By Jer Xiong
I knew my mother most when we were on car rides together, just the two of us. Despite her hatred of traffic, she showed an easy confidence in handling stick shift and driving, something I never learned myself, but had watched her do my entire life. It was fascinating watching her transform into someone without her usual temperament.
In the car, I was different too, my irritability subdued by the lulling engine hum, by the crunch of tires over gravel, by the audio tapes crackling along my mother’s favorite songs. Never mind that I would have to crank hard at the handle to open the window because the A.C. didn’t work in our scrappy Toyota van. It didn’t matter where else I’d rather be than running errands in the morning. Once we sat in the car, we were different.
And because we were like two specters about to vanish at sunrise, I needed to ask a pressing question.
“Would you force me to leave?”
I learned it from my friends at the high school first: a girl, a boy, a secret evening date that took too long. When the girl returned with the boy that same night, her parents demanded that the boy take responsibility and marry her since her reputation was now tarnished. This was the latest gossip in our small community; everyone knew each other’s business so my mother already heard first about this situation. The boy must marry the girl, even if they both don’t want to. And when they marry, the girl will leave to join the boy’s family—not just a physical moving, but a spiritual one where her spirit joins her husband’s ancestral lineage, thus severing her spiritual ties with her family.
Raising a daughter, as the saying went, is just wasting effort to prepare her for some other family.
My mother didn’t answer me, face forward, eyes steadfast. The car heaved during a turn.
It was not unheard of for daughters to be treated callously by their parents, even if a mother was once a daughter too.
My mother was the first daughter and first child of her family. She would eventually gain seven sisters, some that she never grew up with since she married at an age not quite 18. The times were different—1980s in Thailand refugee camps versus right now in the early 2010s in northern rural California—but the expectations and outcome were the same every generation: The daughter left and became an outsider.
I looked at her and committed to memory our resemblance: thick black eyebrows, stubby fingers with hairy knuckles, a permanent resting frown. These physical features were biological facts, proof I was one of her seven daughters. She was etched in my skin and blood.
“Would you make me marry the man if that happened to me?”
I was 16. That girl from my high school was 14. We were, actually, not so different.
In the confines of the car, I feared what the future might be like for me. I watched my mother for anything; I prepared for heartbreak.
“Why would I force you into that kind of life?” My mother said, at last. The car shuddered, and the clutch wheezed upon her foot, but her voice never wavered. “If they don’t want to marry you and I force you to, they may not love you.”
Love.
In all my years of witnessing the bonds between a wife and a husband in my community, love did not always come first, and it was not always equal. But to mention love of all things—I was so sure my mother and I would return to the roles we lived beyond the car—two people who never heard or understood each other—and now I saw a truth I never considered before.
What did I really know of my mother—this woman?
I knew nothing except this: She loved me enough to not let me go.
Jer Xiong is a Hmong writer and editor. She received her MFA in Creative Writing (focus in Creative Nonfiction) from California State University, Fresno, with an emphasis in editing and publishing. She was born and raised in Northern California, but currently works and resides in Los Angeles. She’s a member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle (HAWC). Her works have been published in Los Angeles Times, Cincinnati Review, Lunch Ticket, and elsewhere. https://jerxiongwrites.wordpress.com/