1987: Belinda Carlisle, Heaven on Earth

By Katie Mansfield

In San Antonio, where the gardenias bloomed in the backyard and the black asphalt cul-de-sac burned our bare feet in the summer, I played at being a popstar. In those days, I was at my bossiest: nine years-old to my sister’s six, I commandeered her queen-sized bed as a stage. With the ceiling fan on full blast to counteract the sweltering light bulbs overhead, I’d tell Julia to reset her dance position, then I’d rewind the track and press play. First, the slight jingling of chimes, like something cosmic––then out poured Belinda Carlisle’s voice, backed by a resonant choir, flooding the room the way I imagined a stadium light might. 

Ooh, baby, do you know what that’s worth? Ooh, heaven is a place on earth.

My sister and I jumped, spun, and sang until we were breathless, hearts pounding as hard as the killer drumline. The CD was my mom’s; I knew next to nothing about Belinda. I didn’t know she’d been the lead singer for the Go-Go’s or that there’d even been a Go-Go’s. All I knew was that Belinda sang 1980s anthems, an era that existed for its bigness: loud colors, shoulder pads, poofy hair. In my mind, the 80s were about how my mom lived in a time before my sister and me, with her perm and her bangs and a secret recklessness. She once told us a story about driving toward a beach with her friends despite a hurricane warning. I didn’t believe her. For one, she couldn’t swim. The woman who was always lathering sunscreen over me, convinced every freckle was another step on my way to skin cancer? It seemed impossible that my mom had once been a girl who welcomed the elements with open arms, someone who rolled the windows down, let the wind blow through her hair and willingly crammed too many people in the backseat of a car.  

The mom I knew had no wildness, offering more of a cocoon than a push into the unknown. What better example than my elementary school commute being only five minutes, buckled safely in a minivan with five other kids? Stuck so close to my mom, I existed within her sonic bubble, picking up on all her favorites while the musical landscape of the 2000s passed me by. So by the time I was in fourth grade, when a girl in my class asked me who my favorite singer was, I fumbled for names I could pull from my mom’s shelf: Sarah Brightman? Pitying my cluelessness, my classmate burned me a CD of the hits I’d missed: Soulja Boy’s “Crank That,” Cupid’s “Cupid Shuffle,” Fergie’s “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” 

I took the CD home to show my mom, and we listened to it together that afternoon in the living room. Both of us were bewildered, but where my mom shrugged it off as “music these days,” I felt like the proverbial gates had been thrown open. By sixth grade, I commandeered the car stereo. During rides home, I’d spin the dial to Mix 96.1, digesting as much as I could so that I wouldn’t be left floundering on the gymnasium floor during middle school dances. I begged my mom for iTunes gift cards so I could buy songs by Avril Lavigne, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry. The Belinda Carlisle CD I’d choreographed to collected dust.

Even as I was starting to develop interests and opinions of my own, my mom and I remained close. In middle school, I finally reached her height (all 4’11” of her), which meant I could start wearing some of her clothes. I’d inherited her propensity to freckle, which she hated but I loved, especially when one of my camp counselors called them “angel’s kisses.” While other moms and daughters braced themselves for the rocky teenage years, my mom and I sailed smoothly through. Every afternoon, I’d recap the school day; she knew all the main characters in my life and was in on all the gossip. When I wasn’t around her, I heard her voice in my head as a second conscience. I turned down soda at birthday parties because she always lectured on how it was bad for my bones. Going to the mall with friends mildly paralyzed me because I was scared my mom wouldn’t like whatever outfit I brought back.

As much as I loved our relationship, however, I suspected that my mom was always going to be the first arbiter of my tastes, a thought both comforting and terrifying. So when it came time to choose colleges, I pointed at a map and said, Anywhere but here. It wasn’t really her fault, or Texas. San Antonio had treated me well. My high school was diverse. My parents created community by gathering with their fellow Vietnamese friends for card games and crawfish boils. On weekends, my dad drove us to Austin to check out new restaurants. But none of that beat the chance to leave for somewhere I could hear my own voice a little bit louder.

