Han Ong Reads “My Balenciaga”

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1:50Han Ong:This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker. I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker. On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Han Ong read his story, My Balenciaga, from the March 23, 2026 issue of the magazine. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Berlin Prize, Ong is the author of more than a dozen plays and two novels, Fixer Chow and The Disinherited. Now here's Han Ong.

2:24My Balenciaga My mother and I were living on the Upper West Side in New York with my Aunt Feli, who was at work. She was the chief thoracic surgeon at Mount Sinai when I heard that the film star Nora Onor had passed. I knew that my mother had brushed elbows with Nora at a few movie premieres in Manila in the 70s, so I delayed telling her the bad news. When I finally did, she went completely silent. She was already seated, but her ribcage sank into her hips. We forwent social media. We knew that the sites would be overflowing with tributes and condolences from various Filipino expat communities.

3:12Ours was only a small sorrow, because it had been decades since we'd seen one of Nora's films, and we were grieving more for ourselves, our individual vanished youths, during each of which Nora had been a big, big light, than for the deceased performer. Eventually, my mother remarked that 71 was far too young to be making an exit from life. She herself was only four years older than Nora had been, and Aunt Feli two years older than my mother. She clutched my hand. But we all understand that Nora had her troubles, she said. Softly, she spoke of Nora's beauty, which to her needed no qualification.

4:03She had the most exquisite face, my mother said. To think that some Filipinos were forever debating her looks. She shook her head. We really are a nation that doesn't deserve anything good. Dark skin, this mukang achay, that? What a country of self-loathers. Thank God I got you out of there, Lucy. Here, I could be excused for thinking that my mother was really using Nora to talk about herself. My mother knew from beauty. On a trip to Rome with her parents when she was fifteen, undertaken so that my grandmother could secretly ask God at a church in the Vatican to compel her husband to reform his cheating ways, a strange man who turned out to be a modeling scout had stopped my mother to hand her his card.

4:57Imagine my mother's surprise when my grandfather had encouraged her to turn up at the address on the card the next day. By the late 60s, she had been in Dior's stable of models and her crowning achievement had been her anointment as one of the in-house favorites at Saint-Laurent in the 70s, the designer's most hectic decade. Because the American market had deemed my mother exotic, a label that did not have commercially positive implications until many decades later. She'd worked only in Europe. In Manila's inner circles, my mother's beauty, just like Nora's, had been put between quotation marks by some snipers in the gossip columns, and, most distressingly for her, by the film studio heads, who couldn't see her either as the star's love interest or as the female villain.

5:50the only two paths for an attractive woman in film in those days. My mother was a smiler, a cackler, but I was worried that the death of Nora, the most lachrymose of movie actresses, would have the power to reveal, if only for a short stretch, the shadow slivers of her otherwise well-curated self, the worrier, the weeper. Not having inherited my mother's looks, I had grown used to a certain caliber of so-called compliments, from Aunt Feli, who cooed them, and from my mother, who sensed that I needed consolation was clear. What a pleasant, comforting, reassuring face Lucy had. More or less the same pitying remarks had been offered by the teachers at the Catholic schools my mother sent me to, first in Manila and then in far-flung places like Spain and Italy, from which, to everyone's surprise, I had emerged as a girl who loved books, whose future was in writing.

6:55It had been the singular luck of my life to have a mother who waylaid strangers at parties with the tireless subject of her great novelist daughter. She told anyone who would listen that I had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. not true. This was later amended to two Pulitzers. Of course, these people had never heard of me, and though I underwent some initial embarrassment, I soon joined her in these, to me, harmless impostures. Once, I expected a friendly woman to contradict my mother's claim that I had been shortlisted for the Nobel Prize, but the woman's mouth opened in awe and admiration instead of in anger.

7:41My two novels had been only modestly successful, in sales, in critical praise, but I suspected that among the reasons my mother was proud of them was that there was a character in each book who was clearly based on her, a great beauty who, in old age, maintained the convictions of her reckless youth. My mother had raised me on her own, with my Aunt Feli's help, financial and otherwise. It was like having two mothers. This had caused great dismay for my grandparents, my grandfather in particular. In the last years of his life, he'd grown overly solicitous with my grandmother, hoping to make up for his past indiscretions, and I once overheard my grandmother telling my mother that she wished he would exhaust his energies on other women so that she could be left in peace by this arthritic pest.

