International Women
Me, my father, mother and maternal grandmother by the street sign bearing my mother’s family name — another story — in Durban, South Africa circa 1980.
The theme/hashtag for International Women’s Day 2021 is #choosetochallenge.
Truth: I would never “choose to challenge” my mother, a fiery 5’2” enigma who emigrated to Southern California from South Africa, where she was born and raised, attended Catholic school to circumvent the apartheid that would have limited her early education, and worked in my grandparents’ grocery almost as soon as she could see above the counter. She was proud to have been hired as a typesetter for the Natal Mercury newspaper before fleeing to relatives and opportunities abroad.
Within the year of her moving to the U.S., she was introduced to my father, married and had me. Before I was in kindergarten, she modeled in hair shows and was a contestant in a “Mrs. California” pageant, representing one of the coastal cities in which we lived and where I was born. I try to imagine my mother standing in a row of tanned, blonde Malibu Barbie-like competitors. I do remember that someone - I’m assuming my mother - kept a photo of her on-stage in a blue one-piece swimsuit bisected by white satin sash for years, unframed and unforgettable to me to this day.
The international woman stumbled on the pageant “substance” question, what to do about child hunger. She could have talked about having grown up hungry herself, but did not. I grew up firmly cautioned against using “ugly American English” which I could not recognize, being a product of (rather good) American public schools, but apparently spoke. My 100% Chinese mother speaks Zulu, Afrikaans, and Hakka Chinese with a South African accent. Translation: we don’t speak Chinese or American slang.
My adolescence was punctuated by her discipline and distracted oversight, to which I owe my ability to angry-clean a house, survive off scrambled eggs with cheese and “swallow bitter.” My mother grew milder as she grew older - her fucshia leather skirt suits and red Honda prelude (which she refuses to sell) have been replaced by multiple visors bedazzled with pink and scarlet sequins, and forest green leather driving gloves. Distraction persists and manifests as idiosyncrasy. My mother loves to remind me of her heroism and self-appointed titular role of Dragon Queen. She was born in the year of the dragon, the most powerful in Chinese astrology (according to my mother, or dragons).
This year, we embarked on recording her oral history, so I could learn from and listen to her recollections of growing up Chinese (or Black, or Colored depending on the government) during apartheid. I plan to lean into and pull truth and wisdom out of the many wisps of drama and trauma that marked her life before she gave me mine. By proxy, I have experienced a small portion of those, and while chronicling them likely would drain me of the positivity we have replenished over time, our stories would absolutely be examples of choosing and not losing to challenge.
Another truth: My mother’s story, while extraordinary in its own right and expanse from the eastern edge of Southern Africa to the west coast of the United States, is one among countless international women, mothers, daughters and sisters. We are like the sea, infinite, choppy, deep with story, lost, buoyant, rising to meet the sky and crawling to the shore, reflecting all the beauty of possible horizons, absorbing and self-renewing in spite of the treachery of man. I would not choose to challenge the formidable international woman any more than I would mother nature, and I wade in the safe shelter of everything my mother and others did not choose to challenge, but nevertheless did.
