Week 6 - Uyen Ngo

Not only was it so interesting to hear about Professor Valverde's narrative of her childhood and her complex relationship with her mother, I found a personal connection to it. I actually also was reminded of a movie while reading her story, "The Joy Luck Club". I remember being 14 years old when I watched that movie and at 14 years old, I cried my eyes out at the parallels that I found in the story with my own complex mother and daughter relationship. I found the stories of these mothers and daughters pairing shared a similar theme of the daughters believing that their mothers were distant to them and that in some ways, they didn't really love them. However, it was only after finding out their story and they understood them more so.

 For Professor Valverde, it seems as if she grew up thinking that her mother did not love her or was not a real mother to her. In her head was grained the image of her mother leaving and when something that hurtful happens, it's hard to forget that there is a reason to everything that one does. Her mother's story revolves around her encounter with men who either did not want to make her their main priority or was not able to be with her because of unfair reasons created by Vietnamese society such as being born out of wedlock or being thought to be "too beautiful to make a suitable wife" (Valverde 361). And in some ways, because they were so different, she did things to try to connect them such as letting a Vietnamese American scholar pursue her, just to find out that it does not work that way. As Professor Valverde mentioned, "sometimes, it is simply impossible to dig and pry to understand another soul" and that resonated with me. This applies to everyone, but specifically my mother. I spent much of my teenage years trying to understand her soul. But at the end of the day, her soul is hers and my soul is mine and I have to trust that every soul is doing its best to find its way without getting lost and to understand that will set us more at peace, especially when it is with loved ones

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Works Cited

Kieu Linh Caroline Valverde. “My Mother Not My Mother.”