Dear Mom (2023)
Part I — The letter I wrote before we met again in Shanghai
A month ago, mom and I spent three hours chatting at a Starbucks in Shanghai.
It was unexpected. And yet the night before, I had been picturing the exact scenario as I panicked and stressed about preparing myself for a surprise visit to my grandparents.
I hadn’t been home in almost three years. My dad cut me off after my last visit. A year and a half ago, mom sent me a message:
“I don’t think I will see you again if you don’t make up with your dad.”
On the day, my grandpa pretended it was all coincidence. He called mom while he was out buying lunch after I mentioned I hadn’t eaten. She arrived in a cab from across the city, as if summoned.
I’ve been procrastinating on writing about that afternoon. Instead, I keep returning to a letter I wrote to her in 2023.
Maybe that’s where this story really begins.
27 Feb, 2023
I finished reading Crying in the H Mart on the tram ride home. The book is a love letter from an American-Korean daughter to her mom, a resilient, loving, but tough Korean mother who succumbed to cancer in her fifties. Food, ingredients, and recipes were how the daughter connected with her often stubborn mom. For every unfamiliar Korean dish mentioned, I could substitute it with a Shanghainese dish my mom cooked for me along with frames after frames of memory of my mom preparing food in the kitchen.
As a child, similar to the author, I had always been scared of the thought of my parents passing away, especially my mom. On weekend nights when my parents went out, I would keep running horrible scenarios in my mind. Knowing they would be back late, I often called my mom cellphone from the landline at least 2 or 3 times before they returned. Thankfully, they did come back every single time.
I always kept all the lights in our apartment on. If I finally saw them approaching the building entrance from our fifth-floor window, I would open the apartment front door and shout something loud to make the auto sound-trigger lights above the staircases light up all the way from ground to our level. Our apartment building didn’t have an elevator back then, so everyone had to climb the staircases to come home.
This fear started to fade after I moved to Australia 11 years ago. The longer I was away from home, the less it surfaced. Once a while, my friends would ask me if I missed home. “Not really,” I would say, “I have always been away from home, so this is the default.”
However, it finally came back when my mom retired a few years ago.
Ever since my mom showed me her first pension check from the government with utmost excitement, I’ve been worried about the possibility of her falling ill and missing out on the chance to enjoy her post-retirement golden period. In this nightmare scenario, I imagine staying by her hospital bed, blaming myself for not spending enough quality time with her over the past decade. I’d tell her “mom, you have to promise me you will get better, you have worked so frick’n hard, not reserving time for you to relax is not okay, I won’t allow it”.
In my mind, my mom’s post-retirement period is a time when she can finally do what she wants, whether it’s traveling with her besties, binge-watching her favorite TV shows, or following a hot fitness instructor’s exercise videos.
The reality, however, is that my mom is still co-running her small business connecting house cleaners and nannies to the community around it. Since COVID hit, the shop has barely been breaking even. On top of running the shop and doing house chores, my mom spends two hours each way traveling on three connecting subways to her parents’ house every week to cook and clean. All of my grandparents and my uncle, who is only a year older than my mom, have been dealing with endless health challenges for as long as I can remember. Knowing that my dad was never going to contribute much beyond money, my mom has always been the fearless and tireless sole caretaker for her family.
I don’t know how my mom manages to do it all. Frankly, I’m terrified to just think about what I would need to do if I found myself in a similar situation.
·
My mom has always lived up to my childhood definition of cool. I would often brag to everyone about how she would play along with my fake cold or headache scheme at school and drop her work to pick me up for a day of shopping mall wandering, movie watching, and ordering McDonald’s. And there was always an ice cream to wrap up the day.
I lived on campus throughout my entire school year since my dad decided to move the entire family to the city outskirts when I was in grade 1. Without any subway lines remotely close to where we were living, it would typically take me three hours one way to go to school every Sunday afternoon until line number 9, the longest subway line in Shanghai with a sweet sky blue as its identity color, drastically decreased the complexity of interchange and time of my weekly trip.
So I would usually make my fake sick call on the evening of a school day. Without a fail, my mom would always show up the next morning around 11 am. Then, one of the teachers would appear at the classroom door, called out my name, and asked me to pack my bag because my mom had arrived. Getting showered by jealous eyes and small talk among my peers, I would nod my head, pretend to re-pack my super well-packed bag, and walk slowly towards the teacher with some fake coughs.
I was a pro criminal walking free from the school jail, and my mom was my ride or die.
I did get sick quite often when I was a kid. With an awesome survival instinct knowing none of my parents would really have time to take me to the hospital for IV fluids or a shot up the butt urgently during school time, my body always acted up with a very reasonable fever during the weekend or summer/winter holiday, on top of it having to be when my mom was around.
Again, being the coolest person I know, my mom would always have a box of KFC mashed potato ready at the end of every hospital visit. I want to side track here and point out that hospitals in Shanghai all have GP, pathology, pharmacy, specialist, x-ray, and pretty much everything in one place. Imagine people actually walking away almost fully recovered on their first visit to a doctor!
Back to the hospital visits, my fuzzy tiny brain had always convinced myself that my mom had a secret connection with the head of KFC, or whatever that person is called. Later I would come to realize that it was perhaps because I hadn’t paid close attention to the surroundings of any hospitals and KFC’s research team was doing a decent job understanding the needs of patients and chose wisely to open a store next to every major hospital in my city. I don’t think Macca had the same strategy though.
