At age 4, my parents divorced. My mother left with a strange man on his motorcycle. Since then, It has been hard to call out “Mom”; instead, I directly call her by her name—Li Aijun. Afterwards, I lived with my father and seldom saw her. The last time we met was in my senior year of college, when she was in the late stages of cancer. She passed away just two months later.
In 2017, I experienced persistent insomnia, leading to two years of psychological counseling. The main focus of the counseling was my relationship with my birth mother. It was during that time that I realized that she was an unavoidable presence, despite my attempts to distance myself.
In 2021, I began working on a project related to my mother. During this time, I organized her belongings, delved into her past, scanned numerous photos she left behind, and frequently visited her grave to take pictures. The resulting work combines old and newly taken photos with text, following the chronological order of my mother’s life.
Although titled “mama,” the project goes beyond the mother-daughter relationship. It also encompasses the story of my mother—a woman with limited educational background, who sacrificed a stable job for love and found herself repeatedly left behind by the times. She lived through the era of family planning, the entrepreneurship boom, and the southward labor migration. She was once extravagant, poor, and ultimately passed away from cancer at the age of 47. She was a ‘consumable’ of her time but also lived a vibrant and passionate life. The project also explores the emotional and cognitive changes I underwent while re-reading and reinterpreting her life, her, reflecting my evolving view of our mother-daughter relationship.
Everyone has their own mother, and mother-daughter relationships often share common themes of devotion and greatness. Through this project, I aim to provide a unique example: a life story of a woman who broke free from traditional female shackles and societal expectations to live for herself. While I abstain from passing judgment on my mother’s choices, I, as a woman, understand and share empathy for the choices she made.
First marriage gives birth to me
In 2017, I suffered from persistent insomnia. All of my attempts to cure myself, including medicine, sports, and practicing mindfulness, had been of no avail. Since then, I have begun two years of therapy, the focus of which is my relationship with my biological mother.This relationship has been the most challenging thing I’ve ever dealt with before turning thirty. My parents divorced when I was four. She jumped on the motorcycle of a man unknown to me and left. Since then it has become difficult for me to call her “mum”. Instead, I refer to her by name—LI Aijun.
Later I began to live with my father and I scarcely saw her anymore.
The last time I met her was in my final year in college. She was diagnosed with terminal cancer and passed away within two months. It was during my therapy that I started to rediscover her again, though she had long departed by then.
Childhood photo And rock
Childhood photo And rock
Continuous shots on the train
Continuous shots on the train
Sculpture
There used to be a statue of a woman in the front of her office building. When I was a kid, passing by it, I would always ask my father: “Who is this?” His reply was constant: “That’s your mother.”
Window
Therapy was rearranged for 6 o’clock in the morning. I thought that, with a dizzy head upon waking up, I would not experience much emotional fluctuation. But upon mentioning her, I began to sob and later burst into tears. The feeling of being unloved devours me. I am like a child crying in the dark. Pain lingers on me as how it was in my fifth year, undiluted despite all these years. The therapist no longer asked how my body felt. I struggled alone like swimming in a vast salt lake, grappling with a solitary question that echoed in my soul: “What should I do to feel less painful?”
What exactly can I do to get better?
My patience has run out. I yearned to erase all the dreadful memories with a blink of an eye, removing this woman from my life. Yet, I am unable to do so. I simply cannot.
June 25 2019
Mother’s face (first marriage turning point)
Chestnuts and hung up phone
After the divorce, my father made several attempts to reconcile with my mother. As far as I can recollect, he took me with him on three occasions, trying to persuade her to marry him again.
Once, we were in her office. She peeled an entire bag of chestnuts for me and said , “Just go home, it is not gonna happen.”
Sunflower sweater
After a long period preparing for this work, a sudden wave of unfamiliarity suddenly engulfed me. I don’t know who the person in the picture is. What’s her relationship to me? Why do I keep scanning pictures of a complete stranger every day?
I tried to summarize her life, to find out the turning points in her life, when the downfalls happened.
After graduation from high school, she could have worked in a large-scale state-owned enterprise and thus secure a lifelong occupation. According to my maternal grandma, she abandoned this promising career to marry my father since she had not reached the eligible age for marriage as required by the state-owned enterprise. Instead, she went to work in a food machinery factory. She could have postponed the wedding, though. Just wait another six months, and she would reach the eligible age. Yet, according to my paternal grandma, it was because she was in poor health and unwilling to work on physical labor in the former enterprise that she begged my paternal grandpa to find her a new job.
A few years later, the food machinery factory went bankrupt. My parents divorced, and she married another man, and never found herself a steady occupation. Meanwhile, she was carrying her second baby.
Given the national implementation of the birth control policy at that time, she was worried that this illicit pregnancy would cost her husband’s job. She went to Xinjiang alone for delivery. However, upon her return to Xi’an, the baby was discovered, and all her efforts were futile. Ultimately, she had to divorce again to secure her husband’s job.
She became jobless and alone. With her ex-husband’s help, she opened a sauna bathhouse and struggled to make a living. It was roughly the year 1996.
What soon followed was poverty and noticeable aging. She used to care so much for her appearance, yet she scarcely had decent clothes anymore. Those few nice clothes would reappear in her later photos.
After the sauna bathhouse went bankrupt, she went to southern China to earn a living. My maternal grandma said she distributed leaflets and earned only 20 Yuan a day. In those damp and sweltering nights, dozens of people crowded on a shared sheet, a wooden board covered with dry grass. My maternal grandma asked her to give up, yet she said it was fine. At least she was making money, which was better than nothing.
Later, she returned to the village for agricultural and poultry farming. She even opened a mahjong shop for livelihood.
She passed away at the age of 47, relying on her basic living allowance income from selling online video game equipment. Several game pals came to her funeral, and only then did I know she once earned money through selling video game assets.
Tombstone and bouquet
I visited her tomb again and again, perhaps not for her but for myself. If she were still alive, would my understanding of her still matter to her?
Remnant flame
I realize that there is a process for people to choose the usage of words.
In the past, I had no idea what the word “mother” meant. I addressed her as “biological mother”. And when I mentioned “mum” like everyone else, I was talking about my stepmother. When others asked me about my “mother,” I felt the place for this word in my heart was empty. In the initial stages of composing this work, I decided to call the book Biological Mother, since it was a fitting description of our relationship—an unbreakable blood tie entangled with hatred, strangeness and isolation. However, after working on it for some time, I felt that biological mother sounded too indifferent. Additionally, my feelings of hatred towards her lessened over time. In my notes, I replaced “biological mother” with “mama,” a term distinct from “mum”—what I usually call my stepmother. As time passed, I began to call her “mother” when discussing this project and her old photographs. It was then that I realized that the once-empty place in my heart had already been occupied.