I was sorting through my autumn clothes when I found an old photo album at the back of the wardrobe. The plastic film on the cover had wrinkled, like a lake rippled by time. Most of the photos were of me: my hundred-day baby portrait, my primary school graduation photo, pictures of me in outfits my mother had put together, standing at tourist spots I no longer remembered. Then I turned to the last page and stopped.
A young woman in a red dress was standing on a makeshift runway. The lights caught her face. Her chin was slightly raised, and there was something in her eyes I didn’t recognize: a bold, defiant light. It took me a long time to realize I was looking at my mother.
I brought her the photo while she was chopping vegetables. Her knife paused for a few seconds, and she smiled. “Oh, that. I entered a modeling competition in the city when I was around thirty. You were only seven or eight. Of course you wouldn’t remember.” She looked down and went back to chopping. But for a moment, her eyes drifted somewhere far away. A faint smile touched her lips, a smile that belonged to the woman in the red dress rather than to “Mom.”
Suddenly, she felt like a stranger. Could the radiant girl in the photograph really be the same person as the middle-aged woman in front of me, wearing an apron, her hair tied up any old way?
My mother’s circle of friends is small now, and she doesn’t get much exercise. She spends her spare time watching short videos. When I tell her she should get out for a walk, she waves me off. “Forget it. There’s so much to do at home.” Her world has shrunk to a map folded over and over until it fits in the palm of a hand. To her, taking care of the family is her “most important task.”
But what about the girl in the red dress? Where did she go?
When I think back on growing up, the older women in my family were always there, taking care of me, nagging me, and loving me in their own ways. Almost everything, good or bad, involved them. The men were like distant mountains: authority, rules, and untouchable idols towering above us. They rarely helped with the small, repetitive work of looking after us, but they always had the most prominent places in the family.
But I had never seen what those women looked like when they were young.
Today, a photo I stumbled across made me want, for the first time, to see my mother at eye level: not looking up at everything she’d sacrificed as “Mom,” not looking down on her limitations as a “middle-aged woman,” but seeing her at eye level. To see the girl who’d had ambitions she kept to herself, who’d once shone under those lights.
I want to know who she was before she became “Mom”.,
Identity Compression: From an “Ambitious Girl” to a “Compliant and Passive Mother”
When did the girl in the red dress begin to disappear?
I tried to think back over the changes in my mother. She’d once placed in a professional skills competition. She could use an abacus faster than a calculator. She liked singing when she was young; people said she had a lovely voice. I heard all of this from other people, though. She never told me herself. With me, she was always the one asking, “What would you like to eat today?” The one saying, “It’s fine. I’m not tired.” The one putting the last pork rib in my bowl and gnawing on the bones herself.
She turned herself into a bow, drew herself taut, and launched me into the world. Then she relaxed, not knowing where to go.
I’ve seen her looking lost. Once, when I came home from school, she was sitting on the sofa with the television on, though she wasn’t watching it. Her hands rested on her knees. She wasn’t doing anything. When she heard me come in, she turned as if I’d startled her awake and quickly put on a smile. “Hungry? I’ll go make dinner.” It was so brief she didn’t even notice it herself. But I saw it. Alone, she was empty.
Who am I now? Had she ever asked herself that? Or was even the question a luxury she couldn’t spare the energy for?
Compliance is quiet. It doesn’t draw attention the way shouting or arguing does. It’s like water rising little by little until, by the time you notice, it’s above your neck. When did she become so “easygoing”? Whatever anyone said, her answer was “Okay.” Whenever the family had a decision to make, it was “You decide.” Her own needs always came last.
When I was in secondary school, I heard my aunt say on the phone that my mother was “too meek.” I didn’t think much of it then. Looking back, those words hit me like the sound of a bell.
Last year, something really shook me. On her birthday, I asked what she wanted. “No, no. Why waste the money?” she said. I suggested a cake, and she waved it away. A meal out? “Cooking at home is so much better.” I got impatient and spoke a little sharply. She went quiet. After a while, she said softly, “Then you decide. Anything is fine.”
“Anything is fine.” Three light words that left me unable to speak. She wasn’t being polite. She really didn’t know what she liked anymore. The girl who’d put on a red dress and stepped onto a runway, the girl with that light in her eyes, had been wrapped in layer after layer of “wife,” “mother,” and “daughter-in-law.” The layers were so thick I could no longer see who was inside.
I know how much I get out of her being a mother. She looks after me, loves me, gives me the best of everything. But I keep wondering: what if she weren’t a mother? What if she’d put herself first? What if she’d spent all her energy on herself, like the successful career women in films? Could I sit here writing this today with such a clear conscience?
The answer is no.
So this is still just reflection on paper. I enjoy the security her compliance gives me, then pity her for it from the safety of that same life. It’s hypocritical. But there’s something that bothers me even more: what brought that girl here, one step at a time? Did she choose it? Or did something she couldn’t see spend decades wearing down her ambition, lowering her voice, and closing in her world?
Was it the way our family was structured? The pressure to be a “good wife and devoted mother”? The expectations of everyone around her, myself included? Or had she come to believe that “family is the most important thing in a woman’s life”?
I don’t have an answer. But as I write this, she’s probably in the kitchen again, busy making sure I eat well tonight. And here I am, eating her cooking while thinking about the other person she could have been.
Deconstruction and Seeing Her at Eye Level: From “Taker/Judge” to “Witness”
I stopped here for several days. Going on meant admitting things I didn’t much want to admit.
