E. Madison Shimoda
A Portrait of M. C.
M. C. began to tell her thinly veiled autofictions around the time her daughter turned five, when the child was just beginning to grasp complex ideas. These stories were more like fairy tales than realist narratives—they often involved angels and other divine characters, and only about fifteen percent of the stories held up to fact check. M. C. told these stories to her daughter on the train rides home from department stores, where they spent countless afternoons wandering aimlessly. While the rising action of these stories varied, the setup and climax were always the same. There were two central characters: a girl and her mother. The girl was typically depicted as a “naughty” child—a child who talked back to her mother, who loved her friends over her mother (one iteration, told right after they had gotten a cat, involved a girl who loved her cat more than her mother), who did not put her mother first, and who had an uncanny resemblance to M. C.’s daughter, both physically (straight black hair, monolid, round-faced) and in disposition (talkative, inquisitive, incorrigible). The fictional mother was stern like M. C. but was only that way because she loved her daughter so, something the daughter seemed to take for granted. From here, the stories varied depending on what lesson M. C. was trying to teach that day, but they always ended in the same way: the mother would die and the daughter would realize for the first time how important her mother was to her. But it would be too late. It was always too late. And usually, right around then, the real daughter would begin crying. How M. C. felt about her crying daughter, no one knows.
As high-octane as M. C.’s stories were, there were a lot of important, illuminating details missing in her autofictional fables. Her tales were ones that, like many Asian tales, should have begun with its colonial, war-ridden past. On December 8, 1941, an hour and a half before the Japanese flew over Pearl Harbor—which in effect would mean they had unleashed the deadliest of enemies onto themselves—they invaded Kota Bharu, a city located at the mouth of the Kelantan River in northeastern British Malaya. The Japanese then advanced southward and invaded Kota Tinggi, the village where M. C.’s family lived. Four years later, shortly after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrendered, ending the war on the Asia-Pacific front. Nine years after that, M. C. was born, into a country that was still struggling to recover from its double colonial past.
M. C. was born into a family of three brothers and three sisters and a mother who had one foot out the door. M. C.’s mother had been only sixteen years old when she married M. C.’s father, who, though many years her senior, was a wealthy owner of tin mines and was considered a good match. M. C.’s mother had been the only woman in the village to wear a Western-style white dress at her wedding. The Japanese occupation had changed not only the family’s financial circumstances but its emotional one. Or perhaps there was no love lost between a child bride and her groom from the start, but had there been any love previously, it had run out by the time M. C. was born. By then, the tin mines and wedding dresses were mere legends, as far removed from reality as dragons.
While the exact dates are unclear, we know that M. C. was old enough to walk her mother to the bus stop the day her mother left. M. C. had stood at the stop, long after the bus had departed, still trying to figure out why her mother had just apologized over and over again and expressed how she wished she could have taken M. C. with her. It seemed obvious to M. C. that her mother could have taken her to wherever she was going if she had wanted to. Some part of M. C. is still waiting at the bus stop today.
Not having a mother: that’ll force a girl to grow up quickly. Soon M. C. was school-age and was enrolled in an English school. This was something her eldest brother insisted upon when he found out that one of the teachers at the Chinese school had abused one of their sisters. Yet the difference in schools didn’t make M. C.’s life any easier.
From her mother, M. C. had inherited a small, oval face, doe-like eyes, a sharp nose, and a general aura of being someone well-cared for even when the opposite was true. As a child, M. C.’s beauty was a curse. At school, she was taunted by students and teachers alike for being the pretty girl who looked just like her mother and would most likely become a fallen woman in the same way. This put little M. C. in a sickening position where she had to proclaim that she was not like her mother, a woman she loved with all her heart. Why did it feel so bad to betray someone who had betrayed you?
At home, M. C. was a literal and metaphorical punching bag for the men in the family who were mired in the responsibilities of being, well, men. Her second eldest brother was an exception; he had only hit her once and afterward cried and begged for forgiveness, which she gave immediately because that was the kind of person she was. Only once were the police called by a concerned neighbor, but M. C. had lied that the bruises and lacerations were a result of her own clumsiness to save her father from being arrested. That was the kind of person she was.
After high school, M. C. worked two jobs, gave most of her small salary to her family, but was also secretly setting aside a small sum for herself. One night, M. C. informed her father that she was going to university in the U.K. He asked her how she planned on doing that. She told him by flying out the next morning.
In 1973, M. C. moved to London. On her first day in the new city, she went into a grocery store. The British merchandise, though common in her home country, shone like glitter. What shocked her, more than the fancy packages of fruit pastilles and Walkers crisps, was when the shopkeeper asked her, “What can I get you, love?” Love. To run into it in a small, dingy London supermarket! The word hit her like a tropical storm. Yet, there she was alone in a country where the sky was merely incontinent.
M. C. eventually found it impossible to juggle three jobs and continue her education, and she unceremoniously dropped out of university. She then followed a flatmate to Tokyo, moving from Great Britain to Japan, as if giving chase to the people who had destroyed her family. In Tokyo, she met and married a Japanese man, and a few years later, became pregnant. Eight months into her pregnancy, she flew alone to her home country. On a February morning, she gave birth to her daughter at 2:06 a.m. at Johor Specialist Hospital. She was not conscious for her daughter’s arrival, but hours later, when she was slapped awake by the obstetrician, she was asked if she’d like to hold her child. From behind an anesthetic haze, she answered: no. Years later, she’d recount this to her daughter in uncharacteristically realist fashion—no angels, no magic, no death. I wanted you to hear it from me, she said. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to hold you. I was in too much pain.
Upon returning to Tokyo, M. C., like the miller’s daughter in “Rumpelstiltskin,” locked herself in a tower room with her baby daughter, and for years, spinning tale after cautionary tale about how ungrateful daughters lose their mothers. Yet, years later, the imp would get his wish: the daughter would emerge from the room as an adult, donning a cloak of unfilial weave, and leave Japan for America. Like her mother, she would be drawn to the country that at one point in history had destroyed hers; like her grandmother, she would abandon M. C. Yet it turned out that M. C.’s stories were wrong. Mothers do not die in the wake of their daughters’ betrayals, but the daughters live the rest of their lives dying.
About the Author
E. Madison Shimoda is a writer from Tokyo, Japan, currently living in Manhattan. She is an MFA candidate in Fiction at Columbia University, with a joint concentration in literary translation; she translates from Japanese.