8:38Here was the great triumph of my mother's life. She had run circles around her authoritarian father, baffling him so much, and perhaps even scaring him, that he'd expended all his vigilance on his other daughter, Feli, who, under his stern eye, he'd been sure, would become the most esteemed lawyer or doctor, and whose success in life would redound to him. For many years, the identity of my own father was unknown to me, though I was never especially eager to find out. My mother was two parents in one, both male, decisive and withholding, and female, melodramatic and fanciful, at the same time. And then, one day, she asked to speak with me alone in her bedroom in the old family house in Passay, to which we had returned for the last months of my grandmother's life.

9:35This had required another of the frequent uprootings of my growing up, from a Swiss boarding school in this instance. My grandfather had died the year before. My mother said, I suppose you want to know about your father. I didn't. He is a famous Italian movie director. And then she told me his name. This man was not Fellini, but could be considered famous in the same way that I could now be considered a great novelist. We were respected in our circles. I was not moved to contact my father. All I did with the knowledge was to confirm my suspicions that I was the result of my mother's partner's ugly features.

10:21Image searches at the libraries vindicated me with many pictures of a jowly, long-nosed man whose eyes were almost always shielded by sunglasses. My mother said, Your father saved me for a time. She meant that when they met, she was at a low ebb financially, and their arrangement was that he would pay for her living expenses. In other words, she was a kept woman. This did not shock me. In a way, I had been raised to be my mother's most trusted confidant. She thought nothing of telling me that, before her full-time employment at Dior, when the days between modeling gigs sometimes stretched into nail-biting months, she'd slept with men to pay the rent, to buy groceries and new clothes, and to maintain her hairdo.

11:15Her regrets, if she'd had any, had, I supposed, been sanded down in the many revisions of her self-narration. She later said that this means of earning money had continued intermittently, even into her successful modeling run. And not to excuse herself, but many of her peers, all of whom knew that they would not be young and good-looking forever, had done the same thing. Their clients were from a higher economic and social bracket. Aristocrats, industrialists, movie directors, record moguls, rock stars. I loved having such a character for a mother. Perhaps my approbation was unusual, but I didn't know any other way.

12:04From the time I turned 18 until I was 24, my mother made many energetic efforts on behalf of my romantic future. She never failed to introduce me to the sons of her friends, and she encouraged me to make good use of matchmaking services. But in recent years, she'd finally admitted her relief that I was in my early forties still single, for who else would be willing to devote their life to taking her to doctor's appointments, escorting her to church services, when fear of death turned her penitent, and going with her to the opera. This last obligation was the most unpleasant because I was unnerved by the sounds the singers made, and, though I loved melodrama, the plots in these operas were in a category of foolishness that I could not abide.

12:57But I understood what I was actually there for. At no other time would I be witness to this woman's free-flowing tears, ostensibly inspired by the onstage tragedy, but perhaps really, secretly shed for herself, out of a self-pity that she knew to be unwarranted, but that, as a Filipina, perhaps under the guiding star of such figureheads as Nora on Or, it was her duty to indulge. Aunt Fally clutched her chest when my mother told her of Nora's death. Was she ill? Aunt Feli asked. I told Lucy not to read that part of her obituary, my mother said. She turned to me. You are not going to speak about it in my presence.

13:46Aunt Feli looked at me and rolled her eyes in sympathy. She asked my mother, You knew her, didn't you? Only in passing. Every six months or so, we sat next to each other on a talk show. There are also pictures of you two together, Aunt Feli reminded her, at Imelda's film festival, for example. That couldn't be, because the festival was in the 80s, when I was no longer living in Manila. That was during my international phase, Hong Kong, the Riviera, Venice, London, Berlin. You were never in Berlin, Aunt Feli said. In my imagination, I was. This was another glory of my mother's. Not only did I not mind having a fantasist for a parent, I counted on her romantic fabrications to enliven our days together.

