Listen to the Squawking Chicken: When Mother Knows Best, What's a Daughter To Do? A Memoir (Sort Of) (3 page)

The highs of gambling never last long. And there was always a new dependent on the way. Ma looked after her siblings every day after school while her parents slept off their all-night mah-jong sessions. But she loved school and she remembers herself as a bright, engaged student even though her parents were never supportive of her studies. She only had time to study when the younger kids were finally in bed and after her parents had left for the gambling halls, reading by lamppost out on the street because she was forbidden to “waste” electricity. (This is totally the Chinese equivalent of the grandfather trope: I had to walk ten miles knee-deep in snow just to get to school.)

Soon, though, she had to quit. She’d just started Grade 10 and her parents noticed that she’d become rather attractive and could start earning money for the family waiting tables. So Ma was sent to work at a sketchy local night lounge. The regular patrons, mostly minor players in the local gangs,
became fond of her sense of humor and sassy, no-shit attitude. They showed their affection by tipping her well and looking out for her when they could.

It was around this time that her mother took off with another man. Ma’s father checked out and started disappearing for days on alcohol-fueled mah-jong benders. Ma had to care for her five brothers and sisters, relying on neighbors and sometimes even her gangster buddies. A few months later, her mother returned, having been abandoned by her lover, and now pregnant. Ma’s parents reunited and they asked her to keep their secret. Ma helped her mother through her abortion, continuing to look after her siblings, managing the household as my grandmother recovered, making excuses and lying to neighbors and other family members who were curious about what was going on at home. Soon, my grandparents were carrying on like nothing had happened, thanks to the efforts of their dutiful eldest daughter. Ma was happy to have been useful to her parents. She complied with their requests without resentment and she thought that after this ordeal she would be more appreciated.

But soon after, on a night when her connections weren’t around, Ma was raped on the way home from work. There was no sympathy from her parents when she stepped in the door, her clothes torn, her mouth bruised, her palms cut.
They did not offer to call the police. They did not help her clean herself up. Ashamed and despondent, Ma attempted suicide that night by swallowing pills. She remembers, through her haze, overhearing her parents discussing whether or not to help her and take her to the hospital. They ended up deciding not to, both to save money and also to save face, because Ma was the only one who knew all their secrets—her mother’s affair and the aborted baby, her father’s womanizing and drinking problem, their debts. With her gone, no one would ever find out. That was the night my ma started squawking. She forced herself to start vomiting and when she was finished vomiting she started screeching.

When Ma brought me back to Hong Kong years later, people used to tell me all the time about the night Ma started screaming. It’s remembered like legend—that her screams rang through Yuen Long all night, that she screamed so hard and so violently it was like the gods were being summoned to deliver judgment upon her parents. Her screams were so incriminating, her parents actually skipped the gambling halls that night, hiding inside to avoid the neighbors, knowing that they’d been found guilty. Ma screamed to forget that she’d been violated; she screamed until the wound from her parents’ treachery became a scar that permanently transformed her soul; she screamed to announce that she’d been reborn.

The next morning, she told her parents things were about to change. And they did. From that day on, all she had to do was look at them funny and they’d step back. That was when she started running her own life. She was fifteen.

Did you know that the phoenix is a breed of chicken that molts on a regular cycle? Ma was molting. She’d become the Chinese Squawking Chicken.

The Squawking Chicken never read to me at bedtime. This is partly because she’s an immigrant. This is why I don’t know
Goodnight Moon
. I read my first Dr. Seuss book in high school, when it was part of a class assignment on children’s literature. But it wasn’t just the language that prevented Ma from reading stories to me at night. Reading to children at night simply isn’t part of traditional Chinese culture. Besides, Ma doesn’t think there’s much value in stories that encourage dreams and fantasy. She believes that children are perfectly capable of coming up with their own happy fantasies, and that “storytime” instead should be used to ready children for life’s upcoming challenges.

I used to ask her all the time, “Why don’t you ever tell me anything good, anything fun?”

And her answer all the time was, “Why do you need to
prepare for the good things that happen? They’re good. They won’t hurt you. Do you need advance notice for the arrival of happiness? Or would you rather have advance notice of the hard times? My job is to prepare you for the hard times. My job is to teach you how to avoid the hard times, whenever possible.”

So instead of fairy tales, the Squawking Chicken told ghost stories, some of which she experienced herself. Many of my life lessons came from Ma’s personal tales.

When Ma was thirty, she was asleep alone one day in Hong Kong. The bed started shaking. She got up and checked if there was an earthquake. Nothing else seemed to be moving, nothing else was disturbed. She thought it was probably a bad dream and went back to bed. She’d just fallen back asleep when the bed started shaking again. It was rocking back and forth. Then she felt like she was being jumped on, hands all over her body, trying to push her off the bed. Except there was no one there.

Terrified, she scrambled out of the house and headed over to her favorite mah-jong den, hoping a few rounds
would calm her down. It didn’t help. She was still unsettled. She felt like she was surrounded by a dark cloud. She kept seeing shadows when there were no shadows. One of the other mah-jong players asked her what was bothering her. Ma explained what had happened in bed, feeling silly as she heard herself telling her friends that she’d been attacked by imaginary intruders. Almost everyone agreed that she was probably just stressed out or too tired, and encouraged her to keep playing. Except for one relative newcomer to the group sitting at another table. During a tea break, she came over to Ma and told her privately that it sounded like she had
jong gwai
.
Jong
is the word for “run into.”
Gwai
means ghost.
Jong gwai
is a common expression in Chinese to describe someone who is acting strangely, out of the ordinary, like they’ve been possessed.

