As queer children navigate the world, they tread upon thorny, winding trails far from the conventional, often without familial support. Barriers arise when the inevitable roadblock – coming out – arrives before them. Specifically for children from Asian countries, where conformity and acceptance from community are highly prized, where strict gender roles and continuing the family name come in conflict with queer identities, there is immense difficulty in being accepted and finding support. In D’Lo’s “Sewing Patches Through Performance” a memoir about his experience as a trans masculine Indian American, his relationship with his mother is expressed through a series of metaphors regarding threads and patches. Like a pair of jeans, it’s torn and worn down through time, and requires painstaking patching and weaving in order to become whole again. The story is separated into five different sections – The Threads, The Holes, The Patchwork, The Desired Pattern, and The Patch. He describes the friction between him and his mother after coming out, and the painstaking journey that it took in order to regain her love and acceptance. He is ultimately able to begin regaining his mother’s affection through a performance of a comedic monologue from her perspective, showing that he empathized with and understood her. In the end, his mother’s love was vital to making him feel whole again. Through this, “Sewing Patches Through Performance” shows not only the importance of feeling seen and loved by family in a queer person’s growth, but also the power of art to interpret and influence the personal. D’Lo places an immense importance on having a family and feelings of belonging. In “The Holes”, D’Lo reflects upon how losing his sister deprived him of the one person in his family who was possibly supportive of his identity. Without his sister, he was left alone in reckoning with his identity, exposed to the hostility of his parents. He further mentions how uprooting himself from his “queer chosen family” was a “rite of passage” for him when running away from home. This emphasis on family illustrates how queer children are in especial need of a familial support system as they struggle to reconcile their identities. Most importantly, D’Lo is in need of love from his mother. She is the heart and soul of the narrative he weaves, making up “the lens from which I have experienced my life, love, and art as a queer and trans masculine person.” Throughout the narrative, D’Lo’s love for his own mother is palpable. He describes her with almost a sense of wonder, saying that “she is a spirit woman, an incredibly mystical and magical being, a woman who becomes more childlike as she gets older.” He calls himself a “dramatic romantic,” imagining that his mother is with him throughout every stage of his life, watching over him through his best and worst moments. He recalls a particular interaction that occurred between him and his mother when he was still a child. His mother would ask “Vut do you hav in yor head?” and he would respond “Uh, mud!” This scene in particular illustrates a childlike innocence and unconditional love that the narrator yearns for. Near the end, he describes being estranged from his mother as “feeling groundless,” that in order to feel like he had “a place in this world” it was necessary for him to receive his parents' love. This intense attachment D’Lo has with his mother is simultaneously harmful. He constantly feels the expectations of his Amma on his shoulders: he can feel the shame every time he lights a cigarette or goes out to drink, he can feel her watching as he runs away from home, he can feel her gaze every moment of his life. He is always being watched and judged by her, yet also unseen and misunderstood by her. D’Lo’s position as the child of immigrants figures heavily in his conflict with his mother. His mother often finds it difficult to communicate properly with D’Lo. The narrator notes how “denial’s river runs deep in our brown bodies” when thinking about his mother’s coping mechanisms. Coming from India, her mother was not equipped with the tools to process her own emotions. Instead, she simply forgets or denies the things unpleasant to her. D’Lo is frustrated by this. He is constantly trying to learn more about her mother, but his mother often shies away from memories that she would rather forget. Because of this, the occasional story that his mother does tell is like “dust from an ancient vault” that D’Lo tries desperately to catch. His mother is paradoxically unknown to him despite being the closest person to him. In “The Threads” when D’Lo describes his mother in a video of him as a child, he says that “She seemed to love me” – seemed, as if he were unsure if her mother truly did love him. Throughout the narrative, D’Lo continuously tries to empathize and understand his mother. “The Threads” begins not with D’Lo’s perspective, but rather his mother’s when giving birth to his older sister. D’Lo hypothesizes about his mother’s shame and regret, thinking that she wished “Krishani [his deceased sister] were alive” instead of D’Lo. Later in the story, D’Lo mentions that one of his very first monologues was written from the perspective of her mother. D’Lo shows a very fundamental desire to understand his mother, not only from curiosity about her as a person, but also from a place of hurt: why did his mother stop loving him? What could he do to regain her mother’s love? Culturally, D’lo’s mother is bound by concepts of honor and shame that prevent him from fully accepting D’Lo. His mother is cautious when D’Lo first brings her to one of his performances. “No, these people are Indian, and they won’t like to hear about it,” she worries. In South and East Asian countries, conformity is often placed above individual freedoms. A sense of belonging in a community is highly prized, and anything – for example, being queer – that can result in one becoming forced out of the community is heavily avoided. D’lo dryly remarks later on in the story “I thank America for introducing me to therapy,” referring to her mother’s lack of emotional processing abilities. D’Lo notes how “in order to make any changes, I really had to make the first move.” Because her mother was unable to reach out and communicate to him, D’Lo has to be the one trying to enact change and repair things. Though D’Lo tells the story of how he regained the love of his mother in this memoir, the implications of it are quite sad. D’Lo frames his own relationship as a situation where both parties are estranged and seeking for reconciliation, but