Tiger Babies Strike Back (5 page)

Thank goodness my mom was a Jedi master at all things practical, and here I am complaining that I didn't get enough hugs?

Pretty much.

To be tough is what Chinese parents want their kids to be. When I was little, I would try to hug my parents and they would wonder what the heck I was trying to do. “Uh, okay, enough, enough,” they would say, patting me awkwardly on the back, or on the forearm. I was always writing little love notes and slipping them into my mom's purse or under my parents' pillows, but they just sort of
endured
it. I was otherwise quiet enough, so they let my weirdness slide.

Many different parents of various ethnicities believe the world is a tough place, so they've got to make their babies tough. Chinese parents have somehow taken this idea and merged it with a competitive drive. When she wasn't reaming us out for our messiness and bad behavior, my mom consistently bragged about her friends' children. She most likely was trying to spur me on. But instead, I just felt
spurned
by her, never being good enough to please her.

She would say things like, “Have you heard about Caitlin? She's going to Stanford,” or “Janet had a beautiful wedding at the Olympic Club.” My mom excelled at making me feel like crap for my own supposed benefit.

Once she said, “Did you see that So-and-So's daughter teaches aerobics? She has such a great body. Isn't it great that she's so slender?”

Of course, then I had to lash out.

“Yeah. Too bad she's a butterface. Everything looks good. But her face.”

“You're just mean.”

“That's right. You have a fat, mean daughter. Your friends' daughters are skinny and sweet. Too bad they're all butterfaces.”

“I don't know how you got this way.”

“You don't? I thought you
made
me.”

Ka-ching! My mom kind of recoiled from that one. I guess she needed to toughen up.

I still kinda feel bad about that exchange. So much so that I still remember saying those words, three decades later. Obviously, when someone consistently makes you feel rotten, sometimes ya just snap and give in to the temptation to fight fire with fire. But when I think about the kind of person I really want to be, I wouldn't ever want my mother to feel like she had to toughen up because of me, or away from me, or in order to protect herself from any armor I developed to combat her.

That's how the dark side sucks you in. Even if you don't want to, you may find yourself still moving toward it. As a kid I was already caught in the tractor beam, and it was pulling me in.

6

Tiger Mothers. Okay, what exactly are we talking about here? We're talking no hugs, no sweet nothings whispered into your soft little ears, not even a smooch good night. Tiger Moms aren't exactly cuddly cupcakes. They don't kiss your boo-boos when you stumble and scrape the skin off your leg. Tiger Moms are, shall we say, detached. Practical to a fault. I was fed and clothed just fine, and I know I should be thankful for that. But what of the abstract, less concrete gestures, those that we most define as “mothering”? Where is that, Tiger Lady? What about nurturing, reassuring, and . . . loving?

Sorry. It's illegal to import that. You'll never get it through customs.

My own mother has always been blunt and matter-of-fact. There were never any romantic Mary Cassatt moments between us. Of course, Mary Cassatt had no kids. All those sweet paintings of mother and child were all wishful thinking. Who else had no kids? Beatrix Potter, the artist whose creations charmed a century of mothers and babies. Maybe they had the ability to conjure those nurturing, feminine ideals because no one was yelling, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,” in their faces while demanding mac 'n' cheese,
Ruby Gloom
cartoons, and rapt attention to the plight of their Transformers.

I try to understand where this Tiger Mom vibe came from in the first place. First off, I remember that life might be comfortable for Tiger Moms now, but their hard-assery comes from having been poor as children. Also, they themselves were discriminated against and, most likely, more openly and harshly than we are now.

Tiger Parents have developed this practical approach from a young age because they had to. Chinese families were often big and rowdy, and their own parents probably ruled with absolute authority and corporal punishment. When our parents were kids, they didn't have time to get all weepy because they probably had to help in the family business whether it was food service, laundry, sewing piecework, or whatever else under the sun Chinese families did to survive. Also, there was the raising of younger siblings, and everyone lived crammed together without any semblance of privacy. Therefore, to them, our feelings of being inconvenienced by the smallest infraction of our personal space must be pretty laughable. When their parents knocked them in the head with a raised third knuckle or pulled their ears, they swallowed their pride, turned the other cheek, and learned how to get tough.

