
Love is in the February air because of Valentine’s Day, a time designated for us to freely express our thanks and gratitude to those we love. We proudly display our affections through a bouquet of flowers, loving words, a warm embrace, or perhaps a candlelit dinner. It is a day we want those around us to know how much we appreciate having them in our lives.
Although a Western tradition, at some point during the past three decades after I left Shanghai, this infectious holiday quietly traveled in reverse across the ocean to China. Now known as “Lovers’ Day,” young people in large coastal cities fashionably celebrate it just the way we do here with roses, poems, chocolates, and kisses – a world away from how love was expressed when I was growing up in the 1960s.
It was the start of the ten long years of the Cultural Revolution when love and devotion were reserved exclusively for high political purposes. I don’t remember my mother ever kissing me, or my mother and father ever displaying affection toward one other. Our family’s love was always implied but never openly said.
The first time my mother used words to express her love for me was through a handwritten letter. At the time, I was in New York City, having just become a mother myself, while she remained at home in Shanghai missing me. Writing was the only way we stayed connected.
Nevertheless, it often took weeks, if not months, for a letter to arrive, and sometimes I would not hear from her for what seemed like an eternity. As a result, receiving a letter from her was always a special event. I would hold it against my beating heart before I carefully opened it to reveal her precious words. I would read it again and again to myself, pretending my mother was speaking to me in person.
In her letters, she mostly talked about ordinary family matters, what was happening around her, and her strong religious beliefs as if she were having a chat with me. Her missing and loving me were more embedded in the minute details she wrote, which only her daughter could detect.
Then, one day, an unexpected miracle happened when I opened one of her letters: Instead of calling me by my name, she started it out with “My dear loving daughter” and ended it with “Love you, Mom.” She used words to express her love for me for the first time in my life! I was in tears. I always knew she loved me but finally, she felt comfortable enough to enshrine it in actual words.
That night, as I kissed my own baby and put him to bed, I thought of myself as being a little child, hugged by my mother as she bid me goodnight.
Reflections From The East Column
By Qin Sun Stubis
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