meliorating:

外公 passed away the day after Chinese New Year last Tuesday.

My first response: to cry, of course. But I was crying not just for my grandfather’s passing, but for my mother as well.

I’ve spent a lot of time this past year thinking about what it means to be a (queer) diasporic subject, complicating my identity as a son of immigrant parents. Diasporic studies understand that the immigrant narrative is not always teleological. In other words, America is not always the end destination for all immigrants, contrary to how we learn about immigration in American schools growing up.

My mother is no exception to that statement; she did not come to America with the intention of staying when she first flew out of Malaysia. And I don’t think she knew that she would not have the means to return to Malaysia, even though she’s wanted to fly back and be reunited with her family for over 10 years now. And she definitely did not know that her mother would pass away unexpectedly before she would have the opportunity to go back, nor did she know that her father would pass away just 2 years after that.

As I sat in my room, just a few miles away from home, I sobbed as I thought about how utterly cruel, unfair, and unjust it was that my mother needed to continue going to work at the laundromat, because taking time for oneself to process your grief (which is what my friends immediately told me to do–and rightfully so) is a luxury only afforded to the privileged few, but not to my working class immigrant mother.

I cried because it’s been over 21 years since she’s last seen her parents and the rest of her family, and it is the American social conditions that strip her of the access to see them. I remember the day my grandmother passed away, my mother told my grandfather over the phone (in Cantonese), “You have to hold on. You have to wait until I come back to see you,” to which my grandfather responded with, “When will that be?” / “Very soon. In a few years.” And she briefly mapped out what needed to be done so that she could return and made it all sound very feasible. I certainly believed her.

I cried because I felt like I failed as a son, spending a majority of my teenage years annoyed with my parents. I had become increasingly negligent and did not try to connect my mother to her family she dearly missed despite the fact that I had the technological means to do so (to this day, I still have not sat down to teach her how to use the webcam on a laptop).

I cried because I was late in realizing my own failures.



I applied to the post-grad program to teach in Malaysia knowing that my mother probably would have wanted me to “return” back home to see her family. When I submitted my essays that used buzzwords I only half-heartedly believed in, like “cultural ambassador” and “bridging cultures together,” I thought I could act as the stand-in for my mother when she did not have the financial means to go back home herself. The idea of a “return” to the homeland is interesting here, since Malaysia has never been my physical home and I have never once stepped foot in that country. But nonetheless, I would still mark the journey as a return because I’ve inherited Malaysia as my homeland, and the responsibility to go back feels like it was passed down to me from my parents. If they cannot return, then perhaps their son traveling to Malaysia could be the next best thing. And it wasn’t until I heard that my grandfather passed away that I realized everything I said in my application essays about the act of bridging two nations together was really about bridging my mother and my grandfather together.

There are very few times when my own motives align with her wishes in a meaningful way, so when my mother told me that she sincerely believed that I could go back to Malaysia to see my grandfather for her while he was still alive, it was a bittersweet moment. For once, I thought selflessly and did something for my mother, a hard task to do when you’re trying to please a woman who is the embodiment of selflessness. Who would have predicted that it would be too late for me to carry out her heart’s wishes though?

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After returning home for the past week and spending time with my family–which has been one of the most enjoyable weeks I’ve spent at home all year–I thought a lot about the following (this is really just a note for myself to expand on these later):