More than one life could contain: Mothers and daughters in Real Americans and How to End A Love Story

By Thu Anh Nguyen

There is a black and white photo of my mom holding me as a baby. Her hair is long and curled, and she is stunningly beautiful (everyone says so when they see this photo, but it’s redundant). When I am thirty-one years old—the same age as my mother was when we were captured in black and white—in my postpartum depression haze, I decide to reproduce this photo with me holding my first son. I spend too long digging through my closet to find a shirt that is like hers. I curl my hair, something that I rarely do, and certainly have not done in years. I tell my brother, the photographer, to take my photo in black and white as well. He understands what’s happening even if I don’t.

Now both photos sit next to each other on my mantle in the living room. It’s so obvious what I was trying to do, what I am always trying to do. I am trying to live up to my mother, but part of me understands that the more we compare ourselves, the more I try, the more I fall short. Mom is so aspirational for me: I feel proud of myself when I can taste something someone else has made, and then cook it without a recipe, using only my senses. Mom never taught me how to do that, but I am good with my hands, and quick on my feet the way she is. Even so, I vow not to make my kids–or anyone for that matter–feel inadequate or like a failure if they aren’t good at the same things. I don’t want to be a martyr, to work myself into the ground, and resent everyone for it because I watched that make her miserable for years. All the ways in which we are similar just highlight all the ways in which we are different from each other. I am as equally proud of that fact as I am ashamed. I really know how to break my own heart. I learned it from my mom.

It’s impossible to be the daughter of my mother and read books like Real Americans by Rachel Khong and How to End A Love Story by Yulin Kuang without thinking about all the daughters and mothers that ever were, all the ways the daughters are pulled towards and away from their mothers. Khong and Kuang’s books are arguably about so many other things—romance, socioeconomic class, Hollywood, and grief—but the way they examine mothers and daughters is their deepest, raw core.

The mothers in both novels are Asian immigrant women, like my own mother. In Real Americans, May is mother to Lily, and May’s own difficult life fleeing China during Mao’s Cultural Revolution drives many of her decisions in raising her daughter. May never tells Lily about her history, and it’s that choice to leave the past in the past that makes it so haunting; a specter that hangs over both of them, and the generation that follows.

In How to End a Love Story, Helen, the novel’s protagonist, explains that while her parents support her, “they don’t have context for her and it makes her feel like they’re talking in opposite directions in every conversation.” Of course, for immigrant families, part of the lack of understanding between generations is due to all the borders crossed, and it is the price of the American dream. Helen thinks that her parents should have realized the price they paid since they “decided to move to another country and start a family…[they] should have known that not fully understanding [their] own kids would come with that territory.” What both books examine are all of the impossible choices parents have to make. Whether or not they realized the price they paid, what could they have done differently? Would they have done anything differently? A common refrain in my immigrant household when I was growing up was that my parents gave up so much so that I could have an easier life than my parents had.

Speaking to Roxane Gay’s book club about Real Americans, Khong used words similar to Helen’s in How to End A Love Story, saying that “parents make the best decisions [they] can for [their] child but are missing so much context.” Khong explained that “it’s such an American belief that we are responsible for our own fates” when there are other powerful forces making decisions for us. For May, those forces included the Cultural Revolution and the limited pathways a young Chinese woman could take. May expects Lily to capitalize on the advantages she has as a first generation Asian American. Lily describes how that pressure to perform weighed heavily on her:

She’d decided, back then, that I was remarkable, and I could not persuade her otherwise. I was nothing special, I wanted to protest. I wouldn’t ever be…But I couldn’t say that now…

Lily feels like she is falling short of May’s American dream for her partly because she’s constantly an assistant, and never a boss. Lily recalls what it felt like as a nine-year-old visiting her mother’s science lab. Lily feels how disappointed May is that she doesn’t love it as much as she does. Lily realizes that May “had always longed for more. She had always wanted more than one life could contain.” Something that characterizes parental love is the magnitude of the love, but the difficulty with that outsized love is the outsized longing and expectation that comes with it. Because Real Americans is told in three different sections, one from each generation—May, Lily, and Lily’s son Nick—we get to see what the lives do contain, all the hopes and dreams, and limited perspectives of each character, realized and unrealized. What is beautiful about Khong’s fiction is that it allows the reader to transcend the limited perspectives; we get to see the parts of the story that each generation of her characters miss.

