Pine-Sol and Grief: A Mother-Daughter Cultural Story

A Familiar Intrusion

The smell of Pine-Sol was heavy when I walked into my apartment, making my cozy home feel institutional — like a hospital or an elementary school. I looked around for her, but the apartment appeared to be empty. I listened for the sound of small, house-shod feet shuffling in the back rooms, but no sound came from my small bedroom. I set my pack of books on the bar and walked into my bedroom, where my suspicions were confirmed: my mother, her small body rigid and strict even in sleep, was napping on my bed.

It was my sixth year away from home. I had graduated from college with honors and was excelling in my studies at medical school. I had supported myself financially through a long series of dreary waitressing, tutoring, and secretarial jobs. I did my own laundry, made my bed each morning, and found sustenance entirely on my own — and yet my mother refused to believe I was capable of handling the responsibilities that came with adulthood. As such, she took it upon herself to take a taxi to my apartment at least three times a year to sanitize and organize in ways she was certain I could not.

The Weight of Cultural Inheritance

I crept out of my own room, trying not to make a sound. Somehow, even with her uninvited intrusions into my life, I felt that my mother deserved a little peace and quiet now and then. She had moved with her parents from Japan just before the Second World War — not the best time to be Japanese-American in the United States. Her father was incredibly strict, even by traditional standards of their culture, and insisted that she conform to his ideas of a traditional Japanese woman, presenting a perfect façade to counter the crippling insecurities of being an immigrant in a strange culture viewed as a potential enemy.

She carried these ideas of perfection — in presentation, at least — into her instructions to me, her only daughter, and remained aghast at what she perceived as the flaws I was not eager to hide: wearing jeans in public, listening to popular rock music, having sloppy handwriting, not cooking each of my own meals. The wartime experience of Japanese Americans cast a long shadow, and for her family, visible impeccability had been a form of survival.

Uninvited but Routine

Her unannounced visits became routine in my first year out of college. Without the "structure" she perceived had existed in the dormitories, she assumed I must be flailing to survive. She would appear, uninvited, to fold my laundry, throw away expired milk, and — most annoying of all — scrub every tiled surface of wherever I was living with an industrial-strength, industrial-smelling generic version of Pine-Sol. Entirely too frugal to invest in the name-brand cleaner, my mother was just as satisfied with the generic's results and took every opportunity to explain that just because a surface appeared free of dirt and stains, it was not free of germs and needed to be thoroughly attacked on a regular basis.

At their inception, I found these visits only mildly annoying — I was, after all, receiving what amounted to free maid service. After a few years on my own, though, they felt like a personal insult: your home is not clean enough, you are not meticulous enough, you will never be good enough for the standards I set. Although these thoughts were never voiced, I felt them acutely.