Umbilical Cord: Creative Nonfiction by brenda Lin

Before my mother’s wedding day, my grandmother gifted her the umbilical cord that had dried up and fallen off her newborn belly, which Ama had carefully saved all those years. This is a common practice in Taiwanese families because Taiwanese people love homonyms and umbilicus, which is the navel, is pronounced like the word for wealth (/) in Taiwanese, so that when one’s umbilical cord is returned, it is transformed into an ouroboros gift of good wishes. My mother showed hers to me when I was a little girl. The saved umbilical cord was brown and hardened, like the carcass of an insect many days after its death. It was strange and it was beautiful. The umbilical cord is what ties a baby to her mother when the baby is nested within her like a Russian doll, wholly dependent, sharing cells, fluids, air – I marveled at the actual purpose of the umbilical cord, the poetry of its thingness. Surely, that the connection between mother and child could be preserved, wrapped in tissue, placed into an envelope, and returned as a gift years later, was a form of magic. 

“Where’s mine?” I had asked. 

I don’t have yours, my mother told me flatly. 

I wrote my first book in graduate school, fueled by this hurt. Like most mother-daughter relationships, ours was complex. I had always admired my mother’s intellect and discerning eye – she is a textile collector – which made me all the more thirsty for her approval of my creative pursuits. A response she often gave to something I offered: “I’m difficult to please.” Our relationship was complex, which in turn made it meaningful. 

It should come as no surprise that in the end, I realized I didn’t need the physical umbilical cord to understand that the currents, which held me to my mother, were not only strong, but alive and pulsing with energy. The greatest champion of my book when it was published – simultaneously surprising and obvious – was my mother. 

I titled the book Wealth Ribbon, a direct translation of the Taiwanese for umbilical cord, 財 帶, and dedicated it to my mother. 

My mother worked for many years at the children’s apparel business that my father started in Taiwan in 1971. The business didn’t own mills or spin threads, but there were always patternmakers and cloth cutters and seamstresses at my parents’ office. Once, when my brother was seven or eight, he was running around in the office, doing flips and cartwheels and somehow got his foot caught in a cloth cutter. One of the men – the company was always overwhelmingly female in demographic – carried my brother and his bloody foot away from the machinery. To this day, he has a scar at the base of his right big toe where the doctor sewed his foot back together. This is how I remember it. 

My mother’s job was in merchandising and on her travels for work to Europe and all over Asia, she bought lace, embroidered cotton, silk scarves, batiks, obis, and saris. She conjured ways of stitching these fabrics together to make blouses, jackets, and matching purses. For a time, her signature was to re-fashion large squares of silk scarves into cap sleeve blouses with mandarin collars and two Chinese knot buttons at the throat. When communication between Taiwan and China opened up in the late 80s, most of her travel pivoted to China, where she was introduced to the weaving and embroidery practices of minority cultures. She would create her own textile study trips and stay with families in villages in Guizhou, learning about the process of cloth-making. The first textile she collected was a Miao baby carrier, with the carrying straps cut off. She learned that because Miao women carried their babies all day, every day, they believed the baby’s spirit was infused in the cloth of the carrier and that when the baby had outgrown her carrier, the straps were saved to protect the child’s spirit; the straps being an extension of the umbilical cord. 

I grew up with the language of textile and tactility: 

thread 

spinning 

fabric 

dyeing 

weaving 

warp 

weft 

sewing 

embroidery 

knit

pliability 

complexity 

give 

folding 

mending 

tying 

wealth ribbon 

∞ 

A friend who was newly pregnant had told me that she could feel an actual burrowing in her pelvis. When I became pregnant with our first child, I imagined there was a muffled tapping coming from inside my uterus, like a tiny person was knocking on a tiny little door in a tiny, underground house. 

I had been an incongruently tall child, the same height as many grown women in Taiwan (five feet) and two whole heads taller than other kids by the time I was nine years old. While my pre-adolescent peers were willowy and thin, or sinewy and athletic, I was already soft and curvy. My size and shape felt embarrassing because the timing was so premature. I stopped growing one year later, so eventually everyone around me caught up, then towered over me, the result being that I’d always felt I inhabited an anachronistic body. But pregnancy allowed me to reclaim all the ways my body had once betrayed me. I observed the physical changes – rounded belly, swollen breasts, strong legs to support my new weight – with welcome curiosity. Tracking the size of the growing baby, which most pregnancy websites compared to different foods – first a poppy seed, a lentil, then a blueberry, fig, peach, sweet potato, coconut, pumpkin, and finally, a watermelon – made me feel of this earth, like I was rooted and was growing, sprouting from humus and that I belonged exactly in this body, where my baby fruit was nested inside. 