At this news, Ma cut out of the game and went to see a feng shui master. Feng shui masters are like spiritual advisors, well trained in feng shui principles, the ancient Chinese study of heavenly astronomy and earthly energy used to promote balance and well-being. A proper feng shui master is also familiar with the supernatural. He can give advice on where to best position a desk in the luckiest corner of a room to ensure maximum success and financial gain. He can also enter a space and detect the presence of positive and negative otherworldly forces. Many feng shui masters have capitalized
on their talents and have turned their services into businesses. It’s been a lucrative endeavor for a few of the top ones around the world. But for every legit feng shui master, there are five frauds. It’s like good magic and black magic. A proper feng shui master uses his power to help people. An evil feng shui master exploits them.

Ma told the feng shui master what had happened in bed—how it felt like it was vibrating, and how, later on, she felt like she was being pushed and shoved by hands she couldn’t see. The feng shui master asked Ma for her birth date, birthplace and exact time of birth. He studied her face, focusing on her eyes, closely examining her, silently, for several minutes. He took out some incense and let it burn, studying the pattern of the smoke. He made some notes on his scroll and used his abacus, flicking the beads back and forth, sometimes slowly, jotting down mystery calculations corresponding to Ma’s birth information.

Finally he completed his assessment.

“You have very sharp eyes,” he explained to Ma. “They help you see to your advantage, but sometimes they see too much. A dullness has descended on your face. It has come down from your eyes. You have seen something and what you have seen has blocked your vision. You must remove what is covering your eyes. You must remove the ghost. A
ghost is what you have seen. And you will not truly see again until it leaves you alone.”

The feng shui master sent Ma away with instructions to check her house for any recent additions. Had she picked up anything strange? Had something been moved? Had she inadvertently allowed a sinister presence to invade her space by creating a ghost-friendly environment?

Ma called her brother and asked him to go home with her because she didn’t want to go back by herself. She thoroughly searched the apartment, looking for clues—anything that may have been rearranged or accidently shifted. She called the cleaning lady and asked her if she had changed anything the last time she was over. There was nothing out of the ordinary . . . until she remembered.

The week before, Ma had found an umbrella on the sidewalk on her way home. Thinking it would be useful, she brought it home and put it in the utility closet with the brooms and other cleaning products. Now Ma asked her brother to open the closet. She stood behind him, fearful. The umbrella was leaning up against the wall. And beside it were a boy and a girl, shivering and hungry, their hair matted against their gray, gaunt faces, black eyes filling with black tears, reaching out to her with rotting hands, pleading with her for help. Her brother snatched the umbrella and
slammed the door. They ran out of the house, several blocks, to the local dumping ground. They lit the umbrella on fire.

Ma reported back to the feng shui master immediately. His eyes widened as soon as she said the word “umbrella.” He stopped her right away. “Has no one ever told you that ghosts hide under umbrellas? Never pick up an umbrella off the street. An unwanted umbrella harbors ghosts that are waiting to claim a new home.”

There was no more bed-shaking after that. And Ma never picked up an umbrella off the street again. Or anything else for that matter. Not money, not jewelry,
nothing
.

Ma told me this story one night when I was eight years old. I was pissed off at her because she hadn’t let me keep a really pretty bracelet that I’d found lodged between the seats on the subway that day. She told me to shove it back into the crack where I’d found it and initially I refused. I still remember her red nails snatching the red band out of my hands, wedging it back into the cushions. My tantrum was immediate. I started wailing so loudly people moved away from us to sit somewhere else. Ma stared straight ahead and ignored me the whole time. When it was time to get off the train, she held me by my wrist and dragged me onto the platform. I complained the whole way home. I complained through dinner. I complained during my bath. I stomped into my
bedroom, slammed the door, desperately wishing for a different mother.

Ma came in a few minutes later. She didn’t turn on the lights. She sat at the foot of the bed facing me, lit a cigarette, and slowly and dramatically told me about the umbrella. The light from the window filtered through the smoke, making her look like a disembodied head floating in fog. I was terrified. By the time she got to the part about the feng shui master, I had scrambled over to her end of the bed and buried myself in her lap. She just kept talking and smoking. And when the closet door opened and the children appeared, I stopped caring about my bracelet. Fuck the bracelet. Fuck everything you find that doesn’t belong to you. I’d rather not be mauled by dirty hungry ghost children in my own bed.

This was the Squawking Chicken’s lesson, one she repeated to me over and over again when I was growing up: what’s not yours will never be yours. Taking what’s not yours can have tragic, frightening consequences.

Ma did not want me to grow up with envy. She didn’t want me to grow up wanting what I couldn’t have and, more importantly, taking what I didn’t earn. Ma wanted me to learn that life wasn’t easy, that the things you desire don’t just appear one day on the sidewalk, waiting to be picked up, that things are never free. And if they seem free at the
beginning, you’ll end up paying for them in the end. If you’re lucky, she warned, you can write a check, and it’ll all even out. If you’re not lucky, well, a ghost just might come along and possess your soul.