When Mother was in her sixties, her fifth daughter in America wrote asking her to immigrate, saying America was better than Rangoon and material life was abundant. Mother refused. She said, “I’m not going anywhere. Even if I die, I want to die in Burma.” She could not bear to leave the old home where she had lived for decades, and she did not want to abandon Father’s lonely grave in a foreign place with no one beside him.
Mother gave birth to nine children. She raised every one of them one mouthful of rice and one bowl of soup at a time. She never hired a nanny. Even during confinement after childbirth, she got up herself to wash clothes and cook. Father was a tailor. From early morning until late at night, his feet worked the treadle of the sewing machine, carrying the days and months along as he labored for others. Mother bought the food, cooked, washed clothes, and cared for the children, while also finding time to help Father remove basting stitches, sew on buttons, and work buttonholes. When her second daughter was born, Mother put the baby in a pram by the shop entrance while she sat beside it doing needlework. Burmese passersby, seeing how cute the baby was, would push the little carriage and play with her.
The children came one after another, and Mother raised them all this way. As the little birds grew, one by one she let them fly away, hoping each would have a good future. When her eldest son graduated from middle school, Father and Mother sent him back to the motherland for further study.
Someone asked, “Uncle Ye, how can you bear to let your eldest son leave home instead of keeping him beside you?”
Father said, “What future would he have staying by my side? Let him go out and make his way in the world!”
Mother’s heart ached, but she still held back her tears and saw him off. When the second daughter reached fourteen, Mother likewise sent her back to China to study. After the eldest daughter completed teacher training, Mother was also willing to let her teach in a rural settlement far from Rangoon. Six children remained at home: two in middle school, two in primary school, and two still small enough to play at home. Mother’s burden did not lessen. As prices rose, life became harder and the load grew heavier.
Years of overwork gradually weakened Father’s body. He often coughed and became short of breath. Mother urged him to see a doctor, but Father merely bought patent medicine at the pharmacy, postponing the doctor again and again.
Finally, one day Father was seized by a violent coughing fit and spat blood. Mother panicked and rushed him to a government public hospital. Only after examination did they learn that Father had a disease of the lungs. Today such an infectious illness might not be considered hopeless, but in the economically backward Burma of the 1950s medicine was scarce, and penicillin injections were extremely expensive.
In the hospital, Father kept worrying about the shop and the children at home waiting to be fed. At home, Mother worried about Father’s worsening condition. Every day she ran between two places: caring for the children’s daily needs at home and going to the hospital to look after Father, who could no longer move easily. The sorrow and pain in Mother’s heart could not be known by the children thousands of miles away. And how much could the little boys and girls right before her eyes understand? They saw only the smile she forced onto her face.
Father had not been in the hospital long when treatment failed and he died with regret. He had passed the age of fifty by only four years. Poor Mother wailed in grief. How would the family live now? The older children were scattered far away, and a widowed mother was left with six children who had not yet come of age, the youngest only four. How heavy that burden of life must have been.
The overseas Chinese community deeply sympathized with Mother. People donated money, and with help from the Burmese Chinese Women’s Association and other community organizations, Father was properly laid to rest.
With help from her younger brother, Mother and the children encouraged one another and endured the hardship together. A few years later, as the children gradually grew up, the third daughter inherited Father’s trade. Mother then sent the fourth daughter and her middle-school-age youngest son back to China to continue their studies, hoping they too would have a better future. The fifth daughter married and soon followed her husband to America.
Mother loved her children deeply, but she was not selfish. She did not want to keep them beside her if doing so would cost them their future.
One by one, Mother’s children flew away like birds. Mother became lonelier and lonelier.
By the 1970s, Burma’s economy was deteriorating and life was becoming more difficult. Her fifth daughter wrote from America, earnestly asking Mother to come. At first Mother refused, despite letter after letter. A golden nest or silver nest was not as good as one’s own doghouse. Mother did not want to leave the old home where she had lived for decades, nor Father’s grave, the grave of the man who had shared her life for so many years. Besides, Mother was a housewife unused to traveling. She normally went everywhere on foot and could not tolerate the dizziness of vehicles or boats.
America was so far away and so unfamiliar. Mother knew no English. Everything would be inconvenient. So she preferred to remain in that dim, narrow old house.
Yet in the end, her longing for her children was too strong. How she wanted to see those little birds she had sent flying away. Her eldest son had been gone for more than twenty years and had married and raised children in Kunming. How she longed to see those two grandsons. Her second daughter had finished university in Tianjin, married, and had a son. When would Mother see them? The fourth daughter and youngest son had returned to China only to run into the Cultural Revolution. Their schooling came to nothing and they were sent to farms for labor. Mother regretted sending them back to suffer. Fortunately, they later obtained permission to go to Macao. Were they living well?
Mother missed her sons and daughters so much that she often could not sleep through the night. She waited and waited until her hair gradually turned white. How she wished the birds that had flown away would return to the nest and restore the warmth the family once had.
Under her fifth daughter’s repeated pleading and persuasion, Mother realized that if the whole family was ever to be reunited, the only way was for her to go to America first. After turning the matter over again and again, Mother’s love became determination. She flew to America alone.
After Mother arrived in America, she became the needle and thread. With an invisible strand of family love, she drew together the children scattered in different places and connected them all to Los Angeles. As the children gradually immigrated to America, Mother was overjoyed. She was reunited with sons and daughters she had not seen for decades and surrounded by a large group of grandchildren. Eating yuanxiao, the food symbolizing reunion, she would sometimes wake laughing from her dreams.
At holidays, three generations gathered together. More than fifty people packed the living room, kitchen, and bedrooms. The children and grandchildren wished Mother a happy birthday, and Mother handed red envelopes to the younger generation. Everyone sang, danced, talked, and laughed. What a warm and harmonious family scene.
Mother died smiling at the age of eighty-four.
I often think: how could a housewife who rarely left home, a widowed woman already over sixty, fly thousands upon thousands of miles to America alone? How could an old woman who became dizzy even riding in a rickshaw willingly endure the hardship and motion sickness of a long journey to a distant and unfamiliar country?
Ah—it was that loving heart.
Mother’s courage and strength came from the unbreakable bond of affection that tied her to her children, from that deep love of a mother for her young.
At Thanksgiving, we brothers and sisters take our children to green Rose Hills. At Mother’s grave we place flowers and offerings of fruit and food. We thank Mother for raising us, and we thank her for that heart of love containing limitless self-sacrifice.
Originally published January 5, 2001.