The Year I Became My Mother

Abstract

The Year I Became My Mother Grace Chao (bio) On the day I turned twenty-five, I decided I would give my mother the life she never had. And by that I mean I planned to live the life she was never able to live. It was the seventh of September, 2018, and I was going to be my mother. She had been dead for one-and-a-half years. I would give myself a year to do everything. I would wear whatever I wanted, change my job, travel abroad, live without any rules or responsibilities. There was more to this list, of course, but I would add to it along the way. The first thing I did was get my hair cut like my mother's when she was twenty-five. I had a color photograph, taken in Taipei the day before her wedding in 1989. I got bangs and a shoulder-length perm, and I asked the lady at the salon to dye each of my blond highlights back to black. I wore green, my mother's favorite color and my father's least favorite. I bought a few boxy blazers on sale at Topshop, in houndstooth and olive, which weren't hard to find because eighties businesswoman fashion was always making some comeback or another. [End Page 277] My mother, Lisa, had never gotten to be a businesswoman, let alone have what could be called a profession. I suppose you could say that I desired to become my mother because I was bored with my own life, and maybe that was partially true. Nothing truly spectacular had happened in the first quarter century of my life. I didn't like to think about the years before I turned eighteen. I read about a lot of movies and travel destinations online, but I felt stupid when I had to admit I hadn't gotten around to watching most of the famous films, or that I had never even been to New York. People didn't care that I knew you could drink stunning coffee in Morioka, Japan, or that an extra had been run over and killed by a massive chariot in the original Ben-Hur. (I'd imagined a muscular pair of legs sticking out from under gold-adorned wood, gladiator sandals shorn clean off.) And I had only slept with two people in my entire life: the six-foot-four boy to whom I'd lost my virginity, exhilaratingly, and then dejectedly, in college; and Paul, the boyfriend whom I'd met at a bar after graduation. We'd gone to the same school but never crossed paths, and he'd been so drunk he had to ask for my name the next day. I broke up with Paul the second week after I turned twenty-five, in a lime green dress and a khaki mac jacket and chartreuse smoking slippers from the Gap. It helped that Paul had been a hair-gelled banking associate for three years and was going to leave for business school in a few weeks, albeit not very far away, and that my mother had disliked Paul, so much that they'd only met once. "It'd probably benefit you to sleep with more girls," I said, and he agreed, in a way that made it clear that he wanted to sleep with more girls, not that he could've tried harder with me. "Thanks for sticking it out with me," I said, though I didn't really mean it. I tucked my freshly dyed hair behind my ear. Paul, who primarily wore grays and browns, who had more money than I but only ate Jack in the Box and liked to [End Page 278] hold me but never say I'm sorry, shrugged before asking why I was dressed like a string bean. When I left, I took the bus and then the K train from Paul's eighteenth-floor apartment back to my place, a room with one shabby window in a three-story lavender house that leaked in various corners. I took the wooden stairs three at a time, threw open the door to my room so hard...