Perhaps the largest thing left unsaid in both novels is love. Khong describes this as a generational issue where “we miss each other slightly; we try to love each other, but we can’t do it the right way; we can’t meet each other as peers.” In both Real Americans and How to End A Love Story, it might be easy to misread the mothers’ coldness or harshness as a lack of love, but it’s more than that. It’s a language and a cultural issue; it’s what it means to be an immigrant child to parents who grew up in a foreign land. When her mother tells her repeatedly that she is happy for Lily’s engagement, Lily cannot believe her. Lily hears it the same way she hears “I love you,” as a “foreign phrase…that would never be native, or natural.” It’s as if Khong is saying that part of the foreignness of being an Asian in America is being a foreigner to love. The misunderstanding goes both ways: Lily also doesn’t understand that giving her mother a clock as a present is bad luck in Chinese tradition. In that moment, I wanted to give her a prize for just trying. We are all just trying so hard to love—to show love, and be loved.

It is particularly poignant in How to End A Love Story that Helen struggles to articulate love because this book is a Romance. Readers expect a happy ending, but Helen knows that she has “never been built for that kind of uncomplicated happily ever after,” and wonders “if she’s incapable of loving the way other people do.” She defends herself by saying that she can only love the way that she’s been taught to love: she loves her parents even if it sounds like she doesn’t “to people who come from other types of families. Families that know how to love each other out loud.” The “out loud” was so familiar to me as a child who grew up only hearing families say “I love you” in sitcoms. Those families I saw on TV were mostly white families, like the family of Grant, the man Helen starts a relationship with. When she visits his house for the first time, Helen is immediately welcomed by Grant’s mother, like it was such an easy thing to do. Helen does start saying “I love you” out loud in college, but it sounded forced. She can’t imagine saying it without “immediately dying of embarrassment.” Love is so overwhelming even though it can’t be vocalized, and when Helen and her mother have a terrible fight, she tells her mother that it is “suffocating” being loved by her.

It makes complete sense to me that the love is too little or too much in these books. How could it be the right amount when so much depends upon it? Is the point to even say it out loud? When parents have done everything for their children, why would they also need to say anything about it? Nick, Lily’s son in Real Americans, is second generation and half white, and feels the same guilt and pressure that Lily felt growing up: “he knew he would always feel guilt,” that “there could never be a righting of the scales.” For me, the most devastating and true lines about being Asian American are when Nick wonders “why did parents perform all these un-repayable acts? Was it because they felt guilty for bringing us here in the first place? It was a chain of guilt, like daisies, unbroken.” If love is a clumsy connector, it seems often in these books that guilt might be the sturdiest connector.

Lately, every book I read seems to mention generational trauma, and it’s clear that both Khong and Kuang’s books portray its devastating effects. The characters hurt each other in shameful, cyclical cycles that I recognize from my own family’s stories. While Real Americans and How to End A Love Story reminded me of so many tortured conversations with my mother, and also all the conversations that I was never able to have, what gave me hope, and why I loved these books, is that they recognize both what is untranslatable between Asian American children and their immigrant parents—what is possible beyond language and beyond the American dream.

Although May can’t say “I love you” in a believable way, the love is there, and is as much a part of their family story as guilt is. Lily catches her mother staring at her, “with love in her expression that was a little too much to bear” and then one glance later: “her expression said she didn’t know me at all, yet recognized me completely.” When Lily and Matthew are first falling in love in Real Americans, they are too shy to say “love,” so instead say that they are “not nothing” to each other. Lily being recognized by May is not nothing, and maybe it’s everything to these Asian Americans who have spent their lives trying to assimilate. Even more than I have wanted love, I have wanted my mother to just recognize me.

At the end of Real Americans, after years of estrangement, May resolves to write Lily a letter. She knows that she doesn’t have the language to say what she wants to say precisely, but that she can “try.” It’s the trying that feels so real to me. It’s not a happy ending per se, but a hopeful one.

