Li Miao Lovett

About this author:

Li Miao Lovett began her writing career after a 600-mile backpacking trip on the Appalachian Trail where she encountered a stalker, a compulsive poet, and ten thousand mosquitoes. She stopped being a good Chinese daughter in her twenties; nowadays she tries to be a good enough mom to her son Alex. Her work has been published by the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED Perspectives, Narrative Magazine, and Words Without Borders. She has won awards in nonfiction and fiction sponsored by the National League of American Pen Women, Stanford Magazine, and the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. Her forthcoming novel, In the Lap of the Gods is a tale of love and loss set amidst the rising waters of China’s Three Gorges dam.

My Articles:

May 20th, 2007

The Distances Between Us

My mother was not too chatty on the phone when I called her for Mother’s Day.

“Thank you for remembering. I’m going to church now, but I wouldn’t have picked up the phone if I didn’t know it was you.”

I’m her grown daughter and only child, and now that she’s moved far enough away that she can’t bring us a trunkful of food every time my folks visit, her answering the phone is a nod of specialness that I cling to.

Especially since I’m going to be a first-time mom. She’s gone to town with the shopping. Five cream-colored outfits, plus another five in blue that say “baby prince” await the little hamster that’s germinating in my belly. She’s gotten me a travel satchel, a diaper bag, and maternity clothes from their last trip to Taiwan. But Mom seems as far away as the island nation we’re from, and even as I feel the poignancy of that separation, I realize that motherhood is close at hand for me.

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