By Kevin Brown
Jessamine Chan’s debut novel is set sometime in the near future, as far as one can tell. Society functions much as it does in 2022 when the novel was published, but there are some technological advances the state uses to help improve parenting, at least as they see it. The School for Good Mothers follows Frida Liu, a thirty-nine-year-old Chinese American mother. She’s recently divorced after having discovered her husband’s affair. While she was willing to work to save the marriage, Gust, her husband, refused to stop seeing Susanna, whom he would ultimately marry. Frida has been trying to create a life on her own, while sharing custody of their only daughter Harriet. On a day that Frida repeatedly describes as “a very bad day,” she makes a poor parenting decision, a decision that will change her life and her daughter’s life.
Rather than simply losing custody of her daughter, Frida must attend the titular school for good mothers, a state-run, year-long program to teach women who have been bad parents—according to the state—how to be good mothers. There is a similar school for bad fathers across the river, but readers learn little about that campus. The bulk of the novel follows Frida and her fellow “bad mothers” throughout the course of the year, as they receive lessons on the appropriate type and duration of hugs to give, how to cook for their children, ultimately progressing to the final unit on The Moral Universe. They put these lessons into action by interacting with their AI children, though it’s clear the AI is not as advanced as the instructors make out and not representative of the true complexities of children. Frida names her robotic daughter Emmanuelle and comes to care for her over the course of the year. The mothers have to pass various tests, while also not becoming distracted—the mortal sin of mothering—by videos of their actual children, the men they meet when the two schools do activities together, or the other mothers they come to know and love over the course of the year. After this year, a judge will review all of the information and decide if the mother can return to their children’s lives or not see them again.
Throughout the novel, Chan offers questions and critiques about the way American society views parents, but primarily mothers. Even before Frida ends up at the school, readers see the guilt and judgment laced through society and the court system. Frida is not simply criticized for her “very bad day” (and it is an awful decision); she is barred from seeing her child. Gust, on the other hand, bears no responsibility for his affair and the dissolution of the marriage that put Frida in the situation in the first place. Frida and Susanna judge each other’s decisions on how to raise and treat Harriet, prompting Frida to feel guilty for even minor decisions about the type of mother she is, with Susanna seemingly the perfect mother.
Chan shows the family court system to be tone-deaf to the needs of the child, while arguing they are working to protect that child. Throughout the process—ranging from the supervised visits to the mandatory psychological examination to the hearing itself—no one listens to Frida’s honest explanations of her decision-making, nor does anyone hear Gust and Susanna’s defense of Frida as a mother. Chan is not writing an essay, though, and her creation of Frida as a clearly flawed mother reminds the reader Frida is far from perfect, that she did make a decision that threatened the life of her child. What Chan is seeking, then, is for the reader to be better than the court system, to honestly see Frida for her strengths and her weaknesses, to understand her decision without approving of it.
Chan continues that nuance once Frida is at the school for good mothers. She presents a wide range of mothers and allows them to reveal their humanity, as well. Some of them clearly made decisions society would say were worse than Frida’s, while others’ choices seem not only understandable, but also ones most of us would make. The breadth of characters reinforces the idea of guilt and competition/comparison between mothers, as each of the women think their decision was defensible, while they are outraged by others’ choices.
Chan uses the time at the school to explore ideas around gender—the fathers have far fewer rules, and there are even fewer of them at their school, a clear comment on how little society expects of fathers—but also race and class. Some mothers are clearly there because they are African American or Latinx, as their supposed infractions are actions every mother would make. Other mothers have ended up at the school because they didn’t believe they had any real choices, such as the mother who had to leave her child in the car while going to a job interview. She needs the job to take care of the child, but there are no safety nets she can use while pursuing employment. Chan also explores how society reinforces heteronormativity, as none of the women were in same-sex relationships before coming to the school (or if they were, they don’t mention it), and when some of the women secretly pair off, the school works to end those relationships. The idea of motherhood the school promotes is the 1950s Father Knows Best variety, one that has nothing to do with the realities of twenty-first century mothering.
The school uses technology to both survey and evaluate the mothers, reminding readers that society is always watching and judging mothers. The AI children have cameras that record their surrogate mothers, while also taking readings of the women, as if they were a much more advanced Fitbit. There are cameras in every room on the campus where the school is housed, and the women receive brain scans to evaluate their maternal feelings. Motherhood is not simply something one can observe; it’s something those in power can–and do–measure.
The school is not just a school for good mothers, of course; it wants to produce perfect mothers, ones who will never make a mistake. Near the end of the novel, after Frida has finished the year-long program and is meeting with her social worker again, Frida is dressed in the same outfit she wore to her first supervised visit with Harriet. It fits a bit better now because of Frida’s weight loss due to the conditions at the school, but the narrator writes, “She looks conservative and tidy, not the mother she was before, not the mother she became, but a mother from a manual, blank and interchangeable.” That’s the goal of the school and the implicit goal of society: there’s one correct way to mother, and anyone who deviates from it should be judged and suffer accordingly, no matter the effect on that woman, her child, and anyone in their life.
Society expects so much from mothers, and, in good dystopian fashion, Chan takes those expectations and pushes them a bit further than where we are today. It doesn’t require a significant leap of faith to imagine the judgment society already applies to women moving toward a time and place like the one Chan has imagined. As one of literature’s goals should be to evoke empathy in readers, those of us who have had the pleasure of reading this novel should be a bit more sympathetic the next time we judge a mother’s decisions.
Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. You can find out more about him and his work on Twitter at @kevinbrownwrite or on his personal site..