Feed on POSTS
“All my mom wants for Mother’s day is cash,” I said. “She doesn’t want anything else, just write her a check and she’s happy.”
“Why? Your mom doesn’t like Mother’s day gifts?”
“No, my mom’s an immigrant.”
In 1981, with me in Chinatown, Los Angeles.
Mom & Me by amyadoyzie.
Circa 1981 in Chinatown, Los Angeles. I wanna take photos like this one day, where I’m the big person.
Congrats to my folks, who after almost 20 years has finally paid off their home!
My moms has also informed that after more than a year of toiling, working 12-hour days and a second mom-shift at home, she’s finally earned back the initial investment she put into the restaurant that she manages. She’s finally making a profit off of her small-percentage ownership [sic].
While I’m here abroad, trying to show my girls what they’re truly capable of, my mom is at home making those possibilities come to fruition. She has trouble understanding how our narratives are inextricably intertwined. She can’t fathom how I’m doing this because of her, but I am.
That’s America for ya. An immigrant woman, who came from nothing with the most base knowledge of survival English can buy a small piece of a Chinese fast-food restaurant and earn an honest living from it- but at the same time she can’t comprehend English enough to know how much her own kid shows love and adoration for her through writing.
I keep saying it over and over and over again, hoping in vain that one day they will stumble across these words and finally be able to internalize it: I am proud that you are my parents. I hope you’re proud to have me as your kid.
For a couple folks who arrived in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, without a dollar between them and a handful of broken English phrases- my folks did alright for themselves. They raised three kids, made sure we were clothed and fed and even bought us a Nintendo Entertainment System in the late 1980′s. Their dream for us was that we finish high school, finish university and then find a permanent cooshy, rolling office chair to settle into. Their dream for us was to live leisurely beneath fluorescent lights, enjoy air-conditioning and not have to stand eight hours a day to get health insurance.
I partly fulfilled this dream after graduating, and then trashed it for this unsustainable volunteer gig. Alan, on the hand, is a system analysts or something equally as vague and exhaustingly boring. But at least he’s taken some of the burden off my shoulders so that my parents don’t feel like all their kids are failures.
Now Albert’s done. He has no plans of being a humanitarian bum like me.
“Albert, don’t be like your big sister,” I warned him. “Get yourself a job with health benefits. I haven’t seen a doctor or dentist in more than four years.”
“Don’t worry,” he replied. I thought perhaps he already had a job lined up, something were he can use his newly minted graphic design degree.
“Really?! What happened?”
“I’ll never be a volunteer.”
The three of us kids- this bizarre amalgamation of hopes, dreams and expectations have chosen divergent paths. But ultimately we fulfilled something for our folks, for our immigrant community and for ourselves- whatever that may be.
We love our pops.
It’s funny that a man who is so un-aesthetically inclined raised two graphic-designing kids. Albert, my youngest brother, is going to graduate this summer with a degree in graphic design and this is equally an ode to my dad and Albert. I had it printed out and sent to my parents house, my brothers are gonna stick it in an 8×10 frame and bestow this hideous piece of design work to him.
I hope he thinks it looks good.
(During past Father’s Days I’ve sent him cards with hot dogs, a slot machine that dispensed Big Macs and various other disappointing weirdnesses.)
In 1981, with me in Chinatown, Los Angeles.
I called her on mother’s day morning. She was sleeping. I miss my mom and I miss sleeping.
I’ve been debating on whether to write about this for about two weeks now. That’s also the same amount of time it’s taken me to finally even come to terms with it.
Working and living in Chittagong has been so hectic and draining that I’ve just recently given myself the time to process it all.
My mother’s father, my grandfather, my gong-gong, passed away.
Albert e-mailed me on April 20th to say that he was in the hospital. On the 21st he was on life support. And on the 22nd he left us. Albert told me over Skype, I had about a half a minute to even think about it before I had to meet with a student in the next room.
From that moment on, I buried it. I dug a deep hole inside of me and gingerly placed all my hurt into it before covering it up and tip-toeing away- hoping that if I left it silently that it wouldn’t notice I was so far away from it. I was simply too busy with work to even imagine not doing it.
Guilt overwhelmed me.
A memory crawled its way back into my thoughts.
Just days before I left for Bangladesh, my folks and I got into an argument that I felt was born out their concerns for me and my future. I complained about the ordeal with Alan, one of my younger brothers, and he sided with them. He asked if I could understand where they were coming from. I’m empathetic enough to understand my parent’s point of view, that they’re worried about my well-being and they only want the best for me. But what I didn’t appreciate was when my mom lobbed some really petty and upsetting remarks at me.
I said that it just came down to the fact that no one knows what I’m doing abroad or why I’m doing these things. They never asked.
Except this time Alan did ask me something, “Maybe mom just thinks like ‘Why you gotta help the world before you help the family?’”
It stung and I didn’t have an answer. Maybe those two thoughts are mutually exclusive. His question came back to me when I talked to mom a week ago. She was in the midst of planning gong gong’s funeral.
“Everything’s fine,” she said. “Don’t worry about us. We’re fine.” I could hear her pushing back tears.
“Okay,” was all I could muster.
I felt like the worst daughter/granddaughter. On the other side of the earth. Helpless and not present. I’m left with re-thinking my purpose and why I’m here and what I would do if something might happen to another loved one.
I’m wandering around inside myself trying to find where I hid this pain, so that I can hold it up to the light and know it. I took the last couple days off work, but still don’t feel any better or worse. I can only describe it as feeling lukewarm.
I’m getting up tomorrow morning and teaching again. Work again. Because, really, I don’t know what else to do.
A heavy homesickness has stricken me. I’m homesick in a way that I’ve never felt before. The kind of missing that’s tumbling in the pit of my stomach and weighs my heart down to my feet.
