By Thu Anh Nguyen
There is a black and white photo of my mom holding me as a baby. Her hair is long and curled, and she is stunningly beautiful (everyone says so when they see this photo, but it’s redundant). When I am thirty-one years old—the same age as my mother was when we were captured in black and white—in my postpartum depression haze, I decide to reproduce this photo with me holding my first son. I spend too long digging through my closet to find a shirt that is like hers. I curl my hair, something that I rarely do, and certainly have not done in years. I tell my brother, the photographer, to take my photo in black and white as well. He understands what’s happening even if I don’t.
Now both photos sit next to each other on my mantle in the living room. It’s so obvious what I was trying to do, what I am always trying to do. I am trying to live up to my mother, but part of me understands that the more we compare ourselves, the more I try, the more I fall short. Mom is so aspirational for me: I feel proud of myself when I can taste something someone else has made, and then cook it without a recipe, using only my senses. Mom never taught me how to do that, but I am good with my hands, and quick on my feet the way she is. Even so, I vow not to make my kids–or anyone for that matter–feel inadequate or like a failure if they aren’t good at the same things. I don’t want to be a martyr, to work myself into the ground, and resent everyone for it because I watched that make her miserable for years. All the ways in which we are similar just highlight all the ways in which we are different from each other. I am as equally proud of that fact as I am ashamed. I really know how to break my own heart. I learned it from my mom.
It’s impossible to be the daughter of my mother and read books like Real Americans by Rachel Khong and How to End A Love Story by Yulin Kuang without thinking about all the daughters and mothers that ever were, all the ways the daughters are pulled towards and away from their mothers. Khong and Kuang’s books are arguably about so many other things—romance, socioeconomic class, Hollywood, and grief—but the way they examine mothers and daughters is their deepest, raw core.
The mothers in both novels are Asian immigrant women, like my own mother. In Real Americans, May is mother to Lily, and May’s own difficult life fleeing China during Mao’s Cultural Revolution drives many of her decisions in raising her daughter. May never tells Lily about her history, and it’s that choice to leave the past in the past that makes it so haunting; a specter that hangs over both of them, and the generation that follows.
In How to End a Love Story, Helen, the novel’s protagonist, explains that while her parents support her, “they don’t have context for her and it makes her feel like they’re talking in opposite directions in every conversation.” Of course, for immigrant families, part of the lack of understanding between generations is due to all the borders crossed, and it is the price of the American dream. Helen thinks that her parents should have realized the price they paid since they “decided to move to another country and start a family…[they] should have known that not fully understanding [their] own kids would come with that territory.” What both books examine are all of the impossible choices parents have to make. Whether or not they realized the price they paid, what could they have done differently? Would they have done anything differently? A common refrain in my immigrant household when I was growing up was that my parents gave up so much so that I could have an easier life than my parents had.
Speaking to Roxane Gay’s book club about Real Americans, Khong used words similar to Helen’s in How to End A Love Story, saying that “parents make the best decisions [they] can for [their] child but are missing so much context.” Khong explained that “it’s such an American belief that we are responsible for our own fates” when there are other powerful forces making decisions for us. For May, those forces included the Cultural Revolution and the limited pathways a young Chinese woman could take. May expects Lily to capitalize on the advantages she has as a first generation Asian American. Lily describes how that pressure to perform weighed heavily on her:
She’d decided, back then, that I was remarkable, and I could not persuade her otherwise. I was nothing special, I wanted to protest. I wouldn’t ever be…But I couldn’t say that now…
Lily feels like she is falling short of May’s American dream for her partly because she’s constantly an assistant, and never a boss. Lily recalls what it felt like as a nine-year-old visiting her mother’s science lab. Lily feels how disappointed May is that she doesn’t love it as much as she does. Lily realizes that May “had always longed for more. She had always wanted more than one life could contain.” Something that characterizes parental love is the magnitude of the love, but the difficulty with that outsized love is the outsized longing and expectation that comes with it. Because Real Americans is told in three different sections, one from each generation—May, Lily, and Lily’s son Nick—we get to see what the lives do contain, all the hopes and dreams, and limited perspectives of each character, realized and unrealized. What is beautiful about Khong’s fiction is that it allows the reader to transcend the limited perspectives; we get to see the parts of the story that each generation of her characters miss.
Perhaps the largest thing left unsaid in both novels is love. Khong describes this as a generational issue where “we miss each other slightly; we try to love each other, but we can’t do it the right way; we can’t meet each other as peers.” In both Real Americans and How to End A Love Story, it might be easy to misread the mothers’ coldness or harshness as a lack of love, but it’s more than that. It’s a language and a cultural issue; it’s what it means to be an immigrant child to parents who grew up in a foreign land. When her mother tells her repeatedly that she is happy for Lily’s engagement, Lily cannot believe her. Lily hears it the same way she hears “I love you,” as a “foreign phrase…that would never be native, or natural.” It’s as if Khong is saying that part of the foreignness of being an Asian in America is being a foreigner to love. The misunderstanding goes both ways: Lily also doesn’t understand that giving her mother a clock as a present is bad luck in Chinese tradition. In that moment, I wanted to give her a prize for just trying. We are all just trying so hard to love—to show love, and be loved.
