Projection Child

by Fiona Young

Ownership
The chit-chat comes in the quiet evenings when the household is restful and there is nothing to be done. With a sly creak from the door, Mother would peek into my bedroom, then sit on the bedside with me. It is these casual, bittersweet moments where she’d check up on how her daughter was doing, followed by parental advice that replaced bedtime stories. Like a ritual of prayer or manifestation, my mother spilled synonyms of riches, cars, and mansions as paths she hopes to foresee in my future. It’s as if repeating these words would make the little girl with time on her hands help lasso these dreams for her. I’d roll my eyes at the absurdity of our average lives existing in the world she speaks of. I am a projection child, holding the burden of my mother’s dreams.

These same chit-chats would reveal a sliver of her life before having children. She’d tell things to her daughter as if a friend were gossiping to another. One dissatisfaction that pops up in our conversations a lot is living in a house that was not hers. Instead, it was owned by her husband’s parents, a roof that could crush her at any second. In conjunction, she always strongly advised me to never move in with others unless I knew I had ownership. Own your home, car, and whatever materialistic luxury or need you could think of before ever settling with a man who has them. Ownership—to a woman who grew up owning nothing—was a word that meant everything.

That ownership of herself and her agency waned when she was pressed deep with a horizontal scar stretched across her abdomen, a deep brown contrasting with her tan skin. “I had to open up myself to have you and your sister,” she said calmly with a weak smile. Having a scar be scarred over again for two blessings. Mother recalled how, before we appeared in her life, she used to be praised for the immense beauty she held at my age. Of course, even my father testified that to be true and told me of the numerous stalkers he had to fight off to be with such a fallen goddess. He’d also make these searing remarks that she had fallen. After bearing his children, it was clear that pregnancy stretches the body, unable to snap back to how it’s used to. The change is permanent, down to a hormonal level. Their pristine high school sweetheart love grew mundane and domestic. That is not exactly to say that it lost its influence, but rather showing appreciation is now riddled with chores. One day, she fell ill. Out of the numerous doctors she saw, one commented that if she wanted children, she would have to do it now because of declining health. That sentence rang in her head like an alarm. This meant that she didn’t have time to scrape up a better living situation. She did not have time to think about how the uterus takes more than just your physical beauty. It eats up your dreams, then spits them back out as a new breath of life not belonging to you.

In Utero
The heart monitor beeps blaringly as Jenny, now a Mother, wakes up in a hospital bed strapped with tubes and IVs. It's been two weeks past the due date–her stomach felt no will to push. She had amniotic fluid shots to stimulate a water break, still to no avail. Down to the last resort, the doctor could only offer a C-section. She could barely think as her ears rang, more and more voices joined the room, and blurry eyes made out what she could under buzzing hospital lights. By now, she has stayed at the Coney Island Hospital for 13 hours. She made it, she gave birth.

Taking a glance down, the fresh and deep scar shook her. What was more concerning was that although the baby had already been taken out, her stomach area remained bloated. Blood soaked into the bedding, and still kept leaking. Her husband had to leave by 10 pm because an extended stay wasn’t allowed. She rang the signaling bell to tell this to one of the medical staff, and that’s when they realized their neglectful mistake. They rushed her to the ER immediately, all the while being psychedelically disoriented and hooked up. In that room sat a doctor who sharply massaged her stomach for another two hours, debloating all the blood and liquids dangerously built up in her abdomen when she passed out from exhaustion. No one remembered to check up on her till she had to ask for help herself.

Giving birth to either of her daughters was not easy. The first one was too cozied up, the same kind of stubbornness found in getting out of a warm bed during a winter morning. The couple couldn’t wait any longer as the baby would’ve grown dangerously large for birthing. Jenny knew it would be alright that August night, as she remembered the moonlight that showered her through a sliver of window in that desolate hospital room, hours before giving way to new life. Fiona came out to be a healthy 9.9lb infant (top 10th percentile in birth weight) with a healthy cry. As for the second child, she came into the world more difficult than Fiona. Once a woman has a C-section, they must do it for every child thereafter.

