Sound reaches our ears in waves: short, rapid oscillations of high frequency create cymbal crashes and birdsongs, while long, loping waves of low frequency undulate into wavespeech and murmurs. Effecting such acoustic diversity is the sound’s power spectrum—how its amplitude varies across frequencies. When light, an electromagnetic field, oscillates in the same power spectrum pattern as a sound, the color it renders can be used to characterize the sound itself. Think of “white” or “pink” noise; envision the diatonic scale mapped onto the visible spectrum.
When my mother arrived in San Francisco from China to help with my newborn twins, she brought more than just luggage and baby care skills. A soundscape trilled around her, its cadence woven from past and present, its pitch rendered in full color.
White emerges when all wavelengths of light reflect off an object with equal intensity, much like how white noise distributes its amplitude across its entire frequency range. Examples abound: running water, the whir of a fan, the hum of a vacuum.
My mother busied herself the moment she arrived, unpacking and stocking the fridge, brushing up on baby care. Within days, the chores were taken from our hands one by one: cooking, daytime feedings, even taking out the trash. Running water burbled in the kitchen early morning, its splatters segueing into the hiss of steam as breakfast warmed. Soon after, her butcher knife began shredding cuts of pork loin, the rhythmic “chop chop chop” unraveling into the shake of formula into emulsion, both sounds jarring with the revolutionary “red” songs she had once covered and now played on repeat from Meipian.com. This symphony of domesticity resumed soon after lunch, its staccato refrains of dish rattling crescendoing into baby babbling, the forte of infant cries diminuendoing to Sleep Jar pink noise by way of cooing. Only then, after nine, ten hours puttering on the podium of the kitchen, did my mother slump into the sofa, a gray-haired, chore-coat-clad conductor bent over her phone with reading glasses perched on her soft nose ridge, scrolling through WeChat articles or counting the likes on her latest Meipian post.
I could hear her sounds from the proscenium of my home office—muffled, white-noise renditions filtering through the walls. Admiration for her stamina welled up and surprised me anew, as it had been twenty years since we last lived under the same roof: before I moved in with my grandparents to be closer to high school, before college carried me far away, and graduate school across the ocean. From that distant memory, my mother stepped forward to tell me she had slept only four hours the previous night, having scrubbed the floor and scoured the grout. She was about my current age then, brimming with a surplus of energy—or perhaps possessed by it. Her hair bore no streaks of gray, only the tight coils of a perm, dark as ebony cumulus. Her posture was upright, straight as temple bamboo. And yet, her voice carried the same cadence it did now, her face drawn by the same unyielding seriousness she always wore for chores.
That face turned even younger, a black-and-white, sixteen-year-old supplying the groundwork: Mao’s dialectical materialist education and his call to “go up the mountain and down to the villages.” She had chosen a remote Manchurian village to become a peasant, because manual labor, according to the Supreme Leader, was the crucible of revolutionary consciousness. In spring, the sun burnt the nape of her neck as she hunched over the furrow; in winter, the subzero cold hardened the tracked mud around the village well into a slippery mound, upon which she fell, wept, and struggled back to standing by herself. “Eating bitterness” as such was the point, the rite of passage to a socialist new person like Lei Feng or Pavel Korchagin. Then, as the revolutionary utopia revealed its authoritarian and state capitalist true colors, the rustic years were reinterpreted as a lesson in resilience, a preparation for whatever hardship life threw her way.
Life did not throw extraordinary hardship at her, though, only banality in dollops. She worked steadily through her thirties, forties, and by “work,” I meant housework, as I don’t recall she’d ever put in overtime for her day job, first as a chemistry lecturer at an obscure college, then, after a clash with the students that she never detailed, as a functionary in the bureaucracy. She hired help only after retiring at the statutory age of 55. The first helper quit after just a single visit over my mother’s insistence on using separate rags for each room, and the second entered the kitchen, took one look, and asked, “Do you cook?” because the kitchen, despite having been in continual use for eight years, looked as grease-free as if brand new.
