Before realism there was Victorian literature. Although the setting of these books were realistic, most of their plots were not: consider Emma, for instance, the titular character in Jane Austen’s famous 1815 novel. Her mother died when she was a child and her father is a nervous and tractable man, whose main impact on Emma is not his paternal guidance but his immense reservoir of wealth that enables her to be an independent woman for as long as she pleases. This confluence of circumstances situates Emma as one of the most liberated women of her time: with an endless supply of women and a dearth of authority figures to manage her, she is free to do what she wants with the time and people around her. 

Most of the protagonists in Victorian literature fall into this model of circumstantial independence. In Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Pip, an orphan, serves as an apprentice to his aunt and uncle for four years before rising to high society from the financial gifts of a mysterious benefactor; raised by her wealthy uncle, Dorothea Brooks of George Eliot’s Middlemarch views marriage as the chance to embark on a quest of spiritual education, rather than as a means of securing money. The autonomy of the protagonist is central to the project of Victorian literature. That this matrix of authorial independence and financial prosperity so rarely occurs in reality does not prevent the Victorian novel from being seminal to the modern construction of individualism. 

Marie Mutsuki Mockett sets out on a similar project to the Victorians in her novel The Tree Doctor. The novel is about an unnamed female professor who returns to Carmel, California to care for her ailing mother. The trip sunders her from her husband and two daughters, who remain in Hong Kong. But Covid-19 foils her plans: although she resides in the same state, pandemic restrictions prevent her from visiting her mother in the senior facility center. Moreover, the travel bans issued by the United States and Hong Kong amidst rising infection rates render it impossible for her to visit her family overseas and vice versa, despite continued entreaties from her husband and children. Unable to fulfill her responsibilities as both mother and daughter, The Tree Doctor’s story begins with the intriguing question: if an Asian mother had time on her hands, what would she do? 

Gardening, apparently. “The older a woman became, the more likely she was to love plants and pets, seemingly unaware that she loved these fragile things only because she, too, was growing more frail,” the narrator sermonizes in the opening pages of the novel. She pours her energy into caring for her mother’s garden, many of the plants in dire need of care. Through this project she meets the esoteric Tree Doctor, an arborist with whom she starts an affair. Enchanted by his vacillations of hardness and tenderness, and with her carnal desires activated after years of dormancy, the narrator craves both his sexual favors and romantic gifts while also wondering about his character. The meteoric trajectory of their relationship is interrupted by familial dead-ends: she comforts her daughters about her absence, promising that they would be reunited soon against her better judgment. She continues a civil relationship with her husband, who resents playing the role of single parent and views her absence as abandonment. She visits her mother at the senior facility at last, only to be saddled with new, possibly futile, questions amid accepting her mother’s irreversible decline. 

Mockett infuses the plot with erotic descriptions, most of which surprise due to the sterilized image of middle-aged Asian women. At the end of the first chapter, the narrator comes while picturing Hokusai’s print The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife: “[she] reached beneath her underpants and pictured one month and eight hands. She came quickly and felt her body sinking so deeply it was like falling.”  

This excess of sexual gratification is antithetical to the figure of the Asian mother, a neutered body in the public mind. While the celebrity of young Asian women often depends on hyper-sexualization, from the sensuous characters of Anna May Wong during Hollywood’s Golden Age to the legions of female K-Pop idols that currently dominate the global music scene, depictions of Asian sexuality in middle-age are sparse if one excludes the anomalous super-stardom of actresses such as Sandra Oh, Lucy Liu, and Constance Wu. 

Could it be that narratives about middle-aged Asian women are boring? Such an audacious stance has its grounds: with filial piety deeply engrained in Eastern cultures, Asian women are notoriously saddled with carrying out acts of care for both the young and the elderly. Not only are middle-aged Asian women expected to tend to their relatives in their old age, they are also expected to prepare their children to excel in an increasingly competitive school environment, as embodied in the “Asian tiger mother” trope. How can the Asian woman locate herself, as well as her sexuality, among these imbricated domestic responsibilities? 

In response to this question, Mockett imposes onto the narrator a set of circumstances that challenges her learned ego-death. Crucial to the plot’s machinery is the Covid-19 pandemic. That the narrator must experience chronic physical separation from her relatives to unlock her erotic desires demonstrates the staggering societal barriers that prevent Asian women from achieving autonomy. Compared to the subtle tropes employed by Victorian writers to bestow freedom upon their protagonists, the Asian woman’s path toward a similar degree of independence is far more serpentine.  

Consider the success of Everything Everywhere All At Once. The 2022 film is about Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), a middle-aged Chinese immigrant who must save the multiverse from the wrath of her adolescent teenage daughter. She grafts new abilities from parallel worlds, glimpsing into realities that could have been hers. In one world, Evelyn rejected a marriage proposal from her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), instead becoming a famous actress. However, the melancholy underbelly of her success is exposed within minutes: when Waymond attends one of her premiers, he delivers one of the film’s most memorable lines: “In another life, I would have really liked doing laundry and taxes with you.” The confession moves Evelyn to tears, who begins to consider her husband in a new light: bumbling and naive, he still represents an attainment of domestic peace that is as wondrous as it appears commonplace. That middle-class ennui is ultimately more satisfying than the trappings of feminine careerism is a pretty thought. Certainly, the ideology has significant prestige among the American public. However, illuminating the intimacies of an ordinary domestic existence does little to address its erotic paucity. 

The friction between family and independence reaches its apogee in The Tree Doctor’s last chapter. After the narrator convinces her family to come to America, her other relationships abruptly dissipate. Years pass by. During her amorous courtship with the Tree Doctor, the narrator begins to reexamine her thorny relationship to her body. Experiencing intense sexual passion for the first time in her life, she discovers erotic pleasure as a vista still accessible to her in middle-age. But these meditations screech to a halt as she reintegrates herself into her family. As for her mother, the narrator acknowledges her death off-handedly: “when the virus finally comes for her a mother a few weeks later, at least her mother will know that she succeeded, and that the family was now together.” Resistive, insouciant, and dispassionate, these sentences are disturbing most of all. While post-pandemic life is framed in terms of recuperation, for the narrator, it is also shot through with great loss. The narrator’s reversion from an emotionally motile creature to her duties as a respectable mother induces a heartbreak that only the reader can now feel.  A family reunion should not be a tragedy. If the pleasures of domestic devotion prove to be any less than perfect, it is only the sorrow that bleeds from any kind of loss.