Poems & Stories About My Mother

Things My Mother Told Me (And What I Said Back To Her)

When someone says something bad, don’t fight back. Be nice to them because they will get what they deserve in the end.
If they’re already mean, why should we care about being nice to them?

Don’t point at the moon or it will cut your ears.
I already pointed at the moon.

Don’t comb your hair at night or you’ll be poor.
Why would I comb my hair at night?

Don’t sing at night or you’ll be poor.
What’s wrong with being poor?

Don’t sleep with your hair falling down on the side of the bed or ghosts will come grab it.
Creepy.

When someone says something bad, don’t fight back.
I still think they should get yelled at.

You complain about boiled chicken now, but when you get married, you’ll hunger for it.
Whatever.

Don’t talk to your sister’s ex-boyfriends. They try to get one sister if they can’t get another.
Creepy.

Don’t date orphans. They won’t have a family to help you.
Maybe I should marry an orphan. Then I won’t have to worry about a mother-in-law. (Her response is always, “My Gawh! Don’t ever say that.”)

When you marry, you must throw away all the photos of your ex-boyfriends.
I have no ex-boyfriends.

When you become a daughter-in-law, don’t stay in your room all day. Only lazy girls do that.
What if I don’t plan to get married?

When you cook, you must always ask your mother-in-law what their family wants to eat, how they want the food prepared. They won’t eat the way you and I do.
But what if she says, “Cook whatever you want to”? What do I do then?

If you buy something to eat, you must make sure you have enough for everyone.
What if I don’t have enough money?

If you just buy something for yourself, people will think you are selfish.
Then I’ll just hide it in my room.

If your in-laws are hosting a family gathering, you must be the first to wake up.
I’ll set my alarm for 8 AM.
(No, you must be up at 5 AM before the sun comes up.)

If you’re a lazy daughter-in-law, your husband’s family will send you back to us. Then what will you do?
Refund their money?

If you’re going to be lazy around the house, at least do well in school.
Woo-hoo! Good to know my options.

When you hear your mother-in-law yelling at her daughters about the housework, know that she is really yelling at you.
How passive aggressive is that?

If you marry into a family of thieves, then you become a thief with them. Likewise, if they work hard, you must work hard too.
My husband sleeps in, so it’s okay for me to sleep in too?
No! In reality, you can never sleep in.)

When you get married and your husband’s family is driving you away from our house, don’t ever look back or else you will bring bad luck to our family.
How do you know this?

All these things I have told you are warnings so that, when you marry, when you meet your true mother, she will love you.

After I got married, she asked, “How is your mother doing?”

I turned to her and said, “I don’t know. How are you doing?”

All she could say back was, “My Gawh!”



CROSS STITCH CLOTH


It is white—usually. No, always. There are lines running up and down and sideways like plaid of the same color. My mother used to buy yards and yards of this cross-stitch cloth to sew paj ntaub. She bought thread that came not in spools but rather in bundles that resembled colorful slivers of hair folded up or like kow poon noodles after they have been drained and folded.

She and my sister-in-law used to sit by the window, used to sit on low, homemade square-shaped wooden stools or circular, store-bought woven bamboo ones. She sat there sewing clothes for our trousseau, for the day my sisters and I married.

These will be gifts you take with you when you leave us, she said.

I am five at the time, Mee eight. The other girls are not yet born.

But I never learned how to sew.

I always expected that I would. My mother was always saying girls needed to sew. How would you give your kids Hmong clothes? They were too expensive to buy.

But I never learned to sew just as I never learned how to dance in Hmong.

Eight years later, Mee leaves.
Fourteen years later, I leave.
Twenty-five years later, the other sisters are still not married.
But perhaps this is good because my mother stopped sewing years ago.


MY FATHER FEEDS HIS PARENTS


When we have a spirit-calling ceremony called hu plig or when we have an ua neeb—I’m still not sure what the English translation on this is—my father feeds his parents. He sits at the kitchen table with a bowl of rice, a bowl of boiled chicken, and an empty plate. As though my grandparents are here and not on The Other Side, he scoops a spoonful of rice, tears off a piece of chicken, and pours some broth onto the plate. He repeats this, uttering words beneath his breath. How does he know how to do this? What are the words he says? He has not taught any of us kids this ritual, and I wonder: Who will feed him when he is gone? Does he teach lessons the way my mother does? She doesn’t say, “This is how you cook.” She says, “Go to the kitchen.” When she later learns I don’t know how to cook, she yells at me. “What were you doing all this time in the kitchen?” she asks. “Eating,” I say. “Killing time.”



WHAT WE LIVED ON
(originally published in The Saint Paul Almanac)

$13,200. That’s what we lived on every year.

$850 a month in cash from the county + $250 a month in food stamps.

Divided among nine people.