The way my mother recounted this, many times over our trans-Pacific calls, left me wondering if she took pride in her virtuoso cleaning, a speculation she denied every time I asked. On the contrary, she insisted, she’d have preferred to be free from such trivialities. Her childhood dream had been to become China’s Madam Curie; her first project after retirement was a memoir of high socialism. Now the dream’s only tangible remnant was a photo of her outside the Curie house in Warsaw, and the memoir lay buried in her laptop as a mere preface. If she had any regret, she kept them well hidden. During her four-month stay this time, only once did I catch her standing before the stove and complaining to a pot: the Le Creuset was too heavy, the pantry shelves too high. She threw the pot’s lid on the countertop, and it clashed like a cymbal against the stone.
Formula powder in hand, I tiptoed to skirt her, reaching for the feeding bottle.
“Let me handle it!” her forehead kneaded to a frown. “I’ve just disinfected it with rubbing alcohol!”
How many extra steps she created for the simplest chore, how many long hours she must thus endure without a break—the extremity of her perfectionism never failed to baffle me, and I speak from a perspective tinted by both the messiness of newborns and an above-average inclination toward orderliness, the latter vantage point my mother helped construct. I went as far as considering maternal instincts and the possible evolutionary benefits of her behavioral patterns to settle on a more measured explanation: that her entire need-want continuum had been arranged by some Maslowian logic, where lower rungs demanded flawless completion before higher aspirations could even be contemplated. As her need for control—bringing to mind Liszt’s famous remark, “The concert is myself”—fell inevitably short of the impossible standard of perfection, frustration and resentment became parts of her.
So much time she spent standing, cooking and scouring and decluttering, that by the third week of her stay, the sole of her slipper had detached at the ball of the foot like a gaping fish. Then, before that week was out, she reported that her back was hurting. An old problem, she insisted, nothing that warranted a doctor’s visit. My offer of pain relief patches was accepted, but takeouts and a Hawai’i trip got rejected outright. Relief of her own design came even more modest: a walk in the neighborhood park. She announced it after lunch in a small voice, as if suggesting something inappropriate.
“Sure,” I said. “You’ve been here a month now, and you haven’t even gone out once.”
The rest of the afternoon, I waited for her departure while juggling coding and meetings, until the sun sank low enough to stab my eyes with its sharp, golden glare. Finding her neither before the stove nor in the guest room, I passed the hallway and noticed that the back door was open, the peal of a revolutionary ballet opera wafting in. I could not see my mother but knew she must be there, on the landing with her dwindled frame leaning on the banister, a decentered flood of carmine light pouring over her.
Dad pulled me aside: “Dinner is coming up, so she just took a break in the sun instead.”
Blue. The power of the sound increases as its frequency goes up. Examples: steam escaping from a pipe, a dentist’s drill.
11:30 a.m. Baby Max cried. I stepped away from work to find his arms flailing, his heels thudding repeatedly against the crib. A paste of poop slathered all over the diaper, already leaking through onto the pink of the back like pistachio brushstrokes.
My mother emerged from the kitchen. “Again?” She exclaimed as she took over the baby, pulling the sleeves off the chubby arms. “How sloppy!”
She was referring to Dad, who, three times in one month already, had fixed the diaper too loose. He was out of the guest room now, but my mother had already picked up Max by the armpits and tramped to the bathroom, occupying the sink all to her ornery self. She grumbled while adjusting the water to the right temperature: that Dad’s baby-washing would be as sloppy as his diaper-changing, that he was so sloppy that he shouldn’t be trusted with any housework.
“Mom,” I said, “can we stop this?”
My mother gave me a sharp look. “Someone knows only lifting his lips,” she said, then turned back to attacking the toughest poop stain. “Lunch will be ready only at one o’clock.”
“That won’t do,” I said, the elaboration that I had a meeting then stuck in my throat. I pulled out the leftover paella from the freezer, punched five minutes on the microwave.
“You should have told me earlier.” My mother’s words steeped in rising irritation. Behind her, shredded pork was soaked in marinate, chopped green onion snaked on the cutting board.
“Can’t wait,” I repeated.
“Who’s eating this?” my mother syncopated the syllables, her timber sharp and tempo fast.
“That’s why they invented the fridge,” I said, snatching the paella from the microwave.
“I don’t want to have any leftovers,” my mother hollered up a fifth.
