THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020 35
zards I was encountering for the first
time in New England. A good educa-
tion had previously been a nebulous
concept in my mother’s mind, but, with
the help of the local library and her em-
ployers, it now acquired the concrete-
ness of a blueprint. Public school in a
fancy neighborhood could pave the way
for a scholarship at a private school, then
boarding school, and a prestigious lib-
eral-arts college—a conveyor belt of op-
portunities carrying me toward the East
Coast élite and away from her.
During my first year at Greenwich
Academy, I was the only Asian student
in my grade. Early on, a classmate whose
mother was friends with my mother’s
employer plopped down next to me on
the school bus and asked a question
whose answer she already knew per-
fectly well: “So your mother is a maid?”
Not long afterward, another classmate,
an elfin-faced blonde, asked me how I
had escaped being killed in China. “You
know,” she said, “because they murder
all girl babies over there.” In a current-
events class, I was struck by the teach-
er’s deployment of pronouns: us and
them, the Americans and the Chinese.
When I tried to answer a question about
China, I was flummoxed by the gram-
mar required; as the only Chinese-born
person in the room, was I meant to say
“they” or “we”?
In the first house where my mother
worked, we lived in a maid’s room and
shared the bed. Everything resembled
brightly wrapped gifts for children: sea-
blue toile and salmon seersucker, ging-
ham checks and cabana stripes. Nothing
matched, and everything was mono-
grammed. I had no friends, so I watched
a lot of TV. One Saturday night, I was
astonished to discover a half hour of
news from CCTV, the state channel of
the People’s Republic of China. Those
thirty minutes, every week, bookended
by soaring Party tunes and montages of
the Chinese flag unfurling against ham-
mer and sickle, took on an inexpressible
sanctity. For a year, my mother and I
spent our Saturday nights sitting on our
bed under our chintz coverlet, watching
the Party broadcast. The day it myste-
riously vanished from the air, replaced
by programming in English, I wept as
if some part of me had been scraped out.
The needs of Greenwich households
were mercurial, and every few years my
mother would have to scan the want
ads again. The stress of not being able
to find another position close to my
school suspended her in a state of
near-permanent anxiety. In the mid-
nineties, she developed facial rashes,
which mapped their way across the
planes of her cheeks and blistered on
her upper lip. The briskness with which
they ravaged her face tormented my
mother. It was as if her body were re-
belling against the downward trajectory
of her life—from a respected physician
bestowing small favors on her daugh-
ter’s teachers to a housekeeper who
dressed her daughter in hand-me-downs
from her employers’ children. Soon she
was plagued by pains that migrated
through her body. When, after working
all day, she collapsed on the sofa in our
room, she would probe her abdomen—
kidneys, liver, bowel—trying to find a
cancer that she’d become convinced was
there. “The lump is inoperable, an im-
mediate death sentence,” she would say.
My mother’s worries scared me, but
she could share them with no one else.
Years of having only a useless child for
company hardened her despair and lone-
liness into a rage that could gust into
violent, seething storms. Once, out of
sheer horror that I might lose my mother,
I suggested that she see a doctor. I knew
our situation well enough by then—we
didn’t have health insurance—to be ap-
prehensive about my boldness. She’d
likely berate me for not understanding
that a visit to an Official American In-
stitution was too expensive, too com-
plicated, too intimidating. My mother
had been sewing a button that had fallen
off a tartan skirt, part of my school uni-
form, and my question caused her eyes
to flit up and settle accusingly on me.
“Do you think a doctor would get her
own body wrong?” she challenged. That
it was an illness erupting from the crush-
ing weight of powerlessness and shame
was not a diagnosis she could afford to
obtain or bear to imagine.M
y mother never did develop the
cancer she dreaded would kill her,
but, in the fall of 2011, at the age of fifty-
nine, she received a far harsher sentence:
she would be buried alive by a disease
she had never heard of. As A.L.S. grad-
ually paralyzed her, while leaving her
intellect intact, our years were filled withI.C.U. visits, emergency surgeries, stays
in nursing homes, and wrenching con-
versations with strangers about the lo-
gistics of death. Then, in 2014, after my
mother could no longer breathe with-
out a ventilator, she was moved to the
Henry J. Carter Specialty Hospital, in
Harlem, which, I was told, was the only
long-term acute-care facility in Man-
hattan that could take her.
Early on, it was clear that my mother
needed more help than Carter could pro-
vide. To avoid bedsores, she had to be
turned every two hours. The mucus that
gathered in her airway had to be suc-
tioned every half hour. Because she was
on a ventilator and had had a tracheot-
omy, she could no longer produce sound,
and we had to devise a new way of “speak-
ing.” I would hold up an alphabet chart
and trail through the letters with my
finger until a blink from my mother told
me to stop, and letter by letter a message
would emerge. My mother’s English re-
mains rudimentary. Even when she could
speak, she often resorted to placehold-
ers like “this,” “thing,” “here,” and “stuff.”
Now her sentences wove heedlessly be-
tween Chinese and Chinglish, urgent
with demands I could neither decode
nor meet. I lived on a La-Z-Boy next to
her hospital bed, which I positioned so
that our faces were visible to each other
if either of us happened to open our eyes
in the middle of the night. Not that my
mother could sleep much. Her body re-
sisted the rhythm of the ventilator, and,
several times a day, a rapid-response team
had to manually pump air into her
choked lungs. Every second that she
couldn’t see me left her petrified. I
stopped showering.
After a few months, it became ap-
parent to both of us that I needed to go
back to work—but how could I aban-
don her to strangers? I looked for an
apartment near the hospital and trained
a shifting roster of heath-care aides, Fu-
jianese immigrants and the hardiest,
most unself-pitying women I know. Like
my mother, they had survived in Amer-
ica by working lowly jobs to support
their families, and went about their
chores with the quiet stamina of those
who never take a penny for granted. Al-
ternating their duties week by week, they
tended to her twenty-four hours a day,
never even missing Chinese New Year.
A former athlete, my mother had loved