10 things my Vietnamese mother taught me
This Mothers Day, Mai-Anh Peterson reflects on the life lessons she’s learned from growing up in the UK with a Vietnamese mother.
CW: death, cancer
My sister (L) and me (R) with our mum in a cyclo in Saigon in the late 1980s.
Image: Mai-Anh Peterson
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Asian women live forever. No, seriously, they live forever. They’re also some of the hardiest, most assiduous and persevering people on the planet. It’s not surprising, then, that this lifetime of hard work and weathering storms endows them with a healthy dose of hard graft life lessons they can dish out to their entitled children. We haven’t had to go through the shit that they’ve been through, and because of their resilience, we hope that we won’t have to.
Mother’s Day is a complicated day for a lot of people. Some people have difficult relationships with their mothers, others no longer have mothers, never had mothers, others cannot be mothers, could have been mothers, aren’t viewed by society as mothers. My own relationship with my mother is uniquely and wonderfully dysfunctional in many ways, but I have spent a lot of the last year reflecting more on my own identity as a British South East Asian woman, and much of that identity comes from how I was raised, where, and by whom. Writing this piece was as much a therapeutic piecing together of my relationship with my mother as it was a reflection on the things I’ve learned from her.
Here are ten lessons my mother passed on to me.
Thriftiness
Now, this is not a value that I exercise with as much enthusiasm as she does, but I’m relatively good at financial planning and I have to thank my mother for that. From religiously putting money away into a savings account, paying off her credit card every month, sniffing out the best deals in supermarkets and buying fruit and vegetables from local markets (Lewisham market, Blue Borough represent), 'liberating' sachets of salt, pepper and condiments from cafés and restaurants and learning how to maximise your freezer (supermarket reduced section, hello), the small financial precautions that she exercised on the daily, in order to be able to enjoy occasional nice things like dining out and holidays, have become part of my adult financial philosophy. They also saved us from some pretty hairy situations on more than one occasion.
Respect food
Critical. In most Asian households, food is a way of law. There is no such thing as over-ordering. Dropping off food and preparing fruit snacks are an Asian mother’s love language. They may not be great at sharing their emotions but jings, can they share food. When we were little, we used to sit in front of the TV and our mum would methodically peel and cut up apple slices and hand them out one by one to everyone, along with a slice of cheddar cheese. To this day, I will only peel my own orange if I have no other choice, because it means so much to me to have it peeled by another person. So much that my husband wrote into his wedding vows that he would always peel my oranges for me.
My mum follows the philosophy 'little and often', and thus eats about five meals a day with plenty of snacks. When I was younger, I don’t recall being told off for being out of bed after bedtime if I was hungry. Snacking is a perfectly acceptable reason to get up in the middle of the night. Midnight noodle soup is the rule rather than the exception. When cooking, you balance your meals nutritionally by looking at the colour equilibrium on your plate. Too much green? Add some red, orange or yellow! If the colours line up and the plate is aesthetically pleasing, then all is well and good in the world and your body will thank you for it.
Show respect for the meal you are about to eat by preparing it with care and love, present it nicely when you serve it and, above all, never waste food. Food waste is a cardinal sin in my mother’s household. If food cannot be kept for midnight snacks, the next day’s lunch or delivered to a family member (my older sister lives not far and our mother still drops food parcels off without even bothering to come in or ask how anyone is), it is packaged up into an old ice cream tub (because why buy purpose-use Tupperware when takeaway containers and ice cream tubs exist?), labelled with care and stored in the freezer. I can tell you in all seriousness that there is no greater disappointment for a young child with a sweet tooth than opening up an exciting-looking tub of double fudge chocolate ice cream, only to discover a box of old chicken bones (for broth, obv) or leftover turkey curry from last Christmas.
Image: Mai-Anh Peterson
Learning by rote
My mum went to a French school in the 1950s in Vietnam, in which endless learning by rote was just the way children were taught. While I don’t particularly agree that such a prescriptive system is necessarily how we should be educating the children of today, the hangover of this colonial schooling still crept its way into my own learning and made its mark.
I was good at French, so obviously that meant I had to be the best at it. Every time I had French homework at school, my mother used to make me stand in front of her and repeat the same word out loud over and over and over again until I got the pronunciation right. I was encouraged to repeat certain phrases continually - which I still remember to this day (mieux-vaut-prévenir-que-guérir !) - to her satisfaction. I hated it, but the fact that my mother took such an interest in my French education by forcing me to better my pronunciation, filling the house with French fashion and home décor magazines and serving up the best of French desserts (my mum learnt to cook only when she was living in Paris in her thirties) made me excel at French, which has served me pretty well in life so far. I studied French literature at university, I spent time living in the South of France in my early twenties and have spent the last five years living in Senegal, where French is a very useful language to be able to speak because #colonialism.