My mother explains the expenses to me:
Rent: $600
Electricity: $120
Phone: $20

She doesn’t mention expenses for shampoo, clothes, notebooks, and other things.

What about the food stamps? I ask.
1 pig at Long Cheng: $120
A few chickens: $30
Miscellaneous groceries: $100

Miscellaneous includes gallons of Kemp’s ice-cream I always beg for. Sometimes it’s Neapolitan, Strawberry Swirl, or Tin Roof Sundae, but my favorites were always Cherry Nut and Mint Chocolate Chip. They’re only $4.99 per gallon, I tell my mother.

The pig comes straight from the Long Cheng slaughterhouse in South St. Paul. My mother and dad chop it up and bag the ribs, pork chops, and lean meats into the long chest freezer squeezed in our kitchen. Even when we lived in a two-bedroom apartment, the chest freezer traveled with us and was housed in one of the bedrooms. The pig’s feet, head, and other fat ends get boiled down until the meat is tender and swimming in its own fat. Mother adds minced ginger to it. No salt.

The remaining fat is cut into small pieces and boiled down until the fat becomes hard and crisp, until it becomes kiav roj. Mother stores the kiav roj in empty ice cream buckets. Later, she will stir fry them with greens. The liquid fat also goes into other ice cream buckets. There it hardens into lard that we will use to cook with. No need to buy vegetable oil.

The chickens are worse. If I’m lucky, they have already been killed and dressed before they come home. Sometimes, they come home alive. If that is the case, they live temporarily in an overturned cardboard box or a paper bag. When they are ready to be killed, my mother and someone else—sometimes my sister-in-law—set up a spot in the kitchen. There is a pot with hot water, a bowl, a knife, the trash can, and newspaper or garbage bags spread on the floor to serve as a tarp. One person holds onto the chicken’s legs and wings while the other person slits the throat. The chicken is still wailing as its blood drips into the bowl. When the blood-letting is done, the chicken’s body is soaked in the hot water, taken out, and its feathers are pulled.

I don’t like freshly-killed chicken though. You can’t fry them because the skin’s too tough.




During the summer, we have a garden. One year, it is in Rosemount. Another year it is in Lake Elmo. Other years, I don’t know.

The garden is green, but it isn’t beautiful. The closest thing to flowers are the white, lacy blossoms from the cilantro. There are poles made from skinny branches taken from some farmer’s land. Pieces of colored yarn connect the poles, which hold green beans and tomatoes. Empty half-shells of cucumbers are strewn on the ground, some with teeth marks on the sides.

Mother brings us here every couple of days to pick vegetables. My sister-in-law, Nyab Houa, comes to help out every now and then. Before my sister, Mee, got married, she came here too. My brothers, Pao and Xin, are rarely here but when they do come, Pao always finds a reason to sit in the van. Lisa, Cindy, and Virginia play house. My dad is somewhere though I can’t see him in my mind.

We snap green beans off their vines filling white buckets to the brim. There are so many green beans, they are boiled then packed into Ziploc bags where they will sit in the freezer. One summer, I remember eating pork stir-fried with sliced green beans for almost every meal.

We pick overgrown cucumbers that will be eaten in a number of ways: simply peeled, sliced and dipped in dry pepper and salt, or scraped flesh (with no seeds) mixed into a cold soup of water, sugar, and ice cubes.
Sometimes we bring home a squash or two but not too many. Mother likes to pick their leaves and eat them boiled in water. It helps to make food go down, she says.

There are other vegetables like green onions and cilantro but you don’t need five pairs of hand picking this at the same time. The peppers she doesn’t let us touch because she’s afraid they’ll burn our eyes.

Xin and I want fun things to eat too so we convince my mother to plant cantaloupes and watermelons one year. On one visit, they are too small to eat. Another time, when they should have been ripe, there are no more melons, just empty vines. Xin and I are so mad, we run to another Hmong family’s plot of land and steal a watermelon. But it is only the size of a grapefruit, all white, and rind-tasting, so we throw it in the dirt cracking its head.

We never planted melons after that.





But I would be lying if I made it seem like we lived off the fat of the land. There were the jobs we did on the side.

At twelve, I worked with my mother at factories on the weekend. We assembled bouquets and made flower arrangements that were shipped off to stores like Cub Foods.

When I was thirteen, a few times during the winter, we went to the Civic Center at ten thirty or eleven at night. When we went there, people were always on their way out of hockey games, and I’d avoid their eyes, fearful that my classmates would be among them. The only other time I had been to the Civic Center was around Thanksgiving time when we’d go celebrate the Hmong New Year. On those nights we went to clean, we’d be assigned seating areas. It was our job to sweep then mop our designated areas. I remember the smell of popcorn and puddles of beer. Sometimes the older people couldn’t work as fast, so my mother made me go help them finish their section because no one could leave until we were all done. Our pay off was twenty-five dollars a night. Years after that, when I went to the Hmong New Year and saw piles of food strewn by the garbage can or puddles of pop on the steps, I’d wonder who would be cleaning it that night.

