Mother

Mom, now when I recall everything, has been the very centre of my life. She is a diligent woman, and an ambitious one. She is intelligent but also mysterious. Growing up I understood her through a veil, and had to act at my best whenever she was around. She was like a commander, a family officer and was always ready to straighten out bad behaviour everywhere.

Teaching is her profession, and she excelled at it. Ironically, this is the exact reason I hate teaching as a career and deliberately want to stay away from it.

I hate it because it took her away from me for as long as I can remember. She spent all her attention and time designing better curricula and to educate better students. Now, although I understand it as a respectful profession, I resent it.

She would leave very early in the morning to manage morning classes and come home late staying for extra hours to work on the lesson plans after everyone had gone home. This was her peak period in her career - and exactly my childhood and adolescent years.

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It was rare to see her after I came back from school and I would spend the time alone. When she came back, she didn’t want to talk because she was already exhausted, having spent all her energy talking to the students.

We would sit in silence - I would be in my room doing homework and she would be resting. It was so quiet it felt as if there was no one at home. I could hear some creaking sounds of the bathroom door opening and closing and some tinkling sounds in the kitchen when she prepared food - but that was all. A shouting of - the food is ready! - could startle me and draw me out from my imagined happy world in the silence. But the reality was quiet, cold and stiff when I arrived at the dining table - it was suffocating. We spent the majority of our lives living together like this - we didn’t talk to each other.

When I look back, it was extraordinary, not in a positive sense. How could a mother and a daughter live together for so long - my entire developing years as a person - and not talk to each other under the same roof?

It only intensifies my resentment whenever I think about it.

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The years have passed and I am an adult now. The more I learn about myself, the more I grieve what I didn’t have during those years - her absence was the centre of my life living with her.

As a child, I had no clue what this would mean for the long term - how would this shape me as a girl, as a woman - and how would it impact my relationship with myself and with others?

I learned to be so independent that I shut myself in a bubble I had created - impenetrable to those around me, sometimes even to myself.

Now, after years of being anywhere but home, I’ve grown up as a person of my own and I still struggle to understand what kind of narrative I should give to those years of silence.

Focus? - could be. Because of the silence, the only things I could pay attention to were my homework and some hobbies. I did have undivided focus on certain things I enjoyed, such as singing, music and crafting.

Neglected? - yes. I started to come home late, learned to lie and did some other things I wasn’t proud of.

Freedom? - possible. Since she wasn’t around, I lived a very free adolescent life. I had much more freedom than many other kids.

However, I was missing the most important thing - attachment. This silence-coated attachment had driven me away from her as far away as possible, to France, and I was okay not seeing her for 8 years straight, without missing her. Those 8 long years of living on my own while searching for jobs, apartments and navigating relationships. I managed everything while still living in a bubble - an imagined bubble.

But the bubble couldn't withstand the crashing waves of life. When it finally broke, there was nowhere to look but inward — and back to where I came from. I came home and saw her as who she truly is for the first time.

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The powerful and scary person I remembered when I was little, now is a small and aged woman who craves for love and closeness, who now cries and worries for her daughter’s safety and happiness. The image stored in my head  - of her as a giant, as a tyrant - had shaken loose.

She is, and has always been, a woman who reaches for the best even though she was not given much. She has been fighting for what she deserves no matter how hard the circumstances were.

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I think I now have some sense of what those years were. It was the truest reality of a woman who was in pain, helpless, but still had to go forward. I don’t know what she had to endure in order to fulfil her role as a teacher, a single mother and a daughter herself. The silence was not intentional but it was the only way not to spill her pain into her daughter’s life. She contained it all within herself and eventually proved to the world what she was capable of.

However, as her daughter, I still struggle to put those years behind me - there was too much I had missed - and now I am not yet willing to revisit memories of time I mostly spent alone. The reality turn out to be much more challenging for a child who grew up in a bubble alone - so my resentment is still there.

Maybe someday it will happen that I can sit quietly, willing to remember the good moments within them.

Urumqi, 2026