This is going to be a multi-part series of personal reflections on my life experiences and interactions with having mainland Chinese in-laws and the cultural clashes that have ensued. I’m Taiwanese American, and politically my family has been as far Green* as it gets. The Taiwanese and Chinese have a longstanding history of animosity toward one another, an animosity that has often played out at the interpersonal level.

Part I will begin with my late mother-in-law.

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* “Green” is an international political marker and movement that prioritizes participatory grassroots democracy, social justice, social progressivism, ecopolitics, and localism. Here it also relates to the Taiwan independence movement.

While the mother-in-law (MIL) was alive, our relationship was strained. She was the only thing J and I ever fought about (apart from cross-straits politics, but I wouldn’t call that fighting; I’d call that debate). Before I said “I do” to J, the one hesitation I had was whether I could deal with the would-be in-laws because of the cultural difference, of having to integrate mainland Chinese and Taiwanese families. The mainland Chinese lived experience is diametrically different from the Taiwanese experience, with that difference even more pronounced with the in-laws’ and my parents’ generation.

MIL was born with a physical disability, into a society that did absolutely nothing to accommodate that disability. To say she faced derision, discrimination, even jeering that rose to the level of harassment everywhere she went would be an understatement. From girlhood to adulthood in China, she dealt with random strangers blatantly pointing and laughing at her just because she looked different and moved differently. At birth she was given less than a 20% chance of having any normal semblance of quality of life, but she was also a fighter spirit and at every step, fought tooth and nail to defeat the odds stacked against her. She would overcompensate with her studies and intelligence. She made it her single-minded mission to always be the smartest person in the room. So if you dared mock her for her physical disability, she could cut you down to size by outmaneuvering you with her intellect.

When Mao came into power, her family lost everything. She was sent to a reeducation camp where she had to do hard labor for ten years, with her physical disability and no accommodations for that disability. When she was too slow, soldiers pushed her into a ditch of human manure and laughed. One person (and the only person), Auntie Jing, without hesitation, dived into the ditch and pulled the MIL out. MIL and Auntie Jing became tight as any two friends can be, and I have my own stories about dealing with Auntie Jing. But evidently, Auntie Jing stayed in the MIL’s life, for life. (Here in the US, Auntie Jing now lives about fifteen minutes away from J and me.)

It was the Cultural Revolution. MIL’s mother, J’s maternal grandmother, had to wear a cangue and was marched through the streets for public humiliation. Though not officially an arranged marriage, MIL had what was de facto an arranged marriage to the extent that her soon to be husband (the father-in-law, FIL) was from a social class and background that, under not-Communist circumstances, MIL and FIL would not in any universe have met let alone married.

But to prove their loyalty to the party line, MIL’s father arranged for his daughter to marry the FIL, who at the time was a soldier in the Red Guard. FIL had migrated from the countryside to Beijing to escape famine, and the only way for him to have gotten a hot meal in his belly, shoes on his feet, and somewhere warm to sleep every night was to join the Red Guard.

FIL was a simple country boy with a junior high level education and MIL was, at least pre-Cultural Revolution, a rich city girl who would go on to get her PhD at Tsinghua University. But with her disability, it wasn’t going to be easy to find a man who would marry her, so FIL it was. Not to mention that family wealth was lost overnight to the Communists, and to avoid further persecution, their family needed to demonstrate that they championed the Communist cause.

We’ll get to FIL. From cohabiting with him as a daughter-in-law for the last 3 years, I cannot even begin to imagine how difficult MIL had it. She’s said to me, the few times we’ve had heart to hearts, that there were several instances when she seriously contemplated divorcing him, leaving him, strategizing and trying to figure out if she had a way out, and how. FIL and MIL fought a lot. Even when visiting us, they’d get into these frightening blow-out arguments and speak to each other in ways that shocked me, because I have never seen my own parents argue or speak to each other that way.

While at Tsinghua University, there was one opening, one research opportunity for immigrating to the United States. MIL saw that as her out, and resolved to be the one who won that opportunity. Whether she got the opportunity because of her father brokering backroom deals with the Communists or she got it because of her proven academic capabilities, or a bit of both, I couldn’t say. But the end result is, by will and determination, she got it. And she got out.

Once here in the United States, MIL’s life did not get any easier. She was here on an H-1B visa and her employer, knowing how desperately the MIL wanted to stay in the US and eventually bring her family (FIL and J) over, would make her work unfairly long hours for below-market pay. She was treated like an indentured servant, and in the face of blatant disrespect from her employer, including her boss stealing and taking credit for her research, all she could do was grin and bear it. Her boss was Taiwanese, which probably didn’t help her foster any goodwill toward Taiwan.

