CRITICA

My mother was born in Vietnam while under French colonial rule and grew up during the American-Vietnam War. As one out of eight children, she was raised in a traditional family with the specific gender and patriarchal norms of Vietnamese culture. Her mother was French educated, however she maintained an undiluted observance of the Vietnamese values for herself and especially for her daughters. Despite her education and fluency in French, Thai and Laotian, her domain was at home with her children. My grandmother saw her education and talents as subordinate to her primary role as a perpetual supporter of her husband. Her secondary role was the moral upbringing of their eight children, and to impress in them the importance of these values for future generations, just as her mother had done before her.

My mother was the ideal Vietnamese daughter, kind, gentle, soft spoken, honest and most importantly, obedient. In 1975, she was in her last year of university when her father telegrammed her to return home as the fall of Saigon was drawing near. She obeyed and left the university; unbeknownst to her, at home the fate of her life had been decided. Upon her arrival, she was told that she would be marrying a young medical resident. She had met him while at the university, but he was aloof, and his intentions were not known to her. Before she left to go home, he had written her a letter to end the courtship. The letter then resided in her bedside drawer. Her questions about why the man who had ended their relationship was now her fiancé were second to the decisions her father made for her. After all, she was taught that her father was supposed to know her best interests, and men decided if women are worthy of marriage to them. So, it was best to stay silent about the decisions her father made for her and not question anything. When the decision had been made, the young doctor left with barely a glance to her, the two men having decided her future life in less than one hour. Her mother later reinforced the unnecessary need to confound herself with conflicting and complex feelings, by advising, ‘Just look forward, you’ve been given a gift of certainty during a tenuous time’. That night, my mother went to her dresser drawer where she had kept his letter and tore it up, along with any anger and confusion she may have felt toward him and her parents.

There are two phrases in the Vietnamese language, “chịu đựng” (to endure) and “hy sinh” (to sacrifice) that convey the highest virtues anyone could achieve, especially for a woman. As my mother left her childhood home and entered marriage, she packed these two ideals closely to her heart. When her father-in-law demanded her first child be a male, despite modern understanding of gender reproduction, she made sure to endure his homemade concoctions of herbal tonics and obeyed a strict diet of odd foods conducive to conceiving a boy. When her mother-in-law complained that she got up too late in the morning, despite her early rise at 6am, she made sure to give up two hours of extra sleep so she could be awake before the rest of the household. After the war, when the new government sent her husband to a rural part of Vietnam to act as the town’s doctor, she made sure to care for his elderly parents and work a part-time job to generate family income, all the while caring for her infant child alone. Many years later, her husband would tout that he had the most virtuous wife.

A life under the communist regime was oppressive and not conducive for a young doctor with career aspirations. After deliberation, my father and his father decided that it was worth the risk to leave Vietnam and seek a future in the West, however uncertain and treacherous the journey may be for his then pregnant wife and their toddler child. My father secured a smuggler, emptying their finances, only to realize later they had been deceived when the smuggler failed to rendezvous at the local beach. My mother had agreed to the plan because the alternative would have been to separate from her husband and raise their children alone. In the aftermath on the beach, my father assumed they all would be serving a prison or death sentence if caught, so he decided to take a different path home than my mother, leaving her alone with their child to find her way home from the beach. The implication was that the communist police would not harass a pregnant woman with a young child, and she would be safer without him. At seven months pregnant, she carried her toddler on foot back home where she was peppered with questions from her in-laws as to why she did not stay with her husband.

Her sacrifice and endurance in early marriage and motherhood were rewarded with praise and admiration from all around her, and most important of all, her husband was very proud of his devoted wife.

In a culture where the common agreement is “con hư tại mẹ, cháu hư tại bà” (children are bad because of mothers, and grandchildren are bad because of grandmothers), it is imperative for women to accept shame and guilt if they are not self-scarifying, in order to portray a façade of perfect motherhood. Out of the guilt and shame of having a “bad child,” my mother turned away from me, especially during punishments my father doled out under the guise of “moral education”. Her silence and passivity in these moments grew in proportion to my cries, pain and outrage, and because her complicity in the punishment was invisible, it made it possible for me to see her as the refuge to collect my tears when it was done. It seemed as if she too was punished alongside me, and she too was suffocated with the injustice of my father’s actions.

But the truth was, her allegiance was firstly with her husband, everyone else, including her children, would be second. To protect her children would mean acknowledging a difference of mind with my father, which goes against the core value of one-mindedness, a characteristic needed of a virtuous wife and good mother.