When I was six months pregnant, we traveled to San Francisco for a cousin’s wedding. It happened to be my 30th birthday, so a few nights before the wedding, my family made plans to gather at the pizza place where we used to go when my mother, brother, and I lived in the Bay Area. We had lived there for four years – along with most of our extended family – while my father was setting up his business in Taiwan. 

Before our pizza dinner, my mother presented me with a birthday gift, which was a very odd gesture, because we didn’t grow up with the habit of birthday gift exchange. At six months, the baby was the size of a large grapefruit. I felt the grapefruit shift, push up against the walls of its house, as if the baby were trying to reach for this gift. My mother handed me an old U.S. passport. The words, “Bicentennial 1776-1976,” were embossed on the cover. I opened it to the first page and found a picture of a newborn baby with its still-swollen eyes sealed shut, being held up by a man wearing a maroon sweater with the name ERIC in cream lettering on one sleeve. The man’s face and legs were cut off so that the focus was on the baby. I recognized the sweater, it was my father’s, a sweater my mother had knit for him when they were in graduate school. I didn’t recognize myself. I fingered my type-written name and birth date, as though it were Braille. Then, something fell from the pages of the passport – a small, yellowed envelope. I shook out its contents into the palm of my hand. 

It’s your umbilical cord, my mother told me. 

∞ 

Two thousand years before the modernist notion that things are the carriers of the ineffable – “no ideas but in things” –the Chinese philosopher, Zhuangzi, wrote about the oneness of all things in 

the collected chapters titled 齊物論. The most common translation of 齊物論 is “the equality of all things,” or “myriad of all things,” which discusses the idea that all things – both animate and inanimate – are united through their inherent spirit. Tangible things hold the weight and meaning of the human condition – concrete things tell stories; material things harbor emotion. We are interconnected, not because human beings are poetic and create those connections, but because all things are equally poetic and therefore already intertwined in a delicately balanced web of thingness. 

The in 齊物論 can also mean “together.” When the radical for flesh, , is added to , the character – umbilicus – is created. 

∞ 

My mother had saved our umbilical cord; she’d simply forgotten where she had kept it and was embarrassed to admit she might have lost it; so she allowed me to be angry with her. I think she trusted that I would eventually understand that the thing itself did not matter.

Matter, from the Latin materia – timber, substance, or subject of discourse. Matter also comes from mater mother.

My mother was right – when I didn’t have it, the umbilical cord had become this beautiful metaphor for the tie between mother and child, between a person and her place of origin. Now that I possessed the actual umbilical cord, and could hold this metaphor in the palm of my hand, the spirit of its utilitarian purpose was palpable and electric. I looked down at my hardened belly, lopsided toward one side with the grapefruit pushing insistently against my uterus, and felt the presence of the umbilical cord that, at that very moment, was transporting all the nutrients and all the knowledge in my physical body to the grapefruit so that it could grow into a coconut by next week. 

Later that evening, we drove to the pizza place to gather with family. We had printed out directions from MapQuest, but they lay unused on the dashboard. Instead, we used my mother’s memory as a guide. This was the route she used to take to drop my brother off at school, drop me off at Fan Tai Tai, the babysitter’s, and finally, where she would go to work at the lab for half the day before driving on the same stretch of freeway in the opposite direction to pick us up. How many countless times had she traversed this route – going back and forth between leaving us and being reunited with us, this palimpsestic loop of emotions (heartbreak, relief, joy) that tethered her to her children? As we drove down this short stretch of freeway, I listened to my mother recount the mundane yet wonderfully nostalgic details of her daily routine thirty years ago and felt the road beneath us metamorphose into an umbilical cord, which linked us to the ever widening reaches of our past. 

