What My Mom Taught Me About Love That I Couldn’t Have Learned Anywhere Else

By Angie  |  Co-Founder, Little Zi

April 2026  ·  6 min read

Zizzi has a way of showing love through her hands. Through what she makes. Through the things she never says out loud but sews into every stitch.

This post is not a letter to the reader. It is a love letter to my mom. You are welcome to read along.

Her Hands

If you have ever held something my mother made — a wedding gown, a baby blanket, a Little Zi garment — you have held a kind of love that does not announce itself.

There are no big speeches. No public devotion. Just a thousand small decisions about thread tension and fabric softness and the exact angle of a neckline, all of them quietly insisting: I love whoever wears this.

That is the only language she has ever fully trusted. Her hands. Her work. What she makes.

Where She Comes From

To understand her, you have to start in Peru.

She was born in Peru to a Japanese mother and a Chinese Cantonese father, raised inside Chinese culture — Chinese New Year, Chinese holidays, Chinese ways of seeing the world. Her family ran businesses, and the one I always come back to is my grandmother’s wedding gown business.

That is where my mother started.

At sixteen, she was already learning the trade from the ground up — the way our family has always learned everything. You start at the bottom. You learn how to do the smallest job before anyone trusts you with the bigger one. By her twenties, she had her own wedding gown business and was branching out into full wedding planning — flowers, food, music, tables, chairs, the whole thing. She did runway shows in Peru. She was, in every sense, becoming.

Then Peru went into hyperinflation, and the family had to leave.

Japan

We landed in Japan. And my mother — who had been running her own design business in Peru just a year before — took a blue collar job in a textile factory.

Try to sit with that for a moment. The same woman who had built a wedding planning empire from scratch was now on a factory floor in a country whose language she did not yet speak.

She did not complain about it. Not once that I can remember.

She worked with textiles in Japan because she knew textiles. She was very, very good at it. And quietly, in the background, she was already thinking about what came next.

A Memory I Think About Often

When I was a little girl in Japan, my mother used to bring me to work with her.

I would sit upstairs with the secretary, doing my homework, while my mom worked downstairs in the factory.

Sometimes, in other jobs, I was the translator — a little kid carrying her mother’s words from one language into another, doing my best to be useful.

I did not understand it then. But what I was actually doing, every one of those days, was watching her work. Watching what tenacity looks like up close. Watching what it means to show up to a hard, unglamorous job and refuse to be smaller than you are.

My mom didn’t just say those words. She acted them. And watching her act them, I think, changed me on a DNA level.

How She Loves

She is not a verbal mother. She has never been the kind of mom who says “I am so proud of you” out loud.

What she does is show up. She works. She makes things. She picks fabric for hours. She fixes what is broken. She watches her grandchildren and feeds them and worries about them and stays up late thinking about what we should make next.

She loves through doing. Through making. Through the things she gives us and the things she refuses to compromise on. Through every single piece of Little Zi that has ever left our hands.

The Secret in the Name

I teased this in another post a while back. Now it is time to tell you.

The “Zi” in Little Zi comes from Zizzi. From my mother.

But it is also a quiet wish. A blessing, almost. Every time we send a Little Zi piece out into the world, my hope — our hope — is that the baby who wears it grows up with a little bit of what she has.

That is what we are stitching into every garment, every basket, every gift set. Not just Pima cotton and artisanal organic cotton, though those things matter. We are stitching in her.

Legacy

Now that she has grandchildren, she has started using the word “legacy” out loud.

It catches in my throat every time I hear her say it.

This is a woman who came to a new country with almost nothing and worked in a factory while her toddler did homework upstairs. To watch her, decades later, talk about what she is leaving behind for her granddaughters — to watch her dream that big out loud — is one of the great gifts of my life.

Every Piece Carries Her

I hope you can feel it when it arrives.

And mama — if you are reading this and you have a mother who loved you through her hands, through what she made, through what she did, through the things she never said — please tell her today. Or call her. Or just sit with the gratitude for a minute.

Mothers like ours don’t ask to be celebrated. Which is exactly why we have to do it.

I love you, mom. 💛

— Angie

Co-Founder, Little Zi

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