Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow

Rilke wrote a famous assertion about distance and intimacy, which one can find all over the web and also quoted in a zillion books: “Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.” When I was younger, I wanted to argue with those “infinite distances” (probably I still do?), but now I wonder about seeing “the other whole against the sky.” Do the distances between us help us see each other?

Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, one of the books I most loved in this year’s reading, focuses on the intractable, deeply compelling relationship between a mother and daughter with so much space between them that they struggle to see each other, or even to talk to each other in any real way. It’s a beautiful, hypnotic book, in which most of the events happen in the undercurrents and imagery (recommended to me by a novelist friend who writes beautiful, hypnotic books, in which most of the events happen in the undercurrents and imagery).

In Au’s novel, the narrator has invited her visibly aging mother on a trip to Japan. Her mother is originally from Hong Kong; they live in Australia; the narrator lives in her thoughts. They go to museums, walk through gardens, and eat. The narrator mentions to her mother that she and her husband are considering having a child. Her mother is cautiously encouraging but noncommittal.

The daughter-narrator obliquely captures their undercurrents, blockages, and connections or near connections. She seldom looks at the people around them but focuses on the objects and the surroundings: a pattern of blue tiles, a vase, a set of stairs, a mural, overhanging trees. This is part of what gives the novel its contained, cool quality.

Though she reports on conversations, the deepest and most vulnerable of these are with herself—there is no shared context that allows her to talk to her mother about her current life or her experiences of learning to be part of academic, intellectual worlds. She describes (to herself, to the reader) her constant sense of herself as an outsider who has to catch up with all the knowledge her fellow college students and admired instructor seemed to share, the books they read, the ways they created their living spaces. But she doesn’t tell her mother any of this.

I fell in love with the book at once, and rereading only gives me more admiration for the prose, which creates and compresses both a longing for their connection and a sense of its impossibility. All the paragraphs are marvelous, and a paragraph, or even a page, is not the natural length to share, since the unit of thought or completion in this book is a full chapter, with all of its small twists.

Just before the passage below, our narrator tells us that she and her mother walked through the cemetery at Aoyama, where the narrator very closely observed shrines and cherry trees. Then she tells us that earlier, they’d gone to an outdoor museum with rebuilt Japanese houses from the Edo period, and in one of these, they drank tea made of sakura petals that tasted “flowery, but not exactly sweet.” A remark of the narrator’s mother’s reminders her of what she knows about her mother’s childhood, or at least the place where she grew up:

Looking around the house, with its bare dirt floors and firewood stove, my mother said that it reminded her of her childhood home. How could it, though, when this house was over two hundred years old? But I knew that she meant the bare floor, the simple kitchen with no electricity, the dimness. There were still streets like that in Hong Kong, remnants of tiny villages, crammed into the spaces between skyscrapers, or on rooftops, with electricity cables and washing lines strung between houses. She had told me once that as a girl she had seen a man jump from a five-story balcony, and another time a dog being beaten by the roadside.

It occurred to me that by the age I was now, my mother had already made a new life for herself in a new country. She would have, by then, already become mother to a new baby, and would likely have been able to count the number of times that she would return to Hong Kong to see her family on the one hand. I tried, and failed, to imagine her first months there. Had she been homesick? Had she been awed by the streets, the brick and weatherboard houses, so different from her own home? Had she been worn out not by the big changes, but, as  is often the case, by countless smaller ones—the supermarkets that were so well stocked, but where you could not buy glass noodles, or the right kind of rice; the homes where porridge was something plain and tasteless, made with oats and milk instead of with thinly sliced scallions, bamboo shoots, and black, hundred-year eggs; the roads where people shouted at her from cars when she crossed the street, for reasons she could not yet understand; the bank teller unable to understand her near-perfect, colonial English?