“Can’t talk,” I impaled the fork into the heap of paella. “Need to eat now, hungry.”
“Typical you,” her voice now a crescendo of fire. “Too lazy to cook.”
“I’ve been cooking since college.”
She snorted in contempt. “I’ve seen your ‘cooking.’”
“Egregious,” I stormed back to my room, the paella burning my hand red.
“I must have taken the wrong medicine,” her shrill thundered after me, “coming all the way to be a nanny for compensation of this kind—”
I slammed the door shut behind me, but my mother’s shrill voice kept roiling in my memory, our fifteen years of living together, our subsequent visits and trans-Pacific calls. We had fought in every chamber of these recollections, our quarrels not uncommonly ending with a door being slammed shut. One night, when I was ten, she inserted herself between the TV and me, asking for help with the laundry. A water outage was on, and she needed, but for some reason couldn’t go fetch herself, a bucket from a public faucet down the street. In hindsight, I should have helped, but at that moment, I was glued to the screen and so she pressed on. Our argument escalated until she shoved me out the front door, her voice ringing out at the top of her lungs for all the neighbors to hear—so they could all wake up to see the real me: a selfish, disobedient child beneath the polite, quiet facade.
In J. L. Austin’s theory of performative utterance, language doesn’t just describe reality but constructs it. When someone declares, “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth,” the utterance itself accomplishes the christening. So much can be achieved by sound, considering how a soprano shatters a wine glass (or, for that matter, how the fictive Oskar Matzerath the entire city of Danzig), how ultrasound waves bounce off organs to give color to our interior. My mother’s shrill voice molded the ten-year-old me into a mouse, conditioned to flee at even the faintest glance cast my way. Her voice today didn’t just resurrect that life I, as a ten-year-old, had vowed to leave behind, but also summoned fragments from the one I presently led: the vehemence of a Chinese schoolmate who complained about his mother’s interference in his choice to stay single; the only line that lingered months after reading Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans: “My mother’s love was a war. It was fought every day for the sake of shaping me into somebody new, somebody better.”
Love. Rosy red or angelic white, a world apart from the blue on the spectrum. The space my mother’s shouting banished me into was blue-tinted, rankling, drafty—I recoiled from it even at the mere suggestion. Two months into her stay, one night, my mother offered to take Max and Mia back home with her. Just until kindergarten, she said, so you could save big on daycare.
“No,” I said, without even a moment’s pretense of hesitation.
“Why not?” she said, surprised.
“I wanted my kids to grow up in a loving environment—”
Her face fell. Regret tugged at my stutter, and qualifications rushed to rescue: I was only referring to my impression of her way of communication, I had no aim of questioning her good intentions. All too late: tears were already trickling down her cheeks. Between gasps, she recollected the nights she had stayed up to nurse me, all the cooking, feeding, laundry, hospital visits, family vacations, her dedication to keeping our home clean and tidy, always putting her own needs last. “How could you say I don’t love you?” she whimpered, biting her lips, her face eerily pale under a smear of tear and sweat.
I retreated to my room, closing the door behind me without a sound. Burrowing into bed, I tried to sleep but shifted over memories—her huffing and puffing as she rushed my asthmatic self to the hospital, the tear-streaked face she wore when a nurse turned to my neck for a blood draw after the veins in my elbow had given out. Shattered by those recollections was that troupe, where an overbearing, stereotypically Asian, mother stands in the way of her child’s independence. Never had my mother protested my anthropology degree nor my same-sex marriage—not with the same vehemence she reserved for a misplaced mug, at least. Her battles were waged squarely within the realm of domesticity, where conflagrations could ignite from embers as innocuous as a cluttered shelf. At stake was not control over my life per se, but rather over her domain of expertise, the white-noised space she had meticulously configured and needed to keep configured just so.
The problem: I co-inhabited that space, once before fifteen and now again. I sulked over my mother’s obstinate foothold beyond reason and berated myself for making her cry, acutely aware that both reactions traced familiar pathways. Each retreat from the battlefield carried hopes of reconciliation, only to be dashed by yet another skirmish. I shifted in bed and peered out the window, reminding myself that our grooves, by this point, were carved as deeply as the nighty blue, the possibility of change as obscured as its dim stars. The message they seemed to blink out was simplistically practical: hold on to the flickers between a fight’s bluest flames, those doldrums when one side had volleyed their weapon while the other side had yet to respond. Snatch these moments and make your retreat, and at least, I thought, we could then end a fight without having a door slammed shut like today.