14:43Was I too forgiving? Perhaps, but only for the things that didn't matter. Aunt Feli said, Nora was always my favorite. She was also Mama's favorite. And Lucy's, too. Is that true? but you're far too young, Luce. I said, her old movies were always on TV. I wanted to be Nora when I grew up. I didn't know you wanted to be an actress. Thank God you're not, my mother said. Not an actress, but I used to lock myself in the bathroom and practice crying in front of the mirror. Like Nora, I could do it without moving any part of my face except my lips. When was the last time you cried, Lucy? My mother asked.

15:32I never cry. I've trained you well. It's like having a son for a daughter, my mother said approvingly. That's not healthy, Lucy. Of course I cry, I told Aunt Philly, humorously reversing myself. At movies, my mother said, that doesn't count. Of course at movies, when else? In life, I'm either laughing or clenching my fists. Don't lie, Lucy. I've never seen you angry. You are the Buddha. You are the Virgin Mary. My mother took only the slightest pause. Emphasis on virgin. She burst out laughing, slapping her thigh to emphasize her maniacal cheer. Lucy has men, Aunt Feli said. I do not, I replied.

16:25She does not. my mother said. Aunt Feli turned to me, you're not a Perez for nothing, you're an attractive girl. I will forever be a girl to both my aunt and my mother. What if I tell you that I don't have men but I have women? I didn't know where this courage was coming from, but I had joked about my sexual orientation enough times over the years for me to consider that I had said something without having to say it. As lovers? my mother asked. Is this a confession? Aunt Feli asked. Always the two women acted as if this were the first time I'd mentioned the subject. I've been waiting for this very day, my mother said.

17:11Tell me, if you are a lesbian, tell me about your girlfriend. Finally, here was a downside to being my mother's daughter. It was impossible to phase her, to throw her off balance. If I have men or women, I'm not telling either of you, that's for sure. You know we don't judge in this family, right? Aunt Feli said. You judge all the time, I replied. To hear you tell it, all of your co-workers are morons and incompetents. We don't judge about the important things, so is this really true? Are you a lesbian? Of course not. My cowardice did and didn't astound me. More than anything, it gave the lie to how old I was.

17:58Acquaintances often put my physical age at thirty. Emotionally, in daring and in spirit, I was much younger even than that. Love is love, Aunt Feli said. You should sew that on a pillowcase, my mother teased. Thank you, Gertrude Stein, I chimed in. Let's watch a Nora movie tonight, Aunt Feli said. Of course, there would be tears during the movie. Waterfalls. Many of Nora's weepies were festivals of suffering cherished by millions. The plot seldom made sense until you realized that the whole point was to get Nora to cry and then cry some more. But in the back of my mind, I was afraid I'd discover that the foundational love of my childhood was erroneous, simply poor taste.

18:50Thankfully, the movie we watched that night, Bona, by the director Lino Broca, did not let me down. How well it held up. Nora debased herself for love of an action movie bit player who used her as a servant while tomcatting not only behind her back but right in front of her face. My mother disavowed her first tears. How embarrassing, she said. She too was afraid to come face to face with the entertainments we had once fallen for now that we had grown so much more sophisticated. These days she wept for a higher level of kitsch, her operas. But tonight her sorrow flowed freely and she stopped wiping her tears away.

19:40I knew that my mother was not crying for some man in her past, but I also knew that she had secret griefs, and that it must have been a pleasure to be able to weep openly for Nora, the on-screen as well as the dead figure, while being the star of her own private soap opera. As for me, I wept for all the times my classmates had called me ugly, which had been all the more painful because I had a mother who was considered the Sophia Loren of the Orient. I wept for all the times my mother hadn't shown up when she was supposed to and for Aunt Feli's spinsterhood, but oddly not for my own. But mostly, I wept for Nora's death, which was also the death of part of my childhood.

