When I was eight, my third-grade teacher asked each of us to bake something at home, a family recipe, then bring it in to class to share. My mom panicked and rang the teacher. She knew her way around a kitchen—she could out steam, braise, and stir-fry practically anyone—but baking was new territory for her. At the last minute, she picked up a lemon pound cake at the grocery store, discarded its aluminum casing, and plopped it onto a paper plate. With an improvised recipe in hand, I told my class it was something we would make on special occasions. Swallowing a mouthful of imposter cake, my teacher remarked, “See, I knew your mom could bake something!” I felt relieved and also victorious, as if I had cleverly hidden my family’s otherness.
As a new mom of twins, I’m the same age my own mother was when she gave birth to me. And I’ve started to think of memories such as this—of feeling one lemon pound cake shy of fitting in—and wonder what I want to take from my childhood and what to leave behind.
Growing up Chinese-American, my story felt different. Did my family have traditions? Not in the way holiday cards defined traditions, with stockings by the fireplace and egg hunts on fresh-cut grass. But we did have them, passed down from thousands of years of ancestral history. My parents, first-generation immigrants who met in Berkeley, California, in the ’70s, were simultaneously adapting to their new world and holding onto their shared culture, while teaching my sister and me along the way. An abridged list of dichotomies: celebrating Christmas with hot pot and hong baos (red envelopes). Learning cursive during the day and coming home to practice calligraphy at night with my dad. Reading Archie comics under the table during elaborate banquet dinners in Chinatown with extended family (which always ended with aunties and uncles fighting over the check—family takes care of family).
We were trying to straddle two cultures and find a balance. Sometimes I was happy toggling between the two, having a secret language and family life to fall back on; other times, I desperately wanted to be Stephanie Tanner on Full House, just to try on that sitcom life. I would tell friends that we had a big fluffy dog and a pool in the backyard or that my mom made meat loaf the other night, even though none of it was true.
I didn’t have a stage mom or a bake-sale mom or a soccer mom. Phone calls never ended with “I love you!” Our love was between the lines. She was more comfortable showing affection through lessons in hard work, something she picked up from her own upbringing. When I didn’t get into advanced math in junior high, for example, she convinced the school to let me retake the test. We stayed up late three nights in a row as she grilled me on numbers and pumped me full of ginkgo biloba. Similar to many immigrant parents, there was academic pressure and a steer toward math and science because they’re tangible and objective; you can’t argue with a good grade or a reliable job.
Petite, elegant, and wildly eccentric, my mom was also a fan of discipline, sometimes in public. Once, in the middle of a Staples, she yelled at me in Chinglish—I can’t remember the context. What I do remember, though, was the white woman who approached us at the checkout line. “Sweetie, if you ever need anything, please call me,” she said, pressing a note into my hand. Then she asked if she could give me a hug. My cheeks burned. I felt small, angry, confused, exposed, humiliated. Most of all, I felt protective. Here was someone who had witnessed this cracked prism of cultural narratives and found it so alarming that she would try to reach out and save me—from my own mom.
A question I asked myself that night and many nights after: How do you learn to be a mother?
Back then, there were no Facebook support groups for New Chinese Immigrant Moms, no Reddit boards, no late-night, wine-fueled group chats. You tried to put hot food on the table, raise a respectable family, and hold your head high despite a society that didn’t validate you, that offered a conditional existence instead of a rightful one. You hoped that your kids become better versions of you, that the sacrifice was worth it.
My mom, who named herself after Jacqueline Kennedy, did her best to assimilate. She would watch daytime soaps to practice her English and drive 30 minutes to the health-food store for the brown bread with nuts. She owned a pink ThighMaster. At the same time, she was fiercely proud of her roots. As a lecturer of Chinese literature, she loved to bring her students to dim sum, teaching them etiquette like how to hold chopsticks and how to thank someone after they poured you chrysanthemum tea, tapping two fingers on the table.
For Asian-Americans, the hyphen is always present. It asks, do you want to be Asian today, or do you want to be American? It teaches you to code-switch, to instinctively scan your social surroundings, then lean into whichever side agreeably blends into the situation. You adjust yourself to the world, even if it means editing your truth. To survive, you lean into American because that’s the center that holds everything. That’s what living in the U.S. subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly) molds you into thinking. To stick out as something other can feel exhausting.
Over the past year, I spent whatever free minutes I had reconciling who I am with this terrifying, if exhilarating, new role as a mother, one breastfeeding break at a time. I started to want more of myself so there would be more to give to my babies. I would search their sweet faces as if I were reading tea leaves. Would they share my features, or would they take after their white father? What would that mean for their sense of belonging? How would it influence their view of the world or their view of me?
A year into motherhood, I certainly don’t have the answers. But when I think of what I’ve learned from my mom, I feel gratitude. She taught me grit and determination. She made mistakes so I could make new ones and prioritized education so I could grapple with the hard questions and be part of a larger conversation. I wonder how much of that was because she’s an Asian mom, an immigrant mom, or simply…a mom.
For now, I’m trying to figure it out like everyone else. I am embracing both my Chineseness and Americanness more than ever so that my twins can too. I talk to them in Mandarin and English. We read books like I Dream Of Popo, about a young Taiwanese girl and her family who emigrate to America, and we dance to the Muppets. I feed them bits of dumplings, as well as gluten-free blueberry pancakes. Soon, I’ll adopt some old family traditions, hot pot and hong baos, and make brand-new ones—a cake! from scratch!—for special occasions, like on Lunar New Year, when they’ll invite friends over to our house. We’ll find moments to celebrate their differences, not hide them.
My babies are half Chinese, and in their own way, they’ll also straddle two cultures. Maybe they’ll find the dichotomy confusing and stressful. Maybe they’ll find it funny and magical and teach me something new. Or maybe they won’t have to choose between their cultures at all and grow up in a world that allows them to thrive just as they are—fearless on either side of the hyphen.