I slept on this thought; it carried both a softening and hardening effect.
The next morning arrived sunny. My mother was already in the kitchen making breakfast when I went in for coffee. “Here,” she said, her smile faint but present.
My eyes followed her outstretched hand: a boiled egg, already peeled. I took it.
“Are we all good?” she asked.
“We are all good,” I replied.
Rainbow. The full spectrum of sound; the complete prism of light. Listen carefully to a rainbow, its euphonius hues and mellifluous tones.
Baby Mia cried. Her wail rose climbed like a siren, her tiny heels thumping against the crib with each sob. Then, a sudden, hen-like cluck burst forth to quiet her, and a lullaby followed to restore the calm. In the dark, I could just make out my mother’s silhouette bent over the bassinet, her soft voice lilting a cappella along the melody’s groove: “A little girl goes picking mushrooms, carrying with her a big bamboo basket…”
She had sung the same song to me at age nine, ten, when I lay abed, carried away by the excitement of the day—this, I remembered. With the same dulcet tone, she had hummed Wiegenlied to me at age five, six, when the darkness felt too ominous to sleep in alone—this, too, I remembered. Her songs had always worked their magic. My mother liked singing and excelled at it, so talented that her middle school—the Girl’s Middle School Affiliated with Beijing Normal University, so elite that Deng Xiaoping’s daughters studied just a few grades above her—secured a spot for her at the Central People’s Broadcasting Station youth choir. For three years, she had trained her voice and learned music theory, performed for Japanese, Indonesian, and Albanian guests. When the Cultural Revolution erupted, however, my mother decided her time would be better spent struggling against the capitalists. The choirmaster sent her a letter: consider yourself dismissed if you still don’t show up in a month. But my mother was already on the move by then, planning her “revolutionary linked-up” tour to spread Mao’s gospel to the masses.
“How foolish we were,” she would say, decades later. “I could have stayed; I might have even become a singer.”
“I thought you wanted to be Madam Curie.”
“Science had never been my forte; the arts, languages—those were my gifts.”
Her repertoire consisted of the “red” songs of the ’50s and ’60s, those idealism-drenched, melodious tones. She had sung them while laboring in the Manchurian terra preta, where a sent-down musician taught her piano, an irony not lost on her given the piano’s standing as a marker of bourgeois cultural taste. These same songs accompanied her train ride back to Beijing, filled the fractured days of her working life, and echoed through the hollow expanse of her retirement. Now, she sang them as she busied herself in the kitchen, her voice rising over the blue flame of the stove, mingling with the golden California sun. After what she regarded as a swindled youth and an uneventful middle age, my mother clung to these songs—her companions for over five decades—with quiet fervor, much like Sigrid Nunez’s mother cherished Horst Wessel, the unofficial anthem of the Nazis.
Among her repertoire of thirty or forty, “North Wind Blows” reigned supreme. An aria from the revolutionary opera White-haired Girl, its simple melody wove in Shaanxi folksongs, its colloquial lyrics a lament for the downtrodden: “The north wind blows, the snowflakes whirl /A flurry of snow brings in the New Year/ Dad’s been hiding for a week because of his debt.” The plaintive tune wove itself into our dinner preparations, its stirring refrain choreographing the steam that rose from sauerkraut fish. We ate in the silence left behind by yet another argument, but inwardly, I was at ease, finding comfort in the familiar rather than the strain of hosting friends of diverse provenances—Chile, Germany, the Philippines—around this very table to discuss unheard-of jazz. Music, after all, is potently tribal, and my mother’s tribe intersected with mine across decades. Carried aloft by the anachronistic aria, I found myself floating above her sharp tones, gazing down as their blue frequencies softened and stilled, like ripples in the water beneath a bridge.