20:28As for Aunt Feli's tears, I could not even begin to guess for what or for whom they were being shed. For the occasion, my mother had put on her Balenciaga, a black dress with two wide shoulder straps, a firm bodice, a full skirt that ended a few inches above the ankles, and the illusion of an underskirt supplied by a band of taffeta ruffles, also black, that peeked out from beneath the hem. A perfect festive morning costume. It had supposedly been made in the 1940s for an Italian countess or an English lady, then scrapped, and afterward either smuggled out of the workroom by a starry-eyed seamstress or, with the atelier head's approval given to one of the in-house models, it ended up in the hands of another model who bartered it with my mother for something precious that my mother couldn't remember.

21:30Some days it was a carton of Marlboros, on others a canister of expensive Chinese tea. The designer's label was not stitched inside the garment, which was to be expected of a discard, although so few failures, if any, were allowed to leave the Balenciaga workroom that no one could know for sure if that was indeed one of the house protocols. It was my mother's opera outfit, and each time she put it on, she crowed that she still had the figure for it, until about two years ago when she no longer did. The dry cleaner who'd kept the dress immaculate over the years made a joke when my mother took it in to be altered.

22:14Someone's enjoying life a little too much, huh? And on the spot, my mother changed her mind and took the garment back, and she never patronized that dry cleaner again. For Noronor Knight, the dress was zipped only halfway up my mother's back. She also wore a napkin around her neck so that her tears would not spoil the dress. A shawl served the same purpose at the opera. She meant for me to inherit it after her death, although lately she had been bugging me to try it on and wear it on a date or to one of my book events. She made no secret of wanting to live vicariously through my girlish, boyish figure.

22:58There had once been talk of selling it and spending the proceeds on a cruise for both of us, but, as I mentioned, there was the matter of the absence of any label, and to authenticate it might mean, as I understood it, taking it apart. And, more crucially, where would we get the money to pay the experts? I believed my mother when she said that it was a Balenciaga. I did not think that this was an instance of her taking Baroque liberties with the truth. What reason did she have to lie? In her closet were seven Ungaros, three Riquiels, a Kamali bathing suit and a Kamali sleeping bag coat, five Kenzo dresses, two pieces from the Ballet-Russe collection of Saint-Laurent, all of which were trades or payments in kind, none of them mothballed but instead worn ostentatiously and often.

23:55To my mother's credit, she owned no Chanel's, having refused several gifts. She took every opportunity to remind anyone who would listen that the French woman had been the lover of a German military intelligence officer during the Second World War. Who was this high-principled priestess? She was, because of such stances and suaveness, the love of my life. Sad Mom was the version of her I liked the least and cackling comedian my fave Maybe it was a mistake to watch Bona that night because over the next few days she grew introspective 71 is too young to die, she repeated to me When I didn't say anything, she continued Of course, drugs will do that to you Nora was on drugs Though I understood that Nora had been only playing characters who are martyrs and moral exemplars, in no other country's film industry was there a greater effort to conflate an actor's on-screen life with her real one.

25:07You know, when I go, it will not be because of drugs or drink. It was true. My mother was a kind of adept of the principle of refusal. And yet, despite that, there had been the weight gain, just enough for the zipper on the Balenciaga to become her sworn enemy. How is your new novel going? I never see you staying in your room for long these days. I'm twiddling my thumbs. What is the book about? You know I won't say anything, so why do you ask each time? I'm hoping, not for myself, but for you, that you'll publish soon. I know how unhappy having to teach makes you. Living with you while you teach is a chore.

25:56I know that's not true, I told my mother. You love hearing me complain. It confirms your bad view of the world and of young people. I don't believe their writing is really as terrible as you say. You're not going to get me to read from their work. I'm not turning their awfulness into your personal entertainment. You're so discreet, my mother said, clearly intending to wound me. Where did you get that trait from? Certainly not from me. You know what the two most useless qualities in life are? She didn't wait for me to reply. Discretion and dignity. Also, no matter how many times you bring up my love life, the answer is not going to change.

26:42Actually, have you ever thought that if you left me alone, I might be able to find somebody? I don't like this game of blame the mother. I ask about your love life just so we can have some contrast in our days. Three women living together, what are we? A check-off play? Just have a fling, but tell me all about it. Why do you never bother Aunt Feli about her love life? Feli has always lived under the shadow of my beauty. she will always consider herself a runner-up, not good enough for love. What about your love life? Ha! my mother said, none of the first and barely the second. Nor Onor's death would continue to send ripples out into our consciousnesses.