∞ 

Anni Albers was one of the leading textile artists of the twentieth century. In her book, On Weaving, she laments the diminishment of our collective tactile sensibility – that at the same time our articulation of thought through reading and writing had become more sophisticated, our sense of touch had become dulled. And yet, she writes, “we touch things to assure ourselves of reality. We touch the objects of our love. We touch the things we form.” I imagine she is warning that if our tactile sensibilities are blunted, our ability to express love may be compromised. Therefore, if we sharpen our sense of touch, broaden the vocabulary of our tactile sensibilities, then the things we touch will feel that love and we can reawaken the inherent spirit that lives within all things. 

∞ 

Pregnancy had returned me to my body, but this time, in a doubled existence. I was aware of growing little toes and appendages in my body, of growing elbows and shoulders, and a row of bones along a back I would one day smooth with the warm palm of my hand as I shushed into the shell-like ear of the baby to lull him to sleep. I felt that every part of my physical body was necessary and useful and needed. It was finally the right body at the right time. 

The bulk of my first pregnancy was spent in Singapore, where my husband, Billy, and I had just moved from New York. We had moved with Billy’s job, while I was trying to write what I hoped would be another book; we didn’t know a single person in Singapore. I spent most of that pregnancy by myself – exploring a new city, buying furniture for our apartment, reading and eating snacks, not really writing. I was alone, but I was never lonely. The baby inside kept growing and making its presence known. One night, the baby shook vigorously, making the skin on my belly – now pulled taut over his growing figure inside – quiver and spark, like millions of raindrops against a pavement. It was an exhilarating dance of life and I placed my hands on the rounded curve of my large abdomen, re-absorbing the energy that came from the little being inside, back into my hands, into my body. 

For the last month of pregnancy, I temporarily moved to Taipei to stay with my parents and prepare for childbirth and for “sitting the month” after the baby was born, a traditional practice in Taiwan for mothers’ bodies to recuperate and recalibrate postpartum. This month is known as the fourth trimester, just as important as the three trimesters of pregnancy. My mother was semi-retired then, but kept a busy schedule, into which I was folded. She was intent on keeping me active and constantly moving, bringing me along everywhere she went: to the wet market, to swim laps at the pool, to Chinese calligraphy class, to lunches with aunties who were eager to share their stories of pregnancy and sitting the month. In my journal from that time, I often wrote about how tired I was, keeping pace with my mother. But I didn’t want to refuse her invitations. The way I remember it is that when I was young, my mother wasn’t interested in playing with me. In a way, my pregnancy returned me to her; she regarded the physicality of my pregnancy with amusement, as if she were experiencing it for the first time. She didn’t want me to be still, or separate from her. Now, I see that the baby and I were not merely doubles, but along with my mother, we were a tripled – a braided – existence. 

Complex, from the Latin com –together, and plex – to braid. 

∞ 

Towards the end of forty weeks, the baby was still in a breech position, so when I went into labor, I had to have a Caesarean birth. Billy made it from Singapore, just in time. That first night in the hospital, I still couldn’t feel the bottom half of my body and was afraid to move my legs, which were leaden from the epidural. Before they wheeled me into surgery, I had started to shake uncontrollably, chattering teeth and quivering lips made my body hum with an energy that didn’t feel like it was coming from me, but now, there was a weight. The nurses brought the baby in whenever he was hungry; I would open up my hospital gown and when they set him down on my chest I realized the weight I was feeling was him, the physical reality, the real responsibility I had of him. When the baby started rooting and suckling, it was astonishing and exciting and overwhelming. I had no idea what I was doing/I felt like I had been doing this for years. I drifted in and out of sleep, dreaming that my breasts were like larger than life Georgia O’Keefe flowers, dripping milk off its smooth petals. At one point during this thick, velvet night, I began wondering how I would make it out of the hospital, how I would make it off the bed, how I would detach the catheter and the IV dripping pain medication into my veins? How would I make it out of this dark hospital room, where I wanted to stay forever with my baby in the confident care of the nurses, all the way back to Singapore? I can worry, especially late at night when time yawns ahead into a vertiginous space, and this was the same, except now there was this little being whose life very literally depended on my being able to care for him. So I held on – breathed and focused on the moment and then only as far as what I needed to do in the very next moment, which was to close my eyes and rest until the next time the baby came in to nurse. 

