Stifling gender roles and frustrating trade offs

I cannot help but admire mothers more than fathers.

At American international schools, teachers can usually find the reason for a family’s move by asking the student, “What does your father do?” When a couple moves from one country to another, usually one partner must sacrifice an entire career for the other partner and/or children. I speak from personal experience.

My mother was a pediatric, infectious disease physician in China. After climbing the “hospital ladder” for 15 years, my mother gave up her training and joined my father in Chicago. At the age of ten, it was stifling to watch a successful woman give up her work. For a while, my mom sat at home, her skills unused. My mother is not alone as millions of immigrant women lose a sense of self-worth moving to the U.S. She is also not alone as millions of American women often give up career aspirations. I do not want to belittle the role mothers play as teachers and nurturers for America’s future, but gender is and should still be as relevant a topic as race.

My mother’s story is not altogether different from that of Michelle Obama. Like Barack Obama, Michelle Obama was trained at prestigious schools from humble beginnings. With the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1977, my parents were the first high school class in a decade to take China’s university entrance exam and attend undergraduate and graduate schools.

Flash forward 30 years with both China and the U.S. in cultural and economic “revolutions,” the media frames conversations of Michelle around her clothing not her biography, her intellect and life experience. In my daily conversations, talks surrounding Michelle drops precipitously compared to Barack. I read somewhere (cannot find it now) that Michelle’s supervisor at a prestigious Chicago law firm thought she was the most ambitious associate he had ever met. It is a sad irony to watch Michelle play second fiddle as Hillary did in the early 1990s. As for my mother, she was a revolutionary individual in her own right. As a teenager, she used to read censored Western novels, hidden in a nearby warehouse in her hometown. She is currently a researcher at Yale Medical School’s immunology department. It may be Ivy League, but she must tune to the egos of Yale professors. They may lecture about infectious diseases but have not treated as many patients with infectious diseases as she.

Like my mother and Michelle, women of my generation must also perform a cacophonous, steady djembe: the desire to be the woman our mothers and grandmothers have been – the dependable anchor – and tones of sadness when the desire to excel in a profession, to make a mark on the world shatters.