LOVE LETTERS TO MY MOTHER’S MIGRATION STORY
by HANNAH L.
I decided to write these letters as a processing tool for the bits and pieces of what I’ve learned from my mother’s migration story. These letters are not perfect, but they are honest. My mom is a 1.5 generation immigrant with a complex diaspora across Southeast Asia. I see the many ways that she straddles both the immigrant and the American experience; the responsibility of being the first child, translating documents, and being the primary care executer to her aging parents. She is my hero and inspiration for these letters.
Part of this experience has been God trying to communicate to me that I am still at war with being Chinese. As part of the Chinese diaspora, I reflect more on how Chinese people are everywhere. I mainly hear from my parents that Chinese move and resettle for business, trade, or economic opportunities. That makes me question, “Are Chinese values inherently capitalistic? Do the Chinese just go all over Southeast Asia to rule the economic landscape?” It fills me with so much dissonance. My parents are always worried about my future, financial stability, and security. I understand why–they were immigrants, low income, and had to take care of their parents financially at a young age. I find this at a cross intersection with my faith. I believe that in Jesus there is abundance. How does Jesus redeem culture? I trust that there is something deeper.
I reflect on the migration of my mom’s ancestors. They did not know God, but somehow my grandpa and my mom came to know him. I want to know how Jesus impacted their story as immigrants on a personal level. I sit with how they were constantly foreigners in a land that was not their own, yet they were always in Chinese specific enclaves. I don’t know all the missing pieces and I might never know. As part of their story, I am a Chinese American who grew up in a Chinese enclave on Native American land. I am reconciling the ways my family is perpetually living on foreign land.
I just have more questions! But that is completely okay. I give thanks to God that I get to explore these questions now, to discover and reflect.
I see these letters as living, ever changing as I grow and learn more about my mother’s story.
Dear China,
I don’t know you well but I come from you. We are a hundred years apart. I know that we come from the south, from GuangDong. I call you the motherland but my mom, her mom, her mother, nor her mother never knew your soil, your earth. Yet they know your tongue…
Dear Singapore,
I know you a little bit better from my mom and her stories. We are forty five years apart. Where the heat is sweltering. Where durians grow effortlessly. You are probably the most conflicting to me. A tiny tip of formerly Malaysia, a Chinese enclave that is home to some of the richest people in the world…
Dear Vietnam,
I don’t know you well at all, but I also have a piece of you. We are seventy years apart. You are a mystery to me even though we are only separated by one generation. When I asked my grandma about you one time, she refused to talk about you…
Dear San Francisco,
I know you best. We are thirty years and zero years apart simultaneously. You are stolen Ohlone land and I’m sorry that I didn’t know this until I was 19. You are where my parents met on Silver and Cambridge, at the immigrant church that overlooks 280. Where my grandmother took culinary classes at CCSF…
ABOUT HANNAH
Hannah is a second generation Cantonese American, born and raised in the Bay Area. She works part time for a workers rights organization in San Francisco's Chinatown and part time student at community college to learn about biology. She loves: complexity and nuance, the intersections of faith and justice, her goofy nephews, and pineapple buns with milk tea.