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“Mother” Introduction
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"Mother" is a poem by the Vietnamese-Australian poet and educator Vuong Pham, published as part of his 2013 micro-collection Refugee Prayer. It examines the relationship between the speaker and his mother, who emigrated from Vietnam after the Fall of Saigon and gave up her own dreams of becoming a teacher in order to care for her child. The poem deals with the unique sacrifices of immigrant parents and illuminates the particular bond between this mother and her child, who feels a responsibility to live up to "the teaching legacy" that they share.
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“Mother” Summary
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I realize now, as I did when I was a child and in awe of everything around me, that my mother wanted a perfect world—one not hemmed in by war and people fleeing en masse.
We sit on the floor of the living room. I pull out the gray hairs from her head and ask her, "Mother, what had you wanted to do with your life?" Her smile is never-ending and hangs like question in the air. Her neck bends like a sunflower whose head is too heavy to look up at the sky.
I expect her to tell me that she'd wanted to be a gardener. I think back to my childhood, picturing the shadows that moved in our garden full of trees and cherry tomatoes. I remember her calling to come eat dinner while I was asleep among the lotus ponds.
She tells me that she loved teaching and had wanted to be a high school teacher. I feel happy as I recognize the truth of this. As I smile, memories start to fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, my past suddenly making more sense. "A literacy teacher," I say enthusiastically, and she smiles, eagerly remembering that time I came home from school with a certificate acknowledging that my own literacy had gotten better.
I keep pulling out her grays. Our conversation continues as we're surrounded by the gentle daylight. I realize now, as I did when I was a child and in awe of everything around me, what my mother's life must have been like when she was young, before the violence and destruction of life in Saigon.
I imagine her riding a yellow scooter to school, her hair flowing freely behind her and with a bright smile on her face. I imagine her dashing past the outdoor markets, with their comforting smells of Pho and lychee tea and the loud sounds of rickshaws, bicycles, and scooters going by. I imagine the countryside filled with water buffalo plowing the flooded rice fields as if moving between clouds. I imagine that each scene is charming and pretty as she looks out on it from her classroom window. Soon she will leave all of this behind.
As more gray hairs fall from her head, the past reorganizes itself and I realize now, as I did when I was a child and in awe of everything around me, that I have inherited her desire to teach. I was aware that the responsibilities of taking care of her children proved greater than her aspirations of earning a university teaching degree. And being aware of that, I tell her, "Mother, this week I taught my students about Wordsworth's poem about daffodils. This made me think of you." She smiles and I'm returned to a serene time in my childhood. This makes me think of how she sewed things like pajamas with flowers on them, tablecloths, and bedsheets for less than $5 an hour just so she could buy groceries and pay my school tuition, just so I could keep studying and figure out how to spell the word "persistent." She prayed that I would learn to speak fluent English so that I would never be limited to working in a factory.
I realize now, as I did when I was a child and in awe of everything around me, what it must have been like for my mother to hear the rhythmic sounds of the refugee boats and see the people of Saigon watching. Their eyes were streaked with the brilliance of the flames, the confusion of people dispersed from their homes yet alive in the missile storm.
Her homeland, Vietnam, was shrouded, the deep blue depths of the sea shifting on the horizon like an upset womb. The boats were wet like an open vowel sound, as the city fell to pieces and my mother ran away with nothing except for me, who was growing inside her.
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“Mother” Themes
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The Sacrifices of Immigrant Parents
The poem's speaker is the child of a Vietnamese refugee who gave up her own dreams of teaching in order to provide for her family. The speaker realizes that the reason he is able to pursue his own career in teaching is because of the sacrifices his mother made. The speaker recognizes that if his mother hadn't set aside her own dreams, he wouldn’t be able to speak “an unbroken English tongue”—let alone teach it. The poem thus seeks to highlight and honor the unique sacrifices often made by immigrant parents, particularly refugees, on behalf of their children. Such selflessness, the speaker believes, is what has allowed him to have a better life.
The speaker begins the poem by saying “my mother dreamed of a paradise” beyond the reality of what her life has turned out to be—fleeing her homeland, working long hours for little pay in order to provide for her son. He asks her what her passion was, assuming that she would have liked to be a gardener, but she responds that she would have liked to have taught high school. The speaker is unsurprised when he remembers how happy she was when he came home from school with “a certificate in improved literacy.” It occurs to him that his mother gave up her own ambitions of a university degree while putting her child through school so that he would not also be doomed to a life of manual labor.