Where else might this updraft carry me? To a memory minted during my parents’ previous visit, on a morning the summer before Covid. We wandered through Golden Gate Park as the low fog began to lift, revealing pianos scattered across the landscape—on the lawns, beneath the redwoods, beside the lily ponds. The city was hosting a month-long concert series, Google informed us, and when musicians weren’t performing, these pianos stood open, inviting anyone eager to play a tune.
“Shall I?” my mother said, her eyes shining like gemstones.
She wore a navy coat, white chrysanthemums blooming from the shoulders to the hem. She strode across the damp grass like a breeze, wiped the bench dry, and warmed up with scales. Her arpeggios glided into “Let’s Sway Our Oars,” the melody warbling far and drawing a crowd close. As Dad added a hand on the bass notes, a Chinese woman, around fifty, stepped forward, her voice merging with my mother’s to evoke another time, another place:
Let’s sway our oars
Our little boat cutting across the ripples
The white pagoda casting its beautiful reflection
On the lake embraced by greenery and red walls
This is how I remembered it: my mother seated at the piano, my father bending over the keys, both absorbed in perfecting the next note. The woman stood a few steps away, her eyes drifting over the lawn, where irises bloomed in yellows and purples, the Chinese pavilion rose with its green tiles and crimson columns. They repeated the refrain, and she followed, her voice untrained but full. When the song ended, she disappeared into the crowd as suddenly as she had appeared. Applause erupted. My parents lingered, discussing something with palpable enthusiasm—likely the possibility of another song. When they finally decided against that and returned to me, a fresh glow lit on their faces.
I thought of the song again as I cleaned up after the night feeding, found myself humming it softly to the sleeping babies. The light flicked on, and my mother stepped in.
“So, you like it too,” she said, smiling, her eyes resting on the babies. In this final month of her visit, she’d been kinder, softer. How many more times would she come and stay like this?
“They’ll grow up liking it, too,” I replied, smiling back.
Sound of Silence. Silence requires no explanation. See it, feel it, until the recognition dawns that color and touch are aspects of its quality, like decibel or duration.
Time ran, four months blinking into a week, the final afternoon evaporating into memory. Returning from seeing my parents off at the airport, I found silence pooling thick in the emptied guest room, the whole house steeped in bruised purple twilight, airless and deserted. In that gloom, I packed for our first trip to Basel with the twins—a journey I had agreed to solely for my in-laws’ seventieth birthday. A celebration awaited; many were eager to meet the family’s newest additions.
The babies cried throughout the eleven-hour flight, their shrieks shattering the jet-lag-laden Basel night. Bleary-eyed and swept up in whirlwinds of party preparations, baby vomit, and endless explanation about surrogacy—how our heteropaternal twins shared X chromosomes from the same egg donor but carried Y chromosomes from two dads—I didn’t call my mother for weeks. In that silence, a relief tingled in realizing that she didn’t call me, either, and that her visit, while having brought us closer through shared care of the babies, had also reopened old wounds through the very cadence and timbre of our voices.
She wanted us to be friends; I regretted that we were still not that close.
I thought of her as I sat alone in my in-laws’ guest bedroom, savoring a moment of solitude before laughter spilled in from the kitchen. My in-laws were feeding the twins minced pasta, clumps of it tumbling onto the highchair tray. Baby Max absently smeared his sleeves through the mess, while Baby Mia carefully swept the pieces into a neat pile with her tiny fingers.
“Already into cleaning,” my husband chuckled. “Just like you and your mom.”
Basel evenings were quiet affairs—no blaring music, no loud street chatter—only the muted toll of church bells marking the passage of time. Max flipped open a music box, its rainbow notes spilling across the room, drawing peals of laughter. The fluorescent light reflected off white cupboards, holding at bay the indigo that deepened outside. I reckoned my mother must be asleep on the other side of the world, her breath counting down the ticks toward her own seventy, a lucid dream whisking her back through the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen, the economic takeoff and waning down. All inflection points of a life in her generation, body-warmed efforts subsumed in the vast, continental quiet. I placed my palm against my wrist and imagined my pulse in sync with her sounds, all the warm and cool hues in flux with the hurt and care we gave.
Hantian Zhang’s writing has appeared in AGNI, Prairie Schooner, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. He lives in San Francisco, where he works as a data scientist by day.
Photo credit: Susan Wilkinson