S5E19: Narratives of our Matriarchs

Hạ: Yeah. I'm fake Lena because, long story short, I have a continual battle with my Apple laptop charger. It would not survive this recording. So Lena has graciously offered her laptop for this. So I am now fake Lena.

Margaux: I see.

Hạ: And Lena is fake Ha, because she's using my laptop to watch OnlineMedEd videos right now.

Margaux: Shout out to OnlineMedEd. I still use it as a resident. But anyway, we're in the studio. Not really. The virtual studio.

Hạ: Yeah. So exciting. And it's been a while since I've been able to be with you, Margaux. So I'm super stoked to see you.

Margaux: Yeah. Me too.

Hạ: I still love you, Harjit. We just have had a lot of studio bonding time already this season.

Harjit: We def have.

Hạ: But I am so excited for Harjit and Margaux to join me today on this really, really special episode that I've been thinking about and I've been super excited about. May is a particularly special month for me, and part of it is because it's Mother's Day. I come from a single-parent household, so the ladies have a really strong influence over me. But then the other thing is May 5th happens to be my mother's birthday. Mama Le.

Harjit: Wow. I didn't know that. Happy birthday, Mama Le.

Margaux: So, Ha, is there a Mother's Day in Vietnamese culture too? Because I know we have Mother's Day here in the U.S. in May, and then also in Mexico too, it's specifically May 10th.

Hạ: Yeah. So I wouldn't say that there's really a Mother's Day in Vietnamese culture, but there is a celebration that I would say is the closest to it called Mua Vu Lan. And basically, what that's kind of called is . . . it's held in this month that is pretty important. We could describe it as the ghost month. It's the month where we believe that the world is open to spirits. And part of that holiday is it's a holiday to really honor your parents.

So what I would really remember is I would often go to the Buddhist temple during that day and everyone would get to wear a flower pin on them, and that pin would represent if your parents were alive or dead. So if you were wearing a red flower pin, it indicates that both of your parents are alive. If you wore a pink one, one has passed away. If you wore a white one, both have passed.

And it was the day of really honoring and remembering all of our parents. So I would say that's the closest that we have to a form of Mother's Day or Father's Day.

Margaux: That's really cool. I like the symbolism with the flower.

Harjit: Yeah. That's so beautiful. We actually, in Punjabi culture, I don't think have a Mother's Day or Father's Day specifically. I know a lot of Indian culture we're supposed to honor our parents like God. So I think that's kind of a recurrent belief we have. But specifically in Punjabi or Sikh culture, I'm not sure if there's something of that sort.

Hạ: It is really interesting thinking about how different cultures honor our parents and our ancestors. And I think all of this then comes back to the topic that I wanted to talk about for today. I would love to kind of have a bit of an informal storytelling session where we can share a bit of stories about our mothers and our grandmothers and really reflect on how we're shaped by the narratives of our ancestors.

I really feel "Bundle of Hers" is really about narratives and uplifting voices. And what I've been reflecting a lot on my activist work is that I spend a lot of time trying to uplift voices, but I sometimes forget to uplift the voices of the people who have come before me in terms of my ancestors and their own experiences. So I would love to take this opportunity to do this with you all.

Margaux: I'd love that. And can I start off by sharing something that I saw on TikTok? I do all my learning on TikTok, whether that's a good thing to admit or bad. But I saw this post the other day that said . . . It was a person who was pregnant with a daughter and they said that it was cool to think about that because the fetus has ovaries, every egg that that fetus will have or that person will then have are being carried by you as the mother.

So, in essence, if you are a person with ovaries, your grandmother effectively also carried you or at least half of you. And so it kind of is a nice symbolism to think about how we are even connected to our grandmothers.

When I was thinking about this episode, Ha, that thought came into my mind as something that I'm thinking about a lot too now as a parent myself, how we are connected to our mothers and, even a step beyond that, our grandmothers.

