My Grandmother's Daughter

Personal Essay by Sam Yan

Through weekly calls with his grandmother, a queer Chinese American navigates the painful choice to sever ties with his mother after a lifetime of seeking approval only to be told, “You’re not the son I wanted.”

By

Sam

— A YEAR WITHOUT WATER

Siahaan, Semsar. Ibu dan Anak (Mother and Child). 1982. National Gallery of Singapore, Singapore.

It’s a nondescript Sunday when my grandmother calls me, as she does every week. When I pick up, I pause to check if she’s dialed me by accident. I know that she occasionally sits around with her smartphone open to my contact page, frequently accidentally clicking the call button; it cheers me to know that she’s always thinking about me.

She claims to call because she misses the sound of my voice. Each time, it’s the same set of questions, a ritualistic dance of words choreographed for us two. She inquires if I’ve already eaten, if I’ve not been neglecting my nutrition. Even if I’m famished, I’ll invent the meals that I say I’ve had in response, and I always reply that I’m fine—I never want her to worry about me. She notices the noises underlying my voice, the whirring of vehicles passing by or the chatter from my television, and asks if I’m outside, perhaps with my friends. To keep things simple, I confirm. I don’t like to explain why I’m at home alone.

Sometimes, she updates me on the latest family gossip. She wants to know if I’m happy, living by myself on the other side of the country. She reminds me to take care and to work hard so that one day I can afford a home big enough for her to live with me. In response, I say, yes, of course. I miss you. I’ll talk to you again soon.

Almost ninety years old, she does not know how to end calls on a smartphone; I have to do it. It doesn’t exactly break my heart to hang up on her in this way, but I hesitate for a moment before I do, listening to and parsing the background sounds from her end, wondering whether she’s in her bedroom or elsewhere, hoping that she isn’t solitary. Through the phone, I try to glimpse her life from afar.

Of my four grandparents, she’s the only one with whom I have a relationship. I grew up with my hands held in hers, learning Hunan-style mahjong from her before I could recite the English alphabet. She raised me, and—since we’re no longer in physical proximity—calling is all she can manage now so as to continue looking after me. She does so because nowadays it is only her calls that I will take. She avoids mentioning her daughter, my mother, to me altogether.

I was twenty-nine when I came out to my mother. I had, as a pre-teen, opted to delay this confrontation for a future date, for when I was no longer dependent upon my parents, because I did not trust them to understand. My mother, for example, supported politicians and laws alike that would imperil my ability to exist; I remember vividly when she voted in favor of California’s infamous Proposition 8, causing to be enshrined into legality the exclusion of same-sex marriage—it is a recollection that has forever colored my perception of her. So, when I finally left my closet, I did so only because I had nothing left to lose. I was going through the worst breakup of my life, and I no longer cared what anybody could, should, would think about me. I decided to give her a chance, for the first time, to be there for me as a parent should do.

My mother was born in Changsha, the capital city of China’s Hunan province. It is a region known for being the home of Chinese cultural behemoths, including the Zhangjiajie National Forest Park and blisteringly spicy cuisine (one of China’s great eights; I much prefer our stinky tofu to Taiwan’s, where one of my grandfathers was born in Hualien), and its people are passionate, resourceful, and multifaceted. I think that would aptly describe her as well.

She grew up in a post-Cultural Revolution climate, one of five daughters in a lower middle-class family. As the second-eldest, she often forwent meals to ensure that the youngest had enough to eat. I was told by multiple people throughout my upbringing that there were many instances of her resorting to eating weeds when there was nothing else to consume. Her father, who I never met but shared my Chinese zodiac, was the sole breadwinner. (Extended relatives say that he would have adored me, the first male born to the family in two generations; I sometimes wonder, wryly, whether his son preference would have withstood my coming out.) Her mother, my beloved grandmother, stayed at home to raise their children. My grandfather longed for but never had a son—my mother, as obdurate as any boy could be, was his favorite.

