Listen to the Squawking Chicken: When Mother Knows Best, What's a Daughter To Do? A Memoir (Sort Of) (13 page)

Each time I cut bangs, my luck was indeed diminished. Pimples erupted all over my forehead, and sometimes even lower, on my cheeks and chin, the ashes of those three flames scattered across the battlefield of my face. Each time I did it without consulting the Squawking Chicken. Each time she was unsympathetic. “Look at you. I told you about bangs. So now, not only are you ugly, you’re not even lucky.”

It’s true. I wasn’t lucky during my bangs phases. Even though I loved the way they looked, the way they framed my eyes, gave them some mystery and intrigue, the zits weren’t exactly making me more attractive, and I found that I wasn’t as quick with my studies, I wasn’t as happy with my friends, I didn’t have as much money to spend.

The last time I had bangs I was twenty-two years old. And it wasn’t bangs, exactly, but I had cut my hair very short, in a pixie style, and was trying to grow it out so that the front part of my hair was like bangs, with nowhere else to fall but into my forehead. I broke out. And I had a boyfriend at the time—with a mother who hated me. One night, when he brought me to dinner, his mother said to me, in
front of his entire family: “You should eat more fruit. It might help with your skin problem.”

I was mortified. He broke up with me a few weeks after that. Sure, we weren’t right for each other in the end, but that meddling mother of his wasn’t helping. I partly blame her and I partly blame those fucking bangs. I haven’t had bangs ever since . . . though I considered it, in my late twenties, only now I was wiser and asked Ma about it first. This time, she came at it a different way. “You are approaching thirty. It is a time in your life when you have the most potential. It is time to strike. It is time to push, hard, for the next decade, to set yourself up for when you start to age and slow down. Never cut bangs in your thirties. Never go into your thirties with the three flames at half their potency or less. Why would you handicap yourself? Why would you risk that? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Why jeopardize your future for a goddamn hairstyle?

Feng Shui Blackmail.

Sometimes, though, Feng Shui Blackmail can make you look like a real dick. Ma was reading my Chinese horoscope a few years ago. She said that my luck was good, but fragile. That I had to be careful because my luck, while generally favorable, was vulnerable to attack from sinister forces. I was to stay away from hospitals and funeral homes, especially funeral homes. Under no circumstances was I to attend a
funeral, preferably ever, unless it was a very close family member. And it had to be
close
.

The Funeral Policy is still in effect. And I am super stressed about it. Because, well, you never know. And God forbid, if something shitty were to happen to one of my friends, I’d want to be there for them. I don’t want to be the asshole who doesn’t support a friend just because I’m worried about my luck. Whenever I try to discuss this conundrum with the Squawking Chicken, she always answers the same way. “You go to the funeral, you will get back luck. Why you want to bring bad luck on your friend? This is very stupid. Why do your friends want such a stupid friend?”

There are times, though, when I suspect that Ma blackmails me not for any legitimate fortune-telling/good-luck/bad-luck–feng shui reasons, but simply because she just doesn’t like something I’m wearing. I’ll be in a dress, for example, and she’ll hate the style, so she’ll tell me that I might not do as well in my meetings, and not be as lucky, because the dress color is unlucky. I’ll wear the same color a week later, in a different cut, and she’ll be all over it. “You looks good.” Now that I’m on television, she is particularly critical of my clothing and appearance choices. If it’s a lip color she’s not fond of, that lip color will automatically mean I’ll screw up my lines. If my blouse isn’t to her preference, it’ll be the cause of my missing my cues.

And still,
still
, even though I know it’s probably nothing to do with actual luck, she has manipulated me so successfully through Feng Shui Blackmail that I’ll change anyway. I will take off the unlucky trousers and replace them with a pair we both agree on. I will adjust my jacket until she approves. And when she approves, I’ll go on the air with that much more confidence. Because the Squawking Chicken said it was lucky. So how could it possibly not be?

