#4: Telling my Asian mom about non-monogamy

I often get asked if my parents know about my ethically non-monogamous identity. Here’s my long winded answer, with a focus on my mother.

In an alternate timeline where my mom never left Myanmar for the U.S. and she also still has me for a daughter, maybe we wouldn’t talk past each other so much. Even with generational differences, we’d have enough of a shared language and culture to understand each other better. I’d be able to enumerate how my contemporary notions of self actualization have led me to develop a very different set of values (revoking heteronormative constructions of family, anti-capitalist ideology, embracing non-monogamy) or maybe I wouldn’t have these ideals at all.

With our shared language she could tell me about how she seeks meaning in life, something I don’t think I know about her despite the amount of time we’ve spent together. I think I’d also better internalize how my happiness does not have to come at the cost of hers. The story of immigrant sacrifice and how their children have to repay this debt by living out their parent’s dreams is such a familiar story line and I’m hesitant to flatten my life into a trope. But as much as I’m able to see my emotions reflected in the vast archive of Asian Americana—in movies, books, songs, etc.— these stories still feel like a weak proxy for assuaging the loneliness of my lived experience. Where are the stories of second gen immigrants coming out to their parents as ENM?

I often lament how difficult it is to articulate the nuances of my emotions to my parents when English is not their native tongue, and it is the only language I speak fluently— an outcome of my parent’s desire for me to assimilate in the U.S. I wonder about all the emotional wounds they could heal if they weren’t so trapped in a culture that stigmatizes mental health care, and they could access a shared language of vulnerability with me. Could I be attributing this block to language and cultural differences when really it’s just an unwillingness on either side to engage? People move past these roadblocks with their parents all the time, don’t they?

Sahaj Kaur Kohli of @browngirltherapy captured these feelings so well.

My mother and I have made some strides in speaking more freely about some aspects of my worldview. Each of these moments of candor have felt so halting, and progress has not been linear, as exemplified by a recent conversation we had in which she told me to stop telling her about my life.

“You are your own person making choices in your life that feel right for you, but whatever you’re getting up to, I would rather not know about it.”

I’m still processing that statement and would rather interpret it in the most charitable way, but it made my heart drop. I have no doubts about my mother’s love for me and her desire to have some level of closeness with me, but she is also at a breaking point. She will often unleash a rage upon me about how trapped she feels caring for my sister who has severe autism, and an overbearing husband who she cannot communicate freely with. She’ll rage about how having children and getting married was a huge mistake, but when I remind her I am trying to forge a different path for myself—one without marriage or kids— she balks and says it’s not an option. She is caged in a culture that requires these tenets of success for women and she can’t envision a successful path outside of that.

A photo of my mother when she was around my age. A mother often foists the hopes and dreams she had for her life on her daughter, but what if her daughter was actually made in her image? We are twins.

I am filled with so much sympathy for her and how introducing what she views as destabilizing elements into my, and consequently her life, would be upsetting. This is one of the central dissonances to being an immigrant raising your child in a different part of the world. You want your children to assimilate and be successful according to the terms of this new place but you also reject these same terms because they are anathema to your cultural traditions. She is experiencing what psychiatrist and professor Dr. Eisenbruch coined “cultural bereavement,” characterized by complex emotional distress from losing familiar social structures, cultural values and self-identity. Many immigrants jump into assimilation when they move to the U.S. because they are in survival mode and can’t stop to think about the consequences of shedding their old identity. My differences in assimilation to western values have alienated me from my parents. How do I build intergenerational empathy when I am more different from my parents than they were from their own parents?

How do I build intergenerational empathy when I’m more different from my parents than they were from their own parents?

My mom has not come around to my renouncement of traditional relationship structures and has had a hard time embracing my interracial relationship. She is from a culture rooted in colorism and anti-Blackness and wholly rejects my mixed race partner. I’m trying to have compassion for but not excuse her mindset when it comes to this rejection and anti-Blackness. She left Myanmar’s troubled history of coups, colonization, military rule, and ethnic conflict to a U.S. government that has largely protected her. She was able to go from impoverished to millionaire in one generation, and buys into the model minority myth, which suggests that racism, including more than two centuries of Black enslavement, can be overcome by hard work and strong family values. When American politicians and the media pump up images of the hard-working Asian who can find success within the system (as a convenient way to deny the rights of Black Americans) she internalizes this mentality, because it worked for her. She would be suspicious of anyone I date from a different cultural background (including Asians from other countries, and also white people), but dismantling her anti-Black and anti-Hispanic sentiments is an extra struggle that I am doing my best to chip away at.

In my more generous moments, I know that however misguided her concerns about my life choices are, they are born out of love and an intense desire for me to have a stable life, but at this stage I am pretty far from explaining non-monogamy to her. The idea that our love for each other could breed such seething resentment and sorrow is something I grapple with on a daily basis. With more context and compassion, I am turning this resentment into grief. I see this as a sign of progress because grieving the relationship I will never have with her will help me accept the dynamic we do have and celebrate all the joy within it. Because there is plenty of joy.

As much as I welcome questions about the way I practice non-monogamy, questions about how I engage with my biological family send me to a very lonely place. Fortunately I have a loving and supportive community of chosen family, “nonbiological kinship bonds that many people choose because they need to have mutual support and love” as defined by Trevor Gates-Crandall, a social worker in Colorado. “People are drawn to chosen families because they’ve experienced rejection from their families of origin. Chosen families allow them to create the families that they want.” The freedom I have felt to be my full self without the need to censor around this community has helped in my healing and given me hope. This is why I will continue to advocate for alternative relationship structures and a decentering of the nuclear family as the only way of being. Perhaps in this lifetime (and hopefully not another), I’ll be able to tell her the whole truth and that she’ll be ready to hear it.

Thanks as always for reading 🖤