Things Hmong Women have taught me about packing light

My aunt married her husband when she was 16 years old.  In her senior yearbook, there is a picture of her 6 months pregnant with my cousin.  After 21 years, she and her husband are finally moving out of her In-Law’s.  She said she’s leaving everything except her unused wedding gifts—unboxed pots and pans and table settings she’s stored away in dark narrow spaces like all her teenage dreams. 

I can’t imagine holding on to anything for that long.  Hoping for a glimmer of light one day in the future. 

Maybe it’s the Hmong in her.  It’s in all of us.  Sometimes I wonder why we weigh ourselves down so much.  Like bombs, bullets, and escaping a communist government is the only reason to pack light?

One thing I know is that I don’t want to give myself a reason to hold on to 20 years like it is a Polaroid in a photo album in an attic.  Life doesn’t wait the way we keep our possessions. 

Another aunt asks me if I’ve ever hiked to Eagle’s Peak.  She tells me it’s a hike on her bucket list.  When I tell her we should go next weekend, she looks away and becomes busy with kitchen work.  She doesn’t mention it again—and I don’t press her.  I’ve learned that some dreams are like ghosts.  And my aunt is haunted in the form of things she will never do and places she will never see.  

I don’t believe bucket lists belong 10 feet underground.  You can’t fill a Pyramid with it or burn it to the afterlife.  But even so, my aunt fills her list like a hoarder. 

My uncle’s wife asks me if I still plan to move into my car.  When I tell her I am—she asks me, “Why?”

I wanted to tell her ghost stories horrified me, but instead I say, “I want to pay back my loans and get rid of my debt as fast as I can so that I don’t have an excuse to not do what I want to do.”

She says, “But in life you’ll always have debt.”

Another aunt tells me, “Don’t do it. Stay where you’re at.”

“Why not?”  I ask.

“Because it’s wrong—you’ve forgotten what your goals are—“

I interject vehemently, “I know exactly what my goals are; how can you even say that?  You don’t know what I’m doing to facilitate the life I want to live.”

“That’s not the right way of going about it,” she says carefully after a long silence.

Of all people, I wouldn’t qualify her as a specialist on doing things the “right way”. 

All my life, I’ve looked up to these Hmong women as examples of strength and hard work.  But I don’t want to live my life the way they tell me I should.  I refuse to wait for 20 years to unbox my life, to keep a bucket list with no intention to follow through, to stay exactly where I am even though I’m not happy, or to let my mother say that I just need to find someone to marry in order to gain direction in my life.  Whether or not I attain conventional success is beside the point.  It’s about living my best life and I want to pack light.

My Mother’s Curves

 

Today, pop songs glorify body parts that daughters inherit from their mother. However, the curve of my mother’s hips were never any envy of mine. She let us know how much she didn’t like how they flared from her narrow waist. Us–her three daughters she borned in the United States–long after the war. Long after ESL classes. Long after summers spent taking the bus up north to pick strawberries for penny wages.

 

She told us stories about the time before the Interstate 15 freeway. How her father packed their whole family into a van and would drive on single lane highways through the California mountains to the middle-of-nowhere-city of Banning. She talked about how those roads curved in and out for miles through what felt like endless undulating countryside. And I would get bored listening to her talk about those childhood afternoons.

 

When I was about seven years old, my mother decided she did not like the curve of my belly. And I told her–at least I didn’t have her big fat hips! But that was before puberty; which set in fast and punishing. Mother Nature’s monthly gift came to me in the fourth grade, along with pimples that carved the shape of my face, and lastly, hips just like my mother’s.

 

That’s when the portioning began. She started restricting my meals. Maybe she thought if I was smaller, I’d be more consumable to my elementary school peers.

 

In middle school, I thought if I ran enough miles, I’d be able to put enough distance between me and her hips. But as I gradually became a better runner, I learned there were only so many things I could run from.

 

So I stopped running from problems and started running to solutions. Solutions that I derived from the pounding of my own heart. It is so much easier to hear it when I am running.

 

My mother is more conscious about details than I am. She kept her house like a model home. When I was in kindergarten, she’d scrutinize the curve of my handwriting if it wasn’t perfectly straight. She seemed to think people would correlate my ugly handwriting to my intelligence. Oddly for her, I quickly rose to the top of my class despite having subpar penmanship.

 

When I grew into my inherited curves, I found that I didn’t hate them the way she hated hers. She wears her curves like a bad accent she can’t hide with her perfect handwriting. I wonder if that is a side effect of growing up as an immigrant woman in the United States. Never feeling like you quite belong in your skin, in your body, in your language because you have to live up to two cultural standards. She tried her best to shield me from feeling all her inadequacies, ironically, by making me feel inadequate. But although our curves are the same; our journey’s are not.

Thank you Daily Prompts