as you left it

The way my mother speaks about her family is starkly different from the way my father does. For one, there is far less grandeur in my mother’s family to pride over, and much more urban folklore, stovetop tales, and such, to pass on. The only names my mother knows are not famous ancestor's, but the family names she called her aunts and uncles. My sister and I once reflected on this difference by saying that if our father knows his family history like a tapestry; our mother is woven into hers. Perhaps it is class that creates this divide, or the way women are made to carry the domestic histories, or it could be proximity to immigration. I read once that immigration is most traumatic for the 1.5 generation like my mother, the ones who arrive at twelve years old or younger, still trying to form their identities. What this means for my mother and her closeness to the story, a stitch pulled tight like thousands before, I cannot say with certainty.

My mother has said that when she was growing up, Ah Boo would frequently tell her that she was the oldest and had to control her siblings, and then leave them all alone. It’s easier to understand now that Ah Boo was a young mother, overwhelmed with her own responsibility, though I try my best not to sensationalize their struggle for narratives of the American Dream. When they moved to America, they first lived in a small apartment in Queens and then moved to a house in Long Island, at one point housing thirteen people of relatives. When I ask Ah Boo about their immigration she brushes most questions off, saying it only took a year or so to adjust, language was no problem, she had things under wraps. But my mother’s younger sister has told me that she would often look at Ah Boo as a child and wonder why her face was always wet and black, not seeing a posh twenty-two year old with two daughters and tears streaming, all new in a country where she could not speak the language. It is something else entirely to be the oldest daughter in a family of immigrants. Despite how young she was when she came to this country, in these days I see my mom often as more immigrant than not, more immigrant than she acknowledges most of the time. Unlike Dad, these stories never surprise or deter her. She passes them on like old gossip, like things she always really knew or expected, and pushes back on my questions—you have to remember, she says, none of it is really any different from the United States. There is nothing stranger about who we have been or how we lived than the people around us now.

Don’t let them make you think differently.  

I never met Daiguma. I’m not even sure of her real name; Daiguma is a word for aunt in Cantonese, as my mother called her. I mention this and my mother clucks—you know that we’re Chinese. No one knows any real names.

Daiguma is the only woman I have ever heard of whose name itself necessitates a call and response. To invoke her name is to make anyone who knew her immediately say, “She was so beautiful, but she made so many bad decisions.” My mother once asked a cousin to dig around with some older relatives to find out what she could about Daiguma’s life. I remember we met her cousin for lunch and before she even hit her seat, she said, “Well she was very, very gorgeous and had a horrible life.” Ah Gong gave me the same spiel about his own sister. I barely say her name before he says, “Sometimes to be beautiful means you don’t make good choices.”

Daiguma’s daughter, my Auntie Dora, is one of two aunts I have on my mother’s side of the family, though she is really my mother’s first cousin. When our family moved to the United States, Daiguma and Dora lived with them, and so my mother considers her a sister. Daiguma died of cancer in the 80s, and was seldom mentioned when I was growing up. My Auntie Dora lives a modest life in the country of Vermont. I was surprised to hear about her mother for the first time, a bombshell Shanghai beauty of the 1940s, a negative space I always knew existed in our relationship to my Auntie Dora.

Even after she passed away, men would call my Ah Gong saying his sister had seduced them and taken their money. My mother remembers walking in on Daiguma with mink coats gifted to her by other lovers. Ah Gong says little of Daiguma’s life and Ah Boo was almost twenty-five years younger than Daiguma, her own mother being younger than Daiguma was. What I know about Daiguma leans towards rumor from over the years. I have heard that when she was young, men in Shanghai fought over her, that the one man she loved was not one she could have. I know that in the end, she married an old and powerful man. But the safe choice she made in him turned on her after he was put in jail when the communists took over. So she fled to Hong Kong, leaving both him and their young son behind. Supposedly, she disappeared for years, even though she and Ah Gong knew they had both made it to Hong Kong. She had an affair with a married man and became pregnant, and finally then, she sought out my Ah Gong for support. He helped throughout the years after she had Auntie Dora. When Ah Boo and Ah Gong moved to the United States, they came soon after and lived with them for two years.

My mother says, we always say the same things about Daiguma. She made so many mistakes, why do smart women choose bad men, she was a tragic beauty. But it’s funny, because when I remember Daiguma, I remember her picking her toes on the couch with Ah Boo’s mother and laughing about men. She got married again in the United States and was happy then, really happy with him. But that could be why it’s tragic. As soon as things got better for her, she got cancer and died.

There is nothing I can say about her without speculation, without placing her beauty and tragedy only within a framework that is stuck in wartime Shanghai, or at least 1960s Hong Kong. There is nothing I can say about her without speculation other than that she is still missed.