In How to End a Love Story, Helen tries to imagine an “all-American fantasy” where she and her parents have a heart to heart, but that never happens. Months after their biggest fight, they have a meal. Things have both changed, and they have stayed the same. Helen is with Grant, a man her parents deeply disapprove of. The distance between her and her parents remains very real as Helen stays in a rental instead of in her childhood home. When Helen apologizes to her mother for their last difficult conversation, her mom just gets up to clear the bowls, and announces it’s time for cake. They don’t need to talk anymore because what is left to say? Actions are what matter now. Helen’s parents don’t ever say they approve of Grant, but Mom invites him back to the house to pay his respects at their ancestral altar, and this is an invite I recognize for its worth: it means possibility for a future beyond the guilt, and all the terrible things they have undergone. At the house, Helen worries that she doesn’t know if she is using the incense correctly, but her mother says that Helen does it “fine,” and maybe there isn’t a right or wrong way to do it because “the important thing is we still have a connection.”

I feel connected to my mother every time I look at our photos side by side. It’s a connection that I feel more than I understand. My mother almost never speaks of her childhood in Vietnam, or of that time captured in the photo when she had to suddenly leave her own family and move in with my father’s much larger and chaotic one. When Mom has spoken of it, it’s in very few words, words that remind me of something Khong or Kuang would write: it was hard, of course, but what did you expect? I can see now that maybe my mother was trying to let me make my own way. Maybe she didn’t have the words to tell me, and I’m not sure I would have listened. I am her daughter, after all.

I Have to Leave So That I Can Return

By Thu Anh Nguyen

I am always leaving, and I want them to be prepared. Before summer suddenly turns into Fall, before all the leaves have hit the ground, I make sure I have somewhere else to go. I have to leave so that I can return, so that I can make it through the bitter cold months of winter. It’s my own way of preserving myself; I am the best and most ripe at the height of harvest, and I can last all year only if we spend some time working on me, getting me ready for the long haul.

This leave-taking is the natural rhythm of my family. It’s the way of refugees, which we four became after the Vietnam war ended.

First, Dad tried to leave on a boat, without us.

Then the four of us left together, on a plane. You would think that leaving the only language and family you have to land in the country that helped you destroy yourself would be the hard thing, but it turns out that you don’t find a place to land right away.

The first place we leave in the United States is California because we don’t know anyone there. Then we leave Houma, a town so tiny in Louisiana, that I still describe it as “near New Orleans.” Dad barely made a living on the shrimping boats, and came home reeking every night. Mom couldn’t find a job, and we couldn’t continue living with their friends even though they begged us to stay.

Mom got worried when Dad was held up at gunpoint one evening even though he claimed it was no big deal, and the guy just wanted a ride. The final straw, when it was too much to bear to stay, was when their friends offered to adopt me and my brother.

We settled in Florida, but the leaving never stopped.

This leave-taking is the natural rhythm of my family. It’s the way of mothers, which I never understood until I became my own mother.

Mom had periods every few years when she went silent. She was a storm we couldn’t forecast. She did not make any announcements, but acted like she was going to run an errand, or go to Ba Noi’s house. Then she just didn’t come home for a few days.

Did I worry about her when she was gone? Did I miss her? Did I know, somewhere beyond knowing, that she was going to come back? I know now that she did not have to come back. She was always beautiful, and she was the one who knew how to do the important things: the caring, the laundering, the feeding, the sheltering. She could have made a new family. More likely, she could have gone it alone, not have to hand her weekly paycheck to any man, slice apples for children to snack on, or pretend to smile when our restaurant customers complimented her on her English. She could have been gloriously invisible, untethered.

I can’t distinguish these fantasies I have for her from my own.

Mom always returned, and I still don’t know where she went. My brother doesn’t even remember that she left at all (or he’s not letting himself remember). My dad never acknowledged it beyond having to make us hot dogs with buttered rice for dinner.

I learned from my parents that you leave to survive. I don’t think I will leave my children or my husband, but how can I know for sure? What do I really know of disaster?

My leaving is less significant than theirs in every way, but it is also how I survive. When I am seventeen, I move out of my parents’ house. I don’t speak to my father for a few years, not until I am financially independent. I don’t fully reconcile with him until I am dating someone so beyond his reproach, he has nothing to say to me about it. I have finally learned to harness patriarchal oppression to my advantage.

