My dad dropped me off, along with my trio of suitcases, at the front steps leading up to the squat brick house. 

“You know, your mom need to go outside and exercise more,” he’d said on the drive back from Boston Logan airport. “And get some friends.”

I was greeted by the doormat caked with dirt and pine needles, unopened mail blanketing the kitchen table and spilling onto the floor, dirty dishes climbing out of the sink and onto the stove, rotting persimmons melting into sticky brown puddles on the countertop, fruit flies making spawning grounds of moldy melon rinds and mango skins. Home sweet home.

During the year I was away at college, my mother had only sunken deeper into her abyss. I didn’t know how to reach her down there. I texted her happy birthday and happy Chinese New Year in January, and didn’t receive a response until May. I sent her links to online therapy platforms that accepted insurance, and received no response at all.

When my uncle couldn’t reach his sister because she was too depressed to check her texts or voicemails or emails or WeChat, Jiù Jiu tracked down her ex-husband, who told his son to tell his mother that her own mother had died. My dad then texted me, looping me in on the news: “Btw, did Jamie tell your mom that your grandma (Lao Lao) passed away?” That’s how I found out my grandma died. 

 

I spent the summer after freshman year painting once again in the basement, which had suffered multiple floodings and further decay since my departure. The rodents that scurried across the floor and scrabbled at the insides of the walls didn’t bother me that much. Neither did the long-legged spiders decorating every corner with gossamer silk. Nor the broken light panel dangling from the caved-in ceiling, nor the brown ribbony mushrooms sprouting at the edges of the damp carpet, nor the acorn caps and mouse droppings scattered about like confetti at a baby shower. But the flies – the fucking flies – got me like nothing else. 

The sight of just a single house fly would unleash something primal in my body, and there were so many of them. So goddamn many. I made an exception in my policy to do no harm to other living things – I was under siege, so martial law was called for. I had to eliminate these exponentially multiplying fuckers before everything was deluged by the monstrous swarm.

Every day, I would stand in the center of the water-stained basement carpet with eyes peeled, bouncing on my toes with a slight bend in my knees, gripping my pink plastic fly swatter with a murderous rage. Sometimes I would wait for them to land, sometimes I would lunge for them in midair. When their bodies plummeted down and ricocheted off the floor, I would suck up their mutilated corpses with my mini handheld vacuum. But sometimes their guts and limbs would get smeared on the wall or ceiling, and I would have to wet a paper towel with cleaning spray, climb up onto a chair, and scrub away the forensic evidence.

Because I logged a lot of things – the books I’ve read, the movies I’ve watched, the times and locations of the blowjobs I’ve given, the brand and date of purchase and cost per unit and taste rating of the various protein bars I’ve tried – I began to log my daily fly kill-count. A sample week from July: 66, 79, 64, 48, 53, 44, 45.

Swat. Thirty-four. Swat. Thirty-five. Climb silently onto the chair. Don’t move. Wait for the little demon to descend onto the ceiling light. Okay now go. Thirty-six.

Each buzzing black menace was an agent of darkness, trauma reincarnated in the flesh, a phantom sent deliberately by the universe to haunt me. I seemed to have a problem with that, imagining ghostly contours shimmering into solidity where there was only empty space.

My mother was unrecognizable now from who she used to be. The dictator who once wielded such absolute power had been deposed. The person who hurt me was gone. The perpetrator was dead.

 

Forgiveness is a virtue, they say. It’s something you “should” do, like eating your spinach despite the chalky bitterness that numbs your mouth. It’s supposed to be good for you.

Traditional Christian views hold that forgiveness is a transcendent act of love and compassion. Colossians 3:13: “Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.”

Ancient Greek thinkers like Plato and Seneca asserted that all forms of anger are inconsistent with living a moral life, because they threaten reason and self-control and tempt us to cruelty and vengeance. Contemporary philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas argued that forgiveness has the power to reconstruct our reality, to make new meaning: “forgiveness acts upon the past, somehow repeats the event, purifying it” – much like Nietzsche’s transfiguration of life’s suffering through the redemption of art. 

