Culture

In His Mother’s Pearls

Culture Editor Billy Fong Discovers Nostalgia and the Perfect Accessory in a Passed Down Jewelry Box

BY // 01.08.21

This story originally ran in PaperCity’s December 2018 issue. Given the recent year of sheltering-at-home, we’ve had time to reminisce and remember more and more the ones that we love.

I see it every day as I get ready in the morning. It sits on an armoire that has all of my accessories — pieces I grab in an attempt to look presentable before dashing out the door to face the world. An Hermès belt. A Chanel camellia. One pair of my Tom Ford glasses. My mother’s jewelry box. I’m happy that particular object is one of the last things I see each day. I brought mom’s jewelry box home to Dallas with me in January 2017, having lost her two months prior to a short bout with cancer. While that era of my life is still a fog, I strive to remember mom’s last days more vividly. Perhaps this is the reason I still have the voicemail saved on my phone — the one my dad left me when he shared that mom had been admitted to the hospital and the prognosis was cancer.

I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s in Tallahassee, Florida. That is The South. Mine was a town filled with old homes — I sometimes refer to them as Southern Baptist Neo-Colonials — on hushed canopied roads darkened by Spanish moss. My mom was always well put together, but never a fashion person. She always wore jewelry, whether it was a simple necklace, a watch given to her by my father, or a pair of jade earrings dating back to her time growing up in China.

I never knew much about those years until I was an adult. The Tings (my mother’s maiden name) fled soon-to-be Communist China rather quickly, with rushed visits to government offices to get paperwork created, as Mao began his Long March. My dad and I still laugh about how many personal details are wrongly documented due to the confusion of the time. Dad’s birth year is wrong on his driver’s license — and at this point he can only pinpoint his age within a range of two to three years. (He is somewhere between 83 and 85 years old, now.)

My mom’s entire extended family — aunts, uncles, cousins, and the large staff that worked for them in their compound in Shanghai — boarded ocean liners headed to Brazil, official documents in hand. Many of my relatives still live in São Paulo, a refuge for the wealthy diaspora from China.

My parents had already downsized and moved into a retirement community when my mom passed away. They freed themselves of the needless possessions they had been keeping for many years. Gone were the plastic bins of Christmas ornaments they knew would no longer be needed, as big trees wouldn’t fi t my parents’ new life. I still remember them handing me boxes of artifacts from my youth and saying, “Do you want these? We won’t have the room when we leave this house.” “What?” was always my dire response. “You don’t want my third-grade art project of birds drew, for which I received a gold star?” I suppose, even as I near the age of 50, I want someone somewhere to cherish those yellowed grade-school papers — relics that confirm I was once young and apparently cared about drawing birds.

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I like to consider myself an expert on fashion. In fact, I am dying for a luxury goods version of The Price is Right. I’m quite certain if Bob Barker asked me for my bid on a pair of emerald-python Blahnik slingbacks, I would most definitely come within $10 of the retail price. Jewelry, however, is another thing altogether. It has always flummoxed me. When a girlfriend asks me to admire a pair of recently acquired earrings, I’m perplexed on price. Were they a $15 find at Forever XXI. Or, were they Cartier, a little something gifted by her husband for a special occasion. I guess that’s why I find jewelry all the more fascinating and otherworldly. Fashion trends, like life, are ephemeral. But jewelry endures.

My mom’s jewelry case was not an heirloom antique. It was perhaps purchased from a Sears catalog or an early 1960s five-and-dime store. The brocaded fabric is well worn, with tears and scratches from the many items it has housed over the years. When I run my fingers along those aged edges, I am instantly transported. I am standing by mom’s side while she fixes her hair and contemplates what item she should pull out of the jewelry box to adorn her neck, wrist, or ears. Karen Carpenter faintly sings “a kiss for luck and we’re on our way” in the background. (My parents were big fans of The Carpenters.) And then, just before dashing out the door for a night out with my dad, she gives me a kiss on my forehead and tells me not to stay up too late.

Recently, as I was dashing out the door of my own home, I took out a pearl bracelet from mom’s jewelry box and decided to wear
it. In this new world of accepted androgyny and fluid pronouns (I finally understand and genuinely appreciate the terms nonbinary and pansexual), it felt right to wear it. When NBA stars like LeBron James can carry a handbag and do it with such swagger that it feels effortless, I thought, “Why not wear a pearl bracelet?”

As it turns out, that bracelet was the perfect accessory. Mom’s pearls received numerous compliments that day, proving a wonderful segue for sharing stories about how she lovingly raised me to be a boy and a man who loves and appreciates beautiful things — a faint whisper I still hear from her today as I look at that jewelry box, putting it to my own nostalgic use.

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