Jessamine Chan debut Novel, School for good mothers, not a domestic guide to house keeping. It’s also not the kind of tagline that makes being organized look like an appealing alternative. However, as I read it on a snowy evening, I repeatedly put it down to complete household chores that are often overlooked until morning. Sparkling breakfast. Pillow is hairy. Every last sock fits it. This book is a very powerful horror story that will make even the most industrious parent feel the itch to want to clean, frankly, act like someone is watching.
As School for good mothers To begin with, single mother Frida Liu doesn’t have to work full-time while looking after her 18-month-old daughter, Harriet. When Harriet was an infant, Frida’s husband left her for a much younger pilates teacher. (His name is Gust. Like the wind.) Gust convinced Frida to move to Philadelphia, where she had no family or support system. Now she feels stuck. In a moment of exhaustion, Frida made a reckless choice: She abandoned Harriet one afternoon, a toddler alone in a pub. While Frida was driving out for takeout coffee and answering emails in her office, Harriet cried so loudly that neighbors could hear. The authorities were summoned. Frida pleads with Child Protective Services to bring her daughter back, but Gust and his daughter Susanna capture poor Harriet. Frida is constantly being watched by a group of government snipers who aim to expose her parenting weaknesses. “This is how you show up for work?” A police officer mocked her sloppy outfit. Frida was beaten for not having enough friends, for having a bad attitude. Her attorney explained that CPS took a radical, new approach. She was given the choice of losing her daughter forever, or enduring a year in a state-run re-education camp for bad mothers. Desperate to be reunited with Harriet, Frida chooses school.
Housed in a former liberal arts college, the school in question is a prison with an elegant façade, an open-plan, leafy 101 room. Mothers are forced to chant “I’m a bad mom, but I’m learning how to be good. “They are sorted into groups depending on the age and sex of their children, and match the lifelike robot babies. The AI babies are equipped with cameras to record mothers being given lessons on parenting. Teachers teach women which voice to use, and how many seconds to hold their baby. It is not enough to perform their required tasks; they must do so while thinking the right thoughts and feeling the right emotions. “The data collected from the doll suggested significant anger and attitude,” Frida learned during a goal-setting session. The surveillance robots give the book its sci-fi feel, but what they represent — society’s expectation that mothers are happy, damn it — is instantly recognizable, removed. right from today.
Racism and class discrimination were incorporated into Frida’s school curriculum; most of the prisoners were Black, poor, or both. Second-generation Frida, one of the few Asian-Americans, was alternately judged too Chinese (a psychologist who tried to get her to bond with her parents was “retained” because they had no relationship with each other. physically feel like American caregivers) and not Chinese enough (she is not fluent in Mandarin). She was accused of “fake tenderness” while staring at her daughter’s fake crib. She allegedly engaged in “hostile” behavior when she practiced cutting food to cook dinner for her family. The school affirms that cooking is one of the highest forms of love.
One of Chan’s hardest storytelling moves is to make Frida’s judgment just shaky enough to make you want to pat her on the shoulder and gently tell her to come together to reconcile. Despite her repeated attempts to refer to the instigating incident as “a really bad day,” Frida still went out with her daughter for more than two and a half hours, an option that could have been dangerous for Harriet. You get the feeling that Frida might not have been so terribly plagued by guilt if she had ignored it and returned home with a cranky but unharmed child. She might even have done it again. (Even after being discovered, she recalls the small thrill of closing the door leaving her daughter.) At school, she pinched her robotic kid’s arm in a moment of anger. , and then stepped right into an obvious trap by starting to flirt with one of the men at a nearby school for bad dads. She’s not always the easiest to sympathize with, that’s for sure. Frida’s flaws require us to confront how easy it is to notice a mother who sometimes gives in to her worst actions, even when she’s truly loving.
And, oh, dear Frida. She loves so much that she hopes instead of hoping that she will get her daughter back. School for good mothers being compared to Margaret Atwood’s The story of the maid in a blurb on its cover. The comparison is appropriate, although rather light: Both are horror films about futuristic worlds where women are forced to stay away from their children. A demonic state that plans to protect children by controlling women promotes both conspiracies. Tonally, though, School for good mothers reminds me of Kazuo Ishigurospeculative fiction more than anything else. Like Ishiguro, Chan writes in concise, no-frills prose. And like Ishiguro, Chan has a fatalistic twist in his storytelling. “Frida could punch herself in the face for hope,” Chan wrote. And she can do it anyway. Where did it get her? Just like the copies in Never let me go Unable to escape their dark fate but still mentally resisting it, Frida endures her correction by clinging to the idea that she will be able to escape a system that works against her and be reunited. gather with the one she loves. But the bar wasn’t just raised for Frida and her co-workers, it was slippery, designed to cause them to fall.
In interviews about the novel, Chan cited 2013 New Yorkers posts “Where is your mother?” by Rachel Aviv as an inspiration. In it, Aviv follows a single mother named Niveen Ismail as she tries but is unable to regain her son after losing custody of him following a single incident where she left him alone. After finishing Chan’s book, it’s tempting to feel consolation because it’s a fictional story, but Aviv’s article makes for a particularly meaningful companion piece. It’s proof that the episodes described by Chan can have some sci-fi flourishes (robot kids full of blue goo) but it’s basically a story about the world. hey, not some distant future. Ismail, who fights for her son for many years, and who refuses to leave their hometown despite his adoptive family receiving a ban on her, is a loving mother who is punished punished less for one fault of hers and more for who she is—an eccentric, an immigrant, a possessor of, according to the court psychologist, “certain character traits problem.” The fact that she didn’t carry her wallet was included in her profile. There was a time when she gave her son too many toys. While Aviv’s account of Ismail’s ordeal is a poignant exploration of government overreach and needless family separation, it doesn’t portray something rare. Child welfare agencies have admitted mistakes were made by overreacting. They have often required mandatory parenting classes to maintain guardianship. They took a lot of children away. And so call School for good mothers dystopian doesn’t feel right. Maybe paraneuropathy? Ever speculate a little? This proximity to reality is what turns the book’s emotional punching wall into a complete knockout. A mother reading it without closing her book, sighs and thinks, Thank god the world isn’t really like this. No, she closed it and knew she had to be very careful.
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