I often wonder what my life would have been like as a Chinese American woman if I'd been born in other eras. From 1860 to 1900, I would have been lucky to be the daughter of a shopkeeper or the wife of a merchant. My days would have passed mostly indoors, as Chinese women hardly left the house for reasons of safety or Confucian ideology, which promoted bound feet as a measure to ensure a lack of independence. I would have raised the children and tended to the food, and possibly would have helped roll cigars, bait fish hooks, or do other menial tasks. But more than likely, if I were a Chinese woman during that time in California, I would have been a prostitute, having been kidnapped, sold by my own family, or even auctioned off several times to lead a dismal life.

In those days I also could have been a laundryman's daughter and I might've been glad to be sequestered in steamy squalor, soaking dirt-caked clothes in boiling water and lifting a ten-pound iron to smooth over the clean clothes. I would have had burn marks all over my hands from the strenuous work, but at least I wouldn't have had to suffer gazes from white barbarians out on the street.

Meanwhile, Chinese men were exploited for cheap labor in railroad construction, agriculture, and a variety of service jobs deemed too menial by white workers. The newspapers and magazines of the era frequently caricatured the Chinese as rats, both for the perception of dirtiness and of swarming plenitude. Movies and popular stories of that time frequently depicted Chinatowns as places for murder, kidnapping, and the corruption of whites by sexually depraved inhabitants who stupefied their victims with opium.

However, in San Francisco the climate did slowly and painstakingly begin to change for Chinese Americans. After the 1906 earthquake, the new, rebuilt Chinatown was sanitized and made pretty for tourists with ornate balconies and bright streetlamps. It was hailed as an area ready for more Americanization and commerce, with less vice and corruption. Back in China, the Qing Dynasty collapsed, and a new stage for upheaval was set. Sun Yat-sen founded the Republic of China in 1912, but by 1915 political chaos reigned with conflicting warlords vying for power. Sun died in 1925, and by 1927, his successor, Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist party, the Kuomintang, did not fare better in unifying China. The Nationalists and the opposing Communists inadvertently killed thousands of civilians as they vied for control of the country.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Chinese American women living from the 1920s to 1940s may have been cautious but longed to be carefree, were strong but perceived as weak, might have been adventurous yet stayed back because of family loyalty or lack of opportunity. They joined the ranks of thousands of restaurant workers, house servants, elevator girls, and sewing women. They worked in many nonglamorous but necessary moneymaking endeavors, in any jobs that were available to them. Some married and moved to rural areas, while others remained humble Chinatown residents, some of whom I viewed as a child after they had grown old. These young women of the 1920s and 1930s became the old ladies of the early 1970s who pulled their grim expressions of hardship into sad smiles while they watched me toddle across the street. If I was with my grandma Lucy, they were the ones who stopped to chat, and exclaimed how lucky I was, while I obliviously and petulantly pulled my grandmother toward the Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop on Grant Avenue.

If I were a grown Chinese American woman in the 1920s and 1930s, maybe I would have been one of the ladies I've seen in pictures of the Chinatown Telephone Exchange. I may have had an American hairstyle with pin curls or finger waves, but might have still worn a traditional Chinese dress. Few Chinese women would have donned the outfit of a flapper, as did Anna May Wong who danced the Charleston in 1922 for
East Is West
. Most likely, one's clothing would be modest, because even in the 1940s a Chinese person could still be refused a clerical job at a business simply because of her race. Companies would simply state, “We don't hire Chinese.”

A Chinese American woman back then would no doubt have been keenly aware of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, who toured America in 1943 to raise support for China. She was elegant and spoke perfect English and was a symbol of a new China—pro-American, Christian, and, style-wise, a complete knockout.

Who was this woman? In 1937,
Life
magazine called Madame Chiang Kai-shek “probably the most powerful woman in the world.” She was the wife of the president of China, and she single-handedly charmed the world leaders of the West into believing, for a brief time anyway, that China wanted democracy and modernity. And how did she do it? By speaking English fluently with a disarming southern lilt, and with legs down to there and a cheongsam slit up to here.

Interestingly, while she worked the visual allure of her sexuality to the utmost advantage, in words she sought to downplay her “otherness.”

Madame Chiang Kai-shek is famously known for saying, “The only Chinese thing about me is my face.”

Ah so. A new kind of butterface
.

She was a twentieth-century fox, and she knew how to use her body, her demeanor, and the power of her beauty. Chinese people who remember that era think of her with pride as someone who was accepted on the international stage as an equal in a time of vast inequalities and racism. Without her, China in the 1930s and 1940s would have had no equivalent of a goodwill ambassador who embodied hope and elegance. Madame Chiang Kai-shek rose to prominence by simultaneously playing up her exoticism and denying she was Chