When I was young, I saw my mother as a tyrant. Now I see myself in her photograph
I once found a photo of my mother as a young woman while I was trying to find photos of myself as a child. I was struck by how similar we looked – the structure and shape of our faces, the positioning of our hair and our facial features. I wondered what a colourised version of the photo would look like. When I mentioned this to my mother, she brushed it off. “Out of the two of you, you were always the one who looked more like me,” she said.
Mothers and daughters are destined to clash, but our run-ins with each other weren’t like the ones I saw on television
French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan proposed that all children pass through a stage of development where they learn to recognise themselves in their own reflection. He called it the mirror stage, and argued that it “illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship”: that is, the relationship between the person you are and the person you see when you look in the mirror. But what happens when you look in the mirror and you see your mother? Or, what happens if you look at your mother and you see yourself?
Sometimes it’s hard for me to rationalise and separate the attributes I share with my mother. I know nature and nurture play their separate roles, and I wonder how differently I would have turned out if my parents hadn’t moved to Australia. I wonder how much more alike Mum and I would be if we hadn’t been nudged in different directions at pivotal moments in our lives.
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Mothers and daughters are destined to clash, but our run-ins with each other weren’t like the ones I saw on television or in movies, or even like the ones I saw between my friends and their mothers. My mum and I are both headstrong, hyper-focused, and refuse to yield unless absolutely necessary. Our clashes were never loud but they were still venomous, barbs traded through glances, a roll of the eyes, or malicious compliance.
“I regret teaching you girls to be independent,” she said to me once, in English. My perception of Mum changed after this moment. Part of me rendered her vindictive and monstrous – I was a teenager in that stage of anti-parent rebellion, and it was easier to think of her as a one-dimensional character because I knew we’d never have a serious conversation about what she really meant by that statement. I think I now understand what she was trying to say – that it’s difficult for parents to let go of their children, to set them free into a world they’ve worked so hard to protect them from and against.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve become increasingly torn between recognising that she was trying to do her best – or at least, what she thought was best at the time – and that her controlling behaviour meant I couldn’t just enjoy being a kid. It’s important for me to remember that she is a nuanced human being with her own experiences and biases, and her actions and decisions were born from her upbringing and cultural heritage.
My mum, like many Asian mums, is tough. She’s hard on herself, too, and that transfers into the way she parents. It’s a trait many immigrant mothers share – an inheritance of hard work and resilience they feel compelled to instil in their own children. When I was younger, I saw her as something of a tyrant. She was the queen of our household, and what she said was normally the way things turned out. Now my sister and I are living out of home, she’s softened a little, but childhood habits die hard, and I still see her as the strict, steely eyed head of our family.
I am slightly uncomfortable about characterising my mother in this way; I don’t want to contribute to the overarching narrative of the overbearing “Asian parent”. But this seems irreconcilable with my memories of her ignoring me when I tried to speak up for myself, the pressure I felt from her to succeed at school and in my musical endeavours, and her expectations for me to be the perfect Chinese Christian girl.
Asian women in Western countries are “objects of cross-cultural anxiety”, notes Prof Ien Ang, the founding director of the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, whose work explores issues of migration, ethnicity, diaspora and representation.
Shirley Tucker, a former lecturer at the University of Queensland who completed a PhD on Asian-Australian writers, agrees, noting that Asian Australian women are often seen as figures “of the sinful and morally corrupt Asian femme fatale, and the passive and childlike oriental flower”. We are, in essence, a cultural version of Schrödinger’s cat – at once docile and dangerous, depending on who we’re with or what we’re doing.
If we are loud and assertive, then we are the tiger mother or the dragon lady; if we are quiet, then we must be the Oriental flower. There is no in-between for Asian women, no space for us to be normal or mediocre or complex or to just be. This is why I’ve been hesitant to write about this side of my mum. She’s a whole woman, after all.
I know that in some ways I have no right to criticise my mum.
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Like many daughters, I worry I will become my mother some day. This transformation would be incremental, not unlike something out of a horror movie or a ghost story – my mother’s ghost, come to haunt me while she is still alive. I can already see parts of us moulding together; the way we both repeat a story if we think it’s of particular note, the way we can come to the same solution for a problem, the way we both think long-sleeved tops with cold shoulders are silly and should be banned from all shops.
I already know that if I have children, I’d want them to go to Chinese school and to abacus classes, just as she did with us. Who knows what tools I will be able to access in the future for the purpose of scaring them into submission? I worry I will have good intentions, but fumble at their execution. I don’t want them to fear me like I do my own mother.
But I also know I would be lost without my mother. I wouldn’t know how to name my children properly in Chinese, because these are secrets I have not been privy to; I don’t know which traditions I should be upholding. I wouldn’t know the right words or even the right combination of words to use.
I know that in some ways I have no right to criticise my mum. After all, I have no idea what it’s like to be a mother, let alone a mother in a different country with a different language and culture while single-handedly running a business. Maybe she had to be this way to get shit done. But there will always be a part of me that wonders why my voice matters less than hers simply by virtue of being her daughter. We will never be equals; our conversations will never really be discussions between two adults.
This might seem unfair, but maybe it’s the way things have to be, at least for now. Maybe I’ll feel differently as I age, as I morph into a hybrid of my mother and my own, distinct self.
This is an edited extract from Me, Her, Us by Yen-Rong Wong, published on by University of Queensland Press
