The Burlesque Dancer My Mother Never Was
It was a moment of epiphany. Or maybe something more like mortification. I was catching up with Peter, one of my smartest friends, at one of our semi-regular outings to a Chinatown greasy spoon. Over the clatter of dishes and waiters barking in Cantonese, Peter told me that he enjoyed the portrait of my father in the documentary that I had just finished. So I started to tell him about a new documentary idea about my grandfather, who disappeared in World War II.
“Your grandfather?” Peter inquired.
“Yes,” I replied, wondering why he was arching his eyebrows.
“You just made a film featuring your father and now you’re making one about your grandfather?” He gave me a sideways look, sucked his teeth, and said with a mischievous grin, “How Confucian of you.”
Okay so 99% of you will not know why I was so taken aback by that small remark. But if you know anything about Chinese culture, you know that Confucius is not the wise mustachioed paragon of fortune cookie koans. Confucius is actually the guardian angel of Chinese patriarchy. He’s the origins of the horrible ingrained hierarchical structure in China where women are on the bottom and the authority are at the top. All those stories about female infanticide? Confucianism. All those abuses of human rights in China? Confucianism.
So when Peter made his tart little observation, I was rather shocked. But he was right. Why was I just telling stories about my father and my grandfather? Where were the stories of the female side of my family?
It’s only after coming to Europe and returning to burlesque that I finally have something to say about my mother.
My mother is called Yoshi by her family. Only in the last month have I learned that Yoshi is actually short for Yoshiko. But my father never called her this pet name. In America, she was reduced to her Chinese name, Su Haw. Chinese people have don’t have designated names like John or Mary. Their names are words, sort of the way some Native Americans have traditional names like Crazy Horse or Flying Leaf. Su Haw means “Simple Good” — a stark utilitarian name that seems as if it was carelessly tossed off for a girl born in the midst of World War II chaos.
At the time of her birth, Taiwan was a Japanese colony and the war was spiralling rapidly towards the cataclysmic conclusion of the Empire of the Sun. My mother was born to the thunder of B-24 air raids, curfews and rations, and people scurrying into haphazard brick bomb shelters. It’s not entirely clear what day she was born.
The deprivation of her early years must have instilled an unbending practicality. My mother is completely devoid of squeamishness. She will crush a giant waterbug with her bare foot and watch as yellow slime oozes from its guts without batting an eyelash. She laughs as she dips lobsters in boiling water. Once, when I was labelling dissected pieces of a grasshopper pasted on a page of homework, she remarked in Taiwanese, “The green ones aren’t edible but the black ones are. You snap off their heads and suck on them.” Then she sauntered away to rip out some fish guts or something as I looked at her in horror. She never could understand why I wanted to feed all the stray cats in Chinatown. To my mother, the scrawny, sad creatures that tore at my heart were filthy disease-ridden clawed beasts. My mother basically divides the animal kingdom into edible or suspect. I’ve never seen the woman cuddle a cat, but I have seen her thrust a lightning-quick hand into a stream and hoist out a giant writhing catfish.
That’s the good side of my mother. The bad side is pretty damning. In fact, I reject almost every one of her values.
My mother is a misogynist who thinks a woman’s only goal in life is to get married, preferably to a wealthy husband. She totally believes a woman has no power of her own. For my whole life, my mother has constantly reiterated that a woman’s life is one of suffering. She’s seen my son’s father slap me across the face but she still thinks I should have married him.
My mother sees the world through a narrow tunnel and can’t fathom anything that doesn’t fit her purview. There is no poetry in her heart. She has no interest in history or literature or the arts and she’s incapable of analytical thought. I’ve never had a single real conversation with her.
So it’s with surprise that in the past few years, I’ve come to realize how much I’ve actually absorbed from her.
For someone of her generation as stunningly beautiful as she was, it’s peculiar that Yoshi remained unmarried until she was in her 30s. She was working in a bus depot in her southern Taiwan town when some co-workers introduced her to Evan’s mother. At the time, Evan was in New York City and had just left a Filipino woman who had been cheating on him. I don’t know any other details of this previous relationship except that Evan’s first wife (or maybe she was his long-time girlfriend) had been an artist of some sort. Devastated, he turned to his mother, who set about procuring a nice Taiwanese girl for him.