It is particularly poignant in How to End A Love Story that Helen struggles to articulate love because this book is a Romance. Readers expect a happy ending, but Helen knows that she has “never been built for that kind of uncomplicated happily ever after,” and wonders “if she’s incapable of loving the way other people do.” She defends herself by saying that she can only love the way that she’s been taught to love: she loves her parents even if it sounds like she doesn’t “to people who come from other types of families. Families that know how to love each other out loud.” The “out loud” was so familiar to me as a child who grew up only hearing families say “I love you” in sitcoms. Those families I saw on TV were mostly white families, like the family of Grant, the man Helen starts a relationship with. When she visits his house for the first time, Helen is immediately welcomed by Grant’s mother, like it was such an easy thing to do. Helen does start saying “I love you” out loud in college, but it sounded forced. She can’t imagine saying it without “immediately dying of embarrassment.” Love is so overwhelming even though it can’t be vocalized, and when Helen and her mother have a terrible fight, she tells her mother that it is “suffocating” being loved by her.
It makes complete sense to me that the love is too little or too much in these books. How could it be the right amount when so much depends upon it? Is the point to even say it out loud? When parents have done everything for their children, why would they also need to say anything about it? Nick, Lily’s son in Real Americans, is second generation and half white, and feels the same guilt and pressure that Lily felt growing up: “he knew he would always feel guilt,” that “there could never be a righting of the scales.” For me, the most devastating and true lines about being Asian American are when Nick wonders “why did parents perform all these un-repayable acts? Was it because they felt guilty for bringing us here in the first place? It was a chain of guilt, like daisies, unbroken.” If love is a clumsy connector, it seems often in these books that guilt might be the sturdiest connector.
Lately, every book I read seems to mention generational trauma, and it’s clear that both Khong and Kuang’s books portray its devastating effects. The characters hurt each other in shameful, cyclical cycles that I recognize from my own family’s stories. While Real Americans and How to End A Love Story reminded me of so many tortured conversations with my mother, and also all the conversations that I was never able to have, what gave me hope, and why I loved these books, is that they recognize both what is untranslatable between Asian American children and their immigrant parents—what is possible beyond language and beyond the American dream.
Although May can’t say “I love you” in a believable way, the love is there, and is as much a part of their family story as guilt is. Lily catches her mother staring at her, “with love in her expression that was a little too much to bear” and then one glance later: “her expression said she didn’t know me at all, yet recognized me completely.” When Lily and Matthew are first falling in love in Real Americans, they are too shy to say “love,” so instead say that they are “not nothing” to each other. Lily being recognized by May is not nothing, and maybe it’s everything to these Asian Americans who have spent their lives trying to assimilate. Even more than I have wanted love, I have wanted my mother to just recognize me.
At the end of Real Americans, after years of estrangement, May resolves to write Lily a letter. She knows that she doesn’t have the language to say what she wants to say precisely, but that she can “try.” It’s the trying that feels so real to me. It’s not a happy ending per se, but a hopeful one.
In How to End a Love Story, Helen tries to imagine an “all-American fantasy” where she and her parents have a heart to heart, but that never happens. Months after their biggest fight, they have a meal. Things have both changed, and they have stayed the same. Helen is with Grant, a man her parents deeply disapprove of. The distance between her and her parents remains very real as Helen stays in a rental instead of in her childhood home. When Helen apologizes to her mother for their last difficult conversation, her mom just gets up to clear the bowls, and announces it’s time for cake. They don’t need to talk anymore because what is left to say? Actions are what matter now. Helen’s parents don’t ever say they approve of Grant, but Mom invites him back to the house to pay his respects at their ancestral altar, and this is an invite I recognize for its worth: it means possibility for a future beyond the guilt, and all the terrible things they have undergone. At the house, Helen worries that she doesn’t know if she is using the incense correctly, but her mother says that Helen does it “fine,” and maybe there isn’t a right or wrong way to do it because “the important thing is we still have a connection.”
I feel connected to my mother every time I look at our photos side by side. It’s a connection that I feel more than I understand. My mother almost never speaks of her childhood in Vietnam, or of that time captured in the photo when she had to suddenly leave her own family and move in with my father’s much larger and chaotic one. When Mom has spoken of it, it’s in very few words, words that remind me of something Khong or Kuang would write: it was hard, of course, but what did you expect? I can see now that maybe my mother was trying to let me make my own way. Maybe she didn’t have the words to tell me, and I’m not sure I would have listened. I am her daughter, after all.
Thu Anh Nguyen is a poet whose poetry has been featured in the Southern Humanities Review, Cider Press Review, NPR’s “Social Distance” poem for the community, The Crab Orchard Review, The Salt River Review, 3Elements, Connections, and RapGenius. She also writes about equity, justice, and community through literacy. Her essays on the importance of reading diverse literature have been featured in Literacy Today.