By her mid-40s, around the age I am now, her disability took a serious turn for the worse. She could no longer work, and would be on disability benefits for the rest of her life. She’d have to get overnight dialysis three times a week — and that would be on her healthy months; when she wasn’t doing well, it would be around-the-clock care, rushing to hospitals, surgeries, recoveries from surgeries, physical therapy, and the overnight dialysis three times a week.

Her disability ruled both FIL’s and J’s life, and when I married J, my life as well. When J and I were house-hunting, top priority was making sure our home could accommodate MIL’s disability. After buying our house, we had to do major installation projects to further accommodate her disability. We had to drill a chair lift into our beautiful hardwood staircase, which occupied more than half the width of the stairs and would be a constant inconvenience to me year-round, just so the MIL could visit our home a few times a year. Every time I stubbed my toe, tripped and fell and banged my side into that chair lift thing, I confess I probably did not send out good juju in her name.

She suffered from chronic pain, and so basically there was not a minute of her life that she was not in severe physical pain. A neverending mission was finding ways to help her manage that chronic pain. Her disabilities meant she couldn’t do many of the things in life she wanted to do, and I know she watched how she held her family back, how her family could not do half the leisure things they wanted to do because of her. If a place was not wheelchair accessible, then the family couldn’t go. Visiting anywhere that couldn’t accommodate her dialysis needs was out of the question. Seeing her family make these sacrifices must’ve eaten at her inside.

Nothing in life is clear-cut, though. No one is the perfect innocent victim or an entirely unsympathetic villain. We’re all gray. By the time MIL was at the stage in life interacting with someone like me dating her precious son, the version of MIL I got was not very easy to be around. She was tough, crass, harsh, very sharp around the edges, had no filter, extremely pessimistic, often came across as resentful, and from my perspective at the time, was constantly incessantly complaining (because she was in constant, incessant chronic pain). And in retrospect, I get it. I would have been bitchy, too. And so would you.

The one and only good thing in her life was her son, J. And she clung on to him in ways that I don’t think I need a degree in psychology to say were unhealthy. All the emotional support a husband should be providing that she wasn’t getting from FIL she expected from J. She was constantly creating situations to test J’s loyalty to her vs. his affections for me. Too many times I had said to J, “Your mother is like a third wheel in this marriage. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think it would probably be easier if you just had a mistress versus me having to deal with this kind of a mother-in-law.”

She would make me feel like we were in competition. If I made eggplant one night for dinner, she would then make the same eggplant dish the very next night for dinner, and then imply how she made it better. According to both FIL and J, MIL was never a cook, she never liked cooking. But when she saw that I cooked and enjoyed cooking, suddenly she took it upon herself to master cooking. Every time she visited, she would rearrange my kitchen to suit her own preferences. In my own home, she’d behave like the head of the household and relegate me to a position beneath her. She would sit herself down in the best seat. She would point and tell me where to sit. I kid you not, she would purposefully position herself closer to J and push me off to the side farther away from J.

Before we bought our house and J and I lived in a two-bedroom condo, whenever they visited, she claimed the master bedroom while I was relocated to the guest room. She always got the best seat, best everything, and made sure I was assigned the least favorable. She always adjusted the house thermometers to suit her comfort levels, never considering what my comfort levels might be. In my presence, she would only acknowledge my presence briefly, and then for the entirety of the time, focus on her son like the two of them were the only humans left on earth, entirely ignoring my existence.

When she did acknowledge my existence, it often came across as her trying to convince me of how smart she was. I couldn’t help comparing her attitude to my father’s, someone who I consider to actually be the smartest person I know. My dad almost never volunteers what he knows. He doesn’t brag; he doesn’t even humble-brag. You would never know of his accomplishments unless someone else told you of them. Whereas the MIL would flat out tell you, “I’m so smart, I’m so smart, I’m so very smart, look how smart I am.” Her delivery and tone of that often came across, to me, as her all but telling me, “I’m smarter than you. If it weren’t for my disabilities, I would have achieved so much more in life than you have. Your achievements are due only to your privilege.”

There are sociopolitical overtones here as well. The mainland Chinese from the in-laws’ generation often harbor resentment toward the Taiwanese, and to be fair the feelings are mutual. Among Diasporic Taiwanese, when you identify as being Taiwanese, often the next question is, “Are you pre-1950s Taiwanese or post-1950s Taiwanese?” The context for that is the wealthy, aristocratic and socialite Chinese Kuomintang who left China, along with all their riches, and escaped to Taiwan before the Cultural Revolution.

