Published: 1/9/2020 10:25:50 AM
Editor’s note: We are pleased to introduce you to our new biweekly home columnist, Francie Lin.
A house is less an object than a reflection, a picture that shifts depending on daylight and the point of view, like an image on water. This is an opinion I came to late, in my 40s; for a long time, I thought of houses as solid things, set in stone. The house I grew up in was a small ranch in Salt Lake City: clean, well-kept, but soulless. The furniture was good solid teak, my mother having saved and spent a small fortune to get the best she could afford, but to a child these pieces were fussy, uncomfortable. You couldn’t put a drink on the table without being scolded about leaving a stain; the sofa with its hard cushions and wooden arms held you in a rigid upright position, suitable for visiting properly with neighbors but not for lounging with a book or taking a nap. There was no art. The only décor I can remember was a set of quilted pillows arranged severely on the couch. The house was a museum, meant not for comfort but for show.
I’m older now, and I can interpret my mother’s militant insistence on order and quality in kinder ways — for instance, as a form of outsider pride. This is a woman who, in her 40-plus years in the United States, never made any white friends. She often described things that she considered sloppy, disorganized or morally lax as “American,” despite the fact that she was herself a citizen, having emigrated from Taiwan in the ’60s. But as a kid, I thought that rigidity was part of her core self — an aridity of soul that translated into nagging about proper clothes, etcetera. Happy families, I felt, were by nature messy and chaotic. It didn’t help that I grew up in Mormon country, where lots of friends had eight, nine, 10 siblings. Their houses exploded with turmoil and noise and fun; their parents took in stray children, left maple syrup to congeal on the plates. Nobody had a table you couldn’t put a drink on without coasters. That was the kind of house I wanted when I grew up.
Then I went to college and forgot about having a house at all. Houses were just a petty bourgeois affectation that capitalism dangled in front of the consumer in order to enslave you with a need to purchase throw pillows. After graduation, I lived in a long succession of shared apartments, using moving boxes for shelves, which I eventually upgraded to cinder block and pine; my furniture was always stuff found by the side of the road. My mother was horrified. We fought about stuff like this often, transcontinental calls devolving into screaming matches about a carpet runner or an armchair. My roommates all thought I was crazy. “It’s not about the armchair!” I tried to explain to them, but then what was it actually about? Self-worth, perhaps; a philosophy of pride. I think my mother felt that I was spitting in her face: You didn’t come to the U.S. to have your child grow up and pilfer other people’s trash. I, on the other hand, had no patience for that kind of snobbery. “Who cares where the chair came from?” I cried. “Why do you think a used armchair says anything about who I am?”
Eventually, I became less inflexible, more considerate of the history that informed her dogma, but I still harbored a certain small rebellion. When I had my first child, the half-forgotten dream of a house full of chaos and happiness resurrected itself with full ferocity. We have pictures from my daughter’s toddlerhood in which she is covered head to toe in marker or jumping on the couch, the coffee table in the background crusted with paint and scotch tape, the blinds askew. At some point, my husband suggested that maybe some rooms should be off-limits to kid mess? But I was insistent: no restrictions. A few years went by, we had a second child, moved to another house, but my fixation with freedom continued as uncompromisingly as ever.
One day, however, I came home and looked at the dining room table littered with glue and glitter and recycling cut into a million pieces and suddenly wanted to cry. I literally could not think amidst the chaos sown by what seemed like a dozen children but was actually only two.
So it goes. You can overcompensate all you want, but at the end of the day, you are still your mother’s child. I started getting snappish about crumbs, passive-aggressive about dirty socks left on the floor. No one was allowed to eat on the special couch. Occasionally, I thought of my childhood house. Whereas before its spare bones and harsh cleanliness used to reflect austerity, I now saw strength of will, a proto-feminist standard: My mother loved us, but she was not willing to let the wild impulses of children bulldoze her own need for order and space. I admired that house.
My mother is still aghast at the kind of house I keep, with its homemade shelves and Craigslist furniture, most of which has been scratched to death by one of three or four cats. At least once a week, I go ballistic and yell at everyone and fantasize about throwing all the books and clothes and toys away. Just last week, my daughter asked why there was a cabbage under the table. I don’t remember what I said, or indeed why there was a cabbage on the floor. Don’t mistake me; I have nothing but gratitude for the life I lead, and I wouldn’t change a thing, although sometimes I think I would change everything. “What are we going to do when we retire?” my husband asks now and then, and always an image forms in my mind, a tiny house full of space and time. I keep imagining it in all its particulars, even though I know that a house is a tricky thing, changeable but solid, and never what you think — neither watery reflection nor stone object, but something in between.
Francie Lin is an editor and writer who has a complicated relationship with domestic life. She lives in Florence.
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