I WOULD LIKE to love my mother without feeling, to perform the rituals and duties of filial care without the risk to heart of hurt. Mine, I am ashamed to recognise, is a thin love that loves small, loves just a little bit. Love for someone like me – a middle-­aged, middle-­class, privileged woman with a comfortable life and a job I find endlessly fulfilling – should be easy. But, like so many of my female friends, I am afflicted with Asian Daughter Syndrome, and after a lifetime of being a second mother to my family, I can’t shut up the loathsome whiny voice of the self-­pitying child in my head, squatting behind my left ear, hand out and begging for visibility, wanting ‘mother’ to be a verb as well as a noun to me.

We tend to understand and experience love first as a helpless emotion and sensation, then as the deliberate decision to fulfil the obligations of caregiving and self-­sacrifice for the benefit of those we choose to love. Both emotion and choice emanate from within and beyond the self. The feelings of romantic love surge through our bodies like a heart attack but also seize us from without. The helplessness, the lack of control over feelings are captured by a vocabulary of accidents, insanity and catastrophes. I fell madly in love. I was overwhelmed, I was swept away, I was consumed by love. Romantic love is hunger and thirst, madness and blindness, flood and fire in our fiction and media.