I threw away my mom's stuff.
A great amount.
My first achievement in 2026.
I didn't plan it though.
I planned to use half an hour to do something with our living room.
More space to enjoy coffee, music and occasional tea chats with friends.
I ended up using four days to rearrange the whole flat.
Throwing her stuff away was most of it.
I've never touched her stuff before.
She doesn't touch mine either.
She won't even step into my room if I'm not home, which means my room is left alone more than half the time throughout a year.
Some of her stuff I threw away was worn out, some brand new.
I ask three questions when I decide whether they should still stay in our apartment.
Three simple questions.
First, is it the best of its type?
Only the best stays or it will be buried in the things of its type.
My mom hoards things of the same type.
Among them, she uses the not-so-good ones, lays aside the good ones and buries the best ones.
I do not pity my mom.
She gets to decide the fate of her stuff.
I pity the things of excellent quality and design that don't get to be seen and touched once they are brought home by my mom.
Buried in lockers, boxes, drawers, or somewhere she doesn't even remember. Most of them stay buried for years, if not forever.
Yet some of them are too big to be buried.
About 15 years ago she spent more than half a million yuan on a set of rosewood furniture.
But since Day 1 she has covered them: glass sheets on tables, cushions on sofas and chairs.
So she paid half a million yuan to be in contact with several pieces of glass and cushion, worth several hundred yuan.
I feel so sorry for those rosewood furniture.
No eyes on their rich grain of waves, circles, swirls.
No palms on their about-room-temperature bodies.
No pressure of bodies on their dense, never-yielding surfaces, which firmly push back.
Glass. Brittle cold, textureless, full of fingerprints.
Cushions. Never-alive, easy to wear out, full of folds.
Glass and cushions steal the time these rosewood furniture are expected to spend with humans. Problematic yet alive humans.
To stop feeling sorry for these pieces of fabulous furniture, I removed the glass.
Heavy glass between the rosewood and us for over 15 years.
"Your mom will be mad."
KeKe mumbled while lifting the glass off the furniture.
Piece by piece.
"Let her go mad."
It turns out my mom doesn't even notice the glass is gone.
Nor does she notice that she's now finally in touch with the rosewood she spent so much money on 15 years ago.
She notices nothing.
*
The second question I ask is whether she still remembers the stuff.
Even if brand new, even if of good quality, I threw them away once I decided she no longer remembers them.
KeKe's concerned:
"How do you know she won't look for them one day?"
"One day? When? Not yesterday, not last week, not even last year… tell me, when?"
KeKe nods and I continue:
"She won't let go of the old and will bring home the new. The stored will stay stored."
And the tricky part of storage is that it makes you believe in the existence of an imagined future which deserves the better than now.
It also takes over the space.
Space should be either filled with the must and the appreciated or left unfilled.
An empty room makes us notice things; we own these things not when we buy them, store them, forget about them but when we notice them.
So I threw away tableware, cups, bedding, old and new — unburying the same kinds of much higher quality, much better design. All still in their packaging.
I pity them all.
And I feel the urge to pity them no longer.
Later when my mom sees them, she says "good ones, good ones."
I'd praise her sense of taste the moment she asks for the old stuff.
The praises work.
Work better than negotiation, explanation and persuasion.
*
My mom makes decent money.
She makes me worry nothing about making money.
She spoils me without meaning to.
I want to spoil her too.
Not by buying her stuff, not even by keeping her stuff but by throwing her stuff away.
The third question I ask when disposing of her stuff is whether it makes her feel good about herself.
Many of them do the opposite.
I threw her pen container with a bunch of pens. Rusted iron container, plastic half-used rollerball pens with caps either missing or broken. Her desk was forever messy.
My mom has pretty handwriting. She practiced calligraphy for years, a legacy of her father who practiced for sixty — all his life.
I put two pens made of stainless steel, one red, one dark brown, with heft. I put them into an all-wooden 360-degree rotating pen container, a souvenir from Tsinghua University's Century Celebration. The best university in China, the pride of her Tsinghua-graduate husband. The pride of her too.
The desk is messy no more.
Good stuff blesses. Bad stuff curses.
A whole box of her old clothes. Pilling, misshapen, faded. Not impressive even when they were new. They earned her loyalty anyway. But see what they pay her back. When she's wearing them she'd stare at her phone, necessarily or unnecessarily. Sit with her pelvis tilted forward, spine collapsed. Get annoyed easily when I joke with her.
I threw away the whole box.
Clothes for four seasons.
She has more boxes I wish I could throw away too.
I picked ten to twenty pieces from her wardrobe.
At home: two all-cashmere cardigans. The best of their type.
Outside: two down jackets for winter. The best of their type.
Several pure silk shirts and tailored jackets; the kind you'd want to look at closely for their fabric and design even after years.
And three dresses which perfectly show off her body shape. At 60, she has the shape of me at 18. No exaggeration.
In pretty dresses she slows down with almost everything. She smiles at my jokes, even the ones that mock her.
A pity I rarely see her in the dresses.
I hung them in the space used to hold her old ugly clothes and the uglier ones she kept in boxes.
They are ugly.
And no effort on my part even to find a less harsh word.
I curse them for all those good years they stole from much better clothes to go home and outside with my mom.
*
Disposing of mom's stuff is impossible when she's at home.
It will end up with fights, frustration and failure to throw away even a broken pen.
She left home for a four-day business trip to a coastal city in East China.
She came home with sea wind, confusion, shocks, complaints and joys.
She accepts what I did.
Not happily.
She also enjoys the rearranged flat, without admitting it.
I didn't change her relationship with her stuff: using the worst and storing the best.
At least, I didn't try to change it by talking, if not fighting.
She will continue the old pattern.
I will continue breaking it.
Between what she collects and what I throw stay our insistence and compromise.