Listen to the Squawking Chicken: When Mother Knows Best, What's a Daughter To Do? A Memoir (Sort Of) (20 page)

“Hi Gab, it’s nice to see you again.” Fresh from relieving himself in an alley, my father offered his hand to Gab, Gab
who had a home, with a bathroom, and a sink, in which he could have washed said hand, only he chose to go freestyle instead.

That’s so Low Classy.

I couldn’t look at Gab. I hurried my parents back into the car. I busted out of there with them like they had just robbed the place. And then, when we were a safe distance away, I wailed.

“WHYYYYYYYYYYYY did you just not go into the house, Dad? Why did you have to pee outside? It’s so uncivilized!”

Dad didn’t have a chance to respond. It was like I was having an unreasonable tantrum and Ma was just tolerating me. “Daddy had to go. Do you know how long it took us to get here? Traffic was bad. Hold pee for one hour? Daddy can’t pee in the Mercedes. This is a nice car.”

And that was it. No further explanation required. Ma can always rationalize away her own Low Classy. The wayward youth who leans outside the 7-Eleven is headed for trouble. The Squawking Chicken playing slots at the casino with one leg hitched up on the ledge and a toothpick sticking out of her mouth is simply . . . comfortable.

Sometimes the Squawking Chicken’s voluntary and stubborn blindness to her own Low Classy ways—the farting, the no-tax haggling—just makes for a quirky, funny story. She is rigid and unwilling to compromise—characteristics that have served her well in difficult times, qualities that form the cornerstone of a formidable spirit, an unwavering, big personality, a personality that has guided me mostly by good example but also, in a very significant way, by showing me how
not
to be.

I don’t walk and smoke (anymore). I never jiggle my leg. Pouting feels unnatural and it looks ridiculous. Forget touching, Jacek and I barely acknowledge each other in public. I have adhered to the Squawking Chicken’s Low Classy list and often side-eye others for violating it. But where I’ve broken from her is that objecting to Low Classiness should not
prevent you from showing empathy for those who are unwittingly Low Classy. The same way she sees no contradiction in her moral stance against someone like Low Classy Jane, who, really, is hurting no one with her baby talk and her curious but not necessarily shady friendships with all her paramours, and the Low Classy lack of compassion Ma herself demonstrated toward Jane, who may have just needed some company. It’s one thing to observe a standard of comportment—to practice good manners by avoiding Low Classy behaviors like leg jiggling and walking while smoking. But Ma doesn’t see the cruelty in criticizing those who’ve violated those standards. And she certainly doesn’t recognize the hypocrisy in the criticism—that while it may be Low Classy to carry on with several men at the same time or home wreck a marriage, it’s probably also Low Classy to make a spectacle out of complaining about the two-timer and humiliating the other woman. To say nothing of the effect that humiliation has on other people observing it all go down. I felt bad for Jane when Ma was judging her so openly, just like I was probably feeling bad for the home wrecker when we crashed her apartment. I was only eleven that day and I didn’t understand it at the time, why I was sobbing by the time we left, but I realized it was exactly how I felt as a grown-up hearing her attacks on Jane. I was distressed because Ma was bullying them.

This, perhaps, is the Squawking Chicken’s greatest flaw: she is severely lacking in empathy. Whatever the reason—be it the code of Low Classy, or the rules of feng shui and fortune-telling, or as a result of her own trials and tribulations—she sucks at a basic principle of human communication: understanding. And because she is so bad at such a crucial element in building relationships, she also sucks at forgiveness and, therefore, friendship.

My roommate in my second and third years of college was a girl named Winnie. Winnie and I met in first year because we were next-door neighbors in the dorm. We weren’t close and she wasn’t someone I hung out with regularly on weekends when I’d hit up the local student bar scene, but we did play mah-jong together occasionally and when she was selected by the university lottery for one of the coveted double apartments on campus, she asked me if I wanted to live together. I was lazy. I did not want to live off-campus and take the bus in the winter. Living with Winnie, within walking distance to all my classes, even though I didn’t know her all that well, was a no-brainer. I said yes.