A funny memorialization of that time in history is to compare Taipei, Taiwan’s National Palace Museum with Beijing’s National Palace Museum. Taiwan’s is magnificently impressive with the cultural artifacts it has preserved, whereas Beijing’s is bare-bones. When I visited the Beijing Palace Museum with J, I had remarked, “Dang, this museum has nothing compared to Taiwan’s Palace Museum. You would think that being Beijing, they’d have more cool stuff.” J muttered in response, “Yeah that’s because your people plundered all the cool stuff out of China and took it to Taiwan.”

The stereotype that the mainland Chinese from the in-laws’ generation have of the Taiwanese is that the Taiwanese are filthy rich Capitalists. The stereotype that the Taiwanese from my parents’ generation have of the Chinese is that the Chinese are all poor, and Communist. Paradoxically, in less than 50 years’ time, all of that shifted. These days the stereotype is that the rich Capitalists from China are new money, whereas anyone wealthy out of Taiwan is presumed to be old money. It’s all very Gatsbian.

Mainland Chinese hold the position that China and Taiwan are two brothers forcibly separated. These two siblings then had two very different fates– China’s was a fate of struggle and perseverance, and thus is the wiser one, whereas they saw Taiwan’s as a fate of privilege and comfort, and thus is the spoiled one. China’s perspective today is “Okay, we’ve finally gotten our house back in order, so now it’s time for Taiwan to return home.”

But the Taiwanese see Taiwan as a sovereign nation that should be independent of China. At this point, we’re culturally distinct and different from the Chinese; it would be as absurd as arguing that Singapore should be part of China. Not to mention the intensity of animosity between the Taiwanese and Chinese seem almost irreparable at this point. Seeing what my Taiwanese friends post on social media about China and the Chinese is a fairly strong indicator that tensions are at an all-time high.

These sociopolitical overtones of reunification vs. independence affect interpersonal relations. The MIL would often make underhanded, passive-aggressive comments about my parents and about the Taiwanese. I know these days everybody is in favor of openly talking politics and now advocate politicking at the family dinner table, but I’ve had to witness firsthand how tensions worsen when families with polarizing views politick at the dinner table. It leaves me with the opinion that there’s a time and place, and the dinner table isn’t one of them. That ever present tension between the Chinese and the Taiwanese meant that, between the in-laws and me, there would always be that gap. Every time politics came up between us, that gap would widen, and the prospects of ever reaching mutual understanding becomes a bit more elusive.

The MIL has also said to me, “A woman who does not give birth will never fully be a woman.” She would sneer at me as if to put me in my place: you think you have so many accomplishments, but until you have given birth, you’re nothing. Two things. First, you would think someone who has had to deal with what she has had to deal with in life would be the first to be sympathetic. Second, she never blames her son; she can’t even fathom that it could be anybody’s issue but mine. Her not having grandchildren is a fault that rests solely with me.

The magnitude of her own pain and suffering also meant that she didn’t always see the pain and suffering of others, sometimes to dire consequences. My precious beloved cat died under their watch– their neglect starved and dehydrated kitty literally to death. I won’t rehash that, since I talked about it here (Pain Triggers, Being Inauthentic, and Feigning Zen). The objective magnitude of her pain often obstructed her empathy for anyone else’s subjective sense of pain– unless your situation is worse than what she’s going through, she won’t be able to understand your sense of grief. It was her version of oppression olympics.

When we moved both his parents and my parents onto our cell phone plan, J and I were living in CA, my parents in NY, and his parents in TX. I wanted to keep my NY cell number, which I had since college, and plus I’m sure my parents would’ve appreciated keeping a NY area code. I had even conceded, okay since we are in CA and we’re paying the cell phone bill, the area code should be CA. But MIL was adamant that she did not want to lose her TX number, so J decided that everyone had to change to TX numbers to appease his mother. My NY parents and J and I in CA all had to acquiesce to getting new TX area code cell numbers for the MIL to keep her old number. You can see that more than 15 years later I’m still mad about this! It’s because of what it represents. Per my view, the MIL always makes everyone yield to her preferences. She doesn’t consider others. It represents, to me, that in a tug-o-war between MIL and me, J picked his mom over me. For the last 15+ years, every time someone asks, “Oh wow, why on earth do you have a TX phone number?” I get fist-shaking resentful all over again.

When you know her backstory, you want to be the kind of good person who can forgive her for being the way she is. But it’s hard, because how do you show compassion and accommodate for the shadows of someone’s past while maintaining your own personal boundaries?