I chose California. Campus promised me sunshine and palm fronds, biking with the wind in my hair past the school band frolicking in fountains. Come September, I moved 1,700 miles from home and entered a world of 1a.m. pizza orders, problem sets, and shoving too many people into the backseat of cars. At first I called my mom every weekend, but then it became easier to just forget about it. I had homework, classes, and club meetings to make. I had a life all on my own. 

* * *

Toward the end of my senior year at university, COVID-19 halted any lofty plans I had for getting my own place. Instead, a few weeks after virtual graduation in June 2020, I flew back to Texas to stay with my parents until we got a better sense of the situation. My return wasn’t quite a homecoming, though. My dad had just accepted a position in San Angelo, thereby moving out of my childhood home for a city much, much smaller than San Antonio’s 1.5 million. I arrived only two days after he and my mom got to the rental house. The three of us began to adjust to the scraggly West Texas brush and the deer we encountered every time we took out the trash. Together, we unpacked the deep blue dining room carpet, the well-loved books of my middle school years, old blankets. Boxes and boxes of CDs.

While excavating one of those boxes in the dry heat of our dusty garage, I found Belinda Carlisle again. On the cover of her Greatest Hits album, a red curl dangles artfully over her right eye, the ring on her hand gleaming. Eleven years since I’d last listened to her, yet there she remained: preserved––ageless!––in a golden photograph. But I’d grown, my circumstances had changed, and I found myself gravitating toward different songs on the album. Grateful for the security of living with my parents, but also feeling stuck in limbo, I spun through the revolving door of longing in tracks like “Leave a Light On” and “Half the World.” I, too, was reaching and waiting, though Belinda’s desire was directed toward a lover, while mine was toward a future I felt slipping me by.

I started a job working from home in the family living room, and I couldn’t help but notice how my mom had opinions on everything: snippets of dialogue she overheard me exchange with my coworkers, the way I talked in meetings, which stocks I should invest in. How I drove, how my sister and I made dumplings. Grad school. Better yet, an MBA, because she’d heard another friend’s kid had gone off to major in computer science and you’re too smart to be making less money than they are. 

Back during my teenage years, I’d rarely fought with my mom. Our time was short; inevitably I’d leave home–why needlessly sour the time before we split? Rebellion seemed like a waste. But now, with Covid-19 hovering, I didn’t know when or if our cohabitation would end. As a result, I grew more prone to petty outbursts. Just back off, I’d say. You’re always hovering. You never give us any space. 

Perhaps as a peace offering, or a gentle reminder that she’d existed as a person before my sister and me, my mom allowed me a glimpse of her past. She let me read the box of letters she and my dad had written to each other, a time capsule of their courtship. For at least two years they maintained a correspondence; my mom, working as a computer programmer in the Virginia town she’d grown up in ever since immigrating to the United States in the 80s; my dad, an Army medical student stationed abroad in South Korea. 

In the letters, my parents seemed young to me in a way I could identify with for the first time. My dad wrote about my mom bursting into tears on the phone, wishing he could comfort her. Meanwhile, my dad’s writings charted the early stages of his training, filled with questions about his purpose and whether he was cut out for the career he’d chosen. Somewhere in all that was also their love story, which I scanned for eagerly. Their flirtation was coy, their messages littered with allusions to Vietnamese proverbs I didn’t understand, and references to phone calls I wish I could have eavesdropped on. 

Eventually, my dad floated the idea of a home together. My mom expressed interest in returning to school for a master’s degree. My dad sent clippings of her company mentioned in the news and promised they could look for job postings when she joined him in Tacoma. As the date in the top right corner of the letters progressed, I read on, delighted but also filled with premonition. I already knew the ending to this story. My parents would marry, my mom uprooting her life to move to a new state. She’d never go back to school or take a new job. Instead, she had me. Rather than split her life between work and home, she threw herself into building a nest wherever Dad took us: back to South Korea, then West Point, and then, finally, that two-story pink brick house on a cheerful San Antonio street. 

There, my mom spent entire days wrapping and frying egg rolls, then packaged them in tin foil and sent me and my sister to knock on all our neighbors’ doors, bearing gifts. The doorbell was always ringing, our friends eager to play. On our way out the threshold, my mom warned us to watch out for cars, even though we lived on a cul-de-sac where the fastest anyone could go was 15 miles per hour. No watches, no curfews––when our parents wanted us back, they needed only to walk as far as the driveway and yell the magic word, “Dinner!” Otherwise, we’d go until the streetlamps came on and the air became clogged with mosquitoes. Our life was an idyll just as Belinda had depicted, the world alive / with the sound of kids on the street outside.