Hạ: That is a really beautiful imagery. Go, TikTok.

Margaux: Yeah. Or the person who posted it. But that's all I have time for, is TikTok videos these days.

The other thing I learned or have been thinking a lot about as a parent too is that when I look at my baby, not all the time, but sometimes I have these moments of thinking how amazing it is looking at him. So literally, about one year ago, he was just a couple cells big in utero, that he has grown now to almost a 4-month-old.

I love to think about how I, except for half of his genetic material, have provided him with a lot of the nutrients that his cells needed and the building blocks, and so how interconnected I am to my kid. But that also made me reflect a lot on how connected I am to my mom in a way that I had never thought about before.

And it just is such a deep connection when I really think about it. And sometimes I do get really sentimental about it because I think my mom had given me so much in ways that I never even was aware of.

There are always going to be rough times and generational trauma and ways that our parents were socialized and ultimately raised us in ways that were good and maybe bad. But the true sacrifice that I think we don't realize until maybe we're a parent of our own or we're old enough to be able to consciously reflect back and just what it takes to be a mother and give so much to your kid.

So I have been doing a lot of reflecting on the sacrifices and the true passion that I think a mother has for their child and wanting them to be happy and the best for them.

Harjit: Kind of listening to what you just said and also, Ha, what you just said, I'm reminded a lot about the story of my mother and grandmother as well.

One thing that really struck me was when you said the choices that our mothers and grandmothers made are kind of carried on by us and also relates to what Ha said earlier, which is we don't recognize that they're a part of us, but they kind of are the reason we can even be speaking today on this mic. We are carrying our ancestors with us.

And it reminds me of the story of both my grandmother and mother. I think I've talked about this topic a few times, but in the specific area that we were in, in Punjab, a lot of times people were encouraged not to have daughters. And that could come in a lot of different forms and also resulted in a lot of violence.

I think it's called female infanticide, basically choosing to have an abortion of a girl child so that she's not born because it's seen as a burden, etc. And there are a lot of cultural reasons why that exists in societal reasons. So I think it's a more complicated picture than just saying that, "Oh my gosh, all Punjabis don't like girls."

I do want to make that point clear because I don't want this to be a generalization of my culture, but I think that I am reminded that my grandmother chose to keep her daughter and my mother chose to keep her daughter, although my mom had two daughters before me.

And even though it's been a recurrent theme that my mom had three daughters and it's caused a lot of emotional, social, even financial toll on her, the important thing to recognize is that she made that choice and she had the strength to choose to keep us, all three of us, and chose to, in a sense, allow us to be born. And I think that is something that I'm really reminded of around Mother's Day.

My relationship with both my mother and grandmother was very complex growing up I think because I had a better relationship with my father and grandfather and had a lot of love for them, not realizing that behind the doors, they were enforcing the rules that my mother and grandmother then would enforce on us.

And I think as I grew older, I gained more appreciation for my mother and grandmother, and realized that no, actually, it's not that my mother and grandmother are mean people, it's because they had to deal with a lot and had to enforce these rules because they really had no choice or power in the situation.

So I feel like when this conversation comes around now, I think of Mother's Day as very different than when I was younger because I think I have a newfound appreciation for my mother and grandmother.

My grandmother actually just passed away in January and I realize what a powerful woman she was. She raised nine children in a village in India and her husband, my grandfather, was a truck driver and he was never home. So she literally raised all nine of them by herself. And she cleaned and she cooked and was kind of taking care of the home.

I'm like, "Wow. She actually did a lot." But I never knew that when I was younger because all I saw was she was this angry person. And I realize that maybe it's because she was carrying so much, so much pain, and a lot of unsaid words.

So a lot of my, I think, boldness to speak up . . . I used to be like, "Oh, I'm like my grandfather," because he was president in the Punjab Roadways. I'm like, "He's a strong man." Which he was, but I think a lot of it also is my grandmother because she never had the opportunities to speak what she could or wanted to.

