Mom, I'm Fine

Sunday, ten a.m. — one a.m. Hangzhou time — my mom's video call arrived on schedule. My mother's body clock contains no concept of time zones. It contains only one concept: my daughter should be free right now.

"Have you eaten?" Her opener, always.

"I ate." I tilted the camera up a little, out of frame of the cold coffee and half a bagel on the table.

On the other end, my mother raised an eyebrow. From ten thousand kilometers away she can scan my breakfast and fail it. "Bread again. Is there any real food in your fridge? I'm telling you, your stomach is yours for life—"

"Mom. I'm fine."

"And work?"

"Also fine."

"Is your company doing layoffs?" she said abruptly. "Auntie Li's son — the one from your school — got cut last month. H-1B. Sixty days. Fleeing like a refugee."

Something in my chest dipped. Our org was whispering about a reorg, but I wasn't about to hand her that material. "My team's okay."

"Okay meaning what?" She sat up straight. "A-Dai, you are on OPT. You need to keep that in your head. This is not the time to move. Don't change jobs, don't take long vacations, don't give anyone an excuse. Wait until the lottery hits, wait until your green card is in line — then do whatever you want. For now: stability above all. 稳字当头."

Stability above all. My mother has been deploying those four characters since my college entrance exams. They have a patina now.

The frame wobbled and half of my dad's face appeared in the corner, holding his clay teacup. "A-Dai." He nodded — that counted as his greeting — and went off to the balcony to water his orchids. My father's speaking quota is roughly my name, once a month, plus "take care of your health" at New Year's.

"Oh — we visited your grandfather for the holiday," my mom remembered. "He asked about you."

"Is he well?"

"Perfectly well, just getting stranger and stranger." She lowered her voice, as if Grandpa could hear. "Grabbed my hand asking whether you sleep well. Whether you dream. What kind of question is that? Eighty-something years old, spends all day studying other people's dreams."

I held the phone and said nothing. Outside, a neighbor was mowing; the mower droned on.

"He also said," my mom's voice went lower still, "to tell you to come home for a visit."

"After I finish this project," I said. I have been saying this sentence for seven months. It's basically an auto-reply.

Right before hanging up, my mom suddenly said: "A-Dai. Mom isn't trying to control you. Mom just—" She stopped, and I thought something real was coming, but what came out was: "You looked too thin in the last photos. I mailed you a ham. And the quilt from when you were little — I had the cotton re-fluffed."

The call ended. I sat in the Sunday morning sun looking at my own reflection in the black screen, briefly unable to speak.

My mother's love works like this: everything spoken is a knife; everything mailed is cotton 🥲

She wants me to put stability above all.

She doesn't know: this boat's anchor has already started to drag.