Listen to the Squawking Chicken: When Mother Knows Best, What's a Daughter To Do? A Memoir (Sort Of) (10 page)

After dropping my bags off and tidying up, we went out to meet Ma’s family for dinner. Grandmother and Grandfather were there, as well as my aunts and uncles and their husbands and wives. Also some of my younger cousins. Ma waited until the first course was served.

“Do you all notice something special about Elaine’s teeth? Everyone, look at Elaine’s teeth. Elaine, show Grandmother your teeth. Can you see her teeth? Do you know why her teeth are like that? Elaine, tell them about your teeth.”

She told them about my teeth. She told them about my expensive retainer sacrificed in memory of Barbara Yung. She told them about how I was preserving Barbara Yung’s memory. She told them that Barbara Yung was my tooth idol. She was loud and detailed and repetitive. By the end of the story, everyone else was laughing too.

It was the same the next day, when we met my Uncle and Auntie Lai for dim sum. Auntie Lai is my godmother. She and her husband have three children and her youngest son, Peter, is my ma’s godson. Peter is a year older than me. His sister, Sandra, is four years older than him. And their eldest brother, Thomas, my first crush, is a year older than her. I was always the baby of the group. Peter always made fun of me to impress his siblings, and I was always trying to impress all of them. So I was mortified when Ma started in on the story about my retainer. I begged her to stop. And, of course,
she wouldn’t. She reminded me of my own words. Those are
your
teeth.
Your
mouth.
Your
face.
Your
life. Don’t you want to stand up for Barbara Yung’s life? All summer long, she told the story of my retainer. Every time there was a new audience, my Barbara Yung teeth and my discarded retainer became the topic of conversation.

The thing is, my dental dedication to Barbara Yung’s memory sounded so much more noble in my own head than it did when I heard Ma explaining it to people over and over and over again. In fact, it sounded really stupid. What kind of an idiot fucks with her own teeth over a dead actress? The Squawking Chicken’s voice stripped away all the glamour and drama I’d attached to my retainer decision. It exposed the foolishness of my actions. In making me listen to the story, repeatedly, she broke down the juvenile romanticism that compelled me to throw out that retainer, and all the subsequent rationalizations I had built up inside myself to justify what I’d done. And it was that much more effective because she had an audience. The audience wasn’t for her. The audience was for me. The audience ensured that the story, her telling of it, landed with me each and every time, knowing that I’d know that there were fresh ears to hear it, and to judge it for what it was—totally moronic.

There was a second benefit to the Squawking Chicken’s public shaming of me for my retainer. At the end of the
summer, before she sent me home, I asked her if she was going to make me get a new one. She told me that she and Dad had discussed it over the phone and that they had agreed that they wouldn’t be taking me back to the dentist to refit me for another. This was partly due to finances. But my teeth were
almost
straight anyway. More importantly, though, Ma said that I would have to learn to live with the consequence. She cautioned that a couple of crooked teeth was getting off easy. It wasn’t permanently damaging. It wouldn’t alter the course of my life. But that it was a good, lasting reminder, every time I opened my mouth, of a rash, ill-conceived decision I had made in my youth. Then she explained the motivation for why she kept at me about the retainer, all summer long, every chance she got, and always in front of other people. Ma was preparing me for future criticism: “My criticism of you always comes from a place of love. But as you get older, your critics won’t love you. They will criticize you to hurt you. I am preparing you for criticism that comes from your enemies.”

By verbally assaulting me all summer, by shaming me publicly, by constantly reminding me of my mistake, the Squawking Chicken was not only teaching me how to live with it, but inuring me to the criticism that would result from it. She wanted me to learn how to take it. She was helping me figure out how to deal with it. She was showing
me how to recognize when to eat it when I was wrong, how to grow from it and move forward, and, when I was ready, how to use it to get stronger.

This was also the reason she shamed me by comparing me unfavorably to a piece of barbecue pork when I struck her in the leg with my Fighting Jade Stick ruler. The immediate lesson, of course, was that children shouldn’t run around irresponsibly with rulers flying around in the air. People get hurt. How many times have you seen kids these days playing with something they probably shouldn’t be and one of them ending up in tears? The parents rationalize and apologize in hushed tones. The ruler-wielding culprit is reasoned with, and five minutes later he’s doing it again.

Me? The Fighting Jade Stick was never again seen at my grandmother’s mah-jong den. I spent the rest of that evening at my mother’s feet, singing the theme song to
The Legend of the Condor Heroes
, not knocking over any other tiles; I was rewarded for being obedient at the end of the night with a “bonus chip” from every mah-jong lady at the table.

As you can imagine, though, if this had gone down in present-day North America at a yummy mummy play group, they’d probably call child services on Ma’s ass for abuse. Shame isn’t considered an effective parenting device these days. But shame was one of the Squawking Chicken’s most effective parenting devices. Because there is nothing like
the impression left behind by shame. People remember their shame. Children remember their shame. And if the shame resulted from a mistake they made, well, there’s a really good chance they won’t make that mistake again. That’s what my ma believed. In her mind, shame is one of the consequences of doing something wrong. And it is perhaps the
least
consequential consequence of doing something wrong. As she explained it to me later that night—
You are lucky that you only hurt me tonight and that you didn’t seriously injure someone else. If you hurt someone else, you would owe that person for life. You would be saying sorry for life. You would be under that person forever. You are lucky Mama only embarrassed you. Mama embarrassing you is much better than you having to say sorry to Mrs. Tam forever. You would be indebted to Mrs. Tam forever. No daughter of mine will ever have to say sorry to that Mrs. Tam.
(Therein followed a story about how Mrs. Tam always cheated.)
Better to be shamed and disciplined by someone who loves you, who will never use your mistakes against you, than to send you off into the world unprepared, to be shamed by outsiders who will never forgive and never forget.

