My mother passed away at the age of 77. Her life in China was tragic, and it took me a while to write about her life and death because I had to confront the complex feelings and meaning of her legacy.
I loved my mother for her kind and gentle soul. She was meek, although often in ways I did not understand: bulliable, submissive, & conflict-averse. Her interactions with China Communist Party (CCP) officials were characterized by obedience and tolerance to their inhumane treatment of people like herself & I was long haunted by a childhood memory illustrating the aforementioned, where she got on her knees and begged a CCP official for a raise at her factory job. She sacrificed her dignity only to be cruelly denied. I used to assume I was entirely my father’s child, as he was a fighter whose strength was like the factory steel he worked: firm, resilient, & tough. I spent my life assuming that my defiant nature was the product of my father, but now I am not so sure.
In an unremarkable village in Penshan, China, a sickly child cursed by fate was born. Her mother believed her too weak to survive & left her to die in peace, yet the child refused. Fighting through labored breathing, she produced a cry so loud & enduring that her mother could no longer ignore it. She fed that night & would live to see the morning. The child that defied a peaceful death for a difficult life was my mother.
Growing up poor with an elementary education resigned her to a life of labor in a state-run factory in the capital of Sichuan. The oppression of her social condition was matched by her physicality: measuring under five feet tall, she was frail & strongly nearsighted. Despite this, she won the love & adoration of my father, an illiterate orphan whom she married & blessed with three children. Raising children under Mao’s regime was an arduous burden. We lived in a primitive worker’s row house sharing one restroom & faucet with 8 families. Our mud floor would sprout mushrooms after flooding; we were dirt-poor.
In spite of this, my mother’s heart never hardened. She was known for approaching beggars in the street with small gifts & the words: “Buddha bless you!” Her generosity defied the cruelty of her reality. Despite this, she found happiness in music (which she only sang after a little Chinese moonshine). She was elegant, clean, & loved pretty, pink clothing, which was frowned upon under Mao’s regime. Using what little money, she saved to buying pink fabrics was a small act of defiance against Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Happiness was often short-lived, however, as she was ill most of the time and required frequent care in the decrepit state-run Chinese hospitals; a product of socialized medicine. While undergoing surgery in the eighties she received a blood transfusion infected with syphilis that was discovered a decade later when I brought my mother to the United States. Despite a course of antibiotics, her brain had already suffered the consequences of neurosyphilis. She displayed signs of dementia at the age of 60. Though ill, America offered my mother a degree of peace, even if it was momentary. She & my father converted to Christianity & lived peacefully, attending a Chinese church every Sunday. In the end, her advanced dementia collided with COVID-19 & after being hospitalized, she died in 2020.
My mother’s legacy is one of defiance. It began with a cry that defied death, lived through compassion that defied pain, & endures in me. This revelation testifies to the miracle of God’s design; subtle, yet purposeful. For God imbues in each of us a part of his divine essence. For my mother, she bore the suffering & submission to pain that Christ knew; not out of weakness, but out of love for her family, so that they may have survived. She embraced God’s Word that we defy evil not through the hardening of our hearts, but through turning the other cheek & committing to compassion.