Belinda also knew a heaven like that isn’t a given. It’s created. Meaning someone has to sweat out the work. In the music video for the song, the choir sings, the camera spins, and Belinda tosses her hair. They say in heaven / love comes first / We’ll make heaven a place on earth, she swears, conveying love not just as something that happens to us, but a tool through which we refashion the world. Love was the battery that powered my mother through the medical library, tracking down references to help my dad with writing the papers needed to boost his career, because the heaven she envisioned had two daughters and she wanted to be able to send them to piano lessons, to chess club, to Girl Scouts. Love was reading aloud to those two daughters and throwing as much math at them as possible because sometimes heaven looked like getting them into the right school. But though I can point easily to all these acts, for twenty-something years of my life, I never thought to ask: When love comes first, who might it be putting itself in front of?

 I got an inkling in San Angelo, where my mom and I would walk the same circuit around the neighborhood together every evening before dinner, the sky turning orange and pink above us. She fretted about a year of my early twenties lost to social isolation. We talked in hypotheticals and pointed out houses we liked. At each one, she’d sigh and say, Not as nice as what we had in San Antonio. During one sunset, she joked that maybe she and my dad should wait until I settled down, and then they’d move to whatever city I chose, before following it up, more seriously: Whoever it is, never quit your job for him. Some loves, she was saying, shouldn’t come before yourself.

I appreciate the protective instinct behind those words. I wonder, too, about the shape of her regrets. Still, there are barbed parts of me ready to emerge whenever I feel particularly stifled. Parts that want to ask, Am I your daughter, or your do-over? Parts that want to accuse my mom of trying to live a second life through mine. It is easy to turn a mother into a martyr. Then my mom’s love is a debt to be repaid, and I’m doing a rubbish job of it. On one of Belinda’s other songs, “Vision of You,” she asks: Did I walk / Did you run? / What’s the way to love someone? I’ve been running–first to college and now to a new city, trying to figure out how to calibrate the proper distance between living a life of my own while knowing the scope of that life is only possible because of someone else. 

* * *

As the pandemic restrictions eased, I moved to San Francisco. Now I walk to an office, romanticize old Victorian houses, buy groceries and write silly little poems. Mom calls to ask: Is work okay, are you exercising and eating enough vegetables, when will you go back to school? I make half-hearted promises, evade where I can, push back. My stubborn insistence in forging my own path is a flaw, perhaps, but also a sign of my mom’s greatest success. A childhood in which I was warm and fed and every neighbor’s door swung open to me means I grew up convinced I could belong anywhere, so of course I have the confidence to wave off her plans. I’ll figure it out, I say. It’ll be fine. I can’t tell if she trusts me, if she hears what I’m really asking––for her to trust herself and the seeds she’s already sown.

In the last forty seconds of “Heaven is a Place on Earth,” Belinda shifts keys. Her voice edges up from E major to F# major, continuing strong. I imagine this is her way of challenging us to keep up. By the song’s end, the phrase Heaven is a place on earth has become an incantation of sorts, Belinda’s assertion that it’s achievable. And the way we make heaven down here is by wielding love not as a debt or a leash, but as permission to ourselves and each other. Permission to not be afraid, but to dream and stumble and fall because we know we’re capable of our own deliverance, of conjuring something to get us through in the end. 

I think of that as I look around my apartment room, at the space I’m able to claim because in the end, my mom let me go. Of course she’ll never stop worrying about my finances, my health, my relationships. But I’m starting to learn the streets of this city for myself. There’s a bookshelf I’ve assembled and a fresh pile of mail. This time I’m the one to call my mom first. I know what all this is worth.

Katie Mansfield (she/her) is a Vietnamese American writer of love letters to pop culture and past and future selves. She has previously published poetry in Honey Literary and is interested in, as Chen Chen once wrote in a tweet, “the powers of sweetness.” You can follow her fledgling Twitter presence @mansfieldnotes.