January 24, 2021

> room for me

You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: mother lineages and female friendship.

Hello friend,

My mom arrived in Indiana at twenty-one. When I turned twenty-two, I had newfound admiration for my mother. How did she do that?

How did she buy groceries in English? How did she set up doctor’s appointments? Rent an apartment? Pay taxes? I get that, for my mom, it’s not that impressive—it’s just stuff she needed to do—but I still find it hard to believe that she did all that, cut off that way from her family, before the internet.

Maybe that’s why I find it difficult to picture what that move was like. How the airport looked. What she packed in her suitcase. And so on.

I’m learning that my elders are remarkable women. My maternal grandmother was one of the first female engineering students at Tsinghua University. My great-grandmother was one of very few female OB/GYNs in China.

I’ve been thinking about that lineage. They must have had to prove themselves, in spaces full of mostly men, that they deserved to be there. I’m proud that I can call these women my elders. I want to do right by that heritage.

I think I have inherited their ambition, but I worry that this ambition makes me feel like I'm competing with other women.

In a recent newsletter, Fariha Róisín says that:

I’m surprised more of us aren’t doing the sort of unearthing it takes to truly confront misogyny. Cis-men are pretty annoying but it’s a bit boring to point fingers at men all the time (though it’s also fun, I’m not disputing that!) when women/femme folks are all inflicting so much damage on each other. As a baby academic and the daughter of a real academic, my father would always point out, “Misogyny is replicated by women all the time.”

It's easy to dislike someone and hard to figure out why. francine j. harris gets at that in this poem, especially in these lines:

Katherine with the lazy eye. short and not a good poet, I guess I almost cried.
I don’t know why, because I didn’t like you. This is the first time I remembered your name.

I didn’t like how you followed around a married man. That your poems sucked
and that I figured they were all about the married man.

That sometimes you reminded me of myself, boy crazy. That sometimes
I think people just don’t tell me that I’m kind of, well…slow.

There was this girl in high school that I didn’t like at all. She was pretty and average smart but was convinced she was going to Harvard (spoiler: she didn’t). Thinking back on it, I wonder if I disliked her so much because she was arrogant or whether it was because I didn’t think there was room for a confident girl.

Maybe that’s what people thought of my great-grandmother, or my grandmother, or my mom. That they took up too much space and wanted too much.

In other words, when I don’t like a girl, is it because of her or is it because of internalized misogyny?

When I’ve been telling this to some people this week, it’s like they don’t believe me. “It’s not you. Some people are just terrible.” They’re right, but I think it’s worth asking myself if it’s me, because misogyny often acts invisibly.

When asked about feminist homework, Sara Ahmed (h/t Phoebe) says that:

I describe the process of becoming a feminist as a bumpy process; you bump into a world as you begin to realize that it does not accommodate you. You become conscious over time of how things are not what they seem; how stories that you are told for your own enjoyment narrow down what is possible, especially, but not only, for girls.

This is a question I’ll ask all my life. In the classroom, collaborating with a female teacher. In medical school, where I might feel like I’m competing with everyone else. In the hospital, where most leadership positions remain male. In those moments, I want to channel my elders. When they made room for themselves in those spaces, they also made room for me.

Cheers,
Tiffany