My mother has always loved beautiful things and I have always been wary of them. From the time I was a baby, she loved to stick me in frilly dresses for seemingly mundane reasons. I wore shined black shoes with a chunky mini heel and lacy socks on the last day of third grade, only to slip in class and bruise my tights. For my sixth grade formal, I sat on the sidelines in a full length lilac dress with tulle while all the girls in sleek, short dresses danced together. At the one Christian wedding I’ve been to, a semi-formal affair if that, my mother insisted we purchase new evening gowns. I always felt singled out by my mother’s love of puffed sleeves, lace, and all things antique, which carried with them an embarrassing sense of old world stodginess. At any formal event, it was easy to see that we were the aliens in the room.
Six years ago, when my family first moved in to their three-story house in a beach-side Queens community, all I could see was disaster. Freshly home from my first year of college, I pictured my 60-plus year-old parents tripping down the two-story walk up to our living room and hurtling to their demise; a hurricane coaxing waves to crash through the tall picture windows that framed the dining room; an earthquake shattering the recently-purchased three-tier chandelier with crystal beading hanging over our heads. Our new house, the pride and joy of my parents’ soft lean into retirement, was clearly the stuff of apocalypse.
It all felt like too much, a space we were ill-matched for. The house was in a safer part of Queens than the one I grew up in, but it was smaller. An open floor plan crowded together the living, dining, and kitchen areas. My parents, unwilling to part with the large couch set they had bought from Macy's years ago, forced it into the perimeter of the living room, blocking all its outlets. They also managed to squeeze in two coffee tables, a chair, two cabinets, a dining table we rarely use, and most offensive of all to me, a six-and-a-half foot-tall, four foot-wide china cabinet.
The cabinet itself is charming. Online, it appeared sleek and elegant with its dark brown finish and crisp lines. But in the midst of our cramped aesthetic dysfunction, it looked out of place. The cabinet was, of course, my mother’s idea. She had saved up for years to buy it and when the moment came, she couponed expertly to cut its price almost in half. It sprawled out into both the dining and living rooms, casting a shadow on both. The space between the cabinet and an extended wall created a little nook near one window that my mother likes to sit in, the protruding cabinet hiding her from anyone walking by.
I used to tease her about its awkwardness. I hate seeing people talk down to my mother, but found myself adopting the same scorn when lecturing her about how ostentatious the cabinet was, which I nebbishly feared signaled my family’s descent into American consumerism. It seemed a clumsy type of humble-brag to squeeze yet another mismatched piece of furniture into our tiny living room, solely to display cups and plates we rarely used. Everything about it seemed to say, “I wasn’t made for you.” I shrunk in its presence, feeling alien once more, this time in my own home.
I can’t imagine myself as someone who would wait a lifetime for anything. When I was younger, we didn’t have a lot of money, I rarely craved toys or dolls, and my parents describe me as a kid who was happy being left alone with a book. But they also made sure I never went without anything. My mother quit her job to care for my brother and me full-time. She entertained us by making dolls out of napkins and painting with kitchen supplies. My dad worked two jobs and would come home with vending machine treats for us, then stay up to play ball games and do magic tricks before bed. I couldn’t picture a better life. If anything, I suffered from a lack of imagination.
My mother, on the other hand, was full of the stuff. She grew up on a farm in Anna Catherina, a small village on the west coast of Guyana. She remembers it fondly, the way anyone who grew up climbing trees and swimming in creeks would when trapped in the mercurial smog-land of New York City. But where I was glutted, she was hungry. At the movies, she was dazzled by anything glamorous. Large houses filled with fine things triggered images of sophistication for a young girl in the British Commonwealth. The ability to display your fine things in an enclosed, built-in china cabinet was a luxury.
At home, her mother kept their finer wares in an exposed hutch, with no protection from the elements. Every weekend, my grandmother made my mom and her sister clean the dishes, which would invariably get dirtied from various farm goings-on. Her mother, she told me once, was always rearranging the cabinet for special holidays. When they had family over, or held the yearly puja, or hosted the poorer folks in town for a meal, it was normal for people to pack daal, rice, and curry in the neatly displayed wares, in lieu of Tupperware. (“You didn’t have foil?” I remember asking incredulously. “No, no foil.”) Slowly, the makeshift to-go containers would make their way back to their original owners through a complex web of family visits, holidays, and birthdays. The inefficiency of this system made the pieces all the more precious.
In America, no one sends you off with a china plate full of food. In America, we use foil, or hand out Tupperware, or find any number of ways to say, “Let’s try to limit this interaction to twice a year.” Sometimes we don’t send our loved ones home with any food at all, a cardinal sin, no matter how much they protest. Sometimes our loved ones are all back home, or sprawled out across the globe.
My mother never thought she could own one of those china cabinets from the movies, until she decided to immigrate to America in 1984 to be with my dad. In America, she believed, she would have a beautiful home where she would raise kids who never had to dust dirt from the farm off their plates, and entertain the lucky few relatives who also moved to New York. But the ‘90s came, along with me, and she had to quit her job and there was no money and then there was my brother and then there was college. Her children were old enough to waste their time with things like “film studies” and she was free to work. She started catering parties for her friends and saved quietly, a long game that paid off, 28 years after landing in New York. Some time in 2012 she began to ask me every week to grab my laptop and order her something online. I gave in after a month of gentle, dogged reminders, unaware that I was welcoming her dream cabinet and my personal menace into our home.
There is something weirdly American about my resistance to this piece of furniture that makes my mother so happy. Immigrant finery, that love of everything beautiful, too sincere to be kitsch, is a product of desire. In a land of puritanical shame and numbed mass contentment, we tend to like our immigrants struggling, perhaps making modest gains, but not too many, especially if they’re women of color. It’s a sentiment I scoff at generally, but seeing my mother revel in her success made me uncomfortable, personally. If I believed brown, immigrant women deserved the world, why didn’t that belief extend to my mother?
If I believed brown, immigrant women deserved the world, why didn’t that belief extend to my mother?
My mother, prideful and even-keeled, always took my ribbing about the cabinet in stride, which unnerved me further. Didn’t she care that it was an unnecessary purchase? That it blocked all the light from half the house? That it, worse yet, just looked so wrong in our home? No, her placid smile said, and you can’t do anything about it.
Once, after my usual tirade, her gaze lingered on the cabinet, assessing it, and her smile drifted into a silly, childish thing. “I’ve always wanted a nice china cabinet, ever since I was a little girl,” she said softly. In that moment, I suffered the earth-shaking rediscovery of my mother as a person. It happens every so often by way of a casual gesture or careless comment, and I’m always caught off-guard. The thread connecting my gray-haired mother to a wide-eyed, brown-skinned babe crystallized in one molten smile.
Before I began asking her about her affection for her china cabinet, I was highly suspicious of it. Like my mother before me, I was reminded of old movies where rich people emoted in overly designed rooms, and brown people served them, if they existed at all. It seemed antiquated to want what they had, and to want it so boldly.
And yet, when I set the table for our Christmas dinner or a birthday brunch, I can’t help but admire the ceremony of it all. It is distinctly sublime to pry open glass doors, finger delicate crystal, set down porcelain plates, and help your mother create something beautiful on one of the few days of the year she gets to sit with her family. All the anxieties I have about the cabinet are quieted when I realize it isn’t frivolous to gift yourself something you love, that reminds you of family and how far you’ve come. My mother is allowed to love beautiful things. One day, I might allow myself to love them, too.