Ma definitely never forgot Scarecrow Chiu’s son. Scarecrow Chiu (a nickname Ma gave her because she was so thin) was
one of Ma’s regular mah-jong mates in our gated community, Fairview Park, in Hong Kong. I was twelve, the year after my retainer drama, when Ma and my stepfather bought a house in the new development. It was set up like a Stepford community—cookie-cutter Western-style homes with drives on numbered streets in lettered blocks. We lived on 4th Street in J Block, number 35. My godparents had moved there the year before. When Ma went to visit, she fell in love with the neighborhood because it reminded her of the Canadian subdivision we’d once lived in. She wanted me to be able to hop on my bike and ride around safely when I came to see her every summer. I was getting older and she knew I’d be bored just hanging out with her at mah-jong all day. There was a country club at Fairview Park. Ma became a member and I’d go swimming there with the other mah-jong orphans every afternoon while our mothers gambled from day into night. After dinner, the mothers would resume their games and we’d take our bikes down to the ravine, eat ice cream, listen to music, play card games, and flirt with the other Fairview Park kids. It was innocent adolescent mischief. But there was one kid who took it to another level.

Scarecrow Chiu’s youngest son, Little Geet, was a sweet kid. He wasn’t mean-spirited, but he had a wild streak and way too much energy, even for us, and we were all scamps. When the rest of us went home, Geet would set off
firecrackers near the convenience store all by himself. He got busted for stealing fish balls at the noodle stalls. He was constantly punking the security guards who manned the booth at the Fairview Park main entrance, buzzing the alarms for no reason, or jamming the gates so that cars couldn’t get through. Pretty soon he had a reputation around the neighborhood. And every time he screwed up, his mother, Scarecrow Chiu, would make excuses for him.

One night, the mothers decided to have dinner at the country club. We kids had spent the afternoon at the pool and we were told to meet our parents in the dining room after getting changed. Ma asked me where Little Geet was when I sat down at the table. I told her we hadn’t seen him all day. Scarecrow Chiu called home, he wasn’t there. She called park security. They said they hadn’t seen him either. Everyone started to worry. By now he was an hour late for dinner. One of the mah-jong aunties was married to a cop. She was about to tell him to put out a search when Geet walked into the dining room, on top of the world. Turns out he’d snuck out to go into town with some of his older friends from school to play video games. If that had been me, my ma would have skinned me, right there in front of the entire country club membership, with no hesitation. So I thought, well shit, Little Geet is going to get it.

But Scarecrow Chiu just told her son how worried she’d
been about him and to never do that again. Then she asked the kitchen staff to warm up some food because he was hungry. The Squawking Chicken was unimpressed. She was so unimpressed that she tried to shame Little Geet on Scarecrow Chiu’s behalf. She laid into him for stressing out his mother. She lectured him for being irresponsible, and for potentially putting himself in danger by not telling anyone where he was going. She spent the whole rest of the dinner itemizing his mistakes until his head hung low, and he pushed away his plate, no longer in the mood to eat. Which is when Scarecrow Chiu pleaded with Ma to stop, defending Little Geet, blaming herself for not providing enough activities to keep him occupied during the day. Ma wasn’t having it. She then announced to the rest of us that because of Little Geet’s adventure, we were now all expected to
boe doe
, or check in, every ninety minutes, no matter what, no matter where we were. Fairview Park, back then, was small enough anyway so that you could get from one end to the other in ten minutes on a bike. Ma decided that ten minutes out of every couple of hours wouldn’t stop our fun. Reluctantly, we agreed. That was the beginning of what would become my lifelong habit of
boe doe
-ing. Even now, whatever I’m doing, wherever I am, I check in with my mother. When I get into a cab, I call her. When the cab drops me off, I call her. When I’m out with the dogs, I call her. At the end of the
walk, I call her. I
boe doe
all the time. I just never want Ma to have to wonder where I am. I want her to be able to picture me. The world feels whole when we know where the other is.

That night, none of us dared to ask to go back out. Except, of course, for Little Geet. As soon as dinner was over, he begged his ma to let him go play basketball. She eventually agreed. While we were all walking back to our houses, I listened as Ma pleaded with Scarecrow Chiu to put some limits on her son’s behavior. Little Geet has a kind, gentle heart, Ma said, but he needs direction and he’s too easily swayed. Scarecrow kept insisting that it was fine, that he was a good boy who just needed his space. But Ma warned Scarecrow that if she didn’t rein him in now, she would regret it. That she was doing him a disservice by not only not giving him structure, but also by not calling him out on his mistakes, by sparing him of guilt, by sparing him of shame and humiliation when he was wrong. Because he never thought twice before he fucked up, she was setting him up for failure in the long run. Scarecrow stayed silent. She wasn’t strong enough to discipline her child.

The Squawking Chicken ended up being right. A few weeks later, Little Geet, who was underage, took his parents’ car out for a joyride. He lost control and smashed it into the playground. At dim sum the next day, Scarecrow dismissed
the incident, saying that insurance would cover it and that all boys are fascinated by cars anyway, and that Little Geet had learned his lesson. I wasn’t allowed to hang out with Little Geet anymore after that. When I returned to Hong Kong the following summer, Ma told me that Little Geet had started running drugs for the triads. Gradually, as Little Geet’s criminal involvement increased, Scarecrow pulled back from the mah-jong group, embarrassed by her son’s shady activities. Ma and her friends tried to reach out to her but by then she couldn’t face people anymore, blaming her own weakness for Little Geet’s fate. Little Geet died when he was twenty-two of a heroin overdose. Scarecrow was the one who found him in the bathtub. I was in college when Ma called to tell me. She was very, very sad when she found out.