Tiger Babies Strike Back (13 page)

“I don't have time to worry about it. Let me just do it and it'll be done.”

So he fixed it. And it was finished. The neighbors were pleased. And I was alone with my seething resentment.

Why did this incident make me so mad? The typical Chinese crappiness of it all caved in my stomach. How many times in my whole life did complete strangers treat me like I was supposed to kowtow to them for the singular reason that we were all Chinese and they were my elders? How many times had I heard in life that I should really speak Chinese? Further, my neighbors' disregard for basic parking rules, and their passive-aggressive way of invoking Ma instead of talking to me like a human being affected me like fingernails screeching across a chalkboard.

And now here was my mom shoving aside the news of my book in favor of reveling in Fiona Ma's dream wedding. Fiona. My old neighbors. My parents. They all seemed to be on some kind of wavelength I couldn't comprehend. A chain of command, a way of doing things, a respect of elders or higher-ups was being adhered to, and I apparently never got that memo because I didn't care about letters from city supervisors, wedding announcements, or the fact that, once and for all, I don't speak Chinese. Not Mandarin. Not Cantonese. Yes, that's too bad. Got it. Filed it.

I just wanted my mom to show a little enthusiasm for my lifelong dream come true, that's all.

Ah. Foolish mortal.

In my parents' house, my childhood home, I let my mom go on a little more about Fiona Ma and her dream wedding. I ate it. I walked away. I didn't know how to express my frustration or my anger. I was a good Chinese daughter and didn't explode.

My parents always ask why I don't stay longer.

In my mom's office near the kitchen there's a corkboard where she has pinned up, along with Fiona's clippings, photos of Other People's Kids. I capitalize the letters of that phrase because they are of supreme importance, apparently. My mom is thorough in recounting who just graduated from Stanford, who is going to be a dentist, and whatnot. Although I don't recognize all of them, my mom sings their praises with regularity. Among these accomplished children of other people, one picture stands out. It's a glamour shot of some girl named Crystal. My mother frequently insists that I know who she is, even though I am certain that I do not.

“Sure, you know her!”

“No, I don't.”

“She's our friend's granddaughter!”

“Okay.”

“Isn't she pretty? And now she's older, and really, really pretty. You should see her now.”

The photo is actually attached to a handle and backed on cardboard. It's a fan. Because, you know, who doesn't need a personal cooling implement for those countless, sweltering days in San Francisco? And if that accoutrement is emblazoned with the pretty face of your pal's granddaughter, I guess it's just a win-win.

My mom talks about Crystal kind of a lot. Crystal, if you're out there reading this, don't you think that's kinda creepy?

Why do Chinese people find it easy to praise other people's kids and yet make their own children feel like we are not good enough? I know it's not just a Chinese thing, but nonetheless, the mind reels. I wonder what primal, cultural, or parental need is getting satisfied by having fantasy surrogate children like Fiona and Crystal. Some might say it's the Chinese tradition not to praise your children or else they will become lazy or will stop striving for the highest level. But more significant, I think, is that Fiona and Crystal can never hurt my mom. Maybe it's safer to love them.

And besides, for all I know, Crystal's parents might have a picture of me on their bulletin board, and Crystal's wondering who the hell I am. Maybe she's thinking,
Dang it! I'm Miss Teen Chinatown so why are there press clippings about this stupid writer all over my mom's wall?

Who knows. What I do know is that my parents have tons of friends, and all their yearly Christmas cards are all over the house. My mom and dad never throw anything away, so the Christmas cards from past years are taped up, pinned up, and stuck into the corners of cabinets where the glass meets the wood. I have grown up with some of the families and have certainly heard of everyone's accomplishments.

Interestingly though, there are some kids who, mysteriously, are never included in the family photos that we receive. There are disabled kids, delinquents, and ne'er-do-wells. I know they exist because I've seen them from a distance at events, slumped in wheelchairs or moping in the corners, and also I've heard my mom gossiping on the phone about them. But strangely, there is no photographic proof that includes or even vaguely links them to their relatives. Year after year, there is no trace of their existence in holiday photos. They've been “disappeared” by an invisible Chinese shame police.

Chinese people love to project success, and nothing less. If you're unaccomplished, nothing special, or not too easy on the eyes, don't think you can't be deliberately omitted or photoshopped out of the family tree. That's just one more reason to graduate from a top college—so you can be worthy of the Christmas picture!

If you're not an A Plus, with achievements worth bragging about, apparently you just don't make the cut. Your imperfections have been duly noted. You are an inconvenient truth, like global warming. The fact that you are alive and not going to Stanford is a minor annoyance. The holiday photo gets snapped, and the card is mailed to all the friends and relatives, but you have no say in the matter.

And what does
my
parents' holiday card look like? For the last three years in a row, it has been a photo of my mom and dad, with my daughter, Lucy, in the middle. No one else. There were three different photos, taken on separate occasions. It hardly seemed a coincidence that my husband and I were repeatedly left out of the picture.

When I made fun of the cards, my parents didn't offer much in way of an explanation. All my dad said was, “Well, you weren't around on the day we took the photo. On any of those days, I guess.”