Feng Shui Blackmail is the reason I was married on a Friday, a year before Jacek and I had planned on actually getting married. He proposed in October 2000. We wanted to take our time in planning the wedding. We hoped to do it in 2002. Six months after Jacek proposed, Ma called me late in the evening. She’d been studying her fortune-telling books and looking at her feng shui calendar, comparing my birth coordinates to Jacek’s. I was born in 1973, the year of the Ox. Jacek was born in 1975, making him a Rabbit. There was a lucky day that was coming up very soon, much sooner than we were initially prepared for. Ma pressed upon us the auspiciousness of the date. She said it was the perfect date. She said it was the most ideal day to begin our life together. She insisted that we seriously consider moving the wedding up by an entire year so that we could take advantage of this day. It was November 2, 2001, a Friday, and the
ceremony had to happen between eleven and one o’clock in the afternoon.

Jacek was new to all this Chinese feng shui business. He comes from a Polish background. His father is an engineer, his mother an architect. Feng shui isn’t their thing. So he was understandably mystified by all this culture shock that was coming his way. It’s not that he wasn’t willing to push up our wedding, it’s that he was totally confused by the reason for it.

That’s how feng shui is—it cannot be explained, at least not scientifically. I told him about a friend of ours who really wanted to get married on a certain day because it was a Saturday on a good weekend in the fall. She was able to secure her favorite venue, ignoring the caution that came from the fortune-teller her family had hired to calculate the luckiness or unluckiness of that particular date. The fortune-teller warned that the marriage would be disastrous if they went ahead with it. The fortune-teller offered other options. Our friend dismissed them all. She and her groom were married on the day of her choice. And they were divorced six weeks later.

Jacek was like, okay, yeah, but he was cheating on her, that would still have happened even if they picked another day. Would it have? The prediction that that day was cursed
came true. And if it wouldn’t kill us to get married a year earlier, why not go with it, especially when we were lucky enough to get a day that was so lucky for us?

We were married on the morning of November 2, 2001, at eleven o’clock in Vancouver. It rains a lot in Vancouver, especially during that time of year. It had rained overnight, it was raining that morning when I woke up, and the forecast called for rain the rest of the day. An hour before our ceremony, though, the clouds drifted away. The sky was clear. It was actually sunny for the next four hours, in time for us to exchange vows, take pictures and return to the shelter of our hotel, at which point the rain returned. Coincidence or feng shui fortune-telling?

Jacek was starting to come around, but he was still confused from time to time. Sometimes it was due to language. Like he didn’t understand why my dad kept giving him pants. The word for “pants” in Chinese is
fu
. It’s pronounced in Cantonese exactly the same as the word for “wealth.” We Chinese do this a lot with our words—when they sound similar, we attach their meanings, even if their actual meanings have nothing to do with each other.

For example, the word for the number four sounds sort of like the word for “death.” They’re two entirely different characters (in English that would be the equivalent of two totally different spellings) but close phonetically; one is just
delivered in a lower register. Because of their similar sounds, the number four is considered to be the unluckiest number in Chinese culture. This is why there is never a fourth floor or a fourteenth floor in a Chinese building, have you noticed? They skip the number entirely, not unlike the way thirteen is often avoided in Western culture.

So the reason my dad kept giving Jacek pants was because he was symbolically passing on to his son-in-law his
fu
, or his “wealth,” in the form of . . . trousers. They weren’t the most stylish trousers. At least not for our generation. But Jacek kept stacking them in the closet during the first two years of our marriage like he was stacking cash. He didn’t quite get it, necessarily, but they kept coming, so he kept saving.

Jacek’s feng shui epiphany came in the spring of 2002. Ma called to say that she was sending Dad over from Toronto to spend time with us in Vancouver on his own. Dad was born in the year of the Rat. The opposing sign of the Rat is the Horse. It was the year of the Horse and according to the almanac, Rats were passing through a shitty cycle. The almanac suggested that in the early part of May that year, Rats would be well advised to stay away from home, go on holiday. Ma told Dad to go visit us while she stayed back. We had a great time with Dad. We took time off from work and drove over to Vancouver Island, booking a town house on
the water, and Dad went whale watching and for jogs along the beach. On our last day there, Ma phoned to tell us that there was something wrong with the car. She was driving it to the mall and on the way there, one of the front tires came off. It was a freak accident but she was okay. She drives really slowly and she doesn’t take the highway so when it happened, she wasn’t hurt and neither was anyone else. But the thing is, if Dad had been home, he would have been behind the wheel, and he would have been on the highway at top speed. He would not have been so lucky. Except . . . he was. Because he had left town. My parents and I were convinced that Dad had avoided disaster. Jacek too. He was now a full-fledged believer. And the Squawking Chicken took full advantage.

