Alexis Lam

My mum is my rock, my inspiration and the person who made me who I am. 

She is the reason for my name and my go to fun fact during group icebreakers. 

My mum had watched the fall classic show, “Gilmore Girls,” when it first aired on the CW, which was then the WB. It was the start of 2005, and she found out that she was having a baby girl. She had adored Rory Gilmore — everything from her joy of reading to her intelligence and close relationship with her mom — and she wanted her daughter to be similar. She didn’t watch past season three.

And so I was named after Rory Gilmore. Well technically, her actress: Alexis Bledel. Ironically, my life followed a somewhat similar storyline to that of Rory’s. I grew up with a single mother, I ended up getting into Yale and Harvard and then chose to attend Yale. 

But if it’s one thing I can truly relate to Rory on, it’s the close relationship with my mum. 

She is my best friend. 

When I was a small child with fucked up bangs and a bowl cut, our relationship was more similar to that of sisters rather than of mother and daughter. We would get our nails done together, go shopping, watch movies and eat any spicy chips we could get our hands on at Trader Joe’s. 

One of my favorite memories growing up was going to Fashion Island in Newport Beach, modeling sunglasses at the Sunglass Hut and grabbing strawberry gelato after wandering around the various luxury shops for hours until our feet ached. 

Much like Lorelai, my mother is a beautiful, fiercely independent woman. She is stubborn and doesn’t easily take help from anybody. And yet she is kind and cares too much about people for her own good. I adore my mother. She is fashionable and owns copious piles of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue magazines that live in our bathroom reading baskets. She puts in the time to create the kind of beauty that looks effortless to the rest of the world. 

But that’s where the parallels between the fictional lives of Rory and Lorelai and the real ones of my mum and I end.

I didn’t grow up in an idyllic small Connecticut town, nor did I have rich grandparents to propagate my private school education for high school and university. 

I grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles. I attended a public high school that had over 2000 students in the lower income neighborhoods of my hometown. I’m a first generation low income student. 

Many Asian American children of immigrant parents are expected to work hard and study well in school, attend a good university and work a traditional high-salary job like being a lawyer or a doctor. I internalized this, worked hard in school and it somehow all worked out in the end. So far at least. The self-imposed pressure back then didn’t feel so bad. 

This changed when I moved away and started my first year at Yale. 

Since my grandparents passed away in 2021 and 2022, it really has been just my mum and I against the world. We have nobody but ourselves to support each other. I started to feel the weight of being responsible for our future socioeconomic status. The once-lighthearted fantasies of success that I so envied in “Gilmore Girls” became much more serious, even prescriptive. Achieving academic perfection and fulfilling a career as a lawyer became a decision of real life consequences. 

I understand that the distinction between my mother and Lorelai Gilmore causes the differences between my pressures and those of Rory’s. My mother didn’t grow up in the wealthy suburbs of Hartford like Lorelai did.  She was born in Northern Vietnam in the middle of the war  — August 1965 — and raised in Saigon, South Vietnam. She grew up with two brothers and four sisters, one of whom died when she was a child because my family couldn’t afford to take her to a doctor. They all came to this country with nothing but the few possessions they still had after the war. 

My mother worked extremely hard to learn English at 26 years old, put herself through college and assimilate into American society. It is because of her difficult childhood that she tells me to be grateful and make the most of the opportunities that have been bestowed upon me. She worked tirelessly long hours to put me in violin and dance lessons, get me private tutors — anything that would help me succeed. It comes from a place of love. She wants me to live a happy and prosperous life, one that she didn’t get to live. 

And so it really does feel like everything is riding on me being able to succeed at Yale. I am obligated to pay back her sacrifice by securing a future for us.

There’s never a moment where I’m not worried about her.

I worry about how my mum is doing with her only daughter across the country. There’s a part of me that feels guilty for moving away. 2,503 miles. Six hours by plane, five days by train if I was crazy enough. A big part of me wanted to stay close to home, in California. But it wouldn’t have made me happy. 

I know that my choices force my life to lead one way over another. I worry about how I’m going to get into law school. I worry about how I’m supposed to earn enough to be able to support the both of us. 

But maybe I’m worrying too much. I’m not sure. 

Yale was my dream. It represented everything I ever wanted. It was my foot in the door to achieving the dreams of my mother that eventually became my own. But sometimes, when I look back at pictures from my life at home or pictures of my mum’s haircuts and new outfits, I’m not sure if I made the right choice. 

It’s been a month into my sophomore year and those feelings of guilt are still present. But with family weekend coming up, what I’m really looking forward to is for my mum to arrive in New Haven. I can’t wait to tell her about all the new adventures I have embarked on — that I’ll be going to Geneva in March or how much I’m dreading my upcoming philosophy paper.

To be honest, I really hope I don’t end up like Rory Gilmore. She dropped out of Yale, lived in her grandparents’ pool house and had everything handed to her without much effort. I want to grow beyond my seemingly predestined fate and forge a path of my own. One that doesn’t involve dropping out but is instead filled with cups of black coffee, white chunky knit sweaters and late night studying.