16

When I was pregnant, my spouse and I attended a parenting preparedness class. The teacher asked people in the room to state their names and volunteer tidbits of baby advice for the benefit of the group. We all thought long and hard. Everyone was heartbreakingly earnest. One person advised to hug and kiss your child a lot. Another insisted on the importance of fostering creativity and communication. Someone urged us to help future generations follow their dreams. We all felt warm and fuzzy, snuggling in our collective cocoon of misty-eyed affirmations.

Then a Chinese guy in the group stood up and shouted like a dictator, “You make sure you teach your kids that NOTHING IS FOR FREE!”

The rest of us were stunned out of our soft-focus stupor. He added, “You work hard, or you get what you deserve!”

And that was his baby advice. When he sat back down, everyone had recoiled from their previously open smiles, and some people whispered unflattering remarks about our fellow classmate. But not me. I knew he was just being totally Chinese. He was saying, you want an A on your math test? Then get off your ass. Want a perfect score on your SAT? Then get off your ass. He was saying, work hard if you want a Mercedes, a three-bedroom house with Tara-like pillars, and filet mignon in your belly. Nothing is for free. The unspoken message in his words was, in China you work your ass off but you still get nothing. Here you have opportunity so don't piss it away. When Communists destroy your family and house, imprison you and send your children away from you for hard labor in the countryside, then your Montessori-educated ass will have something to cry about.

So very Chinese.

And he wasn't just talking to the white people. I felt he was talking directly to me. I spent my whole life trying to hug everyone in my family because I was just a sheltered, spoiled, little lovebug. My attempts to rub my chubby face on everybody's tits just made them, well, uncomfortable, to say the least.

Speaking of which, it was just a few months later when a newborn little somebody was doing the same thing to me, that is, rubbing her face all over my boobies, looking for some damn milk.

It was mere hours after I gave birth to a gigantic baby the doctor had dubbed “the Hulk.” I was delirious from lack of sleep, a morphine drip, and the fact that a team of doctors had just unzipped my abdomen and removed a nine-pound, eleven-ounce human being from my body. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, it was time for my hospital-appointed training session on how to milk myself. It was then that the lactation specialist entered my room and unceremoniously pulled open my nightgown. “Oh,” she said with pleasant surprise, “you have African American boobies.”

This struck me as a weird thing to say to a sleep-deprived woman with an intravenous feeding tube, catheter, and no pants on. But that's what she said, right in front of the team of doctors, nurses, and relatives who had all come to fuss and take pictures of Baby Hulk and my zitty, sweaty, bleeding-from-the-crotch self.

The boobie nurse felt me up like a lusty, somewhat clinical sailor, and all I could do was lie there and thank my maker for the morphine drip, compliments of Brown & Toland. I am very modest, you see, and am usually reluctant to whip off my high-school-era minimizing brassiere within the peripheral vision of my best girlfriends or even my own mommy.

Was the nurse saying my breasts were big or small, or a different shape than she expected? Having recently had my gut slit open via C-section, I was still reeling from the sight and sound of my amniotic fluid gushing onto the operating room floor. I was trying to think of a tactful way to apologize to the doctor for drenching his Bruno Maglis with my innards, and I simply was not ready to discuss the racial differences of boobies. Nonetheless, lying there, I wondered whether I needed to give a little speech about how I was proud to be a Chinese American. How my boobs were proud to be Chinese American, too.

She pulled my top open farther so that even the janitor who'd come to empty the trash could see my African American boobies. Watching him carry out a bag that said
CAUTION: BIOHAZARD,
I was jarred back to my breast-feeding lesson. The lactation specialist then ordered me to “squeeze it like a hamburger.” Breasts aren't even shaped like Whoppers or Quarter Pounders, but I'm a people pleaser, so I tried to do as I was told. I pinched and compressed my flesh without success. In my anguish, I reminded myself that I needed to feed my infant. Bilirubin buildup was threatening to turn my baby the color of a pumpkin, and she was already in the butternut squash spectrum.

So I had African American boobies. Whatever the definition, there ain't nothing ghetto fabulous about cracked nipplage, latching on, or pumping and dumping. Breast-feeding is all fun and games until someone gets an eye poked out with a giant, swollen, thumb-length nipple.

Eventually, like many unsung mothers throughout the ages, I finally did figure out how to get the milk out of my engorged breasts and into the mouth of the Hulk. Nonetheless, as relieved and happy as I was about the mammalian success of my body parts, I was still miffed about the racial misidentification of my rack.

If you have ever been unfortunate enough to sit through the entirety of Steven Spielberg's movie
A.I
., you may recall that, after all human beings have been extinguished from the planet, aliens revive Haley Joel Osment's bloated robot corpse from the bottom of the ocean because he is the only half-decayed remnant of a creature who has any memory of what real humans were like. In my postpartum delirium, I wondered if I, too, could be revived millennia from now by benevolent aliens seeking a glimpse of African American breasts. Or maybe the aliens would just choose to reanimate an African American woman instead of me, having used their outer space powers to ascertain that my breasticle anomaly wouldn't be worth bringing me back to life because, based on their records, all indications pointed to the fact that in my heyday I was a persnickety buzzkill.