You're So Selfish

There was never any hiding it. My mother's intelligence network covers the entire North American Chinese diaspora and updates faster than LinkedIn.

The plan had been: find the right moment, deploy a prepared narrative, ease her in. Instead Auntie Li — eternal Auntie Li — saw my coworker's farewell-lunch post in her son's Moments. When my mother's video call came in, I hadn't drafted my opening line.

"You quit your job?"

No have you eaten. So this was real.

"Mom, listen—"

"You QUIT your JOB?!" Her voice cracked. "Daisy, tell me it isn't true. What about your status? What about the green card? Six years! We paid for your degrees, we kept your hours, your father cried at the airport — did you know that? Six years, and you throw it away?"

"I'm not throwing it away, I'm—"

"For what?" She cut me off, and then went quiet. That quiet is worse than the shouting. "For tourism? Or for that person?"

My blood dropped a degree. "What person?"

"Don't treat me like I'm blind." she said. "Vivi's mother is in my group chat. December. A foreign man came and stayed a week. Daisy, answer your mother one question: did you throw away the best job in the world, and everything this family bled for over twenty years, for a Dutchman you have known for three months?"

I had a hundred sentences available. It's not only that. The job was eating me alive. For the first time in twenty-eight years I know what I want. But facing that face on the screen — that face that would relive my entire life for me if it could — the sentence that came out was the dumbest one on file:

"And what if it is? It's my life."

My mother looked at me for a long moment. Behind her, my father's silhouette shifted once and said nothing.

"Your life." Her voice went soft and level — the level of a decision being made. "Fine. Your wings are hard now. Go live your life, then. From today, your life is your own business. Don't call me Mom. I'll consider that I never raised this daughter."

Call ended.

The screen went black and gave me back my own face. I sat on the living room carpet and waited for the familiar tightening in my chest. Strangely: nothing. Just a vast, humming emptiness.

At some point Vivi was sitting next to me. She asked nothing. She pulled my head onto her shoulder.

"It's okay to cry a little, you know," she said softly.

"I don't cry," I said. And my voice was level. Actually level — not performed level, which is the frightening part. The crying feature: it simply never shipped with my build.

That night a new dream came. Not the sea. Not the field. A hospital corridor, white, long, the disinfectant thick enough to sting. At the end of the corridor was a door, and behind the door, someone was coughing.

I tried to walk to it. No matter how I walked, the door came no closer.

My mother said she'd consider that she never raised me.

She doesn't know I'd been waiting twenty-eight years for that sentence — and that freedom, hitting the ground, makes such an ugly sound.