Tiger Babies Strike Back (4 page)

However, my attempt to delight her didn't go the way I planned. My mom recoiled from me and said, “If you're going to be disgusting, I'm not going to kiss you!”

Then she stormed off. And she never kissed me good night ever again.

I went to bed feeling like I'd done something wrong. As an adult now, thinking back, I wonder if my mom thought I was mocking her, or just being sassy, which wouldn't be tolerated. Maybe she was worried about bills, or that I was displaying some kind of early, repugnant sexuality. Whatever the reason, the thing I remembered clearly was the operative word,
disgusting
.

Disgusting. That one moment in time, more than thirty years ago . . . how can I hold my mother responsible for one word, one moment in her own harried life as a person, wife, mother, daughter, secretary, and everything else she was and was trying to be for herself and others?

Disgusting. How could she possibly know that this one word would detonate a small but highly effective bomb throughout my psyche, body, and entire being? I have no way of knowing what was going on in my mother's head or heart back then. She was younger at the time than I am now.

But still. A word like that can sink into the pit of one's stomach like emotional shrapnel. As the years went on, I could form my flesh around that word, take that hard speck of grit, internalize it, and somehow make it into a pearl.

Or not. If my mom had bile crystallizing in her innards, it didn't have anything to do with me. As a matter of fact, years later my mother did have several gallstones removed. I remember when she returned home from the hospital, the doctor had given her the actual gallstones that had been taken out of her body. They were in a little plastic container and looked like tiny bits of black rock. Could they have been a physical manifestation of whatever was eating her up from the inside?

And most important, how can I take the formative experience of having been a pudgy kid, and the memory of my own mother calling me “disgusting,” and do something positive? What might be the silver lining, if any? The resulting pearl is the fact that I have vowed to never make my own daughter feel anything even vaguely akin to disgusting to me. There are many physically repulsive aspects of life in a body, even a nine-year-old body, such as stomach flu, snot, grime, and everything else dirty, squishy, and smelly.

But my daughter is not disgusting. She is never disgusting. I teach her to take care of bodily functions. I am very aware of never belittling her or her body, the things she does, or what she is curious about. I respect her body and her privacy. And yes, I still kiss her good night.

5

My parents constantly tell me I've got to “toughen up.” But I'm a marshmallow, and I want to stay that way. They say I need to grow a backbone, but they're so stiff they can't even move.

We need to be soft and malleable inside because we have to be contortionists to work around our parents' fixed, hardened state. We might make them uncomfortable with our uncertainty, our tears, and our occasional moping. Maybe they believe that showing even a tiny bit of sympathy, or even acknowledging hardship or a tender heart, will cause a psychological upheaval so cataclysmic that all hell will break loose. Don't open Pandora's box, right?

But I don't want to be a sealed box. No air can even get in. I see a lot of these stiff, tight-lipped Chinese adults at family banquets, and they are so stoic and far away they might as well be in China. They are that inaccessible.

Parents, we adult children are messy, but we are what you've got. How about a compromise? How about controlled chaos, like nature in a sprawling state park, where there are some paths and paved trails, but flowers and foliage are still able to flourish? You're missing out on a potentially fantastic rose garden.

In the Sunset District of San Francisco where I once lived, there used to be a lot more small patches of grass and plants lining the walkways. Most homes were planned and built with two or more little plots of greenery, but as Chinese families moved into the houses, they ripped out the sod and any flowers, removed the dirt, and poured concrete over the area. Often they went one step further and painted the concrete green, as if this easy-to-clean slab of pavement was just as good as actual grass, but now improved with no mess and no fuss. My grandma Ruby once suggested we perform this same makeover on our entryway and balked when we declined to do so.

We liked it a little messy, with room to grow stuff. But she thought we were nuts. “Pave it, Kimi. So easy!”

More than anything, she was probably just miffed that we didn't follow her advice. But this is exactly what I'm talking about. I want to break through the Chinese concrete. It's a hardened mixture of filial piety, birth order, and saving face.

Even as I know I stand on the shoulders of many Chinese who came before me and suffered, I want the feeling of not being beholden 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to someone else's standards and comparisons, susceptible to their praise and disappointment.

I want to be seen as myself.

And what is that self?

I, Marshmallow. I want to embrace vulnerability as a strength, not a weakness. If you're steel, or a watertight box, what's not getting in? Your baby's love. Her whispered secrets.

One night, when Lucy was almost asleep, she tugged me on the sleeve and quietly asked, “Mommy, are narwhals up at night?”

I was taken aback by her question. I hadn't known that she knew what narwhals were, nor did I even realize she was still awake. I was glad I had lingered at her bedside and had not immediately jumped up and run off to finish the dishes or brush my teeth. If I had been in too much of a rush I would have missed her sleepy, faraway imaginings of undersea life.

“Yes,” I replied. “At least some of them are awake at night.”

Our children are awake more than we know. And not just at night, but in life. Lucy's wakefulness opens my eyes to my relationship with my own parents. Since she is paying such close attention to everything I do, I am constantly reexamining my interactions with my own mom and dad, and it ain't always pretty.