Hạ: Thank you so much for sharing that, Harjit. That was very powerful. And it definitely made me think a lot about how I am, who I am, and also, like what Margaux mentioned about sacrifices, of the sacrifices that my grandmother and mother have made. And a lot of it that I think about, I think about in terms of using it as a frame with education.

So my grandma grew up right after World War II when a lot of Asia, particularly Southeast Asia, was dealing with the repercussions of everything, and my grandma had to quit school in second grade because she had to go and work as basically a live-in maid to pay off her family debts.

And so that was a lot of her life and she worked and essentially in a way was doing a lot of things for family, because when she married my grandfather and then had eight children, a lot of her work was focused on trying to sustain the family. So she was known to sell fish at the local market. She would wake up way early in the morning just to go fishing, to get crabs, to get all the seafood and to buy it.

One of the really striking stories that made me kind of appreciate how much she was willing to risk for her family was . . . There was this story that my mom recently told me when a lot of the bombings were happening in then Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. There was an announcement all throughout the city that you have to stay in shelter, do not go out.

Well, my grandma saw that as a good business opportunity. So she went out and sold fish, and crabs, and all the seafood that she had caught to our local neighbors. And I remember my mom talking about how she walked in and she was so excited because she was able to get a really good deal and get a lot of good money to feed the whole family, because our family was super . . . my mom was super impoverished growing up.

And similarly, I think a lot . . . moving on to my mom, she actually became the first woman in our family to be able to go to college. And the way that she described it is that she got in just by luck. In Vietnam, the way that you end up getting to higher education is at the end of high school, you take an exam and where you score in the exam gives you entry into certain schools. And she said that she was second to last or the lowest score, but it got her into an economics school. And so she got to do that.

But when she came to the U.S. to immigrate here, hoping for a better life, she essentially had to start all over. She worked a pretty nice business job in Vietnam. She came here and she was scared of cars because she had never seen a car before. She didn't really speak the language. And even as I was growing up, she was still in the process of really learning English as I reflect on it.

She ended up working first in an industry doing book binding. After she had me, she ended up working at a 7-Eleven. And I remember her telling the story about how, because she didn't speak English really well, she was really slow at the 7-Eleven.

It was Lunar New Year's Day, and because it was lunar new year's, she had brought treats for her coworkers. And at the end of it all, her manager came to her and said, "I'm so sorry. You just don't speak English that well. You're kind of slow. People have been giving complaints, so I have to let you go." She was absolutely heartbroken. I was still an infant at that time.

And she made a resolve that she had to go back to school and start all over, because in her setting with her not knowing English that well and her being an immigrant, she saw that the only way to be able to provide for me was to redo higher education, go to community college, and then get a bachelor's degree in business and end up in the job that she's at now, which isn't a fancy job by any means, but it was stable. It gave her the insurance that she needed.

And I still remember she said she absolutely cried when I was 5 years old and she finally got her own job to get her own insurance and could actually go to the doctor and go to the dentist and get her teeth cleaned.

I think a lot about this because I think about how much my family has struggled and has had to just dictate a lot of their education and where they leave off or where they start with their education just based off of family members and the people that they have to support, and, ultimately, me.

And it sometimes puts me in my place and reminds me even though in the system that I operate in within medicine, there are a lot more capitalistic metrics and a lot of different goals and they tell you what I should become and what I should care about.

But thinking about all the struggles that my family went through just to provide for their loved ones reminds me that all of those things are meaningless. It gives me the drive and reminds me that this is why I'm in medicine and that I should appreciate that I've gotten this far because that wasn't an opportunity or a choice that my mom and my grandmother had.

So, for me, that's why I speak up too, Harjit, and that's why I am doing this thing, because I've been blessed with all of this based on the stories that my mother and my grandmother have lived.