At the time, my parents were spending most of the year in Beijing. Dad was an executive at a technology training
institute and his company approved his proposal to open a branch in China. They left me on my own, then nineteen, to manage my own budget, including rent and living expenses. Winnie’s parents also spent most of their time overseas, preferring to stay in Hong Kong through the winter. We were unsupervised and spoiled. From the moment we moved in, Winnie started hosting all-night mah-jong sessions with some of the other residents in the building. I’d join in on the action too and pretty soon, I was cutting class for days at a time either because I was trying to sleep off the mah-jong or because I was still playing mah-jong. All of us smoked heavily at the time. And we rarely cooked. Walking into our apartment was like getting hot-boxed by a combination of tobacco and takeout food. When Winnie wasn’t in London playing mah-jong, she’d sneak off to Toronto with her best friend and disappear for days. Initially I tried to do some cleaning in the bathroom and the kitchen when she was gone, but when she returned, the whole place would just turn to shit again with all the people coming in and out for mah-jong. Eventually I just kept my door closed, so my bedroom was the only (reasonably) clean area in what had otherwise become a dump.

In third year I had a boyfriend so I stopped playing so much mah-jong and ended up at his apartment most nights,
coming home only once a week or so to change up some clothes. One day I stopped by during one of Winnie’s mah-jong sessions. She was sitting at the table holding a fur ball in her lap. I thought it was a rabbit. It ended up being a chinchilla. Winnie seemed like she was super into her chinchilla.

My parents came home to Toronto for spring break that year so I was with them during the week and they drove me back to campus the night before classes resumed. Ma had to use the washroom and wanted to come up. She couldn’t cop a squat outside because it was February and freezing. I knew Winnie had been away for spring break too, and since I’d tidied up, sort of, before I left, I figured it wouldn’t be so bad. The smell hit us as soon as I opened the door. It was vile. Which wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part was that the Squawking Chicken was all over it. She was possessed. She started throwing open cupboards, she lifted all the cushions off the couch, she tore the sheets off my bed, she shook out every piece of clothing in the closet—and there was nothing, nothing to explain the horrifying odor. Except for whatever was behind Winnie’s door. I told Ma she couldn’t go in there, that it was totally offside.

“This is danger!” she shouted dramatically, as her hand wrapped around the doorknob, her red nails turning upward as she opened the door . . .

It was a fucking mess. There were shavings all over the floor. And little pellets of chinchilla excrement. And a weird milky green substance. Rank. The poor chinchilla lay motionless in its cage. Winnie had forgotten to take it with her. Ma lost her shit.

I kept pleading with her that I’d take care of it. That Winnie would be home soon and that it would be all sorted out. She wouldn’t have it. She was threatening to call Winnie’s parents. But I couldn’t sell out Winnie. I wasn’t even sure Winnie had gone home for break and I knew if Ma was able to get hold of Winnie’s parents, there was a chance I’d blow her cover. So I bargained. I promised I’d move out of the apartment and not live with Winnie anymore after final semester if Ma would just leave.

The Squawking Chicken always knows when she’s getting a good deal. She agreed to go on the condition that I keep my word to find somewhere else to live in fourth year and that I call her as soon as Winnie came back to deal with her dead pet situation. Then she told me I had bad taste in friends. That I had always had bad taste in friends. That my friends always took advantage of me. And that I would jeopardize my life if I kept being friends with people who let their chinchillas rot away in their bedrooms. She proceeded to list off the names of all my friends from middle
school through high school and college, calling them all losers. Some of them were, indeed, losers. But not all of them were losers. Some of them were really great people.

“Ma, not all of my friends suck. And I like having friends. I need friends. Everyone needs friends,” I argued.

“You only need one true friend.”

When I’d come home from school after arguing with my best friend in high school, which is pretty much what best friends in high school do all the time, Ma would say, “You only need one true friend.” If a friend was late to meet me, or I was frustrated with a friend over something harmless, like not calling me back when she told me she would, Ma would decide that the friend was worthless, declaring, “You only need one true friend.”