Yoshi seemed to fit the bill: no formal education, a simple girl from a small town, who just happened to be bombshell gorgeous. Yoshi must have agreed to the wedding. Or maybe her family egged her into it. At any rate, Evan came back to Taiwan and traveled south. Day one, there was a formal introduction. Day two, they were married. Day three, Yoshi was on a plane to New York City.
Carl Jung said, “The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.” I believe Yoshi only married Evan because he offered an opportunity to go to America. And I think she wanted to go America because she wanted to be a fashion designer.
The only thing that Yoshi ever taught me was how to sew. Impatiently and with little tsks of exasperation, she demonstrated how to make an end knot by looping the thread three times around the needle. I asked her once to show me how to use her sewing machine, but she refused. “Ai ya,” she exclaimed in Taiwanese, “You’re hunched over all the time and your back is killing you.” Where I saw a desirable skill, she saw tedium and menial labor. Which is really sad because she must have loved it once.
As a teenager, I often wore Yoshi Lin couture. My mother’s best designs were from Taiwan in the late 1960s before she came to America. My favorite was an exquisite emerald green qipao wiggle dress with a large hand-embroidered white and lime green flower splashed asymmetrically on the breast. There was also a black fringed dress with turquoise sequinned straps. And a burgundy velvet cocktail dress with a handmade sequinned flower appliqué.
Yoshi enrolled in the Fashion Institute of Technology when she arrived in New York. And she worked in a sewing factory. I have a vague memory of running around with a gaggle of other children; our joy of movement in contrast to our mothers hunched over sewing machines, immobile except for their hands rhythmically feeding bolts of cloth through the foot of the machine. I remember staring out dusty barred windows to a tar roof with dirty cooing pigeons and a hundred dusty churning fans, everything a dingy shade of grey.
When my brother and I were small, Yoshi would sew our initials on our gym clothes and towels. I watched how she made a V with just one red thread, looping it over in an ingenious way. She made a pink baby pillow for me that was filled with lumpy pieces of foam. She made a blue baby pillow for my brother that I envied because it was filled with down. My brother and I had matching outfits that made me want to crawl into a hole because the last thing I wanted to look like was my brother. But as we grew older, the sewing machine went silent.
With burlesque, I’ve unexpectedly been utilizing and grappling with my mother’s influence. Every time I sew a sequin on a costume, it’s with the small bit of skill that I retain from her. Every time I rim my eyes with eyeliner, I think of her drawing a perfect cat-eye and dusting her eyelids with blue shadow. It took me a long time to realize that I have a talent for make-up and dress that is envied by some women. I know this talent is inherited from my mother. But it’s a talent I’m uneasy with.
I refuse to be reduced to just my physical attributes — I’m a thinker, a writer, an artist, not just an empty vase to be gazed upon! It’s similar in some ways to being Asian-American; it takes years to accept that people see you through a prism. There is no way for me not to look Asian. There is no way for me not to look like a woman. And because I look like an Asian woman, I am burdened with expectations that I don’t conform to. This has become the engine of all my burlesque routines. I’ve essentially turned self-conflict into performance art. Oh, so you think I’m a demure plum blossom? Well lemme tell you a thing or two…
Of course, my mother’s patriarchal viewpoint does exist in burlesque. Not just in men, who think the world revolves around their penis and that a woman who takes off her clothes is just trying to get their attention. Sorry guys, burlesque has nothing to do with a getting a rise out of you. There are plenty of burlesque dancers who, like my mother, are steeped in the Kool-Aid of patriarchy. In continental Europe, I encounter a lot of skepticism towards burlesque being political. Many European burlesquers are not interested in challenging anything. They are perfectly content with just being beautiful onstage. They would agree with my mother that beauty is power. And I’ve belatedly come to accept that they do have a point.
For a woman just to be confident in her sexuality — for a woman to own her own body — that’s already a huge statement. We are constantly shamed for our sexuality. There is something wrong with a woman if she is too sexual. There is also something wrong with a woman if she’s not sexual enough. As women, we are placed on a pedestal but only to be policed. It’s this context that makes a women’s nudity different than a man’s. While a display of nudity in both sexes might be a show of power, a man’s dick pic is a power play on top of the power he already holds. He shoves that unsolicited dick pic in your face as a threat, as a command. A woman consciously or subconsciously displays herself to take back her power. After hundreds of years, we are now declaring, This is what I look like. This is how I see myself. This is me.
