In her essay “The Work We Do,” which appears in our December issue, Elizabeth Miki Brina describes how her mother, an immigrant from Okinawa who came to the US at the age of twenty-six, happily paid for many of her daughter’s expenses even after Elizabeth was well into adulthood. It’s a subject sure to irk anyone who had to pay their own way from a young age. Even I, who managed to make it all the way to college before getting a summer job, couldn’t help comparing my work ethic favorably to hers. And yet, by the end, I found myself questioning the degree to which we tie our job and our earnings to our sense of self-worth. Is that really how we should value someone?
I talked to Elizabeth about money and parents and the fraught nature of writing about both.
ELIZABETH MIKI BRINA
Andrew Snee: I admired your openness in writing about your financial situation. I was raised not to tell anybody about money. My parents were very clear about this.
Elizabeth Miki Brina: Yeah, it’s considered rude to talk about your finances and how much you paid for something and how much your rent is. I wonder if that’s more of a middle-class, white American hang-up, though, because my mother is from Okinawa, and she’s always been very vocal about money. And I think that’s part of why she is actually good with money, and why my father, who was born in the US, isn’t. When I was growing up, I looked down on my mother for being so obsessed with how much things cost. But now I really appreciate it.
You probably remember from earlier versions of the essay, I had to dial back how much I was sharing. I was like, “This is how much she gets in Social Security, and this is how much their rent costs,” and so on. I see now that might have made people uncomfortable. Money is personal. It’s really intimate. There’s a lot of confusion around it.
Andrew: Around twenty years ago when my mother had terminal cancer, she wanted to give my brother and me some of her estate before she died, so that it wouldn’t all be tied up while we were paying for the funeral and other expenses. I had to take her to two different banks to do this, and I remember the white teller at the first bank being very concerned that I was taking my elderly mother’s money against her will. Almost like, Blink twice if he’s got a gun in your back, you know? And then at the second bank the teller was Indian American, and she saw it as perfectly normal: Of course you want to give this money to your son.
Elizabeth: That is something that confused me growing up, because I was one of the only people I knew with a non-white, immigrant mother. My friends were like, “Your mom just gives you money?” That was unheard of to them. They were told they had to work for it. And I can see both sides, right? It took me a long time to understand the value of money because whenever I wanted it, she was like, “Here.”
Andrew: In the opening to your piece, your mother buys you an expensive, trendy leather jacket, and then you can’t bring yourself to wear it to school. A coworker told me that story was like a gut punch to him. It’s such a familiar childhood experience for many of us: you wanted something really badly, probably some trendy thing, and your parents got it for you, and then you lost interest.
Elizabeth: That’s why I opened the essay with that: because it does still hurt very much. That purchase came with a lot of cultural and class dynamics too. If my family had been more affluent, it might not have hit me so hard. And if I’d had a less-contentious relationship with my mother, if I had understood her more as a child, it also wouldn’t have hit so hard.
You have to have firm, clear boundaries in a relationship, right? And I don’t think I ever got that with my mother around money. Her attitude was: There’s no difference between us. What’s mine is yours.You are an extension of me. If we’d had better boundaries, I think I would have become independent sooner. I was very dependent on her for a long time. And I think part of her wanted that. It made her feel good, because there were so many other areas of her life where she didn’t feel powerful. This was one place where she was able to say, “I got you covered.”
Andrew: Also some people are just caretakers. That’s what gives them pleasure and purpose.
Elizabeth: Yeah, and it’s a wonderful quality. It makes her feel good to give gifts to people, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Andrew: There’s a very revealing conversation you have with your mother in the essay, where she’s reluctant to ask for a small raise at work. It really shows her character.
Elizabeth: From what I understand of Okinawans, that’s typical. They’re very content and never ask for more than they need. The culture is more community centered as opposed to individual centered. In America every single person needs a car; my mom’s family in Okinawa all share a van, for five people.
Again, though, I can see it both ways. It’s nice that she doesn’t ask for more than she needs, but from what I saw growing up, that’s partly because she doesn’t think she’s worth it. And in America if you don’t ask for anything, you don’t get anything. No one’s going to give it to you just because you deserve it.
Andrew: We value the ambitious go-getter.
Elizabeth: Yeah, the person who won’t take no for an answer. That’s the character trait that makes you more successful in our country. My father was born here. He understood America and how to navigate it. I was always comparing my mother unfavorably to him. Also he was the man, which added an additional power dynamic. The way I saw my father growing up, he just seemed so competent and powerful and always knew what to do. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized he wouldn’t have been able to do any of the things that he had done without my mother. I always thought of him as the provider, but in reality it was her too. I wouldn’t say it was more her than him, but she had to work a lot harder for it. We needed her income, without a doubt. And she had to work as a waitress, while my father got to sit at a computer and wear a suit. It has an impact on your psyche when you see that growing up.
My mom is seventy-six years old now, and she’s still working four days a week at the restaurant. She’s worked all her life. I don’t think she knows how not to work. I wish she didn’t have to. She should get to retire.
Andrew: Has writing about your parents ever created any problems in your relationship with them?
Elizabeth: My dad more so than my mom, for sure. My mom doesn’t feel like she has anything to hide. My father’s more private. The other essay of mine that was published in The Sun [“Missing Ghosts,” September 2020] was about his PTSD. And he gave me full permission to write whatever I wanted. He’s more reserved than my mother, but he was still generous with his story.
I think a lot about this question: When do your parents’ stories become yours? Where’s the line? Because their stories are going to impact yours, and that relationship you have with them is yours too. How do you protect them while writing about it? My parents are the closest people in the world to me. They’ve given me a blank check as a writer. But that’s not always the case.
Andrew: That’s something we have to walk a fine line on at The Sun. We publish a lot of very personal stories, but we don’t want to cause anyone harm. We encourage writers to show their work to the people they are writing about. I’ve worked with writers who initially didn’t want to do it, but when they finally did, it worked out well. It sparked some conversation.
Elizabeth: I’m really grateful to my parents for their reactions to anything that I’ve written about them. I’m always very nervous about it beforehand, but then I’m pleasantly surprised when they seem to appreciate that I care enough to write about them, to try to understand them. They’re just happy to be a part of it.
I’ve gotten similar reactions from friends and ex-boyfriends. Even when what I’ve written isn’t entirely favorable, they’re just happy to be seen, you know? Because very rarely do we get someone’s unobstructed view of us.
Andrew: It’s like you’re drawing a picture of them.
Elizabeth: Even when I’m just writing about myself, that’s how I think of it. It’s not until you put the experience on the page that you really get to look at it. And then you’re like, “Oh, I guess I really did say those things and do those things.” And you can really interrogate it and figure out what’s going on there. You can look at it and understand it. That’s one of the powers of writing. Life is constantly moving. How often do we get to stay still and look back on this one moment in time?
Andrew: How do you decide what to write about?
Elizabeth: It’s just the things that continue to hurt. I think I had a Nietzsche quote about it in the essay at one point, but it got taken out.
Andrew: Sorry. We must have reached the quote quota.
Elizabeth: I understand, don’t worry. But the quote was “Only that which never stops hurting stays in memory.” I keep remembering these things that hurt, and then I have to write them down and figure out why they are still making me feel this way. Why haven’t I let go? What do I still need to understand about it? Hopefully, at the end of it, the memory hurts a little less. Even if you can’t capture all of it, at least you have figured out part of it.
Andrew: That’s good advice for someone who wants to be a writer and isn’t sure what to write about.
Elizabeth: Yeah, look for the hurt that’s not going away.