There are even supposedly physiological perks: psychologist Charlotte Witvliet conducted studies in 2001 that found that participants who engaged in the act of forgiving a past offense experienced enduring reductions in heart rate, blood pressure, and stress response of the parasympathetic nervous system.

So, the Jesus lovers, the old-timey philosophers who really liked little boys, the new-timey philosophers who hopefully didn’t really like little boys, the no-nonsense academics – they’re all on the same page: forgiveness is good. You should do it. 

But what if it’s hard?

No matter how forcefully I fought, the riptide of grief would suck me in, and I would be unable to paddle hard enough to resist. I would find myself drowning. Every time I looked at the helpless shell of a person sinking into the cushions of the living room couch, I couldn’t help but relive the memory of the monster who once prowled these halls.

But the flesh of that beast had shriveled down to a pile of skin and bones, leaving behind only a phantasm living in my own mind. I was angry at a figment of the past. As Chanel Miller writes in Know My Name, “hate is a heavy thing to carry, takes up too much space inside the self.” Barely able to move amidst the sea of clutter, I knew it was time to clear out the mess of the old to make room for the new. So while I do not condone or excuse what my mother did to me, I’ve been trying to open my heart, little by little.

Thanks to the healing powers of Time and Distance, I’ve been able to find a lot more empathy for my mother. As a child, she was rejected by her parents, abused by her aunt, and shipped off to boarding school, left to fend for herself against the cruelty of the world. She once gleamed with such dazzling brilliance – she was exempted from college entrance exams for her academic excellence, received automatic acceptance to the best university in China, completed a Harvard PhD and Stanford post-doc, got recruited to one of the most prestigious management consulting firms in the world – and then her light had been brutally extinguished. She became a single mother who had never wanted motherhood in the first place, who then watched her family implode and career deteriorate and purpose evaporate.

Forgiveness is not a discrete decision or a one-time act, but an arduous, unfolding struggle. You have to choose it again, and again, and again. Perhaps forgiveness is slowly picking up the shards of a shattered glass from the cold kitchen tiles, hunching your back and bloodying the tips of your shaking fingers, and gluing the pieces back together one by one.

Here we are with this ugly, misshapen vessel. It’s not what it was before, but it’s something intact and new. And maybe we can drink out of it together.

 

In All About Love, bell hooks writes, “Forgiveness is an act of generosity…By forgiving we clear a path on the way to love.” Love – what a clumsy and weighted thing. My mom had always outwardly expressed her love for me, a rare deviation from the norm of East Asian immigrant parenting. But the purity of the sentiment curdled over time, as “love” was distorted and weaponized and reduced to a bargaining chip.

“You clearly don’t love me if you…”

“I love you too much to let you…”

“If you really loved me, you wouldn’t…”

So we don’t say “I love you” anymore, a phrase too freighted with the baggage of history. Now we say “wǒ aì nǐ,” which feels dry and sticky and alien on my tongue, like the unstirred peanut butter that settles at the bottom of the jar. Mandarin has never been our language of communication, so its use marks a deliberate shift in emotional register, a deliberate distancing. The unfamiliarity constructs a safe barrier between us, provides a soft cushion to land, allows us to reach out tentatively toward each other while still keeping something for ourselves. Still keeping our hearts intact. “Wǒ aì nǐ” feels less committal, less devoted, but more open to the possibility of new meaning.

 

During my increasingly infrequent visits home, my mom and I often play out the same motions of a new routine we’ve established. After sunset, I’ll find her on the couch curled in the dark, reading her Chinese novel, her face illuminated only by the cool glow of her iPad screen.

“Nǐ yào dēng ma?” I’ll ask. Do you want light?

“Hǎo, xiè xiè,” she’ll say. Yes, thank you. 

“Wǒ aì nǐ, mā mā.” I love you, Mommy.

“Wǒ yě aì nǐ, bǎo bèi.” I love you too, baby.

That's all I can offer to my Mommy. My fragile, fallible, human Mommy. My mommy who endured so much and tried so hard. My mommy who had such magical dreams and such disenchanting reality. 

All I can offer: a little bit of light, and wǒ aì nǐ, mā mā.