What Mothers Handpicked

"A curious trait in humans, one that gives aid and comfort to the dark angels of entropy and makes it all the more difficult to establish here on earth once and for all a Heroic Age, is the ease with which we take everything personally. At sea level, we cannot even see the Gulf Stream; yet if it benefits us, we think it's only right it does so. And standing on the earth, we cannot feel it move beneath our feet, but if we could, we would wonder what we had done wrong this morning and say ten Hail Marys just in case."

―Russell Banks, "Continental Drift"

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Dear Alex,

In my late teen, I once wrote a poem for my Mom and read it aloud from a lectern during a combined Chinese-English worship service on Sunday in the same church she still joins. It was Mother’s Day.

It took me some time to knit the words in expressive form but they said nothing to her, she told me later. Ideals and metaphors a mother could not grasp: let’s keep things real. Her response bruised me. I never looked back at my handwritten copy of the poem.

Mother’s Day is not an easy occasion for applause and brunch when looking forward means pedaling back to arrive at the present. Our memories of Mom seem more surreal than real. Was her hair once black as the plaques in her CT head scan today? The cataracts - when did they start turning her eyes dreamy? I am becoming her keeper of things, guarding our make-believe dialogues in my finger tips swiping photos of her on phone.

I’ve started reading the book quoted above in my mid-life season at half a lifetime after its influence on you since your college years. Boundaries, constellations and ocean floors have shifted but have we migrated past our complacencies and comfort? Even if the novel were translated in my mother’s native language, why would she ever break open its first page to be broken through the rifts and diasporas hewn in history hers and ours?

On this afternoon of Mother’s Day, I watched alone the 1947 first black-and-while film screenplay debuted by famed writer, Eileen Chang 不了情 (Everlasting Love). Someone added the English caption to taper the language gap. I listened to most of it in Mandarin as spoken by its original cast, many of whom I could imagine extending beyond their scripted roles to be mothers and guardians for princes and orphans on this day when our birth mothers could thank God their children did not turn out precisely as they had wished for.

Yours, Kate