Reports from the Motherland
By Sarah Wang
I am a liar. I am an opium dealer. I am a prostitute. I am a gambler. I am a wealth-hider. I am a teller of state secrets. These were the signs that treasonists wore on their backs while forced to march down the streets in Maoist China. Children, encouraged to denounce their parents, reported adults’ suspicious activity to the communist government. Using public humiliation as a political tool, the Red Guards made use of its class enemies before shipping them off to labor camps or to be executed.
When I was a child, bedtime stories told by my mother about communists in China kept me awake at night. I curled my legs up to my chest beneath the comforter, terror spreading through my body. We were lucky to escape to Taiwan, my mother said, leaning over to turn off the bedside lamp. If we had stayed in China, this is what our lives would have been like. Though she had left when she was eight years old, the intergenerational trauma and her formative years spent in perpetual terror under the influence of war – hiding in the dark fields as bomb sirens wailed through the night – had marked my mother for life. The message contained within these reports from the motherland was not really about our fortune as escapees but functioned instead as a horror story. Children who turned on the flesh that begat them! No reason could justify a child’s treachery against her mother. It was an impossible betrayal. It was against nature.
In America, where I was born after my family immigrated to California in the seventies, there was no agrarian socialism, no overthrowing the bourgeoisie, no Great Famine. There was only twenty-hole Doc Martens, seedy hotboxing in hand-me-down minivans, and parties on a hill overlooking the freeway snaking around the base of Dodger Stadium and alongside the Los Angeles River. We swayed on the precipice and threw bottles down into the canyons, ripe for combustion in the dry desert heat, where coyotes trotted after nightfall. The rivers of blood did not flow from the bodies of dissidents but from my left forearm, where I carved the word “FUCK” one night, inspired by the Slayer Divine Intervention album cover, with a box-cutter. I’d meant to write “THE” and “WORLD” in the wake of FUCK’s disturbed waters, but numb and fatigued, or maybe bored, I never managed to complete the sentence, the task unfinished to this day.
Without a father at home to enforce punishment or law, I trotted along with my pack, which is to say I went the way of my disaffected American teenage peers. We raided our parents’ cabinets for prescription barbiturates and opioids. We sped down the then-gritty Melrose, where gutter punks sold meth, in a stolen car, barely able to peer over the steering wheel. We blacked out at the top of Mallard Canyon, the city a sea of glittering jewels before us, our futures blank and our bodies numb. My mother was easily persuaded and even more easily tricked into believing that I was studying at a girlfriend’s house or attending a junior varsity cheerleading sleepover. Over time, she adapted to this new American milieu of the teenage rebel, a veritable enemy inside her own home. It was up to her alone to contend with the enemy; my father had long ago deserted us. Where had he gone? No one knew. He could be back in Taiwan. He could be dead. Either way, for me and my mother, the situation remained unchanged. Each argument, each slammed door, each threat of running away and never returning to the rage-warped home we shared was a line drawn between us corroborating our positions. The worse I was, the more my mother’s halo glowed.
Slowly, we ramped up our strategies against one another. Trickery and persuasion ceded to a plain disregard for decorum and civil praxis. Whereas once I lied, crawling out the pebbled-glass bathroom window, or casting my friends to act in the small dramas I directed to deceive my mother about where I was going or what I was doing, soon I walked right out the front door and dove into the front seat of an idling car at the curb. At the time, it seemed unfair to me that my mother interpreted my behavior as demonic when all around me teenagers were lining up for their ration of jungle juice at backyard parties and losing their virginity on the red clay roofs above the fray, stretching their baby-doll T-shirts over braless chests afterwards to rejoin the bleary-eyed melee poolside.
While my anger and teenage hubris grew in equal measure, so did my mother’s resistance and offensive attacks in the landscape of war. She stood in the picture window and wrote down the license plate of the car I sped away in, cigarette smoke trailing out of the open windows. She picked up the phone when my friends called, recording our conversations that seemed at the time to contain the weight of the world – but really, did they? For what could we have said using our limited language back then, when we could not see our own insignificance refracted in the largeness of the world? She stole from my jeans’ pockets the notes friends passed me in the hallway – the torn notebook paper folded into hard isosceles talismans distilling teenage existentialism into a litany of unanswerable questions: Why me? Does s/he like me? Will I ever be happy? – and spread them out atop the dining tables of my friends’ parents. Evidence. Ever the good woman, my mother dutifully reported not only the acid-taking sins of my friends to their parents, but mine too. Still, twenty years later, I lie awake at night, the air conditioning thrumming steadily in my tiny New York tenement, wondering if her reports gave her satisfaction, or if incriminating children in the company of other mothers made her feel less alone in the world of single parenting.
