.JiayangFan, who was 25 when her mother was diagnosed with A.L.S., writes about immigration, illness, and her complicated relationship—and symbiotic connection—with her mom.
When your mother was pregnant in China, she prayed for twins. It was the only permissible subversion of the state’s single-child policy.
The toilet bowl was the crucible of indignity, this strange commode you began using only upon arrival in this country. The air constricted in your lungs as you watched her clutch a jar of Olay face cream, slipping it into her purse, while pretending to examine the bottles on the next shelf over. Her fingers: they moved with animal instinct, deft and decisive, as if trapping prey.She didn’t shoplift for the same reason that your seventh-grade classmates did. There was no thrill in it for her, of that you were certain. The things she stole were not, strictly speaking, items you or she needed in order to survive.
The second time your mother told you the story, you were ten or eleven and she didn’t have to tell it at all. The two of you were at Staples, shopping for school supplies. “,” the posters all over the store screamed. Four notebooks, four mechanical pencils, your mother had stipulated, but you wanted more. You always wanted more. When you persisted, she had only to look at you and utter the words “You have more than anyone” for you to know exactly whom she was referring to.
But what did you mean to accomplish by telling your mother that story? Your mother, for whom every story was a tool, for whomHow slowly she turned to face you as she said these words: “I know what you are doing. If that’s the mother you want, go out and find her.”You were alone and she was alone. But it was the way the loneliness lived separately in each of you that pushed you both to the brink of disintegration.
Long after you had moved out of that room with the mallards and the rice cooker, the room that fused two into one, you understood that she was not so much beating you into submission as pulling you back into her body. It was an act not of aggression but of desperate self-defense.
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