When I was 16 years old, my mother told me I would never be happier. Entering adulthood, leaving home, joining the workforce, having children…all of these stages, according to her, would be marked by suffering and disappointment. I didn’t know how to tell her that I felt suffocated and anxious all the time, so I pretended to be the cheerful and carefree girl she wanted me to be.
“I was happier when I was your age,” she said. “Beautiful. Free. You should enjoy it now before it’s gone.” I didn’t feel any of those things, only the terrifying and inexorable certainty that I had to improve. But how could I question a body that once held me in its loving folds?
“I was the prettiest in my family,” my mother told me more than once. “Many men wanted to marry me. They came to see my parents and begged them to court me. I could have married anyone. A doctor from Texas. A French businessman.” Instead, she married my father, a Vietnamese Catholic from a good family. She moved from her close-knit community in Santa Ana, California, to San Jose, a distance that made her feel stranded at sea. She was 22 years old and had a 33-year-old husband she barely knew. I was her first daughter. In the following years, she continued to try to have children, determined to follow in the footsteps of my grandmother, who gave birth to 10.
I was 4 years old when I became an older sister. I was 4 years old when a sharp pain cut through my abdomen. I was 4 years old when doctors cultured my cells and discovered they were malignant. I was 4 years old when nurses put me in a cold, bright room, and a surgeon removed my right ovary and with it, half of my eggs. Even then, I felt desperately responsible for my parents’ fear and exhaustion, for my mother’s pain over the children I might never have.
Twelve years later, my mother had another miscarriage, the last of several I remembered from my childhood. This time, however, I was old enough to understand the root of her despair, to know that she would become a pale shadow of herself for months. Apart from me, only one pregnancy had been successful: that of my younger brother, whose big teary eyes reflected my own anxiety whenever darkness fell over our home.
I couldn’t help but imagine my phantom siblings. A rebellious sister open to sharing secrets in the middle of the night. A second younger brother, more mischievous, to bear the burden of lifting the gloom.
During my mother’s last pregnancy, our family had enough hope to give the baby a name: Patricia, short for Trish. After the loss, I would lie in bed and imagine alternative futures. In them, my little sister became an artist. Together we published illustrated books, building impenetrable worlds where no one could hurt us, where we couldn’t hear our mother sobbing in the next room.
I always carried with me the awareness of the dead babies my mother mourned. I felt the responsibility to make up for her loss, to be five daughters in one body. The smart one, the loving one, the silly one, the super-feminine one, the black sheep.
When my mother bought me clothes and styled my hair, I would smile and let her, with my arms above my head like a compliant doll. Even as a teenager, when I no longer liked pastel ruffles or pearl necklaces, I let myself be wrapped in fantasy.
When I attended a creative writing class during my first year of college, a classmate criticized my writing, saying, “Your characters are chameleons. They lack a solid point of view. They don’t know themselves. They’re not believable.” I sat there trying to become the kind of person who belonged in a writing workshop, taking notes to improve in the future.
My mother used to suggest that I lie or omit the fact that I was missing an ovary. She said I should wear one-piece swimsuits to hide the scar. “People will look at you differently if they know,” she said. “You should say you had a different type of cancer. Or pretend you never had cancer. You were too young.” She trembled with the terror that the world would see me as less complete, less adorable because of my damaged reproductive system.
Reading Lacan for the first time at 20, I underlined: “All things in this world act as mirrors.” I longed to be something more than the reflection of someone else’s fragmented parts.
I wasn’t the only one who harbored the suspicion that my body wasn’t entirely mine. My cousins hid tattoos under sweaters and long sleeves. They worried about haircuts their parents might hate. My mother avoided wearing shorts because her older sister once told her she had unattractive calves. When a distant relative gained weight after giving birth and posted pictures of her beach vacation, I heard my aunts and my mother criticize her for the audacity of showing her larger body.
At 32 years old, I gathered the courage to dye my hair purple, and I only did it after moving to Virginia and putting over 4300 kilometers of distance between my family and me. The first time my mother saw me on FaceTime with my new hair, she looked at me as if I were a stranger. Later, she sent me a message saying I was prettier with my natural hair color.
“What a pity that you had to move so far away,” she often said when we talked on the phone. “You must feel very lonely. How sad.” My loneliness and sadness came from the isolation of a pandemic, not from the distance. In Virginia, when I could start from scratch, I finally had space to breathe.
My cousin, whose homosexuality is an open secret, pulled me aside at a family wedding and said, “My parents want me to go to France to meet a man who has trouble finding a wife. His mother is here and has asked them to send me. As if I’m something that can be ordered on Amazon.” We laughed, encouraged by champagne. I told her to accept the free plane ticket to Paris and find her future wife.
The next morning, we woke up before anyone else and went to the beach. Sitting with our coffees, we said to each other, “I’m so tired.” Around the same time, I finally saw the medical records from when I had cancer. The folder had been in plain sight on a shelf for most of my life, and yet we all acted as if it didn’t exist. It was only when I started thinking about starting a family that I thought to look.
Reading them, I learned that I am a carrier of a chromosomal translocation that doubles the risk of miscarriage. In my family, women bear the deep guilt of failed motherhood: my mother and her miscarriages, my grandmother who lost two children during a famine, an aunt whose son drowned when they fled Vietnam by boat, cousins who suffered miscarriages and struggle with infertility alone.
I have my own secret shame: when I learned that my chances of conceiving a child were diminishing, I felt sadness, yes, but mostly relief. I had long feared having a daughter and the responsibility of protecting her autonomy and mine. It was a lesson I inherited from my mother, my aunts, and my grandmothers: being a woman is a struggle for the vital parts of your body while others claim ownership.
I have always known that my mother loves me more than herself, a fact that fills me with more guilt than comfort. My mother loves me – the crying girl I carry inside, pure in potential – but at what cost?
Some mothers see bodies and minds as clay to mold, a second project to sculpt the life they wanted for themselves. When I look in the mirror, I see myself, but I also see the many versions I could have been. Somewhere is the daughter my mother imagined when she held me in her arms for the first time.
I have often wished to be the living panacea…