Mother and Child Reunion

I love the oddball things I learn by accident

Miho, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A while back, my husband and creative partner Jerry Clement and I were looking for quotes about mothers and motherhood for a couple of different projects (he was working on a Mother’s Day video, I was working on a quote collection for our website) and we ran across the story behind the Paul Simon song “Mother and Child Reunion.”

I didn’t understand the title of the song when it was released in 1972, but there were a lot of songs written during that period that didn’t make sense to me.

Plenty of listeners tried to figure it out. Had a mother or child died and joined the other in the afterlife? Was a child who had been adopted about to meet his birth mother? Did it have something to do with abortion?

Here’s the real story:

Paul Simon was eating in a Chinese restaurant in New York. A dish on the menu featured chicken and eggs, and was named “Mother and Child Reunion.”

Apparently, this is not an uncommon menu item for Chinese restaurants.