TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

Sometimes I wonder what my children will remember about me when I’m gone. I wonder what they’ll tell people who ask, “What was your mom like?” or “What did you learn from her?” 

I know from experience how difficult it is to talk about our mothers. When I was young and still living at home, my mother was the water I swam in and the air I breathed; I don’t think there was enough separation between us for me to see who she was. I joke that it took me until my twenties, living apart from her, to see her fully—as a person with her own regrets, desires, anxieties, and pleasures. I joke about that, but like most jokes, there is a little kernel of truth inside. 

Today’s poem references the Lunar New Year, which happens in February, but it’s a timeless, seasonless poem. It has me thinking about the relationship between mothers and daughters, and between one generation and the next.

Before Lunar New Year, Our Mothers Go Missing
by Uyen Phuong Dang

So we learn how to hang  our clothes,  how to carry rice on chopsticks, 
to cleave things, to braise ox bones  and slice lemongrass  and pan fry 
morning glory, to regrow  green onions in  small glass jars, how to read 
tea leaves like their  knuckles, to pleat  a dumpling until it  inherits  the
folds of their foreheads,  their hands,  the wings around  their mouths;
we learn how to scrub  the toilet until our palms steam, porcelain haze
floating  over  our  heads  for  days;  we  learn  how  to sweep  and  swat
without  a  sound,  catching  invisible  hair  and  flies in  our fists,  in  our
sleep,  and  we  hear  our  daughters in  our  dreams laughing, calling us 
miraculous;  we learn  how to toss things:  McDonald’s toys,  nectarine
peels,  Tiger  Beer  cans,   melon  seeds,   toothpicks,  the  dirt  grinning
under our nails, but we keep the scorn our daughters teethed into our 
skin,  because  we  have  learned  the  language  of  our  daughters,  of
vaping   and   shipping    and   TikTok   and   Shazam,   because  we  have
silkened   their  curses   into   silence;   we  learn   the   language  of  our
daughters because they are our daughters; we learn how to see by the
light of anything:  by  kitchen  blades  and by metal spoons,  by  spilled
milk  and  spit   and   scars  and    the   silvered   strands  our   daughters
tweezed   from  our   scalps as  they  told us  how  beautiful  we  are, how 
sorry  they  are;  we  learn  to  see  by  the  grief  they  kept,  brighter than
anything  we owned;  we learned how  to curl our  tongues  seven times
before  we  spoke,  how  to  break our  backs  on the  stars,  how  to  light
incense  in the dark,  to roll  the smoke  into the names  of  our mothers,
to sew  our lips  around  their absence,  but  we  know  they  will  be  back,
and they will be hungry,  because back home is ahead of them, and we
have piled all those prayers into a hill,  where they will find the house,
and us, silent as trees,  the moon moating our heads,  loaning them its
light.

“Before Lunar New Year, Our Mothers Go Missing” by Uyen Phuong Dang. Used by permission of the poet.