I have held a paying job since I was 14 years old. I have worked more or less nonstop, even when in school, except for three brief maternity leaves. Since the day I first donned my straw cowboy hat to work the drive through at Roy Rogers Restaurant, I have earned a regular paycheck. If you are counting, that makes 28 years of being a good tax-paying citizen.
I was brought up to believe that a steady income is the one source of true independence in an otherwise uncertain world. My mother, raised in poverty in post-war Korea, taught me this. You can only ever depend on yourself and having a job is the only way to ensure security. Money is security. My mother stressed the importance of a strong work ethic and she modeled it for me by working two jobs to put me through college. All day, she folded laundry and cleaned rooms at the local Days Inn Hotel. At night she worked in a factory packing boxes. She was the reason I worked so hard my whole life. She was also the reason I stopped working.
Just after Memorial Day of last year, my mother started feeling unusually tired. Blood tests showed she was badly anemic. An endoscopy revealed a large bleeding ulcer. The follow-on pathology report determined the ulcer was, in fact, a malignant gastric tumor. Mom was diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer. The cancer had already spread to her lymph nodes and liver. Her CT scan lit up like a Christmas tree.
When the gastroenterologist first told us the ulcer was cancerous, I felt the tears on my face before I even knew I was crying. I had done the reading and I knew what this meant. My mom looked at me, her English never being very good, but registered the meaning immediately. Still she said, almost hopefully, "I have an ulcer, yes?" I said, "Yes, mom, you do, but it's cancer." She just sat quietly in the room as I cried, knowing her days were now numbered.
My mother moved to California when my third child was born, over 6 years ago. We didn't plan it that way. She came out to visit and just never left. When she volunteered to spend her retirement years here with me and my family, I didn't refuse her. Because I desperately needed her help. I was working full time in demanding job I loved and I had my identity wrapped around my work. How could I stop? Furthermore, she didn't want me to stop. Her identity and sense of worth too, were very much invested in my career success.
When Amy Chua's book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was published, I fielded my share of questions from friends about my own Asian mother. Was she like that? When I was growing up, did my mother stand over me and demand perfect grades? Yes and no. My mother never hovered over me. She never nit-picked. Her methods were far more blunt-force. Instead, she would simply say to me, "Anne, if you fail, my life is nothing." She didn't say it to torment me. It was simply true. She had given up the life she knew in Korea, in the hopes that my life would be better than the poverty and hunger she had grown up with. I felt the overwhelming burden of needing to give meaning to the sacrifices she made for me. My mother measured her life's worth through my achievements.
So I worked hard. I worked very hard. I put my nose to the grindstone and I didn't look up for 28 years. But when my mom got sick, I knew I had to stop. It was my turn to be her caregiver.
The day I tendered my resignation at Google, my mother was deeply concerned. There is nothing that makes a Korean mother prouder than to tell her friends that her daughter works at Google. Now I didn't. For the first time in my adult life, I was unemployed. And at first, I felt utterly naked without a business card and a steady stream of incoming emails. But soon my days took on a new rhythm.
Instead of meetings and product reviews, I now spent my days ferrying mom to doctor appointments. I sat there with her as toxic chemicals slowly dripped through her IV into her veins to stem the tide of the cancerous cells that were killing her. I stood over her as she vomited and washed her when she was too weak to stand. Every Sunday morning I assembled her medications into a 4x7 matrix of multicolored tablets and capsules to be dispensed at regular intervals each day of the upcoming week. I made her favorite Korean noodles to entice her to eat when she didn't feel like it so she wouldn't grow any thinner. At least once a day, sometimes more often, mom would lose her balance and fall while walking in the house. After scolding her for not using her cane, I would help her back up to her feet and settle her into bed to rest. When her hair fell out, I took her to the wig shop downtown where we found a hairstyle that we convinced ourselves was prettier than the hair she had lost.
At 2 pm on February 14, 2013, 4 days after her 71st birthday and almost 8 months after her diagnosis, my mother died.
That morning, she had exchanged cards and boxes of Valentine's Day chocolate with my children. She had gone to lunch with her pastor's wife. She had put on her make-up and her church clothes, and had worn her wig. She put the wig on herself that day and when she did, she never managed to put it on quite right. When she got home, her hair was predictably askew. We laughed together as I righted it on her head. And then, just an hour later, she was gone.
Throughout my mother's life, money was always her greatest preoccupation and worry. Anyone who has ever been poor can understand that. Even after she knew she had very little time left to live, she still fretted about her savings. In the end, what she couldn't bank was time. There was just no way to make more of it.
I feel like I learned a lifetime of lessons in the last year. In the process, I had to unlearn a lot of lessons as well. To really be the daughter my mother needed me to be, I had to set aside the things she had always taught me were most important. She did too, and it was hard. Through that process, we grew closer to each other in her final days and gained a greater appreciation of the things that really matter.
I'm at a different juncture now in my life and I have a lot of thinking to do about what's next for me. But no matter what I do, I'll always be my mother's daughter.
Photos by Augie Chang Photography