Be prepared
I don’t say this in a ‘Scar-from-the-Lion-King’ kind of way, I say this in a ‘make-sure-you-have-all-the-shit-that-you-need’ kind of way. Here’s what I mean.
On any given day, it’s a guarantee that my mother will have the following items on her person: pen, notepad, napkins, toothpicks, umbrella, shopping bags, scissors. I’m not really sure what the scissors are for but my mother swears by them, and I’m so used to their presence now that I have never questioned why, even though I genuinely can’t think of a situation where we’ve been out of the house and needed an emergency pair of scissors. We grew up with scissors all over the house. Every room has at least two to three pairs of scissors handily stowed away in drawers or in pen pots scattered through the house, so that you never have to be more than an arm’s reach away from a handy cutting instrument or prop for making threats to disobedient children (I’m joking. Well, actually, no, I’m not). I’ve lost track of the number of times she has been stopped at security for a forgotten pair squirreled away in the depths of that Mary Poppins handbag of hers, and HEAVEN HELP YOU if you borrow a pair of scissors and forget to return them.
So don’t forget your scissors, always bring an umbrella, and make sure that your petrol tank is at least half full.
Resilience
Every one of my second-gen Asian friends has a unique story about their parents and how they came to live in the UK. Sometimes it involves war and seeking asylum, sometimes it involves poverty and working from the ground up, and sometimes - like in my mother’s case - it involves a great love story. Whatever the background, starting fresh in a new country - particularly one that’s so culturally different to the one you grew up in - is tough. Now that I’m lucky enough to have other friends from different Asian backgrounds who have shared their stories with me, I can see how socially acclimated my mother actually is to life in the UK compared to many others (after all, she’s been a Londoner for over 30 years). When I was younger, however, I often felt like her way of seeing the world was completely at odds with this strange, half-formed sense of liberal ‘Britishness’ that I felt growing up. It must have been difficult moving from a socially conservative Vietnamese society, surrounded by people who looked like her and shared the same social and cultural values, to a predominantly white one where people have totally different ways of doing things. With hindsight, I should have cut my mother a lot more slack.
When my father was diagnosed with terminal oesophageal cancer in November 2016 and declined suddenly less than nine months later, it hit our family extremely hard. Ours was a family that, for various reasons, had struggled to communicate our emotions as a group. The huge void we were left with seemed to make things worse in that respect, for a time. We were all dealing in our own way. I was extremely close to my father and had had no difficulty communicating my emotions to him one-on-one. Whenever I visited, we used to stay up late together drinking single malt whisky, which would loosen our tongues a little. I think he felt like he could confide in me, which I hope helped ease some of the many burdens he had to carry. After he was gone, I focused on all things practical to deal with my grief. I focused on funeral organisation, on financial planning, on where my mother would live and what to do with the limited edition BMW estate car sitting in her driveway. Looking back, I feel sure that this may have seemed to others like I wasn’t grieving, like I had no emotional fallout after losing my father when I was only in my twenties. But I simply wasn’t ready to deal with it in the way society expected me to. Grief just ain’t a thing you can do by anyone else’s standards or time frames.
During this absolute shitshow of a time, there was one thing I was 100% certain of: my mother would be OK. Without wanting to diminish any of the pain and hardship that comes with losing your soulmate (and that’s what she believes he was to her), I tell you this: my mother was born to survive. She learned how to change the wiper fluid in her car, how to put up shelves and figure out what kind of insurance she needed. She got us a joint mortgage and a riverside apartment in southeast London pretty much single handedly (seriously - all I had to do was put up some money for the deposit and sign on the dotted line). This woman survived an unthinkable war and saw her country and family torn apart, she uprooted her entire life and left her family behind to seek a better life in France, and she ended up carving out a place for herself as a Londoner. A lifetime of hustle and getting things done made her a survivor, and survive this unthinkable tragedy she did. We all did.
Image: Mai-Anh Peterson
Work ethic
Show me a first-gen Asian immigrant mother who doesn’t work absurdly hard in all aspects of her life. I bet you can’t find one.