And every couple of weeks, when I speak to my mom on the phone, I hang up on her in the middle of a conversation. I am 41 years old, and I am still having to find a way out. During one particularly circuitous and brutal conversation recently, she asked me, “why do you have to be this way?” You know my response. This is all you’ve taught me.

Overcome by Water

By Thu Anh Nguyen

Sunglasses Sales Pitch

By Thu Anh Nguyen

Here is where we try.
You have told me that you don’t know
how to keep a precious thing,
but I am going to be so easy
to love. I promise. I can be practical
if that’s what it takes. You don’t have to be
panicked by my beauty.

Just think about how I go with anything,
fit neatly into your bag, stay snug
on your head like a crown, like a sign
that reads: I am responsible!
You can trust me!

You are barely looking at me now,
and I can see it already:
you are grieving my loss.
You know it’s coming, and you would
shield yourself from it.

Symbols Are Not Excuses

By Thu Anh Nguyen

I am learning a lesson that I cannot welcome
about arteries and lungs
and all the things that can go wrong.
What went wrong yesterday was my ceiling fell in
and then the desk broke.
It would have been symbolic for go home
but symbols are not excuses.

And the day before, and for many days before that one,
I had been learning about brothers and fathers,
how they can make jokes with machines beeping in the background,
even while the blood is being drawn,
and each breath measured.

I can’t call the right people to fix the ceiling because
how can I possibly think about that when I am busy
learning for the first time about my aunt,
the ugly one who snapped chickens’ necks,
who was a prostitute?

I put books under the desk to prop it back up
so that everything will look like it’s supposed to
while I am looking out my window,
my mind bending back toward home
like a leaf toward light.

I can hear the burrowing owls,
my father’s raspy, wet breath,
and my own whisper too. I say go gently.
What use am I pushing against it, against his heart?
As if I stood a chance against a desk, a ceiling,
or any real thing.

Proximity

By Thu Anh Nguyen

This is a house warmed with worry,
and still, he’s cold all the time under his knit cap and gloves.

She has to put his socks on for him, one at a time,
slip them on in a way that pretends he still has dignity,

that he doesn’t want to just run out the doors,
shirtless and deep brown, and not as tired as he is now.

I have come home to witness this, to pretend
that I can’t see how he is not himself anymore.

We come home because so much meaning
has to do with proximity:

When I was younger, it was too much—unbearable—
the kind of love that makes you move out when you are seventeen.

But now, I think, no one else will ever worry if I am working
too much or too hard, if I leave early in the morning, in the cold dark.

Who will tell me if I am raising the kind of kids who will come home
when I need them, to warm me, to bear witness to me?

Mud

By Thu Anh Nguyen

When you forget to take off your shoes
before entering, what it means to
wear white in your hair (doom),
how many times to flick the incense
before surrendering to Buddha,
you know that you have been
away too long.

If only there were fewer ways to
address a relative and
fewer relatives to address,
one less obstacle to
bridging the inevitable discomfort,
crossing the distance from
Here to There.

* * *

The slippery sweetness,
desserts passed from mouth
to mouth, mother to child,
every precaution taken,
(even before birth)
a daily diet of fresh papaya
ensures a perfect complexion.

Bui doi are the dirt of life,
orphan children,
life’s dirt
rising.
An unlucky child, the first born—a girl
with no understanding
of what it means to be unwanted.

Huge almond eyes
foretell of bright future,
journeys made far and wide
in the pursuit of her
hard-worked-for perfection,
to show her how much
she is wanted.

* * *

Winds, like change,
stir things up and
the dirt rises
like air,
in air,
God knows where,
a land
forsaken.

The pure sense of things,
of good and bad,
clean and dirty,
lost
amongst bad people
who are always clean,
scrubbing white the girl,
undoing her world.

Precautions taken forgotten,
rituals erased by routine.
Building a new land inside old people is like
taking the bui out of doi,
dirt out of life,
building sandcastles
out of mud children.

* * *

What we have lost
is not nearly as much as
what we have gained, and if
anything was ever done,
it was with more joy than pain,
a priceless future bought,
lifting dirt
from the ground after rain.

Tradition

By Thu Anh Nguyen

They Called Us Wetbacks

By Thu Anh Nguyen

Mom's Viet Kitchen

By Thu Anh Nguyen & Nguyen Khoi Nguyen