My mother had a bad temper when she was young. She did. Small things could set her off; she slammed doors and berated people. I was a picky eater, and sometimes she’d lose patience and bang my bowl on the table. “Then don’t eat!” I thought she was harsh, nothing like the gentle, patient mothers other children seemed to have. I complained about her cooking, about being made to wear long underwear, about the way she never seemed to stop nagging.
Now I live alone and cook for myself. I stand at the stove picking over vegetables, cutting meat, waiting for water to boil. Then there are the dishes and pots to wash. The whole business is enough to make me want to give up. One evening I burned a stir-fry and stood in the kitchen, staring into space. Suddenly I thought of my mother. She’d been doing this for decades, and I’d never heard her say, “I don’t feel like cooking today.” Surely she’d had days like that. She just never said so.
I began to understand why she’d been so irritable all those years. It wasn’t that she wasn’t good enough. She was exhausted.
I started noticing other things too. My grandmother played favorites. My aunt gossiped. My mother could be sour about other people’s children getting into good universities, and I noticed the jealousy I’d missed before. She must have felt resentful sometimes, must have wondered, “How is that fair?” She wasn’t a perfect mother. She was a person, with a temper and selfish feelings and days when she couldn’t cope.
She can be selfish, feel wronged, lose her temper. She can be gentle, put up with things in silence, swallow everything she feels. All of that is part of her.
I used to hold her to my idea of a “good mother.” Later, I pitied her as an “oppressed woman.” I was wrong both times. First I was asking what she could give me; then I was looking down on her. Neither way let me see her as a whole person.
She doesn’t need me to judge her, pity her, or grieve for the life she might have had. She just needs me to see her.
It’s just real. It’s not like good or bad. It’s just what was.
I think of her on the sofa, knitting as she watches television; of her humming out of tune while she mops the floor; of the little smile when she tasted my cooking and said, “Not bad.” None of these moments has to mean anything grand. They’re just a woman going about her life.
Let her have some peace. Don’t ask her to keep being an invincible mother, or to be moved because I finally understand her, or to stand for “liberation” in something I write. Let her be a woman who’s a little short-tempered, a little tired, a little resentful, a little resigned. She doesn’t have to be anything. She can just be herself.
The Transformation of Ambition and Its Echo Across Generations: Her Undimmed Light, and My Reconciliation Through Seeing Her at Eye Level
I used to think her ambition was dead, that the years had worn the girl in the red dress down to a shadow dozing on the sofa. I was wrong.
Her ambition hadn’t gone away. It had changed shape.
I’ve noticed something about my mother when she cooks: the kitchen is hers. Nobody gets to interfere. She decides how much seasoning to add, how high to turn the heat, when to put things in the pan. My father sometimes goes in to help, and she sends him out. “Get out. You’re just getting in the way.” I used to think she was controlling. Now I see that the kitchen is one of the few places she has complete control. In those few square meters, she makes the decisions and her word is final. The spatula is her scepter, the stove her throne.
Then there are her balcony plants: a row of succulents and pothos. Every morning she waters them, turns the pots, wipes the leaves. They’re plump and glossy from her care. I can see how pleased she is when she looks at them. It’s a different sort of pleasure from seeing me get a hundred on a test, something quieter and more private. Something of her own.
My aunt started knitting after she retired. She knits for me, for my cousin, for grandchildren who aren’t even born yet. She’s good at it, always trying new patterns, and neighbors come to her for advice. She says she’s “just doing it to pass the time,” but you can see the pride all over her face when she brings out something she’s made. She’s found a place for herself again in her own small world.
They haven’t won back the stage they stood on when they were young, but in their own corners they’re reclaiming what belongs to them, inch by inch.
When did I decide to start Lotus Ritual?
I can’t point to one moment. Maybe it was coming home and seeing my mother rushing around, putting herself last. Maybe it was hearing my business partner’s story. She graduated from a prestigious university and is extremely capable, yet at work she kept being held back by “You’re a woman.” Maybe it was watching my classmates and friends, smart, ambitious, talented girls, pulled back and forth between “what I should do” and “what I want to do.”
My reason for building an independent website, for starting Lotus Ritual, is simple: I want to make a place where a woman can set aside all her roles. Not someone’s mother, wife, employee, or daughter. Just herself.
That wish comes naturally to me. My business partner, the influencers I work with, the classmates and friends I trust most: most of them are women. They’ve taught me more than any book I’ve read. I think about their perceptiveness, resilience, and creativity, about the strength they’ve found in the narrow spaces left to them. If I can make a place where they can put down those roles for a while, breathe, exist, do what they want, that’s worth doing.
Lotus. A lotus flower rising from the mud, unstained. Ritual. Treating the everyday with care and reverence.
I don’t know how far the site will go. But when someone shares her story in the space we’ve built and says she’s finally found somewhere she doesn’t have to play a role, I think of my mother’s ambition. Perhaps, after all those years folded away, it’s flowering again through me.
She still cooks every day. She still gives me the last piece of meat and says, “Anything is fine.” Sometimes I sit beside her and tell her about my project. She doesn’t really understand the internet, but she asks, “Those girls of yours, are they doing well?”
I say they are. She says, “That’s good, then.”
Just three words. But I know she’s saying more than “good.” As long as we’re doing well, that’s enough. The things she didn’t finish, the things we have the chance to do, we can do for her. In me, in those who come after her, in every young woman she sees, she recognizes the road she never got to finish walking.
I don’t need her to become a “powerful career woman” or make up for any regrets. She’s herself: a woman who rules her kitchen, grows plants on the balcony, knits late into the night. A woman who once wore a red dress and stood on a runway with a light in her eyes.
And I’m her son, finally able to see her at eye level. All I can do is see her, acknowledge her, and walk a few steps farther for her where she can no longer go on.