On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

This article is featured in Issue 3 of the SSENSE biannual print publication.

“It’s a delicate balance,” added Kay. “Nothing should scream costume, it’s a little modern, but maybe the fabric choice is a reference more to 90s China, for example.” The trio met in 2017 at a birthday party for a mutual friend and quickly discovered an affinity for one another, an aesthetic kinship, one marked by their upbringing but also tuned into a particular vibration of lesser-known cultural references. They were all recent graduates from Parsons School of Design. They had also all grown up in Asia (Kay is from South Korea; Can and Luong are both from Vietnam). Though they were each gigging at the time for larger, more established brands such as Gucci, Prabal Gurung, and Phillip Lim, they had dreams to venture out on their own.

In 2018, they launched Commission. The name is a nod to the hustle, to the design work they do—but their references are more rooted in the 80s or 90s fashion choices of their own mothers, East and Southeast Asian women who were imitating stylish Western clothes with pattern sewing and cheap fabrics. Think: A funereal dress with a burst of yellow satin pinned at the breast—like the bow on a box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates—the excess yellow trim running down the side in a flair of pageantry. Think: a brown suede jacket, with a faint disco collar, something one of the men in Taipei Story might wear, but instead paired with a midi-length skirt and high, shiny boots.

My own grandmother, who was born in Taiwan under Japanese rule, liked to make clothes for me with McCalls patterns. It was the 90s; she and my grandfather had moved to the U.S. to live closer to all of us in the Bay Area. The entryway of their Richmond house, where you always stopped to take off your shoes, smelled of sandalwood. The sofas in the living room were covered in a showy, printed fabric, somewhat garish. We often ate dumplings on Sundays, at the round kitchen table, the chairs we sat on layered in plastic slips. When my grandmother died, I remember we cleaned out the house together as a family, and I found the iron spikes of an unused ikebana tray sat in the basement. Something about her clothes felt distinctly handmade, even if they were perfectly measured. Was it the fabric? The slight wobble of the hand that worked the sewing machine? I remember feeling self-conscious about wearing them at school. I was the only girl with matching headbands from the excess fabric.

Last year, Commission launched “Commission 1986,” an Instagram account of crowdsourced photographs of Asian mothers. I’ve looked through them several times. They spark a sense of longing, but also a sense of loss. There will be a high-waisted boot-cut jean. A leather shoulder bag hanging from thin straps. Three strands of uneven pearls, the heaviest gathering dipping into the clavicle. Fingerless white gloves. Plaid and floral-printed shirts. A Member’s Only jacket. And the hair—feathered, bobbed, braided—but also permed. There are so many perms. These mothers are beautiful, the smiles on their faces genuine and intimate, beaming back at whoever it is behind the camera. I feel as if I know them already, even if they are nameless. The style they convey—the bucket hats and the pencil skirts, the tucked blouses and the floral prints—evoke earlier decades, the film the pictures are printed on creating an inevitable patina, but one with a sense of hope—of independence, of marriage, of motherhood—just beginning.

Each image is often accompanied in the caption of the city where it was taken—Seoul, Taipei, Manila—as well as the year. When I look, I thumb through to the daughter who submitted her mother, and who is tagged. I study her face, and I page back, and study her mother’s. Looking makes me want to go home to my mother. To ask questions. To talk over a bowl of Meyer lemons picked from the tree that grows outside our house.

But instead, I don’t. I can’t. We’re living on opposite coasts in the middle of a global pandemic. Plus, I am an avoidant. I find even writing about this topic—mothers, being the child of someone from another country, generational divides—terrifying, as if I’m unearthing parts of myself I’m content to leave buried for now. I lose myself instead in watching the movies Kay, Cao, and Luong discussed with me, like A Brighter Summer Day, Taipei Story, In the Mood for Love, and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! But I am most struck by the films of Yang; in part, because they can show me the Taiwan that my mother came from, and I have never tried to bridge that connection with cinema before. Taipei Story is set in 1985, well after my own mother had become a citizen in the US. She is younger than the character of Chin (played by Yang’s wife at the time Tsai Chin), but I can find enough overlap for everything to feel hazily familiar. Chin is an upwardly mobile young professional who works for a large Taiwanese property developer. She’s just found a nice apartment for herself that will allow her to move out of her parents’ home, where her father—a drunk, who is bad with money—is still served dinner every night by her subservient mother. Chin wants success, and yet her past weighs her down, both with her family, but also her fiancé, Lung, a washed up Little League baseball player now running a fabric shop. Lung is not interested in Chin’s aspirations, which are reflected not just in the apartment, but also in her friends, her clothes. She effortlessly wears beige trousers and baggy blazers, pressed white collars, fuzzy tomato-red sweaters. She wears glasses that look like those I might see in old photographs of my mother and her siblings. The Fuji logo of Taipei blinks in the background. The city’s horizon is clouded with smog.
Taipei Story is a remarkably prescient film, aware of what modernity and American power has brought to Taiwan, of what is lost and can never be regained. Life abroad, the wake of the Chinese diaspora, beckons even as Taiwan is poised to enter an economic boom. But Yang refuses to see all this change for Taiwan optimistically. At one point Chin and Lung discuss moving to the States, where Lung’s brother-in-law has a successful import business in Los Angeles. Going would mean security, but also losing the life they have together in Taipei, of sacrificing independence and submitting to the brother-in-law’s household. There’s a moment where Lung describes what it was like living with him: “He liked guns. When I was there he’d take me either to a baseball game or the shooting range. He killed someone once. A black person. Later the police came and he was acquitted. He said that in the States if you see a suspicious person in your yard you can shoot them dead. Drag them into your house and plant an unregistered gun on them. They call it self-defense. You’re not guilty.”

The poet and writer Ocean Vuong managed to capture the existential weight of having an Asian mother in his beautiful 2019 novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Written as a letter to his own mother, who emigrated to the United States and is the child of a Vietnamese woman and an American soldier who met during the Vietnam war—Vuong reveals the tangled and ugly legacy left behind from the violence Western colonial powers waged on Southeast Asia in the name of democracy and justice. To have an Asian mother is to understand what remains unspoken or left unsaid when generations cross countries and language barriers—as depicted in best-selling novels like Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club or Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake to more contemporary examples from writers such as Weike Wang, Alexander Chee and Cathy Park Hong. When I think of my own mother and her clothes, I remember worshiping the femininity available to me, whether it was slipping my child’s feet into an oversized pair of heels or gazing at a cheongsam hanging in her closet. Fashion, for me, has often felt like a way of finding conformity—even if it still a kind of self-expression—largely because of my own misshapen sense of identity from being mixed race. Fashion affords me a way of saying something about myself without actually saying it.

Maybe that’s why I find the overtly Asian perspective of Commission, tasteful, so cinematic, kitschy, romantic, sleek. Their designs are a revelation. The clothes evoke a past that I feel some ownership over, even if it’s largely imagined, even if my own connection is anomic and tenuous. Last year, I read a book published that same year called Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation, by David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, both who had tragically experienced, while they worked at Columbia University as professors, the suicide of a well-liked Korean American student. They had observed that the students they worked with in the wake of the suicide, either in class or in Han’s sessions—and who were primarily Asian American—described or articulated a feeling of persistent invisibility. As well as the halo of sadness that surrounded it. Weaving in various Asian American literature (Eng is an English professor), psychoanalytic theory and Han’s case studies (Han is a psychotherapist), the professors pointed to larger, more political conversations around Asian American identity—of how the moniker, created in the 70s to form a sense of political cohesion, can flatten the nuances the of Asian American experience, smoothing over the vastly different personal experiences between say, a Korean American arriving in the U.S. post-1965 to a fourth-generation Chinese American, whose ancestors came over during the gold rush of the 1860s, into one entity. Melancholy is a concept that Sigmund Freud defined in his 1918 book Mourning and Melancholia, and it used to convey what one misses without knowing what it is, exactly (as opposed to grief, where one is aware of what has been lost). In other words, I can grieve for my grandmother, but I am melancholic for the 1980s Taipei that Yang captures, a city I don’t really know, and certainly not then. This overcame me.

In these strange times—and in this sad, maddening year that has forced us all to slow down, to shelter in place, to isolate—I have found myself looking for something as if I’ve misplaced it, like a pair of keys accidentally placed on a different table. We are forced to look ahead without momentum, to contemplate our lives with an indefinite pause. Suddenly, I am aware of who I have kept close to me, and who I’m willing to wait and see until this is all supposedly normal again. I find myself retrieving ideas and thoughts that I’ve kept within, that now—with this abundance of time and solitude—are bizarrely closer to the surface, as if buoyed by the quiet. I’ve also found myself seeking other worlds, in the novels I have read (why did I finally pick up Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1940s The Makiaka Sisters in March?), but also in films, like Yang’s, and with clothes like Commission’s. They are all operating in a similar manner, all so fixated on the specifics—the street light against a tree at night, the lacquer of a bowl, the flawless hem of a sleeve—that I nearly forget they are speaking for something much bigger than what I can actually see.

Thessaly La Force is a writer and features director at T: The New York Times Style Magazine.