∞ 

As planned, I did my yuezi, “sitting the month,” in my parents’ home after the baby was born. In Taiwan, the tradition is steeped in the tenets of Chinese medicine, a time when the mother eats 

specific yang foods to balance out the overabundance of yin – associated with the moon, coolness, and female elements, such as childbirth – in her body. I stopped eating meat when I was fourteen years old, but as soon as I became pregnant, my body craved the sinewy texture and bloodied juices of meat. During the yuezi, I ate six times a day – pork knuckles stewed with peanuts to bring on milk, chicken cooked in ginger and rice wine to bring up the temperature in my body, leafy greens with red veins to replenish my blood, and snacks of sweet red bean soup with chewy glutinous rice balls floating in the bowl to increase caloric intake, because, the yuezi nurse explained, breastfeeding used up calories quickly. Between meals, I nursed my baby and performed pelvic and abdominal exercises. The yuezi nurse lay me down on my bed and told me to push my finger into my belly button. Astonishingly, my finger kept on sinking into the softness of the space my newborn only recently vacated. The nurse said this was where my abdominal muscles had separated, to make room for the baby, and the exercises would encourage them to fuse back together again. 

For one month, I didn’t leave my parents’ apartment; I rarely even left the bed. A friend who had her first child a year before I did, wrote in her congratulations card, “Enjoy the newborn cocoon!” When my father had told us it was time to leave San Francisco to move to Taiwan, I was four years old. We lived in an apartment in downtown Taipei. My mother started working at my father’s children’s apparel company; I remember often crying hysterically before she left for work. The lighting in that apartment was always dark – my brother was already in grade school and that first year back in Taiwan, I spent most of my time at home with an elderly housekeeper we called Obasan, so with just the two of us in the apartment, we didn’t turn on many lights. One day, my mother brought home a shallow cardboard box. Inside were large, green mulberry leaves and a handful of white, soft, squishy silkworms. I peered into the box and watched them inch across the carpet of leaves, nibbling voraciously as they moved inside the box. The silkworms were pudgy and not unpleasant to look at. In the quiet of the apartment, I thought I could hear them chomping on the mulberry leaves. Two or three days later, when I checked inside the box again, the leaves had been consumed and mulched and the silkworms were gone. In their place were silk cocoons that looked like tiny ovals of dragon whisker candy, which is made from thinly spun sugar. I don’t remember what we did with the cocoons or if we let the moths hatch. My mother told me that the cocoons were made with one single strand of silk, that for those two to three days, spinning silk around and around their own bodies was all the little worms did. 

In the room where I was sitting the month, I performed the singular job of caring for this little being who had so recently been housed inside my body. For four weeks, we stayed cocooned in that room, where I imagined I was spinning a glossy strand of silk around our bodies, soft and wispy like cirrus clouds brushed across a blue sky. Billy was on paternity leave and staying with me at my parents’ place, in the room they always kept for my grandmother when she visited. The room and everything in it made up my entire universe of existence for four weeks. 

I did nothing but nurse the baby and marvel at his impossibly tiny fingernails and feel the smooth, pristine bottoms of his feet that knew nothing yet of weight or friction. I had no desire to leave the room and relied on my mother for everything we needed. She brought us diapers, nursing pads, and when one breast threatened mastitis, she filled a sock with dried adzuki beans and warmed it in the microwave for me to press on the lumps of clogged milk ducts, coaxing them to soften under the heat. When I ran out of blank nursing logs – which I was diligently filling out with information like the baby’s temperature, which breast I nursed from at what time and for how long, how much breast milk I was able to express, the color of the baby’s feces, whether or not the baby’s diaper was heavy with urine, the strength of the baby’s suckling, the color of the baby’s skin, whether the baby spit up, the look and feel of the baby’s umbilical cord, and any other observations – my mother was the one who made copies for me. She brought all my yuezi meals and snacks, studying the recipes with the attention of a student preparing for college entrance exams. My mother has often said that in another life, she would like to be a traditional Chinese doctor. She was our connection to the outside world. It was as if I had been returned to her womb and we were once again connected by an umbilical cord, one through which she delivered everything the baby and I needed. 

∞ 

In “Material as metaphor,” Albers writes, “A short while ago I had a visit from [a] 10 week old baby who looked at me wide eyed and I thought somewhat puzzled and was struggling as if trying to tell me something and did not know how. And I thought how often did I feel like that, not knowing how to get out what wanted to be said. 

“Most of our lives we live closed up in ourselves, with a longing not to be alone, to include others in that life that is invisible and intangible. 

“To make it visible and tangible, we need light and material, any material.”

