Mother’s day

It’s that time of year again. Mother’s day is this Sunday. All in all, I have this strong and close but strange relationship with my mother. We communicate often in the sense that I still rely on her for emotional support. Yet, ironically, she can be the source of my anguish as a person who doesn’t believe in the pursuit of any career based on creativity (i.e. the arts) and also is innately homophobic. She’s a very smart woman, but not highly educated and chose a more conservative, traditional gender role conforming path in her youth. I’m choosing a slightly different route than her and so our journeys are not the same in many ways. We love each other but are very different people because of our decisions.

My mother has been a good mother. She cares a lot. She’s made a lot of money too that has helped to fund my private school education and is part of the reason why I’m where I am intellectually: thanks to her investments and genes, I suppose, too. I read in the scientific literature that the genes for intelligence are largely–though it’s complicated–inherited from our mothers because they’re mostly present on the X sex chromosome, and boys get their X chromosome from their mothers. My mother was a very smart woman in her youth. A great test taker. She got into the “Harvard of China” (Peking University) on her entrance exams, but went to a slightly less prestigious college (Nanjing University) closer to home.

In a strange way, it may also be because of my mother’s genes that I am bipolar and, perhaps, gay. I don’t know the answer to that. Bipolar is also a highly inherited disorder and has a higher prevalence in individually with higher (but also lower) IQs. I recently came upon a Princeton professor, Yiyun Li, who just won the Pulitzer Prize for her memoir that details the suicide of her two sons at very young ages. She went to Peking University and immigrated to the US in her young adulthood with her family, sort of like my parents.

Yiyun Li’s 2025 memoir titled, “Things in Nature Merely Grow”, got me contemplating about what would happen if I were to have children in the United States. Would I pass on my bipolar genes to them? Would they be at risk for mental anguish and suicidal ideations? Medically and statistically, the literature points to a probable yes to both questions. Information like this really makes you think about the future and, certainly, can influence major decisions in life.