in truth, his mother had a far greater responsibility that she failed to satisfy as a parental figure. As D’Lo puts it himself, navigating the world as a queer person is to do so “without societal rites of passage and without familial support.” Faced with the homophobia of their parents, queer children have no choice but to struggle to reconcile their conflicting identities all by themselves. Especially for queer ethnic children, this process is immensely difficult: they have to face not only hate from their own ethnic community, but also racism from the broader community at large. Rejected by his mother, D’Lo is cast off into a stormy sea. Instead of receiving help in order to make sense of his own identity from his mother, he is left to do it alone. Not only that, D’Lo also has to make sense of his mother’s emotions for her. D’Lo’s mother is never an active participant in the narrative; she is instead a passive one, choosing to accept or deny the requests and pleas of her confused and hurt child. The burden is placed all on D’Lo, who by all means should be the one being reached out to and assisted.. Though D’Lo ultimately manages to repair her relationship with her mother by the end of the narrative, even he admits that “I still believe parents should do better.” “Sewing Patches Through Performance” shows the immense power that story, art, and performance can hold as forms of communication and personal recognition. Firstly, the story of his long and grueling journey with his mother and his identity that D’Lo tells us is more than just a simple reflection on his experiences: it is a celebration, a dedication to the love that he shares with his mother now. Furthermore, by telling his own story, he is also empowering himself. Sewing together different parts of his experiences, he rages against his Amma’s “Sri Lankan denial or selective amnesia.” He asserts his own truth. There is purpose and consideration in the very structure of the story. Of all the different chapters of the story, “The Holes” – detailing the break in his relationship with his mother – is the shortest. D’Lo almost seems hesitant to address how he came out. “[...] it all came out,” he writes, “And not without a pop, bang, or boom…” He then trails off and skips past the actual events that occurred, leaving the reader to imagine what could’ve happened, and immediately moves on to the aftermath: “So I went off to New York [...]” This deliberate omission diverts attention from the fallout of his relationship with his parents to the foundations (the threads) and the eventual mending (the patchwork) of their relationship. D'Lo seems to be suggesting that what’s important isn’t what has been done to him, but rather the way he managed to heal and come out as a stronger person. Because he is able to rework his own recollection of events, he is able to choose what defines him as a person. Amma also tells stories, but as a way of coping and remembering. For Amma, storytelling is a way to remember people close to her heart. She tells D’Lo stories of her brothers and sisters, omitting unsavory parts of who they are, and casting them in a fond light. What matters is not what happened, but what is remembered. As D’Lo chooses certain parts of his story to tell the audience, she honors the most positive aspects of her siblings. She has “memories that create order, for the life of chaos hers could’ve been.” The ultimate act of storytelling comes in D’Lo’s performance of Amma in his monologue, where he acts out his mother’s reaction to his identity. But D’Lo’s performance is more than a mere comedic retelling of his mother’s fussiness and conservative attitudes, it is a message to his mother that he truly understands her, saying through art what mere words could never convey. Between D’Lo and his mother there is this constant tension where both sides want the other to change, but both are equally unable to change themselves or the other. D’Lo simply wishes for his mother to change her beliefs and accept him and Amma wishes that D’Lo would change his identity to become someone that he isn’t. D’Lo’s performance breaks this stalemate. It contains bits of Amma that she never told him, but that he knew regardless, allowing for Amma to “air her grievances” in a lighthearted way. Everything dark in her heart that she was unable to say to her son is brought to light, and more importantly, she now knows that her son truly understands her. D’Lo remarks that “it was the first time she felt seen by me, her child… the person she didn’t know she needed understanding from.” Through the medium of performance, D’Lo is able to bridge a gap otherwise uncrossable. Still, the process is slow. D’Lo admits that this performance is only part of what ultimately repaired their relationship, and that it took many years before his parents fully accepted him. D’Lo recounts a tour that he took several years after his first performance of Amma, where the act of telling a story is portrayed as a sign of intimacy. On a car ride, Amma suddenly decides to tell D’Lo a story from the time when he was born. When she visited a chatrakaran, she was congratulated on having given birth to a boy. Amma corrects him, saying that she had a girl, but the chatrakaran says that she had a boy. This story spiritually suggests that D’Lo’s identity truly is that of a man. However, more important is Amma’s decision in sharing the story with D’Lo. The story, hitherto unknown to D’Lo, becomes a sign that his mother has truly accepted him. The act of sharing stories is then characterized as an act of vulnerability, something that can happen only between two people who trust each other. D’Lo concludes the story by writing, “There is nothing like an Amma’s love… [I wanted to tell her] my head was still filled with mud,” calling to mind a childlike innocence that he has managed to reclaim. Moreover, D’Lo frames the story as one of mutual need: he needs his mother’s love in order to patch the hole in his heart, and his mother needs his understanding to grow as a person. Ultimately, Sewing Patches By Performance is a touching story about the importance of family in supporting queer youths, and the power of art and performance in relationships. It is simultaneously an expose of the unique conditions that immigrant children have to face. Through D’Lo’s struggle to be accepted by Amma, he highlights the emotional immaturity and restrictions of Asian cultures, and the burden placed on the children of immigrant parents in trying to maintain querulous relationships already weakened by the fact of the homosexuality.