Author: Laura Lee
Category: Humorous
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Regardless of bank balances, my family always seemed to live in a different era, one decades behind whatever the norm was in America. When anything broke in the house, at any point over the years, it didn’t get fixed, certainly not by a professional. Our house felt like something alive, something in constant need of maintenance. I replaced the interior parts of each of the toilets in our house more times than I can recall, changed the coils in the leaky faucets until they leaked again. When we had electrical issues in the kitchen, my father attempted to fix the wires without turning off the power, resulting in a melted screwdriver and shorted fuses. When the upstairs toilet flooded, a square hole remained in our living room ceiling afterward, where the plaster had been cut out and not replaced. Time and again the plumbing would fail and our basement would flood, and nothing would be done to prevent it from happening again.
Two of the three entryways into our house had broken locks, which could be locked from the interior, but couldn’t be unlocked from outside. As a teen I often got locked out of the house, and I’d resort to hoisting my body through the kitchen window, grabbing the chest-height sill and launching myself into the house. There was no one at home, besides me, who was willing to fix things when they broke, or to maintain things, and I was limited in my skill set.
It felt, in our household, as though no one was running it—not the sheer physical space, much less the more spiritual idea of a family unit. In leadership, neither of my parents gave advice socially, on how to be successful in communities or in society. My father gave warnings, instead, on what not to do, or what was corrupt and tainted in South Korea, or, most of all, that I needed to study for my SATs. Education had been his escape route to a better life, and my parents saw education as the one essential, the primary vehicle to a solid life. My father had thought about physiological needs, the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid: food, water, warmth, rest. Everything beyond the basic essentials of survival, the bare minimum of financial security—belonging and love, esteem, self-actualization—were completely beyond him.
My mother, on the other hand, was too preoccupied being the breadwinner to take on additional responsibilities. She kept crisp twenty-dollar bills, fresh from the ATM, in a cheap vinyl toiletry bag, a black-and-white patterned thing that looked like a flattened cow, free from the Estée Lauder makeup counter at the mall, in a drawer in the wet bar in our living room. She didn’t track how much money was in the bag, only refilled it when it was running low. Her expectation was that when my middle sister or I needed something, we would take money from the drawer and get it for ourselves. It was somehow understood that this was a system of convenience, and that we were being entrusted with responsibility. My best friend growing up envied this system, but I envied hers, in which she got an allowance to spend, rather than access to a resource, without guidance in how to be.
Having access to cash didn’t make money feel real. As a child I still undertook tasks around the house for the arbitrary amounts my mother assigned: a dollar to mow the back lawn, a dollar to clean the toilets, a dollar to vacuum the house, a dollar to rake up the leaves. And soon the dollar amounts fell away, as she needed help to keep up with maintaining a household.
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My middle sister and I were locked in a strange battle, in which I would do something to help my mother—clean the living room, stack up blankets—and she would undo precisely what I had just done—knock over the blankets I had stacked, purposely create a mess directly after I’d cleaned—simply to antagonize.
My mother assumed certain things about us—that we were a family unit, that our resources were communal, in a way Americans wouldn’t understand. My mother’s conception of family differed from the more individualistic model of the U.S. She assumed that we would interact and engage in ways similar to her model of family life, that we would each work toward the family’s best interests rather than our own individual ones, that fairness would rule.
“I want to buy you your houses one day,” she told me with pleasure when I was growing up, because this was how she thought things should be. In Korea most of her family, wives and sons and her parents, remained living in one household.
Emotionally our family didn’t play out that way, though. Instead we tug-of-warred over resources, over who spent more where and how. In later years, when my middle sister racked up tens of thousands of dollars in bills routinely, attending college and then dropping out, insisting on enrolling for a second arts degree, then dropping out again, fights were the norm, as we, as a family unit, tried to determine how to pay for these large emergency bills. My mother’s model of family didn’t take into account the sicknesses that would plague us.
* * *
“Does she talk about Malala?” my friend asks.
She and I laugh privately at this innocent question. This is how American media covers Pakistan. This is what we hear. She likes to laugh at how here the script calls for her, as a Muslim woman, as a bisexual Pakistani, to play a certain role—the role of “victim,” as she sees it. But it doesn’t resemble who she is, not really, not at all.
She is Pakistani, proudly. “Brown is beautiful,” she says, with those big eyes, after giving me shit about dating white people nearly exclusively.
She is Muslim. “I didn’t think of myself as Muslim until I came here,” she says. And I understand precisely what she means. We don’t feel of something, protective of it, until others who don’t have grounds to speak—who aren’t of it—attack.
“Inshallah,” she says, at times. “Mashallah,” I respond, or vice versa. “God willing,” and “God has willed it,” in turn. Or “Haram, haram!” when we do something forbidden.
We joke, but her religion runs deep. When faced with serious troubles, her first response is to pray.
And she’s bisexual. She dislikes engaging with queerness as a community, for the way it brings out “types” rather than individuals, but she doesn’t mind rainbows. She gives me a bright rainbow monkey T-shirt and delights when women compliment me on it—she knows of my discomfort with rainbows, after all. Her playfulness at work, her refusal to take anything seriously.
To those who don’t know her, these are the outward ways in which she’s meant to identify. And yet there are the more important ways, both large and small. That she still joys in bubble wrap, despite being well on her way to a PhD. Or her sense of wholeness, derived from the family she loves.
“Your amma is so graceful,” I tell her once, after studying a photograph of her mother. Her amma is more reserved than her daugh
ter, I can tell, yet she glows with a quiet, calm happiness, her face unlined.
“Buy Laura a present for me,” her amma says back, after the comment is passed on.
Her amma could’ve had a career, trained as she was as a doctor, but she made a different choice. She’s cooked nearly every meal for her five children over the past three decades, slapping out chapati daily and boiling black tea leaves in milk for chai, and she cares for two grandchildren similarly now.
Commonplace as these acts of devotion might be in Pakistan, I can’t imagine. Love, I think. What it means to grow up in a loving household, with a happy family. What an amulet it provides.
To her amma I am just her daughter’s very good friend, the one whom she buses down to Indiana to see every other week, the one who buses to Chicago every alternate week. Who learns bits of Urdu for fun. Who asks for recipes to make for her daughter. Whose daughter is learning to cook, too, and even, despite her disinterest in such things, to drive.
When she spends December in Pakistan, we FaceTime nearly every day. Her large family talks in the background, and they usually know we’re chatting.
“Assalam aleikum,” I tell her mother, through her daughter.
“Wailakum salaam,” I hear back. And more, too—other blessings in Urdu. Her mother is so earnest in her kindness.
“Don’t your sisters know?” I ask. “Don’t your parents, on some level?”
“No way,” she tells me.
I feel guilty at our deception. No matter what we do, back home we will be nothing more than very good friends.