10 Things I Learned From My Immigrant Mother

In no particular order.

My mother, the first child of a schoolteacher and a car inspector, was born in 1971 in Karamay, a small oil town in China's Xinjiang province. I was born 26 years later in Singapore, and moved to the Twin Cities in Minnesota just in time to start kindergarten.

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Mother-daughter relationships between different generations of immigrants are often portrayed in the media. Tiger mom! Mean mom! Misunderstood mom! Yes, there's credence to these stereotypes; I remember when my mother stood by while I practiced piano for hours, holding a wooden rolling pin and threatening to rap my fingers if I didn't practice properly (she never did). But she also woke up at 6 a.m. to make me breakfast every morning, so I could go to school on a full belly, and gifted me with her passion for language and books.

Mother's Day is about celebrating the women who raised us, and while I can only speak for my own mother-daughter relationship, I now appreciate (or at least have a deeper understanding for) many of the quirky things my immigrant mother does. I probably inherited at least half of these traits. Here are some things mama taught me.

1. Your parents can never meet or acknowledge your partner's parents until marriage is on the table.

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In Chinese culture, when you're dating somebody (if your parents and that person's parents haven't met before), they are apparently supposed to avoid each other at all costs until your partner decides to propose. My mother has actively freaked out and ducked out of FaceTime calls when my (non-Asian) boyfriend's mother said hi on the screen. Keep in mind, I've lived with his parents for months before, and he has lived with mine.

Traditionally, when you or your partner decides to propose, the boy tells his family, and then it's his family's job to go propose to the girl's family, who can accept or reject the proposal. Although private proposals still happen, this tradition prevails in modern China — the couple would already be ready to get married first before taking a proposal to the families. If my boyfriend was Chinese, my parents would expect his parents to formally sit them down and ask for my hand, but in this case it's just a lot of my mother yelling at me to keep her out of the phone screen.

2. ALL plastic bags are ALWAYS reusable.

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Look in any Asian kitchen, laundry room, or sink. See that huge bag of plastic bags from Walgreens, 99 ranch, Macy's...? Asian mothers (and immigrant mothers in general, my Nigerian American friends tell me) all have an ever-expanding collection of plastic bags leftover from shopping. Need a shoe cover? Target bag! Dog shit? Star Tribune newspaper bags are an ideal size/shape! Asians beeeen on the reusable shopping bags before white people decided it was cool.

3. So are gift bags, tofu cartons, and cooking oil.

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In my experience, the number-one thing Asian mothers hate more than B's on a report card is waste. This often stems from growing up in countries with prevalent food scarcity; my mother grew up with everything being rationed and reused. On top of that, mama is an environmentalist — so all plastic in the house is reused. Some examples of my mother's personal reusing scheme:

• Plastic ziplock bags are rewashed and reused whenever possible.

• Gift bags from both nice stores and friends are a part of the collection.

• Cooking oil from frying anything is reused (only once though, before the cancer-causing agents pop up).

• Green onion bulbs are planted into a flowerpot after we eat them, and so are herb clippings. Side note: I saw a mini electronically powered herb garden contraption and asked my mom if she wanted one. She told me I spent too much time around white people — why pay $80 for something you can put together for $5? She was right.

• Tofu cartons are rewashed and repurposed as trays for dog food.

•  Leftover meat is soaked to get rid of aromatics, chopped up, and turned into dog treats.

4. Food is a privilege

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Up until she went to college in the '90s, food was strictly rationed in China. Since her parents both worked and they only had two children in the family, my mother never went hungry — but meat and white flour or white rice were not an everyday occasion. This food scarcity fostered a relationship to food akin to how immigrant kids feel about their parents: strong feelings of responsibility (maximize every meal!) and fear.

The stories she (and other Asian moms) told me at mealtimes growing up all went along the lines of: "I knew a little girl whose family had lots of food, and she wasted it. Now she's a beggar who's always hungry." While many of the stories my family recited about food were slightly traumatizing to a small child (i.e, "You'll marry a man with pockmarks like the grains of rice you leave in the bowl"), I'm grateful for the strong aversion towards waste she instilled in me.

