Notes

Chinese families center upon filial piety. Filial piety is a Confucian value of respect and deference to one’s parents and elders. For the longest time, I struggled with living up to such a principle- with becoming an exemplary Chinese-American daughter.
My mother had been in-and-out of my life for an extensive time. Her mental illness translated into hospital commitments and sudden disappearances, the longest being the two years she left home from my freshman to junior year. During that time, she faded into little recollections: a face mosaiced with memories of a mouth bursting into a shout, a pair of eyes manic and fervent, a clenched fist, a shaking pointed finger, a chest heaving with paranoia and knife-like words that cut into me. Left with me was an odd mixture of sadness for the woman who just couldn’t be a mother, happiness that my afternoons would no longer be filled with the familiar paranoia and yelling I’d come to know, and guilt that I could be anything other than miserable over her departure.
Thinking back, it was the guilt that ate at my heart the most. I hated myself for being happy not to tip-toe up the stairs whenever I came home from cheer. On the worst days, I would lay awake at night, wondering if I was a terrible daughter.
It was her return junior year that propelled me to seek change. Our separation had turned her into a stranger. Yet, this distance made it easier to notice what I once couldn’t- her continued efforts to learn English, her constant rambling of facts that had piqued her interest, her love for shopping that mirrored my own. My mother was never the fragmented memory I had created in my mind- she was just a person. Grappling with my mother’s bipolar disorder, the younger me could only think in terms of good or bad. However, in facing my mother, I was facing every judgment, every preconception, and every absolute I’d held. It had been easy to discount all her challenges and struggles, to ignore her perseverance and focus on her illness instead.
But to look at the world through such a narrow scope is to miss all the wonderful gray: the in between, the messy feelings and wonderfully messy people who are all some amalgamation of the good and the bad in their lives. Just like everybody else, my perspective is limited, but that does not mean I cannot work to widen my outlook: to look deeper, think harder, and constantly evaluate my personal prejudices and unconscious biases. I don’t have the hubris to say that I will ever understand anyone in their entirety, but I will always persevere to try, trusting in the human capacity to learn and mature like I have.
Just as I’ve grown to see beyond my preconceptions of my mother, I have gradually accepted the darker feelings that once gave me mortification. They are a part of me, and I must continually acknowledge them day-by-day if I am to continue to grow. There is no shame in learning from my own mistakes and actively working to be better. I will not hold myself to a static version of the past, too scared to admit my own faults, too scared to be anything other then perfect.
Perhaps I am not the perfect Chinese-American daughter, but I don’t have to be. Nothing is black-and-white, all-or-nothing, and my personal brand of filial piety isn’t either. My respect for my mother is intertwined with the weight of our experiences as a family and the lessons I have learned from her, and it is valid in its imperfection. I used to feel trapped in the need to personify perfect filial-piety. Instead, being my mother’s daughter has taught me to open my world and look outside of myself.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11_e-EqSIV2RRbV8R9zUDsUbrx3VywUHBmD5EyvQIGj4