I don't usually gravitate toward memoirs, well, this isn't a memoir technically. I must have a better tolerance of personal essays then. I only really go for ones whose authors I don't know. Like non-celebrities, or celebrities I have no awareness of. I just think, if I knew this person as a celebrity, then I'm suspicious about the memoir. Usually people are drawn to celebrity memoirs out of a morbid curiosity about somebody else. Somebody that everyone knows, and you always want to know more. I'm too contrary to want to read a celebrity memoir.
I liked the author's tone. Women of colour are often an easy connection point for me. It was a different perspective to see someone whose heritage (and all the harmful things it came with, and all the misogyny) did not become a barrier for her to love her parents and family. Scaachi talks about how her parents normalized fighting to her. Why didn't my parents fighting normalize fighting to me? Why does my fear of conflict manifest as physical discomfort in my body? Is it because her parents allowed room for her feelings? Is it because her parents, as much as they fought, allowed room for each other's feelings? I wonder what shape their fights took. My own parents fighting felt often like my mom's feelings flew over my dad's head, while his feelings covered my mom so much she doubted her own validity. He fights that way with everyone.
Scaachi's mom also criticized her for various things, the same things that my own mom would criticize me for. Whereas Scaachi could read that as love and concern, I can't shake that my mom's criticism contributed the inescapable feeling that I'm inherently a bad person full of wrongs, and it ought to have been my life project to be vigilant about that wrongness. Maybe Scaachi didn't escape that, and it just didn't show in this book. She's so broken up about ending her marriage even when she knew early on that it was a bad marriage. Her mom felt that Scaachi's divorce would be a personal harm to herself, which is common but all kinds of hurtful. My personal comfort depends on your personal discomfort, personal suffering even is what it seems to say, whenever I hear about families conflicting about divorce.
Even if on the surface it looks like her family conflicts mirror my own, there's a core to her family that my own was missing. Every time I see Asian parent-child dynamics with reciprocated love, even if it can't escape being partly problematic, I think about my own unfulfilled desire for nurturing. The excuse I was given was that witholding affection was the Chinese way to raise children. But it is just that, an excuse. So maybe I'm realizing the truth again, every time, that my parents just didn't like me as a person as much as I needed them to. They might say that they do like me, that they express every bit of how much they do. Am I supposed to pretend my unfulfilled needs are fulfilled, to make them comfortable?