The speaker then juxtaposes what he knows of his mother’s youth in Saigon with what he remembers of her from his own childhood. He pictures his mother driving a scooter on her way to class, where she was presumably studying to become a teacher. He imagines “the freedom of her hair,” an image that contrasts with her life as an immigrant mother, doing manual labor—"sewing pyjamas, tablecloths, bedsheets”—for very little money in order to put food on the table and pay for her child’s tuition.
The speaker thinks of “what it must’ve been to mother” amid the missiles and flames of war-torn Vietnam. He understands how hard it must have been for his mother to leave her native home, her people, her dreams, and that ultimately she made a life-altering decision for the sake of the baby that was growing inside her. She braved the terror and uncertainty of fleeing her homeland, the frightening voyage by boat to a new country, beginning a new life without understanding the language or customs of the country she now lives in, and worked a tiring job for low pay all so that her child could have the life she had once dreamed of for herself.
In ending with an image of the speaker’s pregnant mother fleeing Saigon, the poem emphasizes the sacrifices this displaced mother made, and honors the fact that the speaker's very life is something he owes to her strength and determination.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-10
- Lines 17-24
- Lines 28-39
- Lines 43-45
- Lines 49-58
- Lines 59-69
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Legacy and Responsibility
The poem honors the sacrifices that immigrant parents often make for their children while also exploring the responsibility that those children later bear on behalf of their parents. The poem begins with a phrase that implies a kind of realization on the speaker's part: "I know now," he says, implying that he wasn't always fully aware of what his mother did for him until he reached adulthood himself. Learning about his mother then allows the speaker to better understand himself, and in this way, the poem presents legacy as a kind of living bond between parents and children. The poem further tasks children with preserving that legacy as a means of honoring their parents' sacrifice.
When the speaker discovers that he and his mother share this passion for teaching, this knowledge locks the “puzzle pieces of memory together,” allowing him to better understand himself and his mother’s past. The speaker realizes that his dream isn’t something he just happened upon, but rather is his mother’s own deferred dream, passed down to her son. By becoming a teacher, the speaker reasons, his mother will get to see the life she once dreamed of come to fruition through her child.
The speaker recognizes that in becoming a teacher, he is, in a sense, carrying on his mother’s legacy. He remembers his mother’s joy at his proof of “improved literacy” as a child, and now tells her that “this week I taught my students Wordsworth / saw thousands of daffodils and thought of you.” The speaker thus recognizes his own work as an extension of his mother’s. There is joy and beauty in this connection between them, and also a sense of responsibility, as the speaker realizes that the things his mother once dreamed of and worked for can only be achieved through his own life and decisions. The speaker feels a call to live up to his mother’s hopes for him—to embody her legacy with his own life.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-58
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Mother”
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Lines 1-3
I know now, ...
... war and exodus.The speaker begins the poem by acknowledging a truth he's always been aware of: that his mother "dreamed of a paradise" beyond war and mass departures. The words "paradise" and "exodus" may allude to the biblical book of Exodus. This book chronicles the departure of the Israelites from Egypt, where they were enslaved. This opening frames the mother's past without giving the reader any concrete details: she grew up in a place filled with violence, a place from which people fled in huge numbers.
The opening three lines ("I know now [...] war and exodus.") express the speaker's sense of disappointment on behalf of his mother—who presumably no longer dreams of paradise—and also the speaker's own sense of awe towards his mother, who survived all this "war and exodus."
These lines also establish the poem's interesting use of punctuation (or, really, it's refusal to use traditional punctuation). While there is a comma within the first line and a period at the end of the third line, there is no clarifying punctuation at the ends of these lines. Instead, the poet relies on white space and the reader's own instincts.
This lack of punctuation gives the illusion of enjambment in lines that are not actually enjambed. Both lines one and two are technically end-stopped—there are implied pauses after "wonder" and "paradise"—but, thanks to the lack of punctuation, the reader can't actually know this for certain until their eye drops to the following line and it becomes clear that a new clause has begun.
The effect is a kind of tension between one line and the next. The reader is not certain whether they should pause for breath or not (as opposed to an obviously end-stopped line or an obviously enjambed line, both of which indicate whether one should pause for breath).
Perhaps this is indicative of the speaker's relationship with his own childhood and with his mother's past; the speaker is not comparing his current knowledge with the knowledge he had as a child, but rather expressing a continuity between these two states of "wonder." In other words, the speaker has always been and remains in awe of his mother's life and the difficulties she has faced.
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Lines 4-6
On the living ...
... passion in life?’
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Lines 7-10
She smiles—that eternal ...
... meet the sky. -
Lines 11-16
Gardening is the ...
... amongst lotus-dotted ponds. -
Lines 17-20
‘Teaching was my ...
