Washed Away Fate

Artwork by Ann Lee

by Kaitlyn Lee

I am my mother’s daughter

whether I like it or not.

I wear her oval face, complete with a little pudge underneath the chin.

I turn my face and my profile mimics hers, like two different halves of the same moon. 

Her slender fingers with the knobbed knuckles she tells me not to crack.

Her dark brown hair that’s been cut, permed, but never dyed.

It’s like a badge.

A testament that she survived.

Her knowledge and history flew across the Pacific, landed, and now lives in me.

She takes my hands and molds recipes into my muscle memory

like the dumpling dough in front of us.

We laugh at my crude replication

of her perfectly pressed mandu,

and I imagine the girl my mother once was,

learning the same in the bustling kitchen

of her own mother’s restaurant.

But as her mother passed down her recipes,

sorrows slipped through like water from a cracked glass,

trickling down and filling my mother’s cup.

And whenever I’m thirsty, I drink from it

and see my mother through my reflection.

I swirl the cup to distort the image

because I can’t bear to look at it.

I can’t accept this fate of becoming like her.

When my mother immigrated, she cried her education away for three days

so I fight more and more against the standard of sacrifices made to no avail,

but it feels like I’m swimming upstream.

I live the life she didn’t get, but not the one she expected

because I choose to close my cup instead of leaving it open.

My mother always tells me of the chong kaeguri story, 

a folktale about a little green frog who always did the opposite

of what his mother told him.

She says I am like the frog, not listening to her advice

and leaping around without care.

Through her teasing tone, I can sense her seriousness,

but it’s hard to not rebel against my destined path

of overwhelming waterfalls of trauma crashing from one generation to the next.

But we must see the lay of the land against the rapids our lives have created.

So I hold her, crying, 

when she can’t hold her own mother, dying.

I absorb her tears and drink from the cup once more,

feeling full, full, falling, and failing.

I am drowned by her love,

but I don’t know how to swim.

The mother frog told her son to bury her by the river,

thinking he would do the opposite,

but he fulfilled her wishes and watched her body travel away downstream

like how I watch my mother’s hopes wash away.

I want to fling myself into the water as well, 

but I have to learn how to stay afloat

because it’s just us,

my mother and I

in this world where girls grow up to be the damned image of their past.

The past crashing into the present becomes one,

as I look into her tired eyes and see the future.

Kaitlyn Lee is a first-year student studying Psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is excited to share her passion for creative writing with the community.