After drinking the tea, we wandered into an old communal bathhouse. The large room was separated by a low dividing wall, one half for women, the other for men. The baths were deep and square, covered in light blue tiles. Along the walls, there were a series of taps and mirrors, where, I explained, sitting on low stools, women would wash themselves first before entering the larger communal baths. Above, there was a large mural with blue skies, mountains, greenery, clouds and a large blue lake, as lovely and simple as an illustration in a children’s picture book. My mother went up to look at it, craning her neck and sighing, as if it were not a painted wall but a view of a wide and pleasant vista. I took a photo of the mural, whose colors reminded me of the posters used to promote sporting events like the Olympics in the sixties and seventies, then of the blue tiles, and asked her if she would like to visit one of the bathhouses in Tokyo with me. I said I had been to one on my last trip and had enjoyed the experience, all the women and children bathing together. She said that she had not brought her bathing suit and I said that this didn’t matter, in fact, swimsuits were not allowed. My mother smiled and shook her head. I thought of how, at the bathhouse, the babies and younger children had clung to their mothers as they bathed them, tipping water over their heads while holding up a hand to protect their eyes, how they did not feel truly separated from each other yet, but rather still part of the same body, the same spirit. There was, I knew, a time when my sister and I would have felt the same. On this trip, my mother was often dressed and ready before I was. If I happen to wake and see her getting out of bed in her pajamas, she would quickly go to the bathroom to change, even giving a little bow, in the Japanese way, before closing the door.

End of chapter. End of one particular moment in which there might have been a kind of intimacy. Although they occasionally tell each other a story, mostly summarized and reported, there’s little conversation between them. Au gets so much tension from what they don’t say. The daughter knows what her mother’s family ate in Hong Kong, how the house looked, and a couple of odd and painful details from life outside the household. But she can’t imagine what it was like to be her mother, and she can’t ask.

Or doesn’t think to ask. She lets us in on some of her thoughts, but many more she keeps hidden. We know more about the tiles then about how she felt when her mother refused to go to the bathhouse with her. The pair of sentences below, with their abundant imagery of motherhood and then tight declarative statement about what she and her sister would have once felt, is really all we get to suggest the emotion:

I thought of how, at the bathhouse, the babies and younger children had clung to their mothers as they bathed them, tipping water over their heads while holding up a hand to protect their eyes, how they did not feel truly separated from each other yet, but rather still part of the same body, the same spirit. There was, I knew, a time when my sister and I would have felt the same.

But the emotion is everywhere in the details, which is why I have given so much of the brief chapter, because it feels as if any form of summary or explanation would be an act of violence against the book and its careful omissions.

The experience of reading Cold Enough for Snow is like sliding along a river, each turn of the boat slowly opening up a new vista, everything obscured by mist and trees. Reading every scene, I long for the characters to connect, to understand where their disconnections lie, and I study all the oblique memories of our narrator and the stories she and her mother tell each other, looking for hints.

The desire to close the distance between mother and daughter feels urgent and essential. Possibly there’s a limit in fiction as to how much a reader might long for even the most promising romantic couple to be together. Because even if a couple’s narrative about their romantic relationship involves frequent reference to the words “destiny” or “fate,” or horror at the idea that it might never have happened, there are a few million people one might fall in love with, given enough effort and luck.

But a person gets, what, maybe three or four mothers? (Birth mothers, adoptive mothers, stepmothers, mothers-in-law, art mothers, grandmothers who raised us…)

And, in some cases, really only that one central figure.

A mother and daughter may or may not have been a good fit temperamentally, or they might be best friends. They could be totally entwined, warily engaged, or warily disengaged. They might have a total break and never speak to each other again.

Sooner or later, the separations we do or don’t try to cross in life become the separation of death. When I was young, listening to my mother try to understand, explain, rant about, and wonder at her own mother—both while she was alive and afterward—I didn’t fully understand how much the relationship continues after death, in mourning, imaginary conversations, the desire to share artwork and books and experiences, new levels of imagined understanding, and continued bafflement. Also, possibly, in celebration of the unknowable human being on the other side of that infinite distance.

(Notes completed on Dec. 27, 2022: my mother’s seventh yahrzeit)