... past made whole. -
Lines 21-24
‘A literacy teacher,’ ...
... of improved literacy. -
Lines 25-29
I continue to ...
... bloodshed in Saigon. -
Lines 30-34
I picture her ...
... and lychee tea; -
Lines 34-38
that familiar ...
... her classroom window; -
Lines 38-42
and all of ...
... down to me— -
Lines 43-48
I knew the ...
... thought of you.’ -
Lines 49-53
She smiles and ...
... pork, Asian vegetables -
Lines 54-58
and help pay ...
... labours of factories. -
Lines 59-61
I know now, ...
... refugee boat’s thrum, -
Lines 61-64
the faces ...
... the missile storm. -
Lines 65-69
The homeland was ...
... me, growing inside.
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“Mother” Symbols
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Yellow
Several times throughout the poem, the speaker associates his mother with the color yellow, and specifically with yellow flowers. The color symbolizes his mother's bright hopes and dreams.
In lines 9-10 ("Her neck tilts [...] meet the sky.") for example, the speaker compares his mother to a sunflower bending over its stalk, its head too heavy to meet the sky. This shows the way his mother's hopes and dreams are no longer within reach.
In contrast, the speaker imagines his mother earlier in her life, riding "a yellow scooter," the road ahead filled with possibility. The image of her driving the scooter, her hair waving behind her and a smile on her face, suggests that at this point in her life, the speaker's mother had some control over and hope for her future; it was self-directed, and her dreams were within sight.
As the poem progresses, it becomes clear that the mother's dream of teaching will not be realized by her but by her child, the speaker. Later in the poem, the speaker tells his mother that he "saw thousands of daffodils and thought of [her]." Daffodils, like sunflowers, are yellow in color, and their mention here again evokes the mother's once-bright hopes for the future—a future that her child now seeks to fulfill on her behalf.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 9-10: “Her neck tilts like a sunflower / too heavy to meet the sky.”
- Lines 30-31: “I picture her driving a yellow scooter / on the road to school,”
- Lines 47-48: “‘Mother, this week I taught my students Wordsworth / saw thousands of daffodils and thought of you.’”
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“Mother” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Enjambment
Broadly speaking, enjambment reflects the free-flowing nature of the poem. The poem is written in free verse, with no rhyme scheme, meter, or stanza form to contain it, and this looseness evokes the comfortable, intimate relationship between the speaker and his mother. Enjambment adds to this effect, letting the poem unfurl down the page freely and pulling the reader forward through its many lines.
Enjambment is also interesting in this poem in large part because of the way it is in tension with the use of punctuation. Pham often foregoes conventional punctuation at the ends of lines. Without punctuation, a line will seem to carry over even when it has actually reached its syntactical conclusion (essentially, the end of a clause or phrase) or at least a pause.
Examples of this abound. In lines 1-3 ("I know now [...] war and exodus"), conventional rules of grammar would call for a comma following the dependent clause "as I did in my childhood wonder" as well as a comma or em dash following the word "paradise," as the following line is also a dependent clause. These punctuation marks would indicate to the reader that they should pause and take a breath at the end of the line. The passage would have looked like this:
I know now, as I did in my childhood wonder,
that my mother dreamed of a paradise—
one unbound by war and exodus.Instead, Pham chooses not to employ punctuation in either of these situations, pushing the reader to continue without pause across the line breaks—and making the lines appear enjambed. Yet, at the same time, because many of the lines are syntactically complete (basically, they contain discrete phrases with implied pauses at the end), the reader may choose to pause at the end of a line anyway.
The result is a kind of tug-of-war between the reader paying attention to syntax (the arrangement of words) or paying attention to a lack of punctuation.
Another example of this comes in line 4 ("On the living room carpet we sit"), which is not only grammatically complete, but is in fact its own sentence—once the reader has continued on to line 5 ("I pluck her grey hairs and ask:"), it will become clear that a new, separate sentence has begun. For this reason, line 4 might be interpreted as end-stopped even though it looks enjambed.
Ultimately, the choice falls with the reader to decide how they're going to read these lines and whether they will pause at the end of a syntactically complete line despite a lack of punctuation indicating that they should do so.
Other places in the poem employ more conventional enjambment, however. In lines 30-39 (I picture her [...] longer call home.") for example, enjambment allows a long sentence to be broken up over various lines, and the pauses in lines created by punctuation all fall within lines rather than at their end. For this reason, this passage has a flow to it that those earlier stanzas lacked. The reader soon learns to trust the momentum of the enjambment, knowing they will be given ample opportunity to pause within lines, rather than having to figure out whether white space is implying the end of a clause or sentence, as in earlier examples.