Shrink
It is etched in me like code whenever I mention something about Father, that I spoke of him highly. He would often be found at the center of conversations, his jokes keeping the dinner table laughing all evening. I could spout non-stop about his biggest and littlest achievements like starting up a successful store, high scores in video games, reading a thousand books, and more. As much as I was proud of him, he was just as healthily proud of his eldest daughter, who continuously chased that stream of approval. Being raised by such an inspirational individual, I wanted to grow up just like him by adopting his skills and planning out my start-up shop. All this to say and more, standing beside this great man is a woman who’s been by his side for years. Despite knowing these two for all my life, it’s hard to think of something nice and concise to say about the mother of his children.

Spread across a table in front of me was an assortment of fidgets and toys for the fingers to wander, fitted within a soundproof room. Stanley was the name of my high school social worker, donning a short rainbow haircut and a Master's from Columbia. Her reason for being here in the public education system, rather than a private one, was that there was diversity in the cases of students she saw. More than once, I had crumpled sheets of paper frustrations scribbled with the turmoil of understanding the woman who raised me, and tossed them at my shrink. Even knowing my mother’s background as an immigrant who climbed tooth and nail her way here, why did I favor everything towards Father despite the things she’s given up for me? In his jokes were masked nitpicks at her smallest failures, looks, or doing things at a different pace. I’d laugh with his laugh, an echo of father and daughter against the woman who gave them each other.

We’d trod together on a thin line, thin enough that she’d burst if she tried to put up with the heckles. Secretly, it might’ve weighed her heart down as heavily as any discouraging words would. Stanley caught these paper balls effortlessly and unfolded them to rearrange these concerning thoughts.

“It’s not uncommon for the father to be seen as a stronger male figure, and therefore easier to follow. This does not make your mother any powerless.” She said, noticing my downward gaze and pausing to fiddle with one of the toys.

My hands were kept busy to control these thoughts, to not let her words run away from me. I sat for a moment in silence, then wiped the painful relief stinging behind my eyes. I leaned back and so very much wanted to shrink into the couch, to have it hug and swallow me whole as much as the rushing guilt did. Never had I heard of an example where someone bullied their mother. Stanley reassured me I was not the first.

Tolerance can be a dangerous thing. To be tolerant of blatant mistreatment between members of a household, to put up with it quietly, to let a disgusting loathing that I didn’t even know I had seep out of me. This is often what a shrink does, not to shrink your feelings but to shift the way things are viewed. This story was formed from the unraveling of an eighteen-year-long relationship, discovering forms of misogyny, and the reform of one.

She Could Have Been My Friend
“Tiffany? Too many parts to sound out. Amy? Too common. Keep ‘Qi Xia’? Then my teacher can’t pronounce it.”
“What about Jenny?” a girl chimed.
“Jenny? Jen-ney… Jenny! That’s short and special. That’s perfect.”

Mother’s English name decidedly became ‘Jenny’, one that she picked out with her friends in high school. Centered on a school desk was a notebook with pencil marks and eraser shavings all over. Inside were written lists of girly names. It was her first few weeks adjusting outside of the countryside, after moving from China to Brooklyn, New York, and attending school in Chinatown at 14 years old. Picking a new name for a new country made sense, as a new identity in reflection of starting fresh. She’d quickly find a few girlfriends who spoke Cantonese, including her now best friend, Helen. Jenny gossiped nostalgically about decade-old tea with Aunties Helen, Jolie, and many others she hadn’t talked to in years. Once in a while, these people would blip back into her life when she’d have them over for dinner or take me to a cafe to chat with them. There was so much of her life where I didn’t exist, I thought, as I reminisced about how reformative my high school years had been for me.