27:30I didn't know this when I went to the hair salon, but when I came back to the apartment with my newly shorn head, my mother opened her mouth wide and pointed at me. Just like Nora. Nora, too. She is back in our lives. It was true. I had, without realizing it, asked for Nora's famous haircut, which on her did not produce a gamine effect, but rather that of a tomboy. Though this was a Filipino slang word for butch, for lesbian adjacent, another way in which Nora had been disrespected by the gossip mongers, I meant it in the conventional sense of an outdoorsy adolescent whose long hair could only get in the way.

28:15On me, I didn't know quite how to think of my new look or what had driven me to request it. You look so beautiful, Aunt Feli said. The word shocked me, but I didn't say anything. My mother advocated once again for me to put on the Balenciaga. She would not relent, and perhaps because I was still stunned from having been characterized as beautiful, I gave in. Five minutes later, I walked into the living room in the dress. It fit perfectly. It did not wrinkle or gap or pinch anywhere. Model, model, my mother was clapping her hands. Of course, I could not take my mother's instructions seriously and had to exaggerate my catwalk march.

29:04Hold it, Aunt Feli said, and I posed for her phone. This will be my new lock screen pic, she said. Happy now? I asked my mother. You know that photographer from Vogue? My mother began. Alfonso? Among my friends, there were successful and not so successful artists, photographers, filmmakers, many of them diasporic or second-generation Filipinos, Alfonso being one of the latter. You could say that my mother's decision to move us to New York City more than twenty years earlier had been made on my behalf with a perfect understanding of the kind of ecosystem I would need in order to thrive. She would not have to worry about me after her death, and there was also the not insignificant fact that New York was Aunt Feli's home, her true love.

30:01Tell him that I will commission a picture of you with the hair in the dress, my mother said. Alfonso would gladly do it for free, I replied. At least let him know that I will take him out to dinner. We are not la bohème. Aunt Feli was beaming. Lucy, I can already see your new book jacket photo. I refrain from saying that I would never endorse a professional version of myself as a mid-century society hostess or starlet. The commission was carried out a few days later. Alfonso was even more excited to see me in the dress than my mother and Aunt Feli had been. I left his studio that afternoon with a print of the best frame in hand and Alfonso's hundreds of shots sent as a single zip file to my email.

30:54I could not say that the marriage of the new haircut and the Balenciaga had worked a kind of alchemy. I was still so, so recognizably myself, but there might have been the stirrings of some approaching numinous change. The short hair made me look neither gamine nor butch, but instead courageous, as if I were daring the world to look at my naked face. It transformed my plainness into confidence. And the Balenciaga, surprisingly, did not come across as a costume. On me it somehow evoked a nun's habit. This was because of the heaviness of the dress's construction and also because of the generous touch of chiaroscuro in Alfonso's black-and-white photography.

31:43The jeans are alive! My mother trilled when I presented Alfonso's print to her, meaning, I suppose, that I wasn't a model's child for nothing. You are beautiful, Aunt Feli said again. At least, my mother was more honest. Very jolie lad, she said with satisfaction. Of course, I had transported the dress with me on the subway and put it on only once I was at Alfonso's studio, and the first thing I did upon returning home, even before presenting my mother with a prize from the afternoon's excursion, was to restore the Balenciaga to her closet, as if to say that my relationship with it had been brief and that it had ended.

32:31The next time I had dinner with Alfonso and our circle of artist friends at a midtown restaurant, he passed around a dozen prints from our session. If I had known how many compliments my short haircut would elicit, would I still have chosen to have it done? Yes. I loved my new no-muss-no-fuss morning routine, but I would have made myself less available for social occasions. I did not want people talking about my face or my hair, two of the more inconsequential things about me, or about anyone, really. Chloe, one of the friends at the dinner, was an assistant curator at the Met. Though her remit was not fashion history, she was swift with her opinion on the dress.