Burlesque is inherently political because of this. I do believe it remains up to the burlesque dancer to be more conscious and articulate in what they are saying beyond the bottom line of, “Yeah, I can take off my clothes, fuck you.” But sometimes that’s refreshing and plenty enough.
For three years, I haven’t spoken to my mother. But my brother was getting married and my son was having a difficult time, so I put aside my differences with her and got back in touch. With chagrin, I discovered that Yoshi had changed a great deal in the three years I haven’t seen her. She stopped doing her hair and it grew into a thin greying lick of a mane. She wears it up in a straggly bun and hides it under a cheap Chinatown hat. She no longer spends an hour every morning on her makeup. She looks withered and small and old.
I see other women her age who continue to do themselves up and lament that she has given up her only source of pride and power. But after so many years of protesting every time she foisted make-up at me or dragged me to a beauty salon, I don’t know to reverse my position.
In Tokyo, I was relieved when she saw herself in a photograph and remarked how awful her hair looks. “Why don’t we go to a beauty salon?” I suggested brightly. I entertained visions of Yoshi coming out of the salon completely transformed to how she used to be. My brother’s new mother-in-law would gasp. People would once again remark to me how great my mom looked, as she sauntered through Ginza the way she used to be, flawlessly made up with a perfectly pouffed halo on her head.
But once she was seated at the hairdressers, Yoshi refused to get more than just a trim. “I’m an old lady,” she insisted obstinately, “What’s the point of great hair when it just frames a puckered old face?”
I chewed my lip and tried to work through my conflicted feelings. Somehow, we had missed the time when we would have both enjoyed a mother-and-daughter spa day. When I was a teenager, she never had any time and I would have balked like a donkey at going to get my hair done and my nails trimmed. Now, we seem to have ended up on the opposite side of the fence. After the trim, I watched helplessly as Yoshi picked up her cheap Chinatown hat and jammed it on her head.
In an alternate world, where I am more of a showgirl than I actually am, I’d fling my closet open like Jay Gatsby and my mother would step into a wardrobe of my couture burlesque costumes: feathered and beaded gowns, chiffon robes with yards of ruffles, corsets decorated with lace appliqués and Swarovski crystals. She’d run an assessing eye over every seam and tsk over a stray sequin or mediocre workmanship. Then she’d roll out a bolt of French silk, drape it over a mannequin, and expertly cut me a liquid bias gown fit for Jean Harlow. Burlesque dancers throughout Europe would ooh and ahh over my clothes and they would start commissioning costumes from my mother too.
But this will never happen. There’s the real Yoshi, scrunched in front of a Korean soap opera with her hair hidden by a cheap hat and we have nothing to say to one another. She cooks for my father who treats her like a servant. She’s become more passive aggressive with age. Instead of asking you to do anything, she weeps and complains and you have to decode what it is that she wants. She has no friends. She’s the opposite of female power. The opposite of burlesque.
When you don’t have the mother you need, you have to invent her. You have to learn to mother yourself. And maybe that’s what burlesque really is for me: the mother that I’ve never had. Here’s how you do your hair, she says lovingly. Isn’t this lipstick a lovely red? That dress is gorgeous on you! Things I’ve never heard my mother say.
In this alternate burlesque world where Yoshi divorced my dad twenty years ago and started her own clothing line, she’d be in the front row of my cabaret with all her friends. She’d be hooting and hollering louder than anyone else because she sees that my burlesque is a lot about her. She’d see that so much of my burlesque picks up where she left off. The uneasy relationship we all have with beauty and sexuality. Beauty as a business. Beauty as power. She’d know that I’m the burlesque dancer she never was.
I’d remove my last article of clothing and strike a defiant final pose wearing nothing but a sparkly g-string and jewel-encrusted nipple pasties. I’d smile as I catch my mother’s eye in the front row. After my act, I’d join her at her table and she’d already have a drink ready for me, bourbon on the rocks, because she knows her girl. “Thanks mom,” I’d say. “I love you,” she’d reply. Then we’d raise glasses at each other and give each other a hug as her friend takes a photo to post on instagram. Hashtag mother and daugher. Hashtag my girl. Hashtag my mom. Hashtag if only.
