For Mom and For Me
Sometime between middle and high school: a vignette and a minivan
I get in and she tells me that I should sleep, that I barely slept last night, 要多睡. A few moments later, I wake up in the parking lot to staccato sounds of her iPad home button. On my left, she’s reading WeChat—"experts" say microwaves are causing cancer again. I ask her how long we've been sitting here, and she says some time greater than 30 minutes; I ask her why she didn't go inside and leave me there, and she tells me the car door closing would have woken me up and that I need to sleep; she explains I didn't sleep much last night so I need to sleep more, that my body is growing and I need to be tall. I manage to say a quiet sorry, then manually roll up the seat incline at an awkward angle, momentarily wishing gravity worked in the opposite direction. The gear is stiff with age now. These leather seats are cracked and softly folded—wrinkles that carve out a childhood.
Unlike most our stuff, this minivan came with us when I was 5 and we moved from Texas where I was born to China for dad's work. For a while, we lived in a small house near school, but as the move became permanent, we settled into a larger home 40 minutes away from anything. The car rides became routine. From our leather seats, mom and I watched the Shanghai skyline grow tall and large from afar. But there was a time when I hated this car.
A moment in elementary school
Mom waits for me as I get ready to go to school, because I can't find my socks.
Middle school, after classes
The green and usually large minivan pulls up to school, looking much too small among the Shanghai buses. I pull the handle and wait patiently as the still-functional motorized door slides open. It obeys; I shuffle in to the “car’s safest position” seat behind the driver. This seat is going to become a little hotter today; there's something on my mind. I'm older now: ten whole years. Permission to sit up front will come soon, and car conversations are about to become a lot more, well, adult.
"You know, as a baby your feet were so cute, little 馒头脚.” Mom sure knows how to start. Her words seem to sweeten the air with a newness finally announced, as if this ritual weren’t already performed yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that. I already know the next part, "They were so chubby I could just bite them!" Mom and her repeat nostalgia. At the next stop light, I liberate these cutesy 馒头脚 from their shoes, enacting the definition of ‘witty’ I learned in class a few days prior. This is going to be the wittiest thing I’ve ever done. I stick my feet on her lap, "Here mom, how 'bout now?" Smells of gym class invade.
The wit subsides, a vindictive hunger satisfied. Deep inside the rear-view mirror, I catch mom’s knowing gaze—her eyes look like perfect, tilted teardrops, as if nature requires her to always emote outwards. Her look reminds me of shortly before when she told me to disassemble my Lego Houses for packing during the first move, then later for tossing in the second move. Those bricks were too light, too easy to pry.
The mirror continues gazing. "Want to sit up front?" A pause, a judgment, a beat. Hm, nice try. My re-socked feet land back on the ground, and I assess. Usually, she’s the one seeing through me, but not this time. Today, I know that front seats are only good when the destination is desired. Today, it is the origin I am missing: my friends were going to get bubble tea after school, but I couldn't join because I wouldn't have a way home anymore. I can’t just trudge across the street at dinner time. Meanwhile, all I have in this enclosed, empty space with nothing other than me and mom and stupid stories about 馒头脚.
I stay put and concentrate out the window, my pout just in view of the mirror. Outside, the buses are filing away. I stare at myself in one of them instead, sitting alongside a friend or maybe meeting someone new. I stare at how fun my life could have been. I stare and stare, knowing as much as I have ever known anything that Lego houses are small and too easy to move.
A moment in middle school
Mom waits for me for 45 minutes so I can play with friends, and asks if I had fun when I get in.
High school, a conversation on the way home
Mom tells me 努力学习. The pause after seems to linger longer than it should, the air conditioner growing louder each moment. She continues, "When I was your age, I got into 北大, but grandma changed my registration without telling me, so I enrolled into a university down the street." She speaks with no remorse, no hints of anger or disappointment. The phrase that follows always follows, “孝顺.” Filial duty. It has a theological sound, like the piety of an echo you hear when entering a church. Mom says my choice to go to a western international school make me think love is something I can just say to manifest. But, "Real love is responsibility." For grandma, responsibility is keeping kids close, even when there's more out there. For mom, it's letting kids choose what they want, so that they get to at least see what's out there. For me, for now, it's understanding mom spends twice as long on the road as I do and has never mentioned it.