·
Reading the book reminded me of this particular podcast episode, a recording of a therapy session for a mom deep in depression. Weirdly, I could remember the exact moment and place when I was listening to it.
I was getting off tram 109 and about to cross the road heading towards the McDonald’s on Smith St in Collingwood. It was a very bright day, and the sun spared no strength in scorching the road. The dark blue reflective glasses on the building in front of me were making it even worse. In my earphone, the mom was sobbing and was about to get asked if she had thought of the reason she was feeling so down was because of her son’s departure to college.
The therapist went on saying something along the lines of “Maybe you are feeling grief. In a way, you are losing the son you had spent the last 18 years looking after. You might be scared that his going away would eventually bring back an entirely different person.”
I wondered if my mom felt the same way.
Mom has always been my best friend, even after I realized that I am into boys and chose to hide the very fact from her. I tried my best to be honest about every other aspect of my life, and I was always happy around her.
I remembered downloading all sorts of horror movies and watching them with her over the weekends when my dad was away on business trips during middle school. We would both get so scared but would never admit it to each other. Later at night, we would decide to go downstairs together to dump rubbish with a shared understanding that we didn’t want to be alone. Mom would boil river shrimps and make braised chicken feet with soy sauce so we would never have to stop eating when watching imported foreign shows like Grey’s Anatomy or Full House. These early shows often had proper Chinese voice-over and subtitles. Once a year, mom would take a full week off just to use boxes after boxes of tissue paper over some ridiculously sad but addictive Korean shows.
With my dad taking over the role of weekly career and study coach over the video call after I started studying abroad, my mom started struggling to find topics to speak with me. Like every good mom, at the last 5 minutes of every video call, she would ask me to wear enough, never starve myself, and be safe. But we didn’t talk about anything else anymore. She didn’t think sharing her experience at work and struggle with my dad would contribute much to my life. I also couldn’t let them know how terrified I was in a brand new country, plus working 35 hours illegally at a Cantonese restaurant on top of uni was actually brutal and left me no energy to engage in any meaningful conversation. We went on living our seemingly connected but separate life.
Like what mom worried, she did lose almost 10 years of me, and I lost a decade of her as well.
·
I came out to my parents in 2019. It was a 3-act drama on my dad’s front with him being okay with it at the very end. Although mom cried and lost countless sleeps, she kept calm on the surface and supported both me and my dad to find a middle ground with each other.
By chance, Andy and I chatted with a pretty special guest on our own podcast WSYW last year. The guest was also a mom who not only was smart enough to decode her son and realize he’s gay but also a volunteer helping with other parents in the same boat. By listening and chatting about her experience of processing and coming to terms with who her son is, I realized I had done a really shitty thing:
By coming out of the closet, I actually pushed my mom into one.
For the next 2 years, mom took on every emotion by herself, she became a fortress and didn’t tell anyone about it. What’s worse was my dad decided to tell his side of the family a couple of months after I had come out to them. mom was caught off guard getting asked if I already had a boyfriend by one of my dad’s sisters during the lunar new year dinner. Mom freaked out and left the room, then pretended nothing had happened when she returned.
Coincidentally, our guest lives in Shanghai and happens to be on the same subway line as my parents, line number 9. After chatting with her outside the podcast more, we decided it’s a good idea to convince my mom to spend an evening with the guest and her son.
Mom hesitated but went for it courageously. She told me “I can sort of imagine what she (the guest) has to say, and I am not convinced it would work on me, but I guess it doesn’t hurt.”
There was no lecturing and no big presentation on the day. What happened was extremely simple, yet it worked wonders. Mom had a 2-hour long call with me afterward, and we chatted about absolutely everything from when I was already chasing after boys in high school through to deciding to make a life together with Erik.
So what happened?
On the day, mom arrived in the afternoon just before dinner was getting prepared. While the podcast guest was making conversations with her, the son and his new boyfriend at the time were the ones busy cooking. They all sat down afterward and had dinner. It sounds so mundane, but to my mom, it was the first time she saw two real gay guys in front of her being happy, preparing food together with the blessing of their mom. Seeing it was a message strong enough to convince my mom that maybe I was not going to be miserable and I had a chance to be happy.
·
Mom messages and calls me more often now. Although she still spells my partner’s name (Erik) with a “c,” and on the two occasions I corrected her, she made sure I understood she had already tried her best and “Erik” is a weird spelling, she always asks about what Erik has been up to every time.
I feel like we are slowly pulling each other back, and I won’t let go this time.
Last time when I was back at home, I went through dad and mom’s old photo album. I picked out a photo of mom standing in front of a huge tree inside of a park full of stone mountains. Although for as long as I can remember, mom has always had short hair, in the photo, her long curly black hair nicely framed around her cheeks and went all the way down to her shoulders. Not to mention that she was rocking a pair of really pointy glasses, an exaggerated yellow circle on each ear, and a very stylish women’s suit.
I wish one day I get to help mom recreate a moment like this, where she looked so slick, composed, and happy.
·
I miss you, mom. See you later this year.
Mom never made the trip.
We had spent six months planning it, the visa, the flights, the small details that make something feel real. Then it was abruptly cancelled. Not long after, her message arrived telling me to make up with dad or lose her too.
The shock was quiet but total. It took months to admit to myself what it felt like.
For a while, I thought I had lost everything.
Things will get better 🫶