All We Need is Not Love…It’s Forgiveness

In forgiving my mother, I learned life’s greatest lesson

The author and her mother. Courtesy of the author.

A daughter resenting her mother? Not exactly new. To me, my mother was a prisoner of traditional Chinese culture, valuing her sons over her daughters. A Chinese boy is the family pride; a Chinese girl is the family support. I was five when my family was smuggled into New York City from China via Hong Kong, and by nine I was working in my mother’s factory. I could hem 6,000 pieces a day — my older brother worked when he wanted. My destiny was to be a good wife to a Fujian man; the fact that I went away to college, that I earned a law degree, that my American boyfriend spoke fluent Chinese, never mattered. I was a Chinese daughter, one who never mattered at all. I was never enough for her, and I spent my life trying to make her proud.

But life’s greatest lesson is the clarity that comes with forgiveness. It is that powerful force that takes stock of what we have and illuminates what we have been given. My mother taught me this, and learning it was freeing, liberating. I finally saw her with truly open eyes. After a lifetime of rebelling against my mother’s culture, I now understood why she embraced it, finding stability in the familiar. Over time, she rose above its limitations and gleaned the best it had to offer.

Her courage and love of family saw her bring three young children across the Pacific on a snakehead’s boat to join my father in New York City. Her work ethic convinced her that she could run the factory better than her boss ever did — then she bought it from him, and proved it. After my father died, my older brother (now head of our household) told her that good Chinese women didn’t remarry after losing a husband, so she never did. But when my father’s family formally disowned us all, avoiding the responsibility for a widow and now four children, my mother responded by making a killing in the Chinese real estate market.

She was frugal to a fault, except to those who needed her help. Growing up, I watched her wash vegetables or clothes, and use the same water to flush the toilet. She owned only a few outfits, but could step off a trans-Pacific flight looking like she emerged from magazine pages. I still don’t know how she did it. Any struggling Chinese village she read about in…