The panopticon of my adolescence achieved its penultimate potential when, the day after I lost my virginity on the porch of a craftsman house on a busy street – the boy’s Mormon family huddled around the flickering television on the other side of the window from where we squirmed on a flattened square of cardboard – my mother read about it in my diary. Not only was I met with the humiliation of my most private act to date becoming public, but I was also greeted with an open fist striking my face as I returned home after school. What a day! Every dog in a two-mile radius howled, a call and response to my unharnessed wails, all of us meeting midair beyond the fences that kept us from an existence we so desperately longed for, however abstract in nature these prospects were drawn in our small frames of reference.
The panopticon’s ultimate potential was reached not long after I was arrested for a petty crime and placed on probation. Surveillance, little to my knowledge, continued clandestinely inside my mother’s house. In a private meeting, my probation officer encouraged my mother to document my insubordination (talking back, not going to bed on time, calling my friends when using the phone was forbidden) and treasonous acts to fatten his files in a collaborative effort to assemble data on me. Reports of my behavior, recorded in notebooks, awaited submittal to the state. My bombastic and witty retorts, deployed in the tearful maelstrom of fights with my mother in the kitchen, were similarly collected. Later, a judge reviewed these retorts, and I would be quoted back to myself as I sat torpefied in the early morning stupor of juvenile court beside my useless public defender. All my mother’s exertions had finally paid off. The dossier on me was enough to send me to jail. As a ward of the court, a juvenile under probation must submit to the terms deemed necessary by the judge, which may include curfew, truancy, keeping your bedroom clean, respecting your parents, and not talking back. Deemed status offenses, these often constitute the infractions of the terms of probation, resulting in a (disproportionately female) child’s jail term. Off to juvie! If my mother found a proxy husband in my probation officer to exact punishment on me, then consummation occurred when the gavel of the law slammed in accord with what she had been asserting about her American daughter all those years. And here came my punishment, collecting interest over time.
Powerless, unable to prevent me from going out with my friends in high school, my mother revealed that she had hired a private investigator to follow me. “I know what you’re doing. I have photographs,” my mother blurted out.
Methods of surveillance are not uncommon in Chinese culture. A friend who had dated a Taiwanese woman told me that his ex-girlfriend’s mother proposed hiring a private investigator to assemble a dossier on him. The purpose was to evaluate his value as a potential husband. Did he come from a wealthy family? Was the European university he taught at ranked highly? What was his net worth?
China’s mistress dispellers are hired to get rid of a married man’s “Little Third,” or paramour. Services are paid for by wives who fear their depreciated worth as divorced second-hand women and will often set “Little Thirds” up, photographing them with other men, paying them off, or shaming them by sending notes to their friends and family. Counseling, honesty, and confrontation are considered ineffective and embarrassing.
The panopticon functions as a specter, a constant presence whether or not the subject is actually being surveilled. The feeling of being watched is as effective as actually being watched. Many surveillance cameras in subway cars, stores, and on city streets are not functional. They are symbols of the disciplinary society of surveillance, an ever-vigilant apparatus of power. The watchful eye of the camera or jailer allows the system to self-govern. The subject, according to Foucault, becomes the principle of her own subjection.
I recently called my mother to ask her about hiring the private investigator. I was hoping she still had the photos. Seeing myself in the act of being surveilled reminded me of a Bruce Nauman piece where one participates in her own surveillance as a viewer, and thus assumes the dyadic roles of witness and subject, that is, someone who acts and someone who is acted upon. To my disappointment, my mother admitted that she had never hired anyone to follow me. It was just a ruse, an attempt to wedge the specter of power into a situation in which she had none. In fact, the effect it had on me as a teenager was not to self-govern, but the opposite. Instead of behaving lawfully, once I believed I was being surveilled, I ramped up my performance, behaving even more badly for the camera like an eager actor on a reality television show.
It occurs to me that while we were performing for one another – the rebel child, the helpless single mother – our dramas played out in the context of a larger audience: family, friends, the court, neighbors, police and probation officers, teachers, principals, some Lacanian big Other whose existence (or inexistence) ultimately belongs to the order of symbolic fictions. Like Mao’s revolutionaries, perhaps my mother and I wanted to prove something about ourselves by casting the other in opposing roles. In this way, through the language of our actions, we were trying to articulate our own positions, trying to be heard. I am scared. I am lonely. I am sad.
Sarah Wang is a New York-based writer. Her work has appeared in BOMB, n+1, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications.