Things I don’t know
By
My mother in China
I first found out about my mother’s former job when I was fifteen. I was a petulant freshman in high school, struggling with my physics class, and my mother was sitting at the kitchen table holding a test marked with a large 64.
“You need to improve this,” she said as she looked over her mug of sweetened coffee.
“I’ll ask dad,” I replied impatiently. I always asked my dad for help with school. He was the intellectual one, with his many degrees in college and graduate studies. My mother worked at a childcare center, singing songs with three year olds.
“Sure, but be careful you don’t do badly in physics.” I grunted in assent. “Or else, you’ll be in trouble,” she finished.
My mother, who had never punished me a day in her life, who did not comprehend “grounding” beyond the verbal bestowal of its status, gave me her meanest look.
“Okay okay, but why do I even need physics?” I asked. “I’m terrible at it. I won’t go into the sciences. And I’m good at all my other subjects.”
“That’s what I did in high school. But you know, you need the grades to get into college.”
“What did you do in high school?”
“I wasn’t good at history or math. So I just stopped studying.” The thought of my serious mother showing up to class completely unprepared made me smile.
“So what did you do afterwards?”
“I worked!”
I hadn’t known that. I never thought about what my parents did before we came to the United States eighteen years ago. I assumed that my mother had stayed at home to take care of me, as she did after my little brother was born almost a decade later. My dad had always been the one gone. I had no memories of him in China. In America, he always seemed to be at graduate school classes, or working as a computer scientist.
My mother, I associated with home. She would hear me whistling on my way back from school and always prepared a snack for me. She would have fantastic projects for us to work on, making curtains or making cookies or painting furniture. Only recently, after my brother left for kindergarten, had she begun to work. As far as I knew.
“What was your job?” I asked.
“I was a journalist.” She turned to me now with a smile that showed her tiger tooth. “I always wrote beautiful essays at school.”
My dad at an informal philosophy lecture
My father and mother, a former professor of philosophy and journalist in China, had met soon after starting their professional lives. The year after I was born, the Tiananmen incident occurred, and my parents decided they couldn’t stay in China. My mother had not covered the incident for her small hometown.
When my father left for America, we had lived in a ring of small towns near Shanghai, always trying to get work papers in the large city. They never came through, so my mom continued to write for small newspapers and submit editorials to magazines. For a whole year, we were just she and I, living with family friends and making just enough to scrape by. The articles she got published she clipped, pasting them in a red velvet notebook while we waited for our visas.
Then one day my mother came home flushed and happy. Within the month, we had pared down our bags to the bare necessities. We didn’t bring the red notebook.
So we came to America. I remember my parents holding various jobs, but they seemed more a necessity than a career path that they had chosen. My dad was a chef, then a pizza deliveryman as he worked his way through graduate school; my mother worked double shifts as a waitress until my brother was born. We moved from town to town before settling down in Atlanta. My parents were soon firmly installed as a Software Engineer and Childcare Specialist.
With my little brother, we were now four. We speak English at home more than half of the time, and my brother and I complain loudly when we are forced to visit China during the summers. I never think about the beginning anymore.
My father spends his free time dreaming about utopias and the essence of being. My mother opened her own school that caters mostly to children of Chinese immigrants. After I was accepted at Northwestern, my mother wrote an article about me for the Atlanta Chinese newspaper, an article I am still unable to read.
August 22nd, 2010at 11:58 am(#)
[...] Jennifer Wong, whose mother is from China, recalls what her childhood was like and how it has shaped her. [...]