She stepped up her Feng Shui Blackmail after the wedding. It started with a simple suggestion: start your day with hot water and keep it up throughout. Hot water is the beverage of choice for old Chinese ladies. They believe there are certain health benefits. Water of course is good for you, no matter the culture. Hot water, as opposed to cold water, however, warms up your energy, it fires up your spirit, it’s pure, it’s sterile. But Ma’s insistence on drinking hot water was for more than just good health. As always, it was about feng shui and fortune-telling and it had magical properties that she was reluctant to explain.

There are those who maintain that revealing the secrets behind feng shui and fortune-telling will weaken their enchantments. Part of their power comes from blind devotion. If you trust, without question, without justification, they will reward you for your loyalty. Ma was of the mind that the more she divulged about the workings of feng shui and fortune-telling, the less effective her methods would be because she would be betraying an ancient code, something else she’s never been very forthcoming about. The point is you just have to believe. That’s it. And if you don’t believe, well, you’ll see. That’s Feng Shui Blackmail: the “or else” is always implied.

Whenever I’d ask, “But why? What’s going to happen if I don’t [do whatever weird voodoo it is that you’re telling me to do]?” she’d just wave me off, impatiently, almost angrily: “I don’t want to say . . . but it’s up to you.” The “or else” would hang there, over my head, like an upside-down jack-in-the-box just waiting to pop out and fuck me up. Though she’ll never confirm it, I suspect the hot water has something to do with money. In Cantonese, “water” is slang for “money.” Kind of like the word “bucks” in English means “dollars.” A hundred bucks equals a hundred dollars. In Cantonese we say, “One block of water equals a hundred dollars.” So you never want to have a leak in your house, and if you do, you’d better take care of it as soon as possible. Otherwise, you’re
losing money. My assumption then is that Ma’s hot water obsession has to do with us replenishing our money supply. Whenever I bring it up, she always changes the subject.

So we drink the water almost religiously.

About three months after she had us adopting the water routine, she commanded that we start lubricating our eyes, preferably as soon as we woke up. Ma was more accommodating about providing answers to this one. She explained to us that our eyes are the source of our wisdom and decision-making ability. The eye drops were nutrition for the eyes. They would make them clearer, and that would make “seeing” a lot smoother so that we could identify trouble more efficiently and opportunity more often. Eye drops is what I get for my birthday. A supersize box from Costco—this is my annual gift. And that’s it. And when I complain about how that’s a shitty present, the Squawking Chicken counters with, “My present will make your eyes stronger, and if your eyes are stronger, you will be more successful. How is a sweater going to make you more successful? Why are you such an ingrate?”

So we moisten our eyes almost religiously.

The eye drops were followed by the papayas a year later. We were to both start eating papayas. Ma wouldn’t divulge whatever it was that made papayas so special for us. “I’m telling you. Just eat the papayas. Stop asking questions.”

Papayas aren’t exactly the most economical fruit. So at first, Jacek and I would halve them. When Ma found out we were halving them, she asked us how much we were paying every time we went to play golf. “For ten measly dollars, you’re skimping on papayas? Don’t say I didn’t tell you when you . . . you know.”

“What?”

“You know.”

“What?” Nothing. End of discussion. Feng Shui Blackmail works every time.

So my husband and I stopped halving our papayas and started eating one each. About a year into our papaya eating, my gossip business began gaining momentum. Two years into our papaya eating, my gossip blog caught the attention of the producers at
Etalk
, a Canadian entertainment news show. Though I had no television experience, I was offered a part-time position as a reporter. Six months later they gave me a contract. It was 2006 and with both the television gig and my blog, celebrity gossip, my passion, also became my dream career. Three years into our papaya eating, Jacek quit his job at a telecommunications company and managed the administrative and sales side of our gossip blog full-time. I was, by this point, completely reliant on papayas. No day was complete without a papaya. A day without a papaya was a day that would certainly turn out to be less-than . . . even
though, frankly, I don’t like papayas. I don’t like the taste. I don’t like the texture. And they’re a pain in the ass. You have to scoop out the seeds. It’s messy. It’s not a wash-and-go fruit.