My perception of the MIL was probably doomed from the start. Two or three years into dating J, his mother made what can most kindly be characterized as a morally questionable choice. She needed a new kidney. In Mainland China, if you know the right people and pay them off, you can get an organ match among inmates serving life in prison (often there as the result of a broken justice system), schedule their death sentence on the same day as your surgery, and get their organ transplanted into you. It was the most shocking ethical decision anyone in my arm’s length circle of friends and family have ever made, and to this day remains the most shocking ethical decision anyone I personally know has ever made. My relationship with J’s side of the family was rocky there for a while. They saw me as judgmental. And I’m sure I was.

Also, by the time I was interacting with the MIL, I was observing how she wasn’t really that kind to FIL, so I was always sympathetic to FIL because I didn’t have any context for why she did not treat FIL very well. She would want to do activities with just J (or just J and me) and had no guilt or shame about leaving FIL behind and out of things. If we’re gonna get traditionalist about it, technically FIL is the head of the household, so there are little etiquette things an Asian family “should” observe, like no one is supposed to start dinner until FIL has sat down and picked up his chopsticks to signal that it’s time to eat. In no scenario would my mother start a meal, or let us kids touch our food, before dad has taken the first bite. (Like the number of times I got in trouble because I plucked a shrimp off a plate and ate it before dad has sat down at the kitchen table.) So I guess I was always a bit perplexed at how MIL would flagrantly disrespect the FIL by not observing traditionalist etiquette rules.

It would not be until after MIL’s passing, when FIL had to move in with us, that I experienced firsthand how difficult FIL is to deal with, and maybe for the first time, too little too late, actually empathized with and felt sincere compassion for my MIL.

Even the way she left this world conveys her unfortunate lot in life. It was the height of the Covid pandemic, when everybody was sheltering in place and wiping their groceries with disinfectant. She had just gotten the text alert that she was eligible for the vaccine. It was around this time near the end of the year and if the FIL didn’t use up his free pair of eyeglasses insurance benefits, he’d lose it. Not one to pass up free stuff, despite the risks to his wife, he went to Walmart to get his free pair of eyeglasses and came home with Covid. Just days before the scheduled vaccine, the MIL in turn got Covid, and because of her preexisting conditions, it took its toll and she ended up first in ER, and then in ICU where she was put under and intubated.

Even her ending shows her fighter spirit, her ability to defeat the odds stacked against her. People with her extent of preexisting conditions were given less than a 20% chance of surviving Covid, but she did, just like how she fought for her quality of life despite the odds stacked against her at birth. She battled the virus for three months and in her last week of life, she was Covid-free. She actually managed to defeat Covid. She would have woken up, perhaps battered, but would have survived, except Houston experienced a power outage and water shortage. Because of that, she could not get the dialysis she needed, and that was what killed her in the end.

Her ending also shows the unlucky fate and lot she was dealt. At every turn, it was like destiny had something against her, throwing her laughable misfortunes that no one no matter how determined and willful could be expected to navigate. Fate would deal her an unlucky hand, and she’d do everything in her power to outsmart fate and win. Only for fate to immediately deal her yet another unlucky hand.

The timing of her death meant she could not have a funeral. In her last three months of life, fighting for her life, the FIL and J were not allowed to see her because of the quarantine rules. It was only when it was certain she wasn’t going to make it, after she was already unconscious and intubated, were they allowed to see her, in a hazmat suit, to say their last goodbyes.

After the MIL left this world, I felt pangs of guilt. The ferocity with which she fought an objectively unlucky destiny to carve her own path demonstrates a strength of character, a willful determination, and also innate intelligence that I admittedly lack. She’s not wrong– my achievements are due to my privilege, and had I been dealt the same hand she was dealt, I would have buckled under that pressure.

I am expected to be kind because the world has been kind to me. I am expected to be generous because the world has been generous to me. But people have been neither kind nor generous to the MIL. Is it fair, then, to expect her to return anything more than what she’s received? Can she really be blamed for her dog-eat-dog mindset, when that was the approach this world took with her?

After I self-reflected on the ways a slight injustice caused me to be bitter and angry, I had to appreciate MIL’s character. For what she has had to go through in life, she could have justifiably been a lot more bitter and angrier, but she wasn’t. She complained surprisingly little in light of her excruciating chronic pain. If people had treated me the way people have treated her from girlhood to adulthood, I don’t think I’d ever smile at people again. But she smiles when she wins her hand in mahjong, and she smiles when she sees her son. She cherishes the victories she can get and she holds her head high to spite the indignities she’s faced. This wasn’t a generation that went to therapy. To have expected her to come out of her trauma unscathed is the only unreasonable part of this all.

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Next Installment. Part II: The FIL