The anecdotes that my grandmother favors about her daughter are those about her being stubborn and clever. When the neighborhood boys were bullies, it was my mother who stood up to them. She was the one who excelled in school, and she displayed natural intelligence early on, despite later confiding in me that she didn’t love to study (I take after her in this regard, among others) but had to do it to try escaping what would otherwise be an impoverished existence. In her teens, she braved arduous commutes to Beijing Normal University, where she took her place as one of the few hard-won spots allocated to Hunan. Upon graduation, she accepted an instructor position at a college in Fujian. It is there that she was briefly married before breaking it off to follow an American man to his family in Oregon, in pursuit of the American Dream as many immigrants were wont to do in the 1980s. But, the Americans wanted her to be a stay-at-home wife, contrary to her disposition, so she left behind the promise of an easy, prescribed life to make her way to Los Angeles, where she ultimately met my father and gave birth to me.

I do not think fondly of him. To label him an absent father would be a bit of a misnomer—he worked hard to make ends meet, driving for so long on his commutes that he once fell asleep at the wheel and totaled his car in traffic—and I do not begrudge him for his efforts to provide for us, but he was an ineffectual parent, both before and after their divorce; I consider myself to have been raised by women. Primogeniture bestowed upon me all the hopes and dreams—and fears and failures—of my immigrant parents, and LGBTQ first-generation firstborns have long reported the fissures that erupt between our progenitors and us; I am sorry to say that my experience has been no different. I was the wayward child, physically beaten by both father and mother because they equally disdained what they perceived to be my constant disobedience. When my grandmother stayed with us, when she intervened, she was shouted down. At least she tried.

I longed for normalcy. When—or, because—my grandmother did not live with us, I wanted parents who did not seem to hate me without reason. I understood that first-time parents make mistakes with their firstborn that they do not repeat for their subsequent children. I could forgive the extreme stress under which lower middle-class immigrants operate, but I needed parents who loved me. It was true that they had each braved harrowing journeys across the Pacific to give me an American life, that they placed food on the table and a roof over my head—what more could, should, I want from them? Did it really matter if I just wanted them to stop telling me they would kick me out of the house as soon as legally permissible, to quit lording over my head that I had no personal agency because I lived in their home, to end their ceaseless refrain that I was never good enough? All my material needs were met—was that not love? Was that not sufficient? Growing up, I almost never cried. It was moot.

I struggled to process their words. I already knew, from when I was as young as ten, that I couldn’t tell them I liked boys—it would risk accelerating their plainly stated desire to evict me—and I intuitively felt that they were not right to call me a good-for-nothing loser, but a void from deep within the center of my being began to grow. If I knew it was moot, if I had enough fortitude to know what they said was wrong, why did that black hole inside me continue to expand? Why couldn’t my nascent dignity diminish that angst? Icy tendrils reached out from my core to touch the far ends of my every limb until I was fully numb and, between twelve and eighteen, my sense of self-worth plummeted. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t good enough—it was that my very existence was an aberration. I ran away from home. I fantasized about killing myself. I spirited kitchen blades away to my bedroom, testing their mettle against my skin, dreaming of my mother chancing upon my corpse and watching from the afterlife her mourning her loss, but that would imply I was valued, perhaps even loved. I was severely depressed.

I attempted past-life regression hypnotherapy in the first half of 2024. My therapist instructed me to sink my consciousness back in time to my happiest childhood memory, at which point I had a complete breakdown, choking back tears to try to explain to her that I could pick out satisfaction, I could locate laughter, but I could not for the life of me find true happiness. All I had were remembrances of my mother chasing me with a long wooden baton, the one I wielded during my performance routines at figure skating competitions, competing with herself to count how many bruises she could inflict upon my skin. As a teenager with nonexistent self-esteem, I did her one better: I took a knife to the flesh of my inner left arm and carved the letters L-O-S-E-R.

In 2022, when I came out to my mother at last, she was quiet. She had called to ask me something inconsequential, but I had just gotten off the phone after decompressing to a close friend about my debilitating breakup and I couldn’t keep up the pretense anymore. At that point, I was hardly alive, and I didn’t have any energy left to continue living a lie. I interrupted whatever she was saying with three words: “Mom? I’m gay.”

