of efforts to please me and my American ways, putting a drying rack in my room to act as a space heater, humoring my desire to play badminton, investigating the price of Chinese gold, constantly asking what I wanted to eat and then haggling for hours over a few dollars before buying it. I love durian and coconuts and ate a lot of them. Nevertheless, I don’t think I could ever live in Asia. I’m too American. For example, Chongqing’s January is cold but no one uses indoor heating- everyone wears coats indoors while inexplicably keeping all the windows and doors open so that it’s actually colder inside than outside. My first reaction to the sight of everyone wearing down coats while eating inside a relatively nice restaurant was, “China sucks,” and then, “How efficient,” a response I would experience many times on this trip.

Despite every trip to Asia being an affirmation of my Americanness and the existence of endless, dark family secrets, each time I feel like I want to go back more often. Almost my whole family is there, and it’s easy to forget what that means, having never had it growing up in America. Who else would lecture you on having been way too fat during your last visit while exclaiming over how much thinner you are now? Who else would fret over every little thing you’re eating or not eating and insist on hand washing all your clothes? Who else would use your deodorant and lipstick with impunity without asking? Who else would insist on bizarre medical advice such as the importance of not showering for a full month after giving birth? And the first thing my Aunt wanted to do when she came to America was raise me a chicken to live in my yard and lay an egg for me every day! I feel so blessed to have my gigantic, crazy Chinese family and I look forward to the day I’m advising some young relative on the virtues of wearing jade that can only be removed by a trained assistant with lotioned hands.