Miyasan's Daughter

During this time, I walked my own healing path. I had contact with Mom. I took care of her. I always felt it was my responsibility.

I knew how much my mother had given up to marry my father – she made sure she told me – her career as a model, the country she grew up in, the freedom to communicate in her native language, the ability to take care of herself and her son.

In Japan, her son was treated like gold. He was a boy, cherished and honored. He was smart and had many possibilities before him. When he came to the U.S., he was a “Jap”, despised and greeted with bigotry, especially my father’s family. When my mother was in the hospital giving birth to me, my father’s younger adolescent siblings tortured him.

My mother never told me this in an accusatory tone of voice. She just would list a litany of misfortune that happened ever since she married my father – which, presumably, was because of me, even though now I realize that was the excuse, not the reason. Even though I didn’t learn about the threatened abortion part, until I was a teenager, I still always felt like somehow it was my fault, that my arrival, my very existence had brought suffering. Somehow I needed to do something that would make me worth it; that would somehow justify the suffering, the loss and sacrifice.

So I took care of mom. Partly because of that, and partly because I just loved her and felt her vulnerability and need…but I also, resented her, because she was a weight no child should ever have to carry.

My mother was born in China in 1926, where she spent the first two years of her life, before she was sold to a Japanese couple. They took her to Japan, where she was raised.

My mother suffered considerable abuse from her stepfather. Her first stepmother provided a sort of buffer, but when she died, her stepfather remarried. The second wife instigated her husband to beat my mother more severely and frequently.

Mom said she had two older brothers in China. She remembered them and a Chinese mother who never hugged her or held her close. She often told me the story of her first stepmother coming to take her, the exchange of a gold coin and the strange streets she memorized, as she left the familiar ones she and her brothers played in.

Somehow she managed to get away. Running back to her mom, expecting to be embraced with joyous relief, she was greeted with shock from her mother, and then the stone cold words to the woman, who came to retrieve her, “Close the door. She will follow.”

She remembered the sound of the closing door…and the balcony, the balcony she stood on, looking out into the sunset over the Yangtze River, waiting for her brothers, especially her oldest one, to rescue her. He never came. Though she traveled thousands of miles from China to Japan and eventually to the United States, a part of her never left, never stopped waiting. And like before, the one who was supposed to rescue her never came or appeared in any of the other men she looked for him.