My mother is a civil servant (nope, still not retired), which, among other things, comes with certain benefits like a really good pension and an extra day off every time the Queen celebrates one of her many birthdays. However, she is a ceramic designer by trade, having gone to university when I was a kid (see next lesson) in order to get her Masters and hang out with artsy types twenty years younger than her. I spent the formative years of my childhood playing with my sister in my mum’s ceramic shop after school, painting mugs and tiles and fashioning monsters out of clay. It was brilliant, and she still uses some of those mugs to this day. Selling ceramics, though, wasn’t a super reliable way to pay the bills, so she put herself to work in an office job. While overall she has enjoyed the work, she didn’t necessarily dream of becoming a civil servant. It was a means to an end. Even though she has never completely banished her design dreams - my mum is all about the side hustle - she did it anyway, for her family. She works long hours and regular overtime, so that her colleagues with young children can have Christmas Eve and half term holidays off, and so she can put the money away for a rainy day (read: to do stuff for her family or fly home to visit her family).
It is never too late to learn new things
My mother’s hobbies from the last ten years have included (but aren’t limited to): karate, playing the piano and learning to speak Mandarin. The woman didn’t even learn to cook until she was in her thirties, and now she’s the kind of person who hand makes cable knit Arran wool jumpers for people FOR FREE (I have tried telling her that this kind of thing sells for hundreds of pounds on the Internet but she still hasn’t capitalised on it). This is the reason I started properly learning Vietnamese at such a late stage in my life, after umm-ing and ahh-ing over whether or not it was 'worth it' for so many years. Don’t get me wrong, I still can’t speak Vietnamese properly for shit, but I can tell you that I want an iced coffee, my husband is not a light packer and that I don’t eat chicken, so what more could I possibly need to say?
Know your bladder’s limits
Be careful not to drink too much water once you’ve left the house, otherwise you may be forced to deal with the unfortunate issue of needing to pee somewhere you’d rather not pee. This last point is a bit contentious - and my husband is constantly berating me for the fact that I seem to be able to go until about 5 or 6pm without needing to drink any water - but what can I say? I’m a camel. Blame my mother.
On another water-related note, only drink water after, not during, your meal, to aid digestion. I’m not sure what the science behind this is, but this is a thing that Asian mothers just know to be true.
Be honest and set boundaries
Why do you have this picture in this frame? It’s not very nice.
Your posture is terrible - you look like a hunchback.
I’m glad you found someone so relaxed to marry, because you’re quite uptight.
You need to eat more. Don’t eat too much, you’ll get fat. I just want you to be healthy.
In my Asian friend group, these are all things that have been said to us by our mothers. For the most part, you get used to it, but the Asian mother beatdown can be pretty brutal when you’re younger, especially during your teenage years. For many, it can be the source of a lot of childhood trauma that requires a lot of work and professional help to move past. As if often the case, the criticism comes from a place of love, but it doesn’t make it any easier to deal with. My mother, for her part, is a very honest woman. You can always rely on her to tell you exactly what she thinks, with no sugar-coating whatsoever. For this reason, she’s also exceptionally good at setting boundaries, something that my Britishness has always hindered me from doing. I have an intense need to please people, which means I have a hard time saying no. The amount of times I have heard my mother politely say ‘No, thank you. I’d prefer to spend time alone’ or ‘Unfortunately, that’s not possible. I have too much on my plate already - you’ll have to ask someone else’ and thought HOW, woman? Tell me your secret!
While I don’t think I’ll be telling any potential future children that they look like hunchbacks or telling them to suck it in in photos, I will definitely channel my mother’s energy every time I need to set boundaries in both my personal and professional life. And for that, I’m very grateful.
I’m in the forefront in the yellow dungarees, while my mother sits behind me, my father on her right with my sister.
Image: Mai-Anh Peterson
Your kitchen is as only as good as its tools
There is no kitchen tool more valuable than a pair of chopsticks. I have been laughed at many times for the giant pair of wooden cooking chopsticks that came directly from my mother’s own kitchen as soon as she realised I didn’t have any of my own, but I stand by them, and her. Just try to achieve the same kind of dexterity when cooking with a pair of tongs. It’s not the same. Additionally, in my mother’s eyes, westerners can’t make sharp knives properly. She literally only uses chopping knives bought in Vietnam and brought back to England (probably smuggled in her hand luggage, knowing her track record).
Oh, and one more time before you go - don’t forget to have a few extra pairs of scissors stashed in strategic places around the kitchen. Always be prepared.