I am a grown woman with a child of my own, but every time I return home from visiting my parents, I feel like I've gnawed off my own paw to escape the metal teeth of a spring-loaded trap. I scrape away at my own flesh and walk with a spiritual limp for a few days. I don't mean to hurt anyone by saying that. It is simply true. After spending too much time with my parents, it's like I have temporarily forgotten who I am, like I've received a blow to the head with a blunt instrument that is my family. Many adults are reduced to a regressed self in the company of their parents, but how many emotional body slams can we take before ending up with permanent
dain bramage
?

One physical reason for the headaches that develop during my visits is that there is always a lot of noise at my parents' house. A childhood friend of mine loves to imitate the way my mom used to say my name. My mother called me “Kimi,” but it came out more like “Kimmaaaaaaay!”

My friend would jump out of her skin whenever she would hear it. I was accustomed to my mom's yelling, but even so, it did rattle my nerves. My mom, to this day, still continues to talk really loudly. Maybe it's because she grew up in a household with so many kids that you had to shout in order to be heard at all. Nonetheless, the tone and volume of her voice do add a drill sergeant quality to our relationship.

I remember once in high school, my mom was telling me something mundane, but she was hollering at such excessive volume that my hair was practically blowing in the breeze created by the force of her breath. I was right in front of her, but she might as well have been shouting across a stadium.

I couldn't take it anymore and said, “Stop screaming at me!”

She bellowed back, “This is my natural speaking voice!”

Adding further to the noise of the household, even if the volume of my mom's voice doesn't get to me: the constant squabbling and bickering among my family members, which wear me down to a nub, then continue to keep me on edge for hours afterward. I have an aunt who is constantly bragging to my mom about my cousins' careers. My mom once fought back by asking if my aunt's eldest daughter, who was then about fifty, had a boyfriend yet.

“
No, not yet
. . .” my aunt replied in a sweet yet seething sing-songy voice.

Later, in the car, I complained to my husband about how my mom and her siblings are constantly trying to one-up one another, and that my parents are always nitpicking everything, such as my choice of gas station where the price is two cents more per gallon than the gas at the station they prefer ten blocks away, or how I spread too much mayonnaise on a piece of bread, or how I pour too little water in the rice cooker. Nothing is safe without a comment here or a better way of doing things there, or a battle for the remote control, phone, or computer.

“Geez,” I said as we drove away from their house. “In addition to all that shouting, do they have to have every ringer, television, and radio on all at the same time, and every single one on the highest volume possible?”

My husband, Rolf, countered, “Don't you think it's about time you eased up on your mom?”

“
No, not yet
. . .”

In my head I can already hear people saying that this micromanaging is how parents show they love you. They'd say to me, “You are lucky someone cares enough about you to tell you these things.”

I know, I know, I know. But tell that to the bloody stump where my hand used to be.

In Chinese families, the undertow of guilt and filial piety is as strong as the riptide at Ocean Beach. But do you know what the posted signs say on the seawall?
PEOPLE WADING AND SWIMMING HAVE DROWNED HERE.

Nonetheless, I do have sympathy and compassion for my mom. I know she had to work very hard from a very young age. I do understand that. She worked in souvenir shops in Chinatown, and also in doctors' offices after school as a teenager up until early adulthood. Her younger siblings took up my grandma's time, and Mom and her older sister had to work while they watched their sisters and brother grow up with more than they ever got.

My mom and her sister Jeannette were tough immigrant kids. They were tossed into public school knowing not a word of English. Other kids called them fresh-off-the-boat, and they were. They had no toys, helped their mom and dad, and raised all the younger kids to boot. As my grandparents became more prosperous, eventually having their own travel agency in Chinatown, my mom and Jeannette watched their siblings become self-indulgent American beatniks, hippies, and, later, disco aficionados. Chinese translation: lazybones, deadbeats, good-for-nothings.

It is not for naught that my mom, whose name is Irene, is known in some circles as I Ream. Or for short, just the Reamer.

Growing up, I frequently heard my mother yelling at her siblings, saying things like, “Get up, and get a job,” or “You are going to end up just another no-good bum,” or “You act so stupid, it's sickening!”

One can see that before she was a Tiger Mom, my mom was already a Tiger Sister. She had plenty of experience disdaining her siblings, so by the time her own children came along, she had her reaming ways down pat.

Which came in mighty handy for her as she dealt with my brothers and me. As we grew older, my mom spent every weekday morning, for years, making breakfast and our sack lunches, and she drove us to three different schools on opposite ends of town. Then she headed off to work as an executive secretary for demanding doctors. From 9:00
A.M.
to 5:00
P.M.
she was expected to make the nurses' schedules, distribute payroll, comfort families, and fetch lunch. Then she'd pick us up from her mother's place, drive us back across the city, and come home to a house that we had destroyed the night before with our rearranging of couch cushions into play forts. I'm sure she loved being confronted nightly with the disheveled, chaotic results of our many hours of Nerf basketball, Nerf football, and Nerf . . . war. Then she would have to make dinner and somewhere in there say hello to my dad who'd get home at eight o'clock.