Ma wrote off friends quickly. She wrote off Winnie right away because she was so grossed out by the chinchilla death. For me, though, the dead chinchilla was certainly grounds for a fight, but not a breakup. Winnie and I had a lot of fun together. She was spontaneous and carefree, and I enjoyed her company. In the Squawking Chicken’s mind? A permanent split was the only option. Just like she cut off Jane, her roommate in the hospital, for flirting with three men on different days, judging her character on the basis of her behavior with her visitors, Ma determined that Winnie was
Low Classy, morally and hygienically. And she was convinced that any continued association with Winnie would result in me becoming morally and hygienically Low Classy.

When Winnie came home that night, I stayed in my room. I heard her next door moving things around and talking on the phone. She was crying. The next day she told me what happened. She was despondent. She knew she’d fucked up. I felt terrible for her. But, still, after a few days passed, I told her that I was moving out. I tried to not make it about the dead chinchilla but I knew she knew. She was all business about it afterward, asking me to take care of my rent and my phone payments and before long, it was the end of April and I was packing up my things. I never saw Winnie again.

It wasn’t the first time the Squawking Chicken had sabotaged one of my friendships.

Ma hated my best friend in high school. Georgia was gorgeous and popular and fun, with a bomb-ass body, all curves, and enormous breasts that, as you can imagine, made her one of the favorites among all the boys. We were so close, in that special way girls are close when they’re sixteen—we told each other everything, we practically spoke our own language, we loved each other so proudly it made us feel invincible. But the relationship wasn’t without drama.
We were the platonic version of a passionate, all-consuming love affair that couldn’t last. Looking back, on some level, I was jealous of Georgia. She was the sun. And I was just one of the people lucky enough to be warmed in her presence. With over two decades of distance now from the situation, I realize that that resentment was one of the reasons our connection gradually deteriorated. That’s not to say Georgia didn’t do her part, but my response to her faults didn’t help. Neither did the Squawking Chicken.

Georgia was flighty. She was distracted a lot of the time. It was never intentional, just part of her personality. She had problems focusing. Over time, because of my feelings of inadequacy about being friends with the golden girl, I started to take it personally. But I never shared these feelings with my ma. Because Ma was not supportive of me hanging out with Georgia from the beginning, I tried not to talk about Georgia with her, especially when Georgia and I were in the “honeymoon phase” of our friendship. That didn’t stop Ma, however, from sharing with me her opinions of Georgia—all negative. She didn’t trust Georgia. She predicted that Georgia would betray me. She thought Georgia was just using me. She warned me that Georgia would bring me down.

Georgia and I did cut class a lot. She wasn’t interested in school. She wanted to be an actress and she probably wasn’t
suited to a conventional learning environment. I was always a good student, but with Georgia, I lost motivation; I just didn’t want to miss out on any moments with her. So I ended up failing a couple of classes and having to go to summer school to make up for it. Ma was livid. Believe me, she shamed me for a long time, and publicly, for it. But she also blamed Georgia for how irresponsible I’d become. Realizing that I’d started to ignore her standard criticisms of Georgia, she decided to take a different tactic. Ma used Low Classiness against two-timing Jane from the hospital, but against Georgia her method was Feng Shui Blackmail.

She started telling me that Georgia was bad luck. She pointed out that since Georgia became a fixture in my life, my life was going to shit. She suggested that Georgia had found a home for her own black energy, transferring it to me, while stealing my light. I didn’t pay attention to Ma’s cautions when Georgia and I were getting along. But as soon as the first hairline fracture appeared in the foundation of our friendship—over something absurdly innocuous, like who was wearing what to the semiformal—Ma’s words lodged themselves into that tiny, minuscule gap, resolutely refusing to move until the fissure became an actual break. Every time Georgia and I argued, Ma’s words became louder: Georgia was selfish, Georgia was setting me up, Georgia was happy when I wasn’t.