Where enjambment appears in the poem:- Lines 9-10: “sunflower / too”
- Lines 12-13: “shadows / stirring”
- Lines 13-14: “trees / rows”
- Lines 14-15: “fences / a”
- Lines 15-16: “sleeping / amongst”
- Lines 18-19: “do / jigsaw-puzzle”
- Lines 19-20: “memory / lock”
- Lines 22-23: “excitement / the”
- Lines 23-24: “school / with”
- Lines 26-27: “on / as”
- Lines 28-29: “wonder / about”
- Lines 30-31: “scooter / on”
- Lines 31-32: “freedom / of”
- Lines 32-33: “past / street”
- Lines 33-34: “aromas / of”
- Lines 34-35: “familiar / crescendo”
- Lines 36-37: “ploughing / the”
- Lines 37-38: “one / picturesque”
- Lines 38-39: “which / was”
- Lines 40-41: “and / I”
- Lines 41-42: “wonder / that”
- Lines 43-44: “providing / for”
- Lines 44-45: “outweighed / university-degree”
- Lines 49-50: “halcyon-time / in”
- Lines 50-51: “floral / pyjamas”
- Lines 51-52: “together / using”
- Lines 52-53: “hour / to”
- Lines 53-54: “vegetables / and”
- Lines 54-55: “tuition / so”
- Lines 56-57: “tongue / and”
- Lines 57-58: “confined / to”
- Lines 59-60: “wonder / what”
- Lines 60-61: “there / among”
- Lines 61-62: “faces / of”
- Lines 62-63: “flames / incandescent”
- Lines 63-64: “animate / in”
- Lines 65-66: “cerulean / depths”
- Lines 66-67: “womb / boats”
- Lines 67-68: “crumbled / and”
- Lines 68-69: “fled / with”
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Imagery
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Simile
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Metaphor
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Allusion
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Consonance
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Sibilance
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Repetition
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Asyndeton
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Alliteration
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“Mother” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Wonder
- Exodus
- Mind's eye
- The bloodshed in Saigon
- Pho
- Rickshaws
- Picturesque
- Wordsworth
- Halcyon
- Incandescent
- Diaspora
- Animate
- The homeland
- Cerulean
Wonder-
(Location in poem: Line 1: “I know now, as I did in my childhood wonder”; Line 28: “I know now, as I did in my childhood wonder”; Line 41: “I know now, as I did in my childhood wonder”; Line 59: “I know now, as I did in my childhood wonder”)
A feeling of awe in response to something unfamiliar, mysterious, beautiful, or unexpected.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Mother”
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Form
"Mother" consists of nine stanzas of varying lengths, with a total of 69 lines. Line lengths also vary, and, as it is written in free verse, it does not utilize set meter or a rhyme scheme. In fact, the poem has a very informal, conversational feel to it that reflects the conversation between the speaker and his mother, who seem to have an intimate, comfortable relationship. The lack of conventional punctuation at the ends of lines further emphasizes this informality. There are elements of musicality in the poem due to consonance and sibilance, but without any rhyme, meter, or strict form, the poem has a much more relaxed feel.
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Meter
The poem is written in free verse, and therefore does not have a specific meter. Lines contain anywhere from five to sixteen syllables, and this looseness of form due to the lack of meter or uniformity of any kind reflects the ease and comfort of the relationship between the speaker and his mother. They are sitting on the floor of their living room, in itself an informal act, while the speaker picks the mother's gray hairs. Their conversation lingers through the afternoon; there's a sense of them having nowhere to be, content to simply be spending time with each other. There is no rigidity in the way they relate to each other or in the way the speaker thinks back on his past and his mother's past. The poem feels natural in its progression, moving around with freedom, and this freedom is reflected in the poet's choice of free verse.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem does not have a rhyme scheme, nor does it utilize rhyme at all for that matter. It does contain moments and even whole stanzas that have a musicality to them, but that musicality is the effect of other sonic devices, such as consonance and sibilance rather than rhyme. Likewise, while rhyme is often used to draw attention to certain words, the poem employs other devices to do this work, such as the repetition of whole phrases or images. This lack of rhyme is in keeping with the poem's lack of a strict form or meter. The poem feels intimate and conversational rather than stilted or stiff.
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“Mother” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is the adult child of the titular "Mother." This person is thus the child of a Vietnamese refugee living in an English-speaking country, and someone who's had a very different upbringing than his mother did. Where the speaker's mother toiled away to provide for her family in her new country, the speaker seems to have had a happy childhood filled with support and love. He's quite close with his mother as an adult—evidenced by the very intimate act of plucking out her gray hairs—and if his facility with language in the poem is any indication, he has done his mother proud in terms of his own "literacy" studies.