I would also wonder about what happened during her college years, being an important time in life where most people develop core values and beliefs. She’d spent 6 years obtaining an Associate's degree in accounting, coupled with the fact that it was still hard to understand college-level English. I only understood that struggle when I started college myself, and failed my first exam in Accounting 210 and broke down crying at 11:30 pm in the library. She did it and followed through, being celebrated as the first person of her village to get a college degree. I’d silently share the sentiments of being an overachieving older sister; when she was young, all she wanted was to make her loved ones proud and eat chocolate snacks because that was her luxury. It shattered me inside to see her cry when news broke out about her parents’ will. Her name won't be anywhere on it, not a penny, not even the house, which will be given to her younger brother. There were protests about how she was the one who raised her sibling, picking up part-time jobs throughout all of college, the one who sacrificed evenings cooking dinners for the entire family because it was not a boy’s job, nor could the parents come back early from work. Another dream crushed of moving out. Maybe what I do isn’t enough–it is not a house–but I buy her chocolates when I can.

Photography is unique in capturing things like a time capsule. What people don’t often think about is that it can also show what the photographer cares about. Billy, my father, dug up his profusely used cameras filled with pictures of his muse, Jenny. They depict a slender woman with prominent cheekbones, raven black hair down the length of her back, and a solemn stare. There were images of her with ice-queen expressions and maybe a rare smile, posed under cherry blossom trees or a house in Brooklyn next to our old family car. In another cam recorder was a video of her when she was 19 shopping around a suburban mall, wearing what is now considered an authentic 2000s style of graphic tees, low-rise skinny jeans (now mom jeans, which I also borrow), topped with a Abercrombie jacket now belonging to me as a vintage hand-me-down.

There’s a picturesque image of a quiet and polite girl, so seemingly different from the person who walks around the house with a slipper-clapping sound you can hear two rooms away, watching her favorite dramas all day. She had a box under her bed filled with old things from her teenage years, such as merch from her favorite boy bands and idols. There was her MP3 player and old movie DVDs of the genres she liked, and underneath a layer of love letters from the many boys and men who liked her before she met her sweetheart. In a bygone era where fashion was different and so were the trends we knew, it was jarringly familiar in the way we had our fangirl phase and self-exploration. In those pictures, I saw a time when I was not even a thought in her life, someone who was filled with exhilarating and primal youth. I wondered if I could’ve been friends with her if I were her age.

Front Desk
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, my mother went out searching for a job. She worked as a secretary to a real estate firm, directly assisting its CEO on his day-to-day agenda. For seven years, Jenny would come back from 9-to-5 and clock straight to cooking dinner. Then, she went off to talk about her job as the only activity she participated in outside of home. Our family dinners would’ve tasted bitter if we had listened to the misogynistic comments and mistreatment from her boss, she’d retell, as we sat there eating with our ears shut.

In the mornings, the bathroom would be held up longer than usual as she’d complete her makeup and hair routine. Nail appointments became frequent, and mail shipped to our house was often business clothes bought online. In between all the vanity, she was taking care of herself to face the outside world. What she looked like during the day was jarring compared to the cozy housewife revealed in the evenings. To Jenny, she had to look polite and charming, beautiful and presentable, to work as a front desk clerk.

Mother once mentioned how upset she was that her work buddy decided to quit his job. After a few years at that firm, he had packed his desk and moved to a different profession permanently. Buddy was also the only one who’d patiently helped her with learning the computer systems, giving a friendly attitude to the middle-aged assistant. Another time, my mother would call me over to take a look at the new flyers and advertising material she had made. There was such a proud gleam radiating from her for being able to create professional-looking pieces, only after months of figuring out how to work the confusing editing programs. She would soon quit that job too, when her boss made her take care of his two spoiled children like it was some daycare. She caught his elementary daughter trying to cut the handle of her Burberry purse with scissors, and asked what prompted this.

“You said I can’t have it, so you can't, too,” said the girl. She looked back at Jenny with doe eyes that had something dark in them, stunned that her scissors had been taken away.

