I’m not a huge fan of tomatoes, but my friend’s mother always gifts my family her home-grown heirloom tomatoes. They’re truly delicious, even when eaten raw — sweet, bursting with juice and seed — but they look incredibly funny. Just like pumpkins, the classic heirloom tomato has many vertical ridges and crevices, almost as if it’s been weathered old. Surprisingly, their appearance kind of reflects how they’re grown. Heirloom tomatoes are the product of generations and generations of seed selection, for the best appearance, for the best pest and disease resistance, for the best ability to thrive in their environment. Just like a person can be, the tomato in my hand that I’m about to chomp into is the positive byproduct of everything that came before it.
I’ve recently been obsessed with NIKI’s new album, Buzz, and the second-to-last track is titled “Heirloom Pain.” When I listened to the song, my mind immediately jumped to heirloom tomatoes, simply because I thought it was funny how both the fruit and the song name shared this unusual word. Heirloom. Little did I know that NIKI wrote this song specifically with heirloom tomatoes and their cultivation method in mind. Somehow, I happened to connect the dots. In it, she ponders,
Walking around with
heirloom pain
Dad's temper and Mom's mistakes
And always afraid to fall flat on my face
But doing it anyway
NIKI sings about the pain that her parents have passed down to her, which I feel like many listeners born into immigrant families can relate to. For me, my parents moved to America in the 2000s, when going into a tech career wasn’t the most obvious choice (but would prove to be lucrative a few years down the line). My father, raised in the Chinese countryside as the fourth of five children, grew up in a home where physical punishment and a patriarchal family structure were normal. He was always extremely smart, and so he got into a top university and came to work in America. But his biggest regret is not switching to the tech industry. My mother was better off — she grew up in the city and came to America for graduate school, but she still complains. About her working parents being too busy to mind her and her brother, about the regret of marrying her first love, about being stuck as a housewife despite having a Ph.D.. Their backgrounds are taken to the other extreme in our home environment — tiger parenting in my sister and I’s academic and extracurricular lives, extreme control over our friendships and romantic relationships, and fighting and icing each other out over every little thing.
To be fair, we’re just your average traumatized Asian family. But it’s not fair to my sister and me because the damage is still done. My father laughs easily, but he hates being told he’s wrong or feeling uncomfortable. With his stone-faced temper, talking back, debating his opinions, and enjoyable family vacations are all off the table. My mother is an easygoing woman, but she’s so afraid that we’ll make the same mistakes she did that she won’t take our opinions seriously and communicate with us. Their emotional baggage is the result of their parents’ actions, and that of their parents’ parents, and so on. But is it fair that my sister and I have to carry that emotional baggage, as well as everything that came before?
My parents’ actions have made me scared of failure, afraid to reach out to new people, terrified to do anything that doesn’t satisfy their standards. But growing up really makes you see things differently. I will always be my parents’ child, but that’s not all to who I am. My name is Phylicia, and I have the responsibility to live out the life that I want, rather than the life my parents want for me. While I do resonate with some of the things they tell me — being financially independent with a stable job, experiencing more people before committing to a life partner, surrounding myself with uplifting friends — other things I disagree on. I will talk back (respectfully) when I feel that you’re morally wrong. I will have happy family vacations. I will take my children seriously and communicate respectfully, if I decide to have children.
Back to the song — the outro to “Heirloom Pain” goes like this:
People fall in love and fuck up
And have kids who fall in love and fuck up
Who have kids that fall in love
And have you
The backing track to this song is very upbeat and optimistic, but I feel like overall NIKI reminds us of the sad inevitability of fucking up again and again through the generations. Let’s not do that though. Generational trauma is never fair, but let’s not make the same mistakes our parents did. They may have spent all their energy in putting down roots here in America, but it’s up to us — their children — to break the cycle of passing down our emotional baggage to our children and the people around us. You might not even like tomatoes, but just in this moment, let’s all be heirloom tomatoes — pass on the good traits and the good things you’ve learned in life, not the bad ones. 🍅