For Albers, her material was thread and more specifically, the tactility of threads when they were woven together in a coded sequence. In order to break through from the quiet, cocooned existence of our minds, we need material that we can touch and mold, material that can translate the interiority of our experience. In order to sharpen our tactile sensibilities, so that we can deepen our vocabulary for love (Albers, again: “we touch things to assure ourselves of reality. We touch the objects of our love. We touch the things we form.”), we need material. 

The materials in my yuezi cocoon: nursing logs, a belly band I was told to wear during this month to encourage my internal organs to come back together, little squares of muslin cloth we put over our shoulder when we burped the baby, socks filled with dried beans, nursing pads, a baby carrier for when we were ready to bring the baby outside. 

And the baby himself – the baby who was nestled inside and who was now out, in the world, with skin I could touch, eyes I could look into, whose tiny, warm breath I could smell, and whose delicate heartbeat now pulsed to its own rhythm – the baby who was now matter. 

∞ 

When the baby is manyue, one month old, the three of us would return to Singapore and begin our life as parents, in earnest. A few days before our departure, when I was nursing the baby, I felt something – a small particle – roll off of him and onto the bed. Thinking it was some kind of lint, I looked for it with the intention of throwing it away until I saw what it was. It was his umbilical cord, dark brown, dried up and hard. I rolled it around in my fingers and looked into my baby’s face. He looked older, I decided. I lay him down on the bed and he squirmed helplessly, making gurgling noises, jerking his clenched up fists here and there in the air. 

When my mother showed me her umbilical cord, I was a little girl – younger than ten. I understood in a general way that I had stayed in my mother’s belly for nine months before emerging into the world, but the logistics of how I lived, cocooned inside and underwater, was not something I had considered. My mother’s umbilical cord was physical proof of the biology of nascent motherhood and, never having been a scientifically inclined child, the tactile thingness of this phenomenon seemed utterly magical to me. What I was sure of were the intangibles – the fact that I was fiercely connected to my mother with invisible strands of admiration and longing – I wanted to be close to her and I yearned for her approval. That this yearning, in fact, came from a physical ribbon that once tied us together as one was breathtaking and astounding. And now I held in my hand, the thing that had fastened my baby to me, the conveyor that carried information, nourishment, and my deepening love for him. Would he one day understand and feel the weight of this metaphor? 

I rummaged around the room and managed to find a little plastic bag, dropped the umbilical cord into it and tucked it into my journal on the writing desk. The desk was covered with things I hadn’t had a chance to put away since coming back from the hospital – pamphlets on breastfeeding, a list of foods to avoid in the first month, the baby’s and my hospital bracelets, his immunization record, and among them, his birth certificate, which my mother had brought home a few weeks ago. Even this documentation of the baby’s existence – material proof of his being – was delivered by my mother. She was the conveyance of all the things we needed before we nibbled our way out of the silk strands of our cocoon, before we made our own way into the world. 

Is part of the complexity of certain mother-daughter relationships in the ultimate knowingness of the mother’s position? What I often read – and still read – as judgment or withholding on her part was perhaps her waiting for me to arrive at a conclusion she already knew. For example, that I didn’t have to be hurt when I believed my mother didn’t save our wealth ribbon. She never explained to me that it didn’t matter, because it was just a thing. Parenting requires an inordinate amount of quiet patience; my mother didn’t have to explain because eventually, I came to this realization on my own. She could wait. And it meant so much more that I experienced this revelation in my own time. The fact that this thing that didn’t matter – the umbilical cord between me and my mother – had materialized, that it had literally mattered itself back into how I related to my mother shifted my understanding of the metaphor once again. Everything we feel – everything we metaphor, in order to comprehend – resides in tangible things. 

∞ 

I had decided to birth my baby in Taiwan because we were on our own in Singapore and I wanted to sit the month, under my mother’s care. It was a decision I made for me, less for my baby. But when I read the words, “Born in Taipei, Taiwan,” on his birth certificate, it made my heart swell to see that my son came into this world on this island, this home I loved, but had – until then – no intention of returning to. 

I don’t remember feeling it, but there must have been, at that moment, a gentle tug on the cord that tied me to home. 

brenda Lin is a writer, literary translator, and teacher based in Taipei, Taiwan. Her writing has appeared in Fourth Genre, WSQ, Asymptote, Gulf Coast Journal, and others. brenda writes about family, language, and the intersection between text and textile.

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