Margaux: Ha, I think the beauty of telling these stories of our mothers, and our grandmothers, and our ancestors helps us come back to the moment and the power that we have now, like both you and Harjit described in reflecting the stories of the narratives of your mothers and grandmothers.

And it reminds me of a passage in this book called "Against White Feminism" by Rafia Zakaria, who's Pakistani. And she says that in the U.S., this idea of white feminism, we think of feminists as doing these radical things. For example, the young modern woman in Pakistan who's skateboarding is the ideal feminist, right? But really, it's your grandmother selling fish and crabs during this bomb morning, and it's your grandmother raising the nine children by herself, Harjit. That is real feminism. It takes the power and the courage for these women in our lives to have given us the power and the strength that we have today.

And so just telling these stories gives them power that maybe they didn't feel or have. We can give them that power and acknowledgement now, which I think is so beautiful.

And in the vein of sacrifices and what our grandmothers have given us, I'd like to think about my own grandmother and mother's story. My grandmother was born in what was then Czechoslovakia during World War II. And so she had sort of a traumatic childhood in that way where there was a lot of famine and didn't get an education, and then sort of had this . . . not arranged marriage, but more or less it was for economic purposes and not always for love, right?

And then had my mom and her sister, and the Russian government invaded and forced them out and be made . . . They effectively became political refugees, and this is where my grandmother had to make the sacrifice of wanting the best and doing the best for her children. She had to leave her mother behind. So when they left, she said goodbye to her mother and never saw her again, which makes me so sad to think about.

Harjit: I think it's totally understandable why you're so sad. Could you imagine never seeing your grandmother or mom again? You have the choice of seeing them every day.

Margaux: Yeah. So they effectively gave us the privilege by fighting for us, that we now have the power not only to be able to see our own mothers every day, but to be able to speak up in power and fight for all these beautiful things, doing your activism and what we do in this podcast, and as doctors, what we fight for.

So they moved and immigrated to the us. And my mom was a teenager, an adolescent, dropped into American U.S. school and didn't know any English and had to learn. She, I think, became very self-servant and taught herself essentially because her mom didn't know either, my grandmother, and was also struggling, like your mom had, to find a job and to make a means for the family. And then my grandfather was in the picture helping too, so you have to acknowledge that.

But my mom eventually went to college and then went into a Ph.D. program in neuroscience, but she was married to my dad at the time who got matched to Utah. And so they were living in Maryland and she was pregnant with me at the time that he matched. And so she essentially had decided to make the sacrifice to quit her Ph.D. program and move out here and then raise me and my sister.

I think she is such an intellectual person and was so proud of her accomplishments and ability to get into that Ph.D. program, but ultimately made the sacrifice to give my sister and me the life that we had.

And now I think it's because of those doors that she opened and the examples that she set that I became a doctor and fostered my interest in science and my sort of strong-headedness to think, "Hey, I can do anything if I want to."

I think it is just really beautiful, the power that can trickle down, and that does start outside of us and in our lineage. And it's so powerful to recount these narratives. It's so important to not let them get lost, not only to know and acknowledge that we carry them in our bodies, but to verbalize and amplify these stories because it's not just ourselves. We didn't get here from nothing.

Hạ: I always like to say because I grew up in a single-parent household with also my grandma . . . And my grandpa too, so I have to give the kudos that a lot of me is shaped by my grandfather too. But this is about mothers' narratives. But I have always felt I could do a lot because I saw my mom and my grandma do a lot, and I saw them be able to create their own world and their own safety, even despite the rest of the world pushing against them.

Something I always do want to highlight about is that I also think a lot about my family's narratives in the context of the word resiliency. There's a lot of discussion, especially in medicine right now, about resiliency. I would say if you wanted textbook definition of resiliency, those stories of our mothers and our grandmothers are textbook definitions of it.

