SANDRA LIN
cw – abuse
The Letter She’ll Never Read
The time I got beaten in the kitchen of the floor we rented with two other families, I wanted to hate you, but all I felt was helpless. I don’t remember how old I was or what I’d done to stroke your anger, but I do remember this: you, your fist gripping a small bundle of slim, flexible twigs shipped out from the motherland specifically for this purpose, and my skin, rising in painful welts, some of which was starting to bleed.
It was nighttime. The lights were off, and I stood on the other side of the small dining table holding my own body like a broken eggshell, careful to keep something between us. I could barely make out your silhouette between the dark and the spots appearing in my blurry vision. My sobs and hiccups were loud in the silent night, expanding in my chest and rattling inside my head against the back of my eyes and teeth. The air, stifling. Tongue trembling. I knew those tearful blubbers filled more than the space between us and that the stinging hurt settled in more than just my flesh.
“You never listen to me! If you’re so capable now, then why don’t you leave this household and fend for yourself?”
You glared at me, and I knew you were waiting for me to soften first, to apologize so this act of violence can end and we can both go back to being happy. I glared back. Your face twisted into a monstrous scowl. Mad. Heated enough to scorch the insides of my eyelids so that in the weeks that followed, your raging face was all I can see.
And recall the time you yelled because I woke you up on a Saturday noon; the time you got annoyed because I dropped my chopsticks twice during dinner; the time you starved me for doing something so insignificant wrong that I couldn’t even remember the cause a month later; the time you pretended to lose your sanity just to see if I would care; and all the times before and after that.
Of course, you were gentle sometimes, too. Such as the time after my SAT practices dropped by more than a hundred points for some unknown reason when I spent the summer trying to get it up. You held my hand in the car while I sobbed all the way home.
“It’s okay,” you said comfortingly. “Just practice more and get it up again.” I wanted to cry even harder: from the unexpected warmth and the seemingly nonchalant way you said it. Raising a score is harder than catching goldfish in tissue nets or picking up watered marbles with chopsticks.
Love has always been a double-edged sword with you, mama. I used to think that this was the way you care: all hardness and no soft corners. Then, I thought that this is a result of legacy passed down through the generations from your mother, and maybe she got it from her mother. That we Chinese love with thorny hands and razor teeth. Poison tongues. But I’m older now, mama, and I’m beginning to realize that this—hard-love—is nothing more than the ache of your own generation and the strangle of life.
You often tell me about how my waipo1 and waigong2 never really cared for you growing up, how you grew up by yourself, playing in the dirt with cicadas in hand. You came to the world at a time where China was riding a scooter when everyone else was already driving a car.
Waigong had worked as a cobbler, a hairdresser, and probably other jobs that I don’t know about. Waipo, at one point, was selling fruit, lifting the weight of it all on her own body. I think the first time you had fruit to eat was during that time—waipo, bringing home the rotting apples no one else wanted, carving away the decaying parts, and leaving what’s left for you and your siblings.
A mother yourself now, you shadow her: shelling crab meat into saucers despite being allergic to blue crab, bringing bottles of milk after school. How you claimed to prefer the boney parts of chicken and I believed you, but really, who likes poultry that is only cartilage and skeleton?
Money, you said, was hard to make for someone without an education. You would never have been able to compete with those intelligent city kids who didn’t have to help provide for their family. You would never have been able to compete with those kids born in families that could afford extra tutoring when yours didn’t even have enough money to send you to school. So you came to America after hearing about how great it is—the prestige of the country. It was too good of a chance for a young country girl who didn’t even graduate elementary school to pass up even if it meant the high chance that she will never see her parents again. And you never did.
Here, I realize that I am no longer writing to just a mother—I am writing to a daughter who left home for a foreign country at the age where most people still live with their parents in search of a better future. I am writing to a hopeful girl in her young twenties venturing out to society for the first time. I am writing to a wife who met her husband at a time where they were both young but never wild because they had too many responsibilities to let go of.