We've referred to the speaker using male pronouns throughout this guide given that the poem is drawn in part from the poet's personal experiences, but do note that the speaker is given no gender in the poem itself.
The poem expresses a moment in which the speaker is realizing that, as well as he thinks he knows his mother, there are still some things he doesn't know—such as what his mother's "passion in life" was. By asking his mother about this, the speaker opens a door to his mother's past that then allows him to not only better understand his mother's life and the sacrifices she made as an immigrant parent, but also to better understand his own history and how his life is a continuation of hers. The speaker eventually comes to see his own teaching career as an extension of his mother's dream of teaching, a dream she was not able to pursue, and this makes the speaker feel even closer to her.
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“Mother” Setting
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The poem bounces between three settings: the speaker's present, of the speaker's youth, and the mother's youth in Vietnam.
The immediate, physical setting of the poem is in "on the living room carpet" where the speaker and his mother are sitting as adults. It seems as though the conversation between the speaker and his mother takes place over the course of an afternoon or evening, as it "lingers on / as the soft daylight illuminates" them. They are in an English-speaking country, but which one is never specified (though the poet himself grew up in Australia).
The other settings in the poem are remembered or imagined by the speaker. For example, the speaker remembers sleeping in a garden during his childhood, being surrounded by "star fruit trees" and "rows of cherry tomatoes growing over fences." This implies that the speaker had a happy childhood, filled with love and care.
The poem then jumps to a different setting as the speaker imagines his mother's life in Saigon before the end of the Vietnam Wars. This setting features a younger version of the speaker's mother driving a scooter through the streets of Saigon, surrounded by lively street markets, the enticing smell of Vietnamese food, and the sound of "rickshaws, bicycles and scooters." The speaker imagines her at school, looking out on "landscapes of water buffalo, ploughing / the flooded paddies from cloud to cloud."
Between remembered and imagined settings, the speaker returns to the present, to the mother's gray hairs falling from her head. Then again the speaker dives into memory, recalling the "floral / pyjamas, tablecloths, [and] bedsheets" his mother sewed together for low wages to put food on the table after leaving Vietnam.
Finally, in the last two stanzas of the poem, the speaker again imagines his mother in Saigon, only this time she is fleeing the city by boat, along with countless other refugees. In this setting the city is burning "in the missile storm," and the speaker's mother is looking back on her crumbling home as the boats pull away from Vietnam.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Mother”
Literary Context
"Mother" appeared in Pham's micro-collection Refugee Prayer, published by the small press Another Lost Shark in 2013. The collection was influenced heavily by Pham's family, Vietnamese refugees who immigrated to Australia, as well as by his own love for God (he and his family are Catholic) and nature. English Romantic poet William Wordsworth and Japanese Edo poet Bashō are both prominent influences on Pham's work, evidence of which can be seen in Pham's attention to the beauty and serenity of nature (as well as in this poem's allusion to Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" in lines 47-48).
More generally, the poem might be said to belong to a growing international literature which focuses at least in part on the experience of diaspora—that is, of a people living scattered outside of their ancestral homeland. In particular, Pham's work should be considered alongside other writers from the Vietnamese diaspora, such as Ocean Vuong, Thi Bui, Chung Chuong Hoang, and Le Thi Diem Thuy, to name just a few.
Historical Context
Vuong Pham was born in Brisbane, Australia, and is the son of Vietnamese refugees.
On April 30, 1975, the Vietnam War came to an end as the People's Army of Vietnam and the Viet Cong took Saigon, at the time the capital of South Vietnam, by force. The war was a struggle between North Vietnam, which was communist (and supported by other communist countries), and South Vietnam, which was anti-communist (and supported by other anti-communist countries); it went on for 19 years. Upon the Fall of Saigon (also known as the Liberation of Saigon, depending on one's perspective), Vietnam began the process of becoming one united, communist country. When this happened, many thousands of South Vietnamese citizens were forced to flee Saigon.
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More “Mother” Resources
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External Resources
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Poems for Mothers — A list of poems celebrating mothers (rounded up by the Poetry Foundation in honor of Mother's Day).
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An Interview with the Poet — Read an interview with Vuong Pham for Another Lost Shark.
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Poems on Immigration — A collection of poems about and by immigrants.
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Refugee Poetics — An article by Jill Magi for Poetry magazine that discusses "A Refugee Poetics."
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