The gear shift hits P, the conversation fading as it always does, with the engine. Our talk won't continue past the doors of this van. But just a few moments ago, it wasn't clear to me where her thoughts ended and mine began.
A moment in high school
Mom waits for me for 1.5 hours while I talked to teachers for my college recommendation letters.
Before college, when I bought a new lens
My fingers slide around the shutter button, the curvature of the camera grip slightly too large for my hand. Mom bought me this camera a few years ago year, an atypical Asian parent’s gift, but mom never subscribed the tiger mom mold. Until then, my recent YouTube recommendations were filled with astrophotography landscape tutorials even though Shanghai has no stars, DIY Photoshop pimple removal tutorials when I don't own Photoshop, and lens unboxings even though I had no camera to mount them on. When it came time to ask, it didn't take much persuading for mom to say yes. It’s her version of love: always see what’s out there.
Today, we're speeding home alongside a rare, Shanghai sunset gold, the kind that you climb rooftops to see. I ask her to slow down whenever I see a nice scene to shoot out the window, and she obliges. In the light, our features compare themselves: her unworked-but-perfect teeth versus my crooked jaw, her permed curls versus my Bieber cut, and her eyes… seeing so much more than mine or my camera all the time. I wonder—did she ever wish I looked more like her? I snap a few pictures of her driving, candid and serene; still.
Mom asks me why I don't take better portraits of her, and I try and explain to her that I do, I just don't like the posed stuff, and she scoffs. She tells me she buys all this stuff for me, stuff she would never buy for herself, the least I can do is to take a good picture of my mother. I fire back to her that definitions of "good" are subjective, and poised pictures never depict the truthfulness of any person. She asks me if any of my friends have any hobbies nearly as expensive; I find this irrelevant and annoying, but muster up only silence as a response. It creeps into the car, the same way it did when I was in middle school. "I just want to look good in a photo,” she says.
A moment in college
I realize alive in her is a life outside of being my mom.
College, visiting home for winter break
I attempt the exam for the second time over winter break. 94%. The license is printed: a laminated, small ivory card with ugly type: 陈达瑞. It's the first ever official printing of my Chinese name. For the first time in my life, mom will be the passive passenger; I, the driver. The key turns 90°, the engine roars. We begin.
An epiphany slaps my being: Shanghai cars don't have brake pedals. And, today must be 双十一. Also, taxi drivers are definitely magicians, their honks disguising spells of telekinesis. My heart beats way too quickly, or maybe it already stopped, that's probably better. From the right, my ears pick up a slight chuckle. I look over and see mom's eyes sparkling, having concluded their tenure as my chauffeur.
We speed ahead, and I find myself longing for the old car. This new one's seats are like baby hands: hard and free of creases, unable to hold onto any thoughts. The green minivan sits depressed in our driveway now—too old to move, too precious to toss. In retirement, it holds as a relic of my childhood, the closest thing I have ever had to a constant home.
In Chinese, there is a phrase 留白, which means purposeful, empty space, the sort you find on long car rides where the population is exactly two. From time to time, I still think of these minivan vignettes: vindictive and revelatory, unconcerned and sacred, intermittent and close—empty air totally filled. I think of how I actually met my mother, not in any filial way, but in the meandering, messy truth of any relationship, constrained and enclosed: slow. I think of every child, lost behind the driver's seat, oblivious to the driver's depth, and I feel deep longing for relationships soon to be built. And when I lose myself in the cacophony of traffic or of my mind, I am reminded that somewhere, amidst a city backdrop of cracked leather seats and childish resentment and taxi-magicians, a mother and son are cruising along in silence or debate, with nothing ahead except for a destination they’ll soon create.