Chokers encrusted with rubies. Strands of bright emeralds. Delicate headpieces framed by opalescent pearls. These are just some of the golden treasures belonging to her mother that Farah Khalid long admired — and knew she would one day inherit.
That day, however, came far too soon. Khalid’s mother unexpectedly became ill and split her collection between Khalid and her older sister, Lubna, before dying in 2013. Then, in 2021, Khalid inherited the rest of her mother’s items when Lubna died at 47.
Khalid wanted to honor her family members by wearing their jewelry, but she typically preferred silver. She decided to take some of the smaller trinkets to Lahore, Pakistan, and remake them into a chain with her mother’s and sister’s names translated into Urdu. The necklace was washed to tone down the yellow hues, so she could wear it more frequently.
“Having their names on me out of something that they used to wear — it just felt really important to be close to them in that way,” said Khalid, 48, a film director who lives in Brooklyn.
Passing down gold is a common practice among many Asian families. The precious metal isn’t just a superfluous adornment; it’s seen as a liquid asset: something that can be traded, act as collateral or melted down and sold. In pop culture, gold has even become something of its own character: Consider the mangalsutra, a traditional Indian necklace representing marriage, in the Netflix hit TV show, “Never Have I Ever,” and the 2025 rom-com “Picture This,” in which Simone Ashley plays a financially struggling photographer who must marry in order to access her family’s heirloom jewelry.
For many Asian American women like Khalid, coming into these accessories from their mothers or grandmothers prompt questions about how to bring the past into the present. Many women simply stow away these delicate heirlooms in safe deposit boxes of their own. Others save the jewelry for special occasions like their weddings. Some have even reshaped them into more contemporary, wearable pieces. Here are four other women and the stories their gold jewelry tell.
‘Tiny Little Piece of History’
Alicia Penn, 42, Charleston, S.C.
Growing up in Baltimore, Alicia Penn and her siblings would make routine stops at a jewelry store with their mother after visiting the temple. Her mother would spend an hour haggling with the owners, family friends who were also Cambodian, to buy gold accessories that she had no intention of keeping. Instead she would wear a piece until a friend showed interest in buying it, then resell it for a profit.
Penn never gave a second thought to what her mother did. “She explained it as a way to invest and enjoy buying stuff,” Penn said. “I thought it was an interesting way to think about investing, as opposed to traditional stocks and bonds.”
What Penn didn’t know then was that the Khmer Rouge, which was responsible for the deaths of at least 1.7 million Cambodians, had abolished Cambodia’s currency, making gold even more valuable. Penn’s parents left the country before the most brutal years, 1975 to 1979, but her maternal grandmother wasn’t as lucky.
She eventually made it to the United States in 1980 and helped raise Penn and her siblings until she died when Penn was still a child. Penn learned the story of how her grandmother escaped in 2022 during a visit to her mother’s bank locker, where she was invited to select a piece of jewelry: a tiny flat piece of gold in the shape of a mermaid.
“I’d never seen anything like it before,” Penn said.
The jewelry was one of two remaining charms of a gold belt that once belonged to her grandmother. She had sold and bartered pieces of the belt, made up of charms linked together, to escape the genocidal killing fields and flee to Thailand on foot.
Penn wears the charm on a heavy gold chain with a malleable hook enclosure. “It’s this tiny little piece of history that you can’t replicate,” Penn said. “Nobody makes things like this anymore.”
‘I Want to Wear It’
Nigar Iqbal Flores, 39, Clovis, Calif.
Marrying a man outside her Pakistani heritage has complicated the issue of who might inherit Nigar Iqbal Flores’s familial gold, compounded even further by the couple having three boys. “One issue that I have to think through is: Are my kids going to marry a Desi girl who would appreciate this jewelry?” Flores said. “Or are they going to marry a Desi girl who does not appreciate it?”
Her children are still young, but the questions do offer an opportunity for a new tradition, already a familiar concept in her family.
When Flores’s parents got married in Karachi, her paternal family insisted that her mother not work. She defied them, becoming a professor of home economics, and spent her first paycheck on an emerald set, including a necklace, earrings, a tikka (headpiece) and a ring.
“When I was a little kid, I remember being like, What a weird set because circles are not a traditional shape,” Flores said. The reason, her mother said, was that she had designed them herself.
Her mother gave Flores the set the day after her own wedding in 2012. Now Flores is on the lookout to wear her mother’s emerald jewelry to as many formal occasions as she can. “I only buy green shalwar kameez now,” she said, referring to the traditional outfit of loose trousers and a long shirt. “Because I want to wear it.”
Something Reimagined
Robin Kasner, 41, Chicago
Robin Kasner remembers her 16th birthday being a bit of an ordeal. She was given a jade bangle that was measured so closely to her wrist that she needed the help of her popo (maternal grandmother), her mother, some oil and a plastic bag to slip it on. “I never took it off for 20 years,” Kasner said. “Until it shattered.”
A spontaneous visit to a batting cage led to it splitting it into four pieces. Kasner called her mother in tears, who didn’t mirror her panic. She said that in Chinese culture, when jade breaks, it’s a form of protection, and she advised Kasner to keep the pieces. But Kasner was determined to find a way to salvage it for posterity.
She came across Spur, a jeweler based in New York that reimagines heirlooms as everyday pieces. The broken bangle was remade into something else entirely: a smooth, curved jade pendant attached to a 22-karat gold chain. “I love that the broken piece was made into a new piece, and that it’s something that I can hopefully pass along to my future daughter,” Kasner said.
An ‘Acceptance of the Relationship’
Lisa Kumar, 51, Franklin, Mich.
As a child, Lisa Kumar didn’t love the yellow gold she associated with Indian jewelry. But as her mother, now 83, began bequeathing more and more pieces to her, she finally came around. For Kumar, the jewelry offers a reminder of having been hard-won.
Kumar’s father came as a student in the 1960s to the United States from Mumbai. He soon met her mother, who is white and American, and they fell in love and got married — a decision that his parents weren’t pleased about. The couple made a trip to India shortly after their nuptials to meet the family, and, when it was time to leave, Kumar’s mother decided to stay behind for almost two months to travel around southern India with her new in-laws. “That was a really pivotal moment in her relationship with them because they didn’t think that she could hack it,” Kumar said. “And she did.”
Over the following years, Kumar’s grandmother gave her daughter-in-law jewelry: heavier pieces but also simple things she could wear, like half a set of gold bangles. “My grandmother giving all of this over to her was a sign of acceptance of the relationship, acceptance of my mother,” Kumar said.
Now Kumar tries to wear the accessories whenever she can and plans to pass them on to her own daughter, who is 20 and mostly wears silver. “I’m hopeful that as she ages,” Kumar said, “she’ll come around to it the way that I have.”
This story is part of a series on how Asian Americans are shaping American popular culture. The series is funded through a grant from The Asian American Foundation. Funders have no control over the selection and focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of this series.
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