When journalist and former Refinery29 executive editor Connie Wang became a mother, she found herself reckoning not just with her new identity, but with the woman who raised her. That journey became the beating heart of her debut memoir, Oh My Mother!: A Memoir in Nine Adventures—a deeply personal, funny, and moving exploration of the layered bond between mothers and daughters across cultures, continents, and generations.
In the book, Wang retraces moments from her own life and her mother’s. Uncovering the complexities of immigration, identity, control, and what it means to mother while still becoming yourself. For Needed, Connie sat down to answer questions about what writing the book revealed, how becoming a mom reshaped her view of her own, and what legacies she’s passing on.
Needed: What did writing Oh My Mother! reveal to you about your mom as a person, not just as a parent?
Connie: Among most of my friends and colleagues who have children, there’s usually an element of ambivalence before they commit to building a family — and I narrow-mindedly believed that push and pull of career vs. family-building, security vs. risk, the loss of independence vs. the gifts that come from selflessness was some kind of uniquely millennial struggle. In talking to my mom, I realized that her ambivalence towards having kids was magnitudes more intense than anything I’ve dealt with. No matter the time period, the culture, or the circumstances — young, ambitious women have always seen this phase of life with the complexity, seriousness, and interconnectedness it deserves. And in trying to understand how she reckoned with parenthood, it opened a door to understanding her as an individual, completely outside of the context of children.
Needed: You once believed your mother was always in control. What shifted for you when you realized much of her life was shaped by unexpected change and adaptation?
Connie: My mom was — and still is — a control freak. I never thought that I was, perhaps because I didn’t want to be like her in that regard. But as I started building my own family during COVID, I realized that my reaction toward all this chaos was to try and demand order, which is a terrible way to try and raise kids. I’m so much more similar to my mom than I ever realized, and once I began to see our patterns, I better understood just how terrifying it was for her to find out she was stuck in America. She took a sabbatical off work to come visit my dad in Nebraska while he was attending a graduate program and participating in Chinese-American political movements. Because of geopolitical relationships between the two countries during that time, she realized she was unable to return home. Almost overnight, she lost her friends, family, career, home, homeland, culture, and sense of freedom. Imagine going on a fun trip, and realizing you couldn’t ever return home.
I always thought of our immigration story as very orderly, systematic, and planned-for. In fact, it was the complete opposite. It gave me an extreme amount of empathy for my mom who fought against this injustice for decades (without any mental health support); and I have a great deal of pride that she was able to find new opportunities and joys on the other side, and grow into who I consider now to be a very optimistic person.
Needed: Has being a mother changed your view on what it means to be Asian American and your relationship with it? How do you think it shifts generation to generation?
Connie: It must be a very strange thing to go from a life where your ethnicity isn’t even a consideration in your day to day life, because everyone else is the same ethnicity — to a situation where you’re suddenly the only person who looks the way you do. My mom, dad, and I went through it at the same time, and frankly, we never thought of ourselves as Asian American outside of paperwork, or school. At home, we were just us. In public, we were Asian American in as much as that meant that we weren’t white, but that didn’t make us feel any closer to other Japanese Americans, Hmong Americans, Korean Americans, or even Chinese Americans who immigrated generations before us.
That solidarity wasn’t built until I began learning about Asian American activism, and the power inherent in linking arms, and now I can see the interconnectivity of our family’s experiences with others in history, and what’s happening today.
It could not be more different for my son. He is so proud to say that he’s Chinese and Jewish, and that it makes him special. The way he thinks about his own identity is so free of shame, but it’s also not definitive for him. He likes to say that he’s Chinese and Jewish, but mostly he’s Just Marc, which is wiser than anything I was capable of expressing at his age.
Needed: How did becoming a mother yourself change the way you see your own mom and her choices, her fears, and her hopes for you?
Connie: There’s this constant chatter among parents of young kids about what to do if your kids are “strong-willed” — I’m guilty of this myself, and I acknowledge that having kids with strong opinions, with a keen sense of self-determination and self-motivation, can be totally challenging, especially if they’re hellbent on climbing the highest ladder at the playground or screaming through a restaurant meal. We come from a family of rule-followers, and we’ve always known that the expectations for how we behave in public as minorities are higher.
There’s always a fear to make yourself smaller, quieter, more obedient. But, listening to your own morals even when it’s hard is a value that my mom aggressively instilled in me, and I know how much they’ve served me in my life. It’s something I appreciate seeing in my kids, and I try and react in ways that help them redirect these characteristics to ways that make them feel better and are more rewarding, even when my instinct is to freak out.
Needed: After writing this book, what do you now understand as your mother’s greatest gift to you not just as her daughter, but now as a mother yourself?
Connie: Not trying to control others — it’s one of the hardest-won lessons in my mother and my life, and we finally came to an understanding after years where our relationship was very toxic and critical. The amount of work and vulnerability it must have taken her to realize she needed to change is immense, and something I think about constantly as a way to keep myself humble and resilient as a parent. I feel so grateful that I get to start off my parenthood journey with this understanding, and get to see what happens when my kids are raised in a way where they get to be themselves — full stop.
You can find Oh My Mother! in local book stores and can learn more here.