As a Vietnamese daughter raised in America, I grew up straddling the fence of my bi-cultural identity. Through cultural exposure and immersion in diverse social groups at school, I began to voice and act upon my home life dissatisfaction. This was seen as an act of defiance and my mother took on a new role to restore the homeostasis of our family, the denier of truth. “Không phải” (that is wrong), became the common phrase from my mother, especially when I disagreed with my father. Additionally, after my father’s rageful outbursts, my mother would try to invent a new reality in which his motivations were loving. One night, after being berated, belittled and threatened for hours due to coming home past curfew, she denied that my father had done anything wrong and that his actions were out of love for me. She often reminded me of the saying “thương cho roi cho vọt, ghét cho ngọt cho bùi” (love is to give beatings and whippings, hate is to give sweetness and softness). In moments when she did attempt to intervene, she became the focus of his rage, so she seldomly intervened. To this day, my mother’s dismissive way of erasing my experience while installing what helped her to cope, think positively, has become the barrier to having a close relationship between us. My mother, the invisible woman, was born from self-preservation through the perpetuating systemic demand and reward of one-mindedness and self-erasure.

When my father was hospitalized after having a stroke, my mother temporarily moved in with my family. While living with me, she was on the go from the moment she woke to the moment she closed her bedroom door. Her acts of service were a strategy to distract from feelings.

Without external tasks she was rendered empty, or worse yet, not empty of feelings. When asked about simple needs such as meal or home temperature preferences, she deferred the decision and refused to voice her choice. If pushed to claim her opinion, she often became flustered and anxious, making it difficult to collaborate on simple tasks. While interacting with me, she finished my thoughts and sentences, over-anticipated my needs, and attempted to get to the action before me. When she cooked, prior to anyone tasting her food, she criticized the spice level or highlighted her mistakes, in anticipation of complaints from my family. When asked about her birthday dinner preference, she reflexively replied “I will cook soup for us,” as if allowing care from others is prohibited. If I mentioned these traits to her, she would become defensive, deny her behavior, and invent a new reality about the interaction. Her behavior was syntonic, chronic and automatic. During my father’s hospitalization, reflective conversations with my mother about his parenting resulted in arguments when she denied the truth of my experiences, then offered me a filtered picture of an alternate reality. She could not allow for different thoughts and opinions about our home life and my father.

What my mother is not aware of is that as she erased me in these conversations, she also denied her own experiences and feelings. Most importantly, she denied herself authentic relationships with people close to her, leaving her feeling sad, anxious and alone. One morning, as there were no tasks needed in the house, I found my mother sitting on her neatly made bed, in day clothes, hands resting on her thighs, staring into space, as if she were waiting to be assigned a job. An image stuck in my mind, an invisible woman, waiting to be seen by the world, but who cannot reveal herself.

When I became a mother, my mother’s role in my life was fraught with gratitude and anger.

Due to her complete selflessness, it was easy for me to ask for help from her any time.

However, she also became critical of my mothering, often comparing my disagreement with her to her compliance with her mother. Many acts of instilling independence in my children such as weaning, sleep training, self-feeding, and tolerating distress, were seen as cruel. Despite my protests, she continued to spoon-feed my children and rocked them to sleep in her arms past the appropriate age. My value of self-care as a mother was directly and indirectly criticized. Meanwhile, she was impressed and complimented on the simple ways that my husband was helping, such as taking turns with bath time or making dinner. It was as if I was not doing enough, and my husband’s co-parenting was too much. When her attempts to make me abandon my own thoughts and feelings failed, she often collapsed into tears while comparing me to other female relatives or friends who were “good daughters” to their parents.

Reflecting on my mother, I am reminded of a wisdom from supervision, “The truth doesn’t hurt anyone, the truth sets you free, the problem with the truth is that it shatters other people’s fantasies about you, themselves, and the world around them.” My mother’s life has been total devotion to her husband, those above her, and the traditional values instilled in her heart.

Her reality was denied to her by her parents and in turn she denied my reality. Dynamic legacies often get passed on unconsciously and without malice. My mother’s life was constructed long before her birth, through the generations of her mother and her mother’s mother and so on. If she were to face the malice of her legacy, she would need to deconstruct the seven decades of life she has led. This task cannot be done unless she chooses to stop hiding behind her mask of invisibility, and she is not ready, not yet.