She listened to me explain that I had known since I was in elementary school, that I had had a decade of un-coerced experience to know for certain, that I was doing so because I thought I had finally found the one, someone for whom I was ready to risk everything to introduce to her because I felt he would pass her muster, and that I was so irrevocably shattered by his departure I was willing to turn to her for support. I had wanted to marry him, to buy a home and settle down with him, to spend the rest of my life with him, a man she didn’t even know was real until I spoke him into existence right then. She took a moment to digest my words, and then reverted with a sincere question: “Was it the ice skating [that made me gay]?”

Over the course of almost a year, our relationship normalized. When I returned to California to visit her, I found she had decorated the bedroom reserved for my use in gaudy live-laugh-love decor, plastered with the vacant sort of platitudes that would be marketed to devoutly Christian parents of gay children. (It’s okay to be gay!) Still, I recognized an olive branch for what it was, and I lowered my guard. When she later dropped me off at a female friend’s home on my way back to New York, she reminded me to take care of myself and said that I should find a wife as competent as that friend; I laughingly retorted that I was looking for a husband. For a brief period, we had an amicable rapport. It was nice while it lasted.

Months afterward, when she asked me to accompany her on a trip back to her hometown, I agreed, rationalizing that it would be meaningful to return as an adult to her—and my—childhood stomping grounds. On the way there, we stopped in Taiwan, where decades of friction came to a head.

Our initial few days in Taipei were chilly, and I shivered everywhere we went because I had forgotten to pack a coat. I like to assume that she felt bad for me because, on the third day, she led me to a generic clothing store and instructed me to pick out a jacket. She watched me sift through the clothes, suggesting that I pick the cheapest one. But, I disagreed: the least expensive option was also the one I was most unlikely to wear and offered the littlest insulation, thus rendering such a purchase functionally pointless. Instead, I had my eyes set on a down jacket for just twenty dollars more. Yet, she sniped at my choice, making comments under her breath about my spendthrift tendencies that spiraled into full-blown insults about my apparent stupidity for incorrectly packing my clothing. Having had a lifetime of experience with her propensity for nastiness and with the understanding that this was a proxy fight about something deeper, something latent, I refused to tolerate her attitude. I retorted that she was overreacting, being ridiculous and even miserly over such an immaterial price difference for a jacket I wasn’t asking her to buy. She didn’t love my snark. I had provoked her, and she began to scream at me in public, castigating me for my every wrong—my failure to get into an Ivy League college, my supposed mediocre career, my sexual deviance. I was wholly unappreciative of all that she had ever done for me, and I was a colossal screwup for not living my life exactly as she demanded I did, building up to the final sentence she ever spoke to me. To this day, her words haunt me still: “你就不是我要的儿子.” You’re not the son I wanted.

Harris, Chinese Canadian and one of my best friends, says his parental trauma stems from “having a crazed mother who yells at [him] for any small thing that could go wrong.” Thus, he has become “a pushover afraid of making any mistakes because [he] doesn’t want to argue” with his mother, with anyone; forced perfectionism births paralysis. I am the same and yet the diametrical opposite—I spent too many years being obsequious, so I am now always confrontational to a fault—no longer will I accept deliberate malice, and certainly not from anyone who has had decades of maturity to learn, to be, better. When my mother’s facade broke, despite the pure frivolity of the disagreement, I accepted her words verbatim: after thirty years of being shown that I am not the child she envisioned, knowing full well that she had terminated a pregnancy years before choosing to conceive me, that she had gone through all the heart-wrenching effort of having me only to decide she abhorred me, I encouraged her, egging her on. I wanted to hear her speak the truth. When it came, it wasn’t a surprise—it was a culmination of a lifetime of disdain. The next day, I went straight to the airport, leaving Taiwan. My mother no longer has a son.

