Writing for My Mother

By Angela Tung, author of “Puo-puo” in Wisdom Has a Voice: Every Daughter’s Memories of Mother

“Women, show your fiction to your mothers, not your lovers.” Mary Gordon

“Don’t tell outsiders the ugly things that happened at home.” Chinese idiom

When I set out to write “Puo-puo,” an elegy to my grandmother who passed away in November 2010, my aim was to write something that my mother could read. I’d write about my grandmother’s amazing life, how she lived through the Sino-Japanese War and the Communist Revolution, how she, my grandfather, and their children fled from China to Taiwan. How despite poverty they raised five children who all ended up going to grad school in the United States. How she ruled the roost with her tough love, loud laugh, and amazing cooking.

But the essay turned out to be more than that.

I don’t usually let my mother read my writing. I tend to write about very personal things: divorce, infidelity, sex, and relationships. While some women can talk to their mothers about such things, I cannot. My mother knows about my divorce and that my ex-husband cheated, but I’d prefer not to give her the chance to say once again, “You should have told us right away,” instead of three months after we had already separated, “You should have left him right away,” instead of almost a year after his confession, and “You shouldn’t have been with him in the first place.”

I write to understand the past; my mother only seeks to undo it.

As I wrote “Puo-puo,” I found writing about my tumultuous relationship with my mother to be inevitable. Her mother’s opinion, always old-fashioned, sometimes backwards, and so important, often clouded her judgment. How dare I want to become a teacher! Didn’t I remember my grandfather earned so little as a teacher in Taiwan? Could I lose some weight before Puo-puo’s visit? Couldn’t I date a guy who was taller and better looking?

I found myself having to admit that my grandmother, like my relationship with my mother, was far from perfect. I found myself having to mention my divorce and my ex-husband’s infidelity, which most of my mother’s friends, seven years later, still don’t know about. The reasons she hasn’t told them are strikingly similar to the reasons I didn’t tell my parents for so long: they don’t want to get blamed. How could you not see what was going in your daughter’s life? Their friends might say. How could you not stop it? Why did you let her marry him in the first place?

And why my mother would need to share “Puo-puo” with her friends is another story. Her children’s achievements aren’t real until they’ve been acknowledged by friends and relatives. This is why our diplomas hang in the room where they play mah-jongg, why when I was a child, my mother would strewn around the house, as though by accident, my elaborately designed book reports. I imagine she’d have wanted to display copies of Wisdom Has a Voice on the coffee table, where a friend might idly pick it up, leaf through it, and either spot my name or ask, “Ay, Ai Li, why do you have this book?” and she’d say, in her best humble bragging voice, “Oh, my daughter has a story published in it.” But I still have yet to send her the book.

Mother and Angela

I tell myself hiding my writing is to protect my mother, but really it’s to protect me.

Recently I told my mother something I’ve yet to write about. I hid it for the same old reasons: I didn’t want her to be hurt; I didn’t want her to be blaming me for what went wrong. Finally, during a visit, I decided I had to ‘fess up.

Surprisingly she was happy. Not happy about what happened but that I had shared this intimate part of my life with her.

This week I finally put a copy of Wisdom Has a Voice in the mail for my mother. I hope she likes it, but even if she doesn’t, I’ll keep writing.

By Angela Tung, author of “Puo-puo” in Wisdom Has a Voice: Every Daughter’s Memories of Mother