During the summers I was thirteen to sixteen, my mother figured we could make money picking cucumbers. It was only when I was in tenth grade and learning about ex-slaves and share cropping did I make the connection that we were doing just that. We rented a few acres from a local farmer then we’d pick the cucumbers and sell them back. My mother explained that the smallest kinds yielded the most money but you had to pick a lot for them to matter. The largest kinds, the ones that were used for spears and pickles on a stick weighed the most but yielded the least money. So we always aimed to get the middle ones, which were plenty. The hard thing about cucumbers was that they grew fast, so we had to pick them just when they were right and come back the next day if we didn’t finish some rows. Maybe every three or four days, we’d get a break so that the cucumbers could continue growing again, then we’d be back in the field.

I did this for about three years. The year I stopped, my mother had gotten me, Pao, and Xin jobs at a place that made Christmas wreaths. She and other old women put the evergreen boughs together to create the wreaths while my brothers and I took sticks of berries and twisted them. Later, the berries would be attached to the wreaths. We had a certain quota we needed to meet every day before we could leave. Maybe it was five boxes of berries. If there was someone lagging behind, we all helped out.

By the time I was sixteen, I was tired of these jobs, tired of saying, “Nothing” when people asked me what I did on the weekend, tired of sitting in the lunchroom eating sticky rice and fried fish next to people with sandwiches and chips, tired of working jobs where no one knew your name and didn’t care to know. That summer I turned sixteen, I left the berry-twisting job and got a real job, one I could put onto my work history. I became a cashier at the Kmart on Maryland Avenue working for $5.50 an hour. I made somewhere between $100 - $140 a week, which I figured was more than what we’d made picking cucumbers. If we were lucky, we made $100-$140 every three days and that was divided among the whole family.

Later that year, my mother also came up with another money-making idea. We could cook for large events like Hmong family gatherings and serve the food. I could help out with the prep work. My mother would do the cooking. Then I would take care of serving the food. We could make a few hundred dollars every weekend, she said. I was fine with this but somehow this idea never came into fruition.

After K Mart, I worked at Taco Bell for a year then quit right before prom. When I went off to college, I got an office job photocopying papers for professors.
By the time I was nineteen, I started working in non-profits and have stayed there since.

Sometimes, my mother will call me and ask if my organization, which she calls “company,” has any job openings for my brothers. “We do,” I tell her, “but it’s not like you can just do things. You need to have skills, experience.”

“Do you just sit all day at a desk?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“They pay you to think?”

“Yes.”

“How much do you make?”

When I tell her, she says I must have at least $10,000 saved up. I cringe because, although education, experience, and fifteen years of work history are bundled together, I’m not too far from where I started when I was twelve years old.

My Life This Last Week

I will remember being 30 forever.

Excuse my language, but this has been one of the most fucked up years of my life, yet it has also one filled with great opportunities, friendships, and revelations.

For the last several months, I've been thinking of attending the National Asian American Theater Festival in New York. I thought it would be a great opportunity to see what national Asian American artists are doing as well as network. Only one problem: I was broke.

Then in a chance meeting last week, someone said to me, "If you want to go, make it happen." So I wrote an email to friends and acquaintences and within 24 hours, I'd fundraised 90% of my goal. Since then, I've met my fundraising goal and am still amazed at how much people support me. I feel incredibly loved, blessed, and taken care of by the people aorund me.

Just yesterday, I got an email (which might have been accidentally deleted because it went into my junkmail folder) that I'd won one of seven artist residencies through the Midwestern Voices and Visions Program, which supports the creation of work by artists of color in the Midwest. 1 of 7 in the Midwest! That was exciting, amazing, and validating.

But now onto the bad things:

This has been a tough year for me personally. I hate it when people are all cryptic but here goes anyway. I feel as if nothing negative has happened to me in years. Yet this whole summer has been filled with nothing more than one mental slap to my face after another.



On top of that, my mother has been sick. This past Sunday, I received a call that she was having trouble breathing and had been rushed to the hospital. I was fortunate to see her alive for one hour before she died.

One of the things that angers me so much about my mother's death is that she worked so hard, even until the end. I'm naive in thinking that my mother would live until she was as old as my grandmother spending her days chilling by the window, sewing paj ntaub, and watching little children. Maybe she'd tend to a garden in Rosemount and meet up with old friends at the casino for fun.

But the truth is that she's always worked. She worked overtime and had no health insurance. She had no time to sew paj ntaub or tend to a garden as a hobby.

After my mother's body was taken away, my oldest sister, Pa, said to me, "You know how to write. Write a story about her life."

What I didn't tell Pa was that I had been writing about my mother for years.

And now her stories and lessons are all I have left to hold on to.