My grandmother always told me that her daughter had lived a rough life. She had given up lucrative opportunities in China to start from scratch in America, emigrating with less than twenty dollars to her name. As I grew up, I watched her accept a series of odd jobs to make ends meet, from selling avocados to being a substitute Chinese tutor to hawking bamboo. Even as a child, I dutifully edited the written English in her work because I hated knowing that her colleagues discriminated against her for her non-native fluency. At length, I listened to her explain her inability to withstand hunger because it reminded her of her famished childhood years, and I felt those acute stomach pangs too when my own eating was drastically disordered in secret. I was there when life wasn’t easy, and I understood without question that she was doing her best, that nobody was perfect. Nonetheless, despite my every attempt, that knowledge does not, can not, will not help me absolve her harm. Equally, I recall all the moments when I wanted to come out to her, fantasizing about getting the same kind of acceptance I only ever saw other people receive, and stopping myself because I feared her reaction. I still remember trembling because I wanted her approval, not her reproaches, verbal and physical. I can not forget all the nights wherein I longed to disappear far, far away, cursing the fact that I was born to her because I thought it tied me to terror, to her, forever.

Can there be an end to filial piety? Am I allowed to step away? When I spurn my maker, do I hack off my nose to spite my face? If I know that some differences are simply too great to be bridged, what right do I have to remain aggrieved? I confess that I blame myself. These were not isolated events: I had endured similar incidents—public haranguing and private abuses—a million times, yet still I forgave because I wanted to be a part of the family to which I was born, blood being thicker than water and so on. I had spent my life vacillating between acquitting her mistakes and retaining enough self-worth to know that I am not one of those mistakes, but I felt guilty for resenting her implacability, for wishing that I had a “better” mother, for wanting a different life when life itself is so rare a gift. I felt wrong for hating the person who created me. It was the evergreen comparison between the illusion I desired against what was materially real; I knew that grass is always greenest where it is watered, but the greens I tried to nurture in my family’s plot had long ago expired.

As I write this, the calendar in the top right corner of my computer screen alerts me to today being her date of birth.

In the years past, it was customary for me to send her a bouquet at least twice a year: on Mother’s Day and on her birthday. As soon as I had my own discretionary income, I put in a standing order at a florist near her home to recur biannually because it was the right thing to do. Despite—or, resultant of—everything, all the good and the bad, it was important to me that she understood I did not take her for granted. I had wanted her to know that I loved her.

My grandmother’s daughter taught me that water is done boiling when it is quiet. She scrimped and saved to send me to figure skating classes, to chaperone me as I entered competitions across Southern California, to be there for me as the lone pair of eyes supporting me amidst a crowd of strangers’ watching me perform, because it had once been her dream.

The dark circles underneath my eyes are hers. The contours of my lips and the shape of my eyes are hers. My love for music, for travel and adventure, is hers. My disarming charm and natural curiosity, my instinct for self-preservation, my refusal to accept unfairness, my drive to go after what I want despite the countervailing odds, the voice in my head telling me that it’s not enough, that I will never be good enough, they are all hers—and yet they have become mine as well. The more I describe her, the more I describe myself.

My grandmother phoned me when she learned of our estrangement. She asked me to show her daughter grace, but I refused. I declined to mend a bond thirty years in the unmaking. Not once in my lifetime have I ever heard a single word of apology or even acknowledgement from her daughter, and still I am wracked with doubt about whether I should reconsider my decision to withdraw, whether waiting to hear the words that I know will not come is a Sisyphean exercise, but I am no longer forgiving enough to let it go. Forgiveness is a gift given to one’s self, I am well aware, but it is something that I simply can not muster. Ergo, I have selfishly chosen to sever relations, thereby preserving at least a modicum of my own peace.

I’ve been preparing myself for this irrevocable goodbye, knowing full well that time eventually returns us all to the earth, preemptively eulogizing her despite an omnipresent, nagging fear that I will miss her more than anything in the world when she is truly gone. I still have the nightmares, horrible dreams wherein she screams at me for my shortcomings; I still wake up with tears in my eyes.

So, instead, my grandmother calls me every week to ask if I am well.

I always say yes.

About Sam

Born a Chinese American and raised between Los Angeles and Changsha, Sam is currently a resident of New York City. He is a creative nonfiction writer and the author of A YEAR WITHOUT WATER. In his free time, he is a stinky tofu enthusiast and welcomes all inside information on the whereabouts of the world's best, most pungently delicious treat.