“Docile” Explores Mother-Daughter Relationship & More https://ift.tt/GBUILHP
Reading Docile by Hyeseung Song is like watching Gilmore Girls, but in a much quieter, more somber setting. Picture Lorelai and Rory Gilmore, but instead of their lively banter and seemingly perfect mother-daughter dynamic, there’s an undercurrent of silence, restraint, and unspoken tension. Song, much like Rory, begins her memoir as a shadow of her mother. However, unlike Rory, who eventually breaks away to find her own place in the world, the author feels pressured to conform entirely to her mother’s expectations and rules, carrying the weight of her mother’s desires with a silent resignation. Song’s memoir is a raw and vulnerable exploration of the delicate, often fraught relationship between a first-generation Korean-American daughter and her immigrant mother. Her simple, but emotional writing style brings out the psyche of a child, caught in the struggles of assimilation and identity, as well as the generational trauma and expectations that come with the immigrant experience.
Song’s memoir, told in ten parts, begins in Sugarland, Texas, where she’s a young, immigrant primary schooler, and moves into her middle and high school years in Memorial, Houston — the most emotionally raw section of the book. College at Princeton brings intense bouts of depression and self-doubt, followed by Harvard Law School and a year in Korea, where she struggles to fit into the place her parents believed she belonged. She then ventures to New York as a budding artist, becomes a wife in Baltimore, and finally returns to New York, where she navigates her new life as a professional artist.
Not long ago, I had a conversation with a student who was struggling with getting straight As in chemistry. She said, “My parents did not come halfway across the world for me to slack off.” Her words remained with me for the rest of the day, mainly because they encapsulated the very essence of Song’s memoir: the weight of generational expectation, the debt to immigrant parents, and the internalized guilt that often accompanies the pursuit of personal desires in the face of those sacrifices. In the book, she captures her experience of navigating that same complex, emotional terrain, where the desire to fit in and the pressure to fulfill parental hopes collide. Her journey isn’t about rebellion, but about striving to become the daughter her mother envisioned — whether she chooses it or not. “Following your own desires and ignoring your mother’s had consequences,” Song writes, highlighting the constant push and pull between love, loyalty, and self-identity. “I was always having to talk in my mother’s language.” She didn’t inherit a language for mental health; words like “depression, anxiety, burnout” weren’t in her mother’s vocabulary. Instead, she had to piece them together herself in a world that prioritized meeting expectations over emotional well-being. She repeatedly affirms, “I am not my mother,” a harsh reminder to break away even when conformity could be less painful.
Did the diaspora ever know the truth about the home country?
Song’s portrayal of her immigrant experience is blunt and vulnerable. While focused primarily on the mother-daughter dynamic, Song also weaves in her troubled relationship with her Korean-American hybrid-identity, as well as of being an “Oriental” — laying bare the racial alienation she faced early on, right from her primary school days. From classmates asking her teacher, “Can she speak English?” to “Oriental” being an adjective used to describe Asians, undercurrents of racism shape much of her early sense of self and her place in the world. She writes, “Umma believed drinking Coke was a benign way for me to fit in and be American.” Moments as simple as these capture the crux of the immigrant experience in the book — how small, seemingly inconsequential gestures are often laden with significance. “Most of her colleagues were white, or what our family called ‘American,’ not having any notion that we might be American, too.” she contemplates.
Song’s memoir is rooted in the conventions of the contemporary immigrant diasporic memoir like Mira Jacob’s Good Talk and My Mother’s Daughter by Perdita Felicien. However, her focus on her relationship with her mother adds to the intimacy what the genre already brings. The memoir also does a great job of portraying the exploration of her layered identity, elevating it from a typical bildungsroman. We see not only the struggles of the child but also the silent burdens of the parent — specifically the mother, who remains a constant anchor to Song in a foreign land, in her own ways. Song’s mother is not portrayed as a tyrant, but as a figure of strength, a pillar of tradition, and her unspoken pain and sacrifice also shines through. Song’s portrayal of her father and his obsessive pursuit of financial success — the ‘American Dream,’ perfectly represents the immigrant’s desire for upward mobility. This desire is aided by her mother’s emphasis on academic success as a means of survival in an alien society — reinforcing the value placed on education as a gateway to security. As she writes, “Thankfully, being good at school was acceptable to both the Korean and American constituencies,” showing that, for many immigrant children, education becomes the only ground on which they can reconcile the two worlds she was born into.
Song’s memoir is a heartfelt and honest look at the immigrant experience; it speaks to anyone who’s ever felt stuck between honoring their culture and finding their own path. Song’s story is deeply personal but also relatable, offering comfort and insight for anyone navigating the sacrifices and struggles of balancing who they are, with where they come from.
NONFICTION Docile
By Hyeseung Song
Published on July 16, 2024
Simon & Schuster
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