Tidying My Mind

I am the mother who seeks order for her family. I am also the daughter who carries my mother's losses deep within my soul.

Photo by Erica Marsland Huynh on Unsplash

My mother has been gifted so many potted plants that when tasked with watering them all my husband worried she had become a scapegoat for other peoples clutter. “It’s like she’s so nice and agreeable she’ll say, Oh, a plant! I will take care of it for the rest of my life! I’ll put it here, next to my hundred other plants! Volume is the only landscape design choice” he announced as he sprayed the hose over my parents’ front lawn. His concern burrowed in the wrinkles between his brows. He said nothing more, but I could tell he was scowling at me.

The garden of potted plants is our metaphor for my inheritance. I’m not talking about physical stuff. For my mother, an immigrant, objects like plants are reminders of past lives, long-lost friendships, places and people she may never — will never — see again. Though her fears are legitimate, they’ve complicated my own relationship to my stuff. Recently, I’ve been trying to account for my belongings without throwing out my inheritance. Two books which I have been reading in tandem have been instrumental to my reckoning.

I first saw Marie Kondo’s book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up at the cult indie bookstore, Spoonbill and Sugartown in Williamsburg in 2015. The title caught my eye, but back then my ego balked at self-help. Kondo is a vulnerable sage. Her lessons in tidying are based on personal failure and revelation. In the process of becoming a tidying expert, Kondo has been my mother’s friends, my mother, and me.

In one of her many lessons, Kondo reveals that she used to force her belongings onto her younger sister. Years later, while helping a client clean out her closet, she is embarrassed to learn that her client throws out the majority of her wardrobe because it had been “gifted” to her by her big sister. Through her own learning, Kondo advises that, “we need to show consideration for others by helping them avoid the burden of owning more than they need or can enjoy.”

Some of my mother’s potted plants are from an old neighbor I’ll call L. Like my mother, L is Chinese Indonesian, a national and ethnic identity that is rare in Los Angeles (though this is where the majority of Chindos in the United States live). Though L lived a few blocks away from my parents for many years, she and my mother only met while L was moving out of the neighborhood and into a guest bedroom in her married son’s home thirty miles away. “L wanted me to have this China cabinet” she told me the first time I visited after L had given my mother what looked to be her entire formal living room’s worth of furnishings. “She asked me not to sell it. I can’t.”

Chinese Indonesian identity is a complicated. Discrimination against Chinese Indonesian people date back to the seventeenth century, after the Dutch colonized Indonesia. Dutch officials stereotyped Chinese Indonesians as jackals and hyenas, and pitted Chinese Indonesian merchants against indigenous groups in an effort to gain control over the islands. When Indonesia declared independence in 1949 (the year of my mother’s birth), local officials established a socialist government in an effort to unify diverse communities. This attempt at utopia however, was short-lived.

In the early 1960s, the United States government staged a coup to overthrow Indonesia’s socialist president and replace him with an Indonesian military-backed, anti-Chinese dictator. This dictator simultaneously forced Chinese Indonesians to assimilate into “Indonesian” culture by outlawing the use of Chinese names, language, customs, and holidays while also selecting a handful of Chinese Indonesian merchants to lead an increasing number of Indonesian conglomerate corporations into capitalist flourish. In 1998, there was an economic crisis in Asia, and the Indonesian economy grew extremely weak overnight. Rage and riots broke out throughout the country. Chinese Indonesians as a group were wrongly blamed for the crisis, and many people who had nothing to do with the fall of the economy were threatened, beaten, and killed.

This is a history I’ve pieced together through a three-year process of research, reading, and conducting interviews. Knowing what I know now, I’m convinced that Indonesian history is also US history, and it frustrates me as a daughter and a citizen how Chinese diasporic stories are absent from our discourse. Knowing what I know now, I get why my mother could not say no to her friend L, and why she happily accepts “gifts.” Though it bothers me that she lives with a cabinet she doesn’t really love, it’s also very clear that what sparks joy for my mom isn’t stuff. It’s empathy for her friends and family. Caring counters loss. Likewise, sometimes objects serve as portals to entire dimensions in which we long to take up residence. Sometimes the longing is all we have.

Samantha Hunt’s newest work, The Unwritten Book: An Investigation makes a strong case for the beauty in clutter. The Unwritten Book is a hybrid essay collection about the things that haunt us: motherhood, death, addiction, and grief. Between her original essays are chapters from her father’s WIP (work-in-progress), the manuscript of his novel which she finds shortly after her father dies, and which she carefully annotates as she seeks answers to questions she cannot ask her dad. The discovery of his book holds hope. Hunt writes:

I could read my dad’s writing. I could make interpretations and solve mysteries. I could build references. Even when the rocks are busted up into tiny bits or transformed by heat and erosion, geologists can still gather information [Hunt studied Geology in school]. These pages felt like that, my dad had changed but he’d left behind clues, building materials.

Most of the clutter in my home is actual junk. Plastic toys from birthday parties, prizes from trips to the arcade, derivative works from the Marvel Universe. Pretty silk blouses that no longer suit my life. Polyester and poly-blend fabric, which I have been religiously filtering out of our closet since reading my friend Alden Wicker’s book To Dye For: How Toxic Fashion is Making Us Sick and How We Can Fight Back.

I’m battling capitalism when I tidy. This has unfortunately forced me to embrace the aesthetics of forgetting. Stuff that no longer sparks joy go must go somewhere, right? Still, I think Kondo’s method — if followed precisely — is good. Tidying, as a one-time event, is a mindset shift. Figuring out what you do and don’t like in your home changes consumer habits. Determining what no longer sparks joy has also helped me feel more confident about what does. In fact, Kondo explains that if you tidy correctly, the real place you clear out is your mind. Tidying my own home has affirmed who I really am and what I stand for.

I am the mother who seeks order for her family. I am also the daughter who carries my mother’s losses deep within my soul. I wish my mother could be free like me to discard stuff, but I worry how that freedom would strip her of community and belonging. What sparks joy can be complicated, and as Kondo reminds me time and again it is, “is different for everyone.” As Hunt writes of her parents’ cluttered home:

There’s a peace that comes over me in this house. Something similar to floating in a warm ocean. Maybe it’s a desire to drown. It is impossible not to find beauty there, interesting ideas everywhere I look, the detritus of humans who make art. The house also winnows out from my life anyone who is uptight. The house reminds me that order is temporary and that it is better to learn to feel at home in spaces that lack order, rooms that don’t make a human sense. The peace I find in this house is that of being lost with no desire to ever be found. It is surrender and the realization that I am also part of the house and my mom’s collections.

In the children’s book Here We Are, Oliver Jeffers urges us to “leave notes for everyone else,” a phrase I have at the top of my mind as I consider what sparks joy in my home and in my parents’. Like Hunt, I am grateful for the notes. I hope I am leaving good ones behind.

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