After I came out, my Chinese mother still loved me
When I was in college, I had an internship at a media company that was overwhelmingly white and straight. During lunch, the topic of dating came up and I disclosed my sexuality to my colleagues.
“It must have been really hard coming out to your mom,” one of my colleagues said. I knew what he was trying to say: that my Chinese immigrant mother must have taken it horribly, because TV shows and movies like Crazy Rich Asians paint our parents as heartless monsters obsessed with public perception. Maybe this person assumed that ma had stopped speaking to me or disowned me as her child. I remember feeling caught off guard, so I just went along with it: yes, I said. It was bad.
Many other people would make similar assumptions and it began to feel as though people were hoping for a tragic story.
I’m not going to sugarcoat it: coming out to my Chinese mother was no fairytale. It happened on a weekday night after my freshman year of college and dad called me through FaceTime. He was with mom and they both saw that my eyes were swollen. I’d been crying for days because the first guy I’d ever had a crush on ghosted me. What was more crippling than the rejection, though, was the loneliness that came with being in the closet and feeling like I couldn’t even tell anyone that my heart had been broken.
Sensing something was seriously off, dad asked me what he had been suspecting for a while: was I gay? I told them the truth and my mom tried to comfort me from the other end. Stop crying, she told me. We’ll figure this out. We didn’t speak for a few days after that and she asked me later that week whether I was sure this wasn’t a phase. I promise, I told her. They were clearly distraught and confused about my sexuality, but they cared too much about my wellbeing to show me. I would find out later that they cried every night for weeks after that, although they tried to play off their own confusion and hurt whenever we spoke on the phone.
When I had my first boyfriend my sophomore year of college, I changed my Facebook relationship status to “in a relationship.” A day later, ma called me with an urgent tone in her voice and asked me to please take down the status because people she knew were asking her about it. It’s none of their business, I told her, but she insisted. I took it down, but I grew resentful. Although she reassured me that she still loved and cared for me, I still felt like there were conditions. During this time, the process felt messy, uncomfortable and took a lot of patience on both ends. But what I can say for sure is that it was never violent, physically or verbally. My coming out story was not a tragedy. There were no implications that I was no longer my mother’s son. We have enough sad stories, and more queer Asians need to hear stories like mine because white queer children aren’t the only one who deserve happy endings.
Nowadays, our culture is filled with stories of white parents who adore and support their queer kids — Love, Simon and Schitt’s Creek come to mind. On the other side of the “loving white parent” is the trope of the loveless Asian mother, full of wrath and rage.
For a long time, I believed what I saw in the media about Asian moms, namely, that they only cared about appearances and were cold-hearted, emotionless beings. Although at the time, I recognized my own mother as existing outside of some of those stereotypes, a part of me wondered if her love was contingent on the assumption that I would marry a woman and have children. Maybe if I told her who I really was, her love for me would change.
I can recognize that a large part of my fear stemmed from the indoctrination of Western culture, which almost fetishizes the idea of the strict Asian mom. From best-selling novels (enter Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother), comedy specials and movies depicting ruthless Asian mothers in (Crazy Rich Asians), they tend to be one-dimensional and incapable of putting themselves in their child’s shoes. Although I’m not saying that these types of mothers don’t exist — I’m certain they do in every culture — those depictions implicitly drill into us that our parents are incapable of genuine understanding.
Every now and then, my mom will still ask me questions that are rooted in ignorance and her lack of exposure to the LGBTQ community. She’ll ask me who’s “the man” and “the woman” in the relationship and how a same-sex couple decides who will do the chores. But there’s a big difference between not knowing and not wanting to know and I can recognize that ma is doing her best. She actually asks if I’m dating anyone whenever I see her and has insisted she would welcome whoever I ended up with.
For those of us not fortunate enough to have parents who grew up in cultures that know and understand queer people, the process will not be simple. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth it or that it’s full of pain; in fact, ma and I find ourselves having more honest conversations than ever, which has made us closer. My coming out story actually ends in love.
I recognize that I am incredibly fortunate and that this won’t be every person’s experience. Each person needs to gauge their own situation and act accordingly. But it’s time for queer Asian people to hear different narratives aside from the savage parents who care more about saving face than they do the wellbeing of their gay son or daughter. Sometimes, we need to give our parents the opportunity to show us compassion.