However, I would always like to push and say that my family didn't have a choice to be like this. You think my grandma wanted to go out while bombs were potentially being dropped in Ho Chi Minh City to sell fish to her neighbors? I really think that if she had the choice of stability and the ability to live with safety and being insured, that she would have food on the table to feed her eight children, my grandma would choose all of that than being the textbook definition of resiliency.

And it's something that I always struggle with in trying to honoring their narratives and recognizing their strength, but also acknowledging the fact that they had to be strong because the world didn't let them be anything else.

Margaux: Exactly. We have to recognize that when we talk about resiliency. It's within the lens of the system that is forcing that person or people to be resilient in the first place. And so maybe that's where the conversation needs to shift, is how do we change the system so that we can all have that stability, and power, and privilege?

Harjit: I wonder what type of people my grandmother or mother would have if they had the choices or the stability. I always joke with my mom and I'm like, "If you were born in this age and time, you would be exactly like us. And I know you think that we talk back and do what we want and talk a lot, but you are the same."

She came to America, started selling ice cream. She owned a business. She paid the entire down payment for our house. My mom totally wants to be a working person, right? And it's a joke we have, but it's also to say that if they had those choices, they probably would've been different people.

I think, for me, it's really important to also acknowledge my sisters, particularly my older sister, [Sonu 00:23:50]. I think she nurtured and loved me and showed me what safety looks like, was always there for me.

I think one thing that my own mother struggled a little bit with was the love part. I think she was there to be the provider, but I think my older sister is the one who taught me nurturing love from a parent. This is in no way to disrespect my mother, but it's also just to uplift and respect my older sisters, and particularly my eldest sister, Sonu.

Margaux: Harjit, I think that nurturing piece that you're talking about is if we think about the historical traumas that all of our grandmothers endured, it maybe didn't leave space and maybe our grandmothers were not afforded the childhoods that we were and developed that socialization or ability to have the nurturing side of things when they were then parents.

It's so beautiful to see in each generation down when we recount these stories that it gets better. So your sister was a very nurturing person for you and in some ways your mother probably helped a little bit with that, and then her mother in that. And so each step back in the lineage, that trauma gets a little bit erased in us, in our generation, and in the next generation.

We relieve a little bit of the traumas that we're talking about here by talking about them, but by making changes and our actions are resistance to the powers that oppressed our grandmothers and our mothers.

Harjit: Totally agree with that, Margaux. And I feel like if the circumstances were different for my grandmother and mother, they'd probably give me more of that nurturing side. And it just really shows the power that especially this maternal lineage has.

Even thinking about my great-grandmother, her husband, my great-grandfather, died when my grandma was 1 year old and she raised four kids as a single mother. So it's kind of cool to know, "Man, there was that whole back and back and front and front." There's this whole power that we don't really see when we're younger, I think, but it's really nice to appreciate now.

Hạ: It's definitely something I hold on to. And I feel that I've been able to understand my family and understand their perspective and their approaches to the world a lot more by understanding their narratives and how the world has shaped them. And also, as we've established, based on what they've passed on to me, how they've shaped the world too.

So, with all of that, I feel kind of connected with y'all different way when we share stories like this.

Margaux: Me too. I love learning about your badass grandma and mom too.

Hạ: Thank you. So I thank you, the listeners, for listening to us, and I hope you were able to enjoy listening to our mothers' and grandmothers' stories.

I also would like to add I know that sometimes celebrations of families can be hard for some people, especially when you come from a family that isn't supportive and can be toxic and abusive. So I also want to give people space for that too and for awareness of that.

But we hope you enjoyed the episode. As always, listen to us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to your podcasts. Check us out on Instagram. And we hope to hear from you. And tune us . . . tune in next week.

Margaux: You were doing so good.

Hạ: And tune in next week for another riveting episode from the Bundlers.

Margaux: Yay.

Hạ: Bye-bye.

Margaux: That was amazing. You should have heard my closing yesterday. I rambled for like five minutes and I didn't say anything productive.

Harjit: Yeah. She just hadn't done a closing in a long time.