In New York, you wore anger like a mask. There were neighbors in the floor above, right next door, and sometimes, the floor below. In the months following my birth, you received angry knocks shouting for you to shut that crying baby up because they had work the next morning. You were taking care of twins by yourself because dad had to work to pay rent. There was no relatives, no family to speak of. It was just you and two drag-ons.
Later, we moved three times just from what I can remember, sometimes because of complaints about your loud children and other times because the rent was rising and we had to find some place our income could afford. When all the other mamas stayed home while their husbands worked, taking care of their one or two children, you chose to work part-time as a cashier and waitress to help support the bills while taking care of three kids, rushing to catch the train during busy hours. Always running. Always working. Always tensed.
After we moved to Florida, you don’t feel invincible anymore. And I don’t mean this in a bad way. Away from the Chinese community, you began asking for help translating English documents that never came with a translation.
“You’re already in middle school and you can’t even do something so simple? I guess you went to school all these years for nothing,” you’d grouse when I couldn’t find the right words.
Though your initial intent was never to hurt, you always end up lashing out first, the way a frightened feline flashes its fangs, ready to bite back. An immediate reflex.
Even so, you were molting like a city pigeon. Iron-clad feathers loosening to make way for the tender, pink flesh and softness underneath. I was beginning to see things I’ve never noticed before—the frustration outlining the outburst, the concern underlying the reproach—and I can’t help but wonder: did you change or did I grow up? Never were you actually angry at me for my inadequate translations, but agitated with your own inability to understand. Offense is the best defense, right?
In the same breath, you often ask me why I can’t make friends. Why, when I talk to people, I act as if they’re going to chew me up and swallow me whole. I’ll answer you here: it’s because I am still searching for the right words to say. For the kind of people who won’t strike when I say all the wrong ones.
And you wanted to know if I ever hated you or wanted another mom, so sure you’ve lost me to your temper. I want to say, I can only try to. No matter how harsh you were, you’re at most a tiger without its teeth. I will never allow someone else to call me khieng-yang3. I will never want to call someone else mom.
I am never a good daughter; I am never not a good daughter. You can never seem to make up your mind, but one thing’s for sure: you’ll always have a better daughter, and that daughter will never be me. That’s a fact I’ve come to accept as well; better to be a good daughter than the best daughter if being the better one means to become only a daughter. It is not to say that there is anything necessarily bad with being a mother’s best daughter. It’s what you used to be, always assuming roles that rotated around others: daughter. Mother. Sister. Wife. Employee. Daughter-in-law. You’re always yourself, but never truly yourself. Never really Ye Yuting. You can call it selfishness, but I will never be able to readily, happily, prioritize others before my own needs. I will never be able to swallow my annoyance without letting it show; maybe I learned my own temper the way your generation learned survival.
Mama, I’ve made peace with our differences and the way you are a long time ago. I don’t know if you have yet. Maybe one day, either one of us will be bold enough to initiate conversation beyond the surface level. Just a mother with her misunderstood daughter and mouths that hold oceans, brushing the seafloor. One table, two cups of tea.
1: waipo- maternal grandma (in Mandarin)
2: waigong- paternal grandpa (in Mandarin)
3: khieng-yang- dog (in Fuzhounese)
Sandra Lin (林诺晨) is a Chinese American from New York who currently attends Bell High School in Florida. She is a Scholastic Awards National Gold Medalist, national winner of JUST POETRY!!!, the first-place winner for the 2021 Polyphony Lit Fall Contest and the 2022 Nancy Thorp Poetry Contest, as well as a YLS, HSF, and Horatio Alger Scholar. Her works are published or forthcoming in Kissing Dynamite, Eunoia Review, Kalopsia Literary Journal, and elsewhere. Sandra is working on a platform that aims to empower marginalized voices in literature. She can be found on Instagram and Wattpad @sandranuochen or her website https://sandranuochen.carrd.co.