5. Costco is a religion.

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Step into an Asian mom's pantry in America, and you will find enough supplies to cover at least one minor apocalypse. Currently, we have enough coffee for a year, TWO freezers full of meat and fish (not including her turning our garage AND deck into an outdoor freezer in the wintertime), and a full inventory of liquor. I haven't even started on the cleaning products, toiletries, and dried goods. My mama flashes her Costco membership card like a rapper with an Amex.

Those 10-gallon barrels of soy sauce at Costco? Yup, my mother's pantry is where they end up.

6. Family is a support system, no matter what.

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Chinese concepts of blood run deeper than individual relationships, which unfortunately often results in a cultural gap between immigrant generations. The reason many Chinese parents aren't "nice" to their children, or don't try to develop close personal relationships outside of obedience, is that they believe blood is unbreakable — no matter if you like them as a parent or not, you'll always be their child. There are problems with this mindset, such as children feeling unloved and parents feeling unappreciated.

However, one aspect of the Chinese attitude towards family that I love is that your family is supposed to always be there to help you out. If I get sick or am tired of cooking for myself, my mother's house is always open (in fact, my parents would prefer that I lived with them until I get married like a good Chinese girl). My brother and I were raised to always look out for each other, because we're the only family we have in this country. It's one of the reasons Asian parents will scrimp and save to put their children through college. When Asian parents grow old, they expect their children to take care of them.

7. In a relationship, whoever cares the more about an issue should have the most say.

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Both my mother and my grandmother espouse this saying: In an argument, whoever in a relationship cares more about a specific problem should get the most say and should come up with a way to resolve it. For example, say my boyfriend and I get into an argument about the dishwasher. Being raised in an Asian household where the dishwasher is just a giant drying rack, I'm used to washing my dishes and putting them in the dishwasher to dry. My boyfriend, however, not converted by my genius way of using the dishwasher, puts dirty dishes on the rack for the machine to wash — right by my clean dishes.

It drives me crazy that the dirty dishes are next to the clean dishes, which negates all my effort of washing them. It doesn't really bother him to not use the dishwasher as often, but it really bothers me to have dirty dishes sitting there all day. He listened to my mother's advice and decided that since he cares less than me about the effort it takes to put my clean dishes away before loading his dirty ones, I get the final say. (Hahahaha.)

8. There's always a risk of being kidnapped.

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I'm not sure if this is just my Asian mom or an Asian mom thing in general, but my parents instilled a healthy fear of sex trafficking and bride kidnapping in me. To this day, every week I get a story from my mother about different ways they try to kidnap girls in China. China's decades-long one-child policy means that there's a huge lack of women in rural areas, where girls are often aborted in favor of boys. According to my mother, one common way villagers find wives for their sons is to go into cities, kidnap a girl, take them up to the mountains, and then force her to marry and never leave. While sex trafficking is certainly prevalent, I'm a bit skeptical about bride kidnappers being around every corner. (And restaurant! And train station! And anybody who talks to you who you're not related to!)

9. Take care of your teeth while you're young.

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Many Chinese people have problems with their teeth when they get older due to childhood nutritional deficiencies and a lack of dental care. My mother was her paternal grandparents' first grandchild, so when they were taking care of her as a newborn, they hoarded all their ration tickets for formula and milk and tried to feed the baby as much as possible. She got extremely sick off overfeeding and possibly some bad milk, and was treated with tetracycline, an antibiotic discontinued in the West that permanently stains the teeth when taken at a young age. So although her teeth are mostly straight and healthy, they look like they've been dipped in ink — it's a common phenomenon in her generation of Chinese.

Now, my mother always reminds us to take care of our teeth when we're young to avoid the dental problems she and her parents deal with.

10. Always prepare for the worst.

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My mother's generation grew up during a tumultuous time in China. Her parents grew up in an even more tumultuous time. I have to remind myself that one of the reasons Chinese immigrant parents emphasize stability is because they grew up in the midst of a huge amount of change. You never know when a regime is over, when food may run out, or a global pandemic like COVID-19 may cause mass panic and supply chain issues. This made our household uniquely equipped to handle COVID-19 lockdown: enough toilet paper for months and plenty of liquor when things get bad.

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