Taking care of school children was one of the few things she had on her resume, along with work experience at CPA offices and pharmacies; It was not found in her job description.

Chicken
The way I was raised is similar to that of a farm chicken. I was provided a solid roof over my head, with a surplus of healthy grain dinners and snacks in the fridge, living in a humble penthouse I shared with my cousins. Chickens are raised only for their eggs, otherwise, they’re cooked. We keep close to our elders and support our family as much as possible, huddling under the same roof as it rains. All four of my grandparents are lively and well, nestled under the same home where their grandchildren will be raised. As for my cousins and me, we don’t fly away from the coop. It’s practically biologically ingrained into us that we can’t fly. As my instinctive duties, I held the promise to my parents of being someone who could take care of them when they got older, and to provide a steady supply of gratuity paychecks when I am old enough to get a full-time job. What if by the time I grew up, my eggs were too small or my eggshells were too thin? I’d put pressure on myself to become the best of the flock and fund their dreams of an egg monopoly. Mr. and Mrs. Farmer reassured me they’ll keep me in that cozy coop if I'm too afraid to become a free-ranger, that I’d always have a home to fall back to, even if I can’t lay eggs anymore. I should at least try, is all they both wished for.

My mom, who grew up as a farmer, would probably find this metaphor funny. She misses the dozen geese she fed while waddling them around the lake. The smell of the oven-brick stove, fishies in the ponds, and celebration parties with chicken in place of a birthday cake. She misses the relatives whom she has not seen since moving here decades ago. But here she is now, building a new home in New York with more family members living within her vicinity than she started with. She’d explore all four corners of Central Park, malls upon malls, and possibly every restaurant in Chinatown. When I travel with her, nothing seems to surprise her in the city.

“I’ve been here when I was your age, “ she said. “And I’ve brought you here too, don’t you remember?”

I didn’t remember. Not all of it, but only the snippets we’d watch on our 10 terabyte collection of family photos and videos. It’s 2012, and the camera pans to a children’s park located at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, presumably recorded by the father. A little girl runs around with her toddler sister, both of them having a classic bowl haircut every Chinese kid has ever had, donning colorful tie-dye leggings that break every rule of cohesive fashion. They didn’t care. Then pans to the mom, holding hands with them as they venture through the matrix and nature. This repeats—for family trips to Disney World, the Bahamas, Pennsylvania, and more—as many of these trips wouldn’t have happened without her planning them. She was also present for every doctor checkup and parent-teacher conference, where my teachers and classmates' moms would recognize me by her. There was never a night when I’d go hungry, as the kitchen is always filled with dishes prepared by her hands. A mother gives and gives, and it’s clear she’s given her everything to me and my sister to live more than just regular lives. After all this, she decides it’s also important for her to share her dreams and story of childbirth with me.

These grand presents weighed heavily in my mind, as it wasn’t something every child gets. I live by the belief that happiness stems from having gratitude, and so looking back, I am grateful to her for giving me so many things to be thankful for. At an early age, I had already taken lessons in karate, ballet, piano, and swimming—overwhelmingly signed up all at the same time—because these were things my mother couldn’t ever even dream of trying when she was younger. Now that she had the resources, she gave them all to me to experience.

Parents who carry struggles growing up, either shelter their children from that burden, or put that baggage on them as a means of “I shouldered this burden, so why can’t you too?” In between all her giving was a bit of that baggage she had from growing up poor and the daughter of a traditional Chinese family. I’d have bouts of unexplainable anger from feeling carried down by guilt. She felt the need to always tell me I should be grateful for having a roof over my head or nice clothes to wear. I already am without her asking for it, and sometimes I’m hurt when she assumes I’m not. But it doesn’t change the fact that her number of positive gifts outweighs the hurtful words. It’s difficult to come to terms with this communication barrier built over the past 18 years. Now it’s time for it to come down. Words are my sledgehammer, and I will use them to meet her across the wall.