“Are you the founder’s daughter?”

I was in a packed elevator racing down to the first floor of a small, run-down hotel. This was where my mother had been running the programming of her still-nameless cult—out of two unassuming and dusty conference rooms. Her dreams of building a commune atop a hill had crumbled only six months earlier, when she’d tragically fallen out with her then-partner-in-crime. He had called her người điên for wanting to erect a fence along the commune’s perimeters to ensure her followers wouldn’t escape.

The hotel was tucked inside an alleyway, away from the hustle-and-bustle of central Nha Trang, a small coastal city in southern Vietnam. It was December 2022, the tail-end of Nha Trang’s wet season. It was breezy and chilly, a smattering of degrees lower than what would constitute acceptable beach weather. The sea was choppy and uninviting. I was so used to seeing meandering crowds of beachgoers, yet they were nowhere to be found.

The gentleman trying to confirm my identity stood next to me in the elevator, leaving barely an inch of space between us. Like everyone else, he was on his way to the first session of my mother’s programming that month. It was a meet-and-greet of sorts, of the cultish variant. Every month, my mother gathered a few dozen new recruits, who then went through several days of eating nothing, drinking nothing but lemon juice, oil, colloidal silver, and clay, in the hopes that their cancer, or diabetes, or dementia, or heart disease, would be cured. Participants were instructed to permanently stop all medication they were taking. Also on the agenda were laughter yoga (yes, yoga while laughing), a rowdy karaoke night, and a rather urgent invitation to buy my mother’s latest book.

I wondered how the gentleman was able to recognize me. Then, I remembered my face was plastered across my mother’s social media—that is, before her accounts got taken down for spreading COVID misinformation. I remembered the photo of me in my college dorm room (that I begged her not to post), which garnered several thousand likes. I remembered the photo of me in my first apartment, accompanied by a caption that explained—incorrectly—what I did for a living. I had to include it, she had told me. People were starting to suspect you were in the U.S. without papers.

I stood in the elevator, teetering on a response that was both too much and too little.

***

Seventy-two hours before, I had greeted my mother for the first time in three years. Outside Tân Sơn Nhất airport in Saigon, we hugged, coldly, woodenly, keeping a lifetime’s worth of air between us. The hot breeze that came and went was what hugged me more tightly, a warmth I knew only in my chosen family thousands of miles away.

“Bây giờ thấy con mập quá,” my mother remarked, gesturing at my stomach and thighs, where I had put on some twenty-odd pounds since the pandemic began.

This was the first time I had heard her voice in over six months, when we had stumbled through a barely-ten-minute phone call. We’d exchanged small tidbits since then in the form of WhatsApp stickers, TikTok videos spreading anti-vaccine propaganda, insincere “I miss you’s”—always disjointed, always rushed.

We got in the car and drove for eight straight hours to Nha Trang. I threw up from car sickness, then slept, fitfully. She asked if I’d like to help her lead the orientation of her newest cohort of adherents. I smiled faintly and replied with noncommittal nonsense.

***

“Ðúng rồi,” I told the gentleman in the elevator, affirming I was my mother’s daughter, and hinting, perhaps desperately so, that I still spoke my mother tongue, albeit brokenly.

My mind raced. Tell him to run. Tell him this is a scam—one that fools even the scammer herself. Ask him for his name first, maybe? Introduce yourself first, maybe? No—just remind him to go to the doctor. Tell him this is a waste of money. Or did he already spend it? This was surely a no-refunds cult. How does one say that in Vietnamese?

The elevator door opened. Almost a dozen people spilled out, flocking to various corners of the hotel lobby. A flurry of murmurs in Vietnamese: the conference rooms are that way—no, that way. I hope we’re not late. An air of wide-eyed excitement.

“It’s great to meet you,” the gentleman said in English, before waving and walking away.

My mother exploded on me forty-eight hours later. That night, I packed the things I had and hid them under the bed, terrified she would destroy my belongings in a fit of rage. Forty-eight hours after that, I almost fainted from panic, then started a to-the-second countdown of how much of my trip remained. And forty-eight hours after that, I was on a plane back to New York.

When I arrived home, I bawled, then slept for three days. My mother texted three days later, and I responded three months later.

***

For the next two years, my dreams became frighteningly familiar. They were a tedious agony, a hum of horrors repeatedly relived. Twice or thrice a week, I found myself screaming at the silhouette of my mother, suspended in a liminal space between tweenagehood and responsibility. I was nine years old, yelling obscenities my tongue had only just learned. I was seventeen, hurling a tirade of con ghét mẹ’s. I was five and fifteen and twenty-four, crying out because I was lonely and also wanted her to leave me alone.

I told myself that recurring nightmares shouldn’t feel this predictable. That through both restful and sleepless nights, I should come up with more creative, less two-dimensional ways to resent her.

***

In my single-digit years, I grasped onto my mother with a desperation intense even for an only child. After I learned to walk, I walked only to follow her around. In the park and at the playground and at the mall, I clung onto her legs, bursting into tears when I was asked to let go. After my father walked out, I nurtured a ball of bitterness and pain entirely on her behalf. It was us against the world, I told myself at age six. For the next six years, I recited this clichéd catchphrase, sang it like a hymn, played it over and over in daydreams and nightdreams — and still heard echoes of it for another six, or sixteen, years after that.

The love, the attachment, the unguarded tenderness didn’t disappear overnight. Rather, they ebbed and flowed, swelled and plummeted, morphing first into a deep heartache and later into a soft, wistful nostalgia. My world shifted, then cracked, then crashed with every glass thrown, door kicked, vase smashed. With every thinly veiled threat that escalated into full-throttled chaos every time I forgot to turn the light off, or slept in too late, or made a close friend who wasn’t her.

I was an early experiment in her foray into the anti-science. Her first-ever cult follower, if you will. Instructed to fast constantly, for a week at a time, while deep in puberty and grasping for sustenance in order to grow into my body. Instructed to drink clay, then silver, then clarified butter. Applauded when my body inevitably gave in and threw up, repeatedly (that was “detoxing”). Asked to report my weight daily. Barred from life-sustaining and life-saving medication.

***

“She’s selfish and has a need for control,” my first-ever therapist told me when I was seventeen.

“No. That’s just her way of caring,” I had replied reflexively.

I had arrived in the U.S. barely a year before, settling in a small beach town just north of Los Angeles, some 8,000 miles away from my mother. My therapist was so American, I had thought. Of course Americans think their parents are selfish.

“She exhibits many signs of antisocial personality disorder,” another therapist told me, many years later. Holed into my New York City apartment in the early days of COVID, I thought to myself—of course she’s antisocial. She can behave in embarrassing ways sometimes.

A single Google search later that night revealed to me what antisocial personality disorder actually was.

***

These days, when my world caves beneath me — an ever-increasing affair as we descend deeper into 2025 — I feel the clichéd immigrant urge to tether myself to my roots. A yearning to know and feel my lineage in my bones. A quiet wanderlust, but specifically for the land my parents and grandparents and ancestors call home. A thirst to re-live, fervently and wholeheartedly, the first eight years of my life — when I, too, had the privilege of calling Vietnam home.

But I quickly feel the grip of my mother’s ruthless embrace. I feel the air getting whisked out of my lungs. I hear her omnipresent monologue, which gaslights time and space, tearing me from the web of community from which I was born, ensuring that my one and only constant would be her.

Your aunt is miserable and loves no one but herself. All of your grandparents are bitter and resentful. Your uncle only loves you because he neglects his own son. Your other uncle is only successful because of me. Don’t trust this cousin, or that cousin, or that one — they only care about money.

Then, I feel an unstoppable urge — a responsibility, even — to free my memories from her grasp. To let them breathe, and grow, and take root. To nurture them into the maturity of which they were once robbed.

And so, I recall my maternal grandmother, who taught herself how to read. Who would hold my hand and wipe my tears when a nightmare jolted me awake in the middle of the night. My paternal grandmother, whose hands healed everything she touched, whose beauty was the talk of towns. My grandfather, who wrote prose and poetry that gorgeously animated the mundane of everyday life. My uncle, the social butterfly, who knew just how to bring everyone together in a way that felt light on our feet yet brimming in our hearts. My older cousins, who sang and danced and made art as bold and bright as the sun.

And I recall cut fruit as both an intimate love language and heartfelt apology. Mango and mangosteen ablaze with warmth. Riding—and falling off—bikes in meandering backstreets with friends old and older. Clutching my uncle on the back of a xe máy in the thrill of evening traffic. Listening to tales chronicling spirit, and resistance, and tenderness, shouted and whispered across generations that came well before my mother’s and will extend well beyond mine.

Fearfully, then fearlessly, I let myself feel togetherness. One that is unfettered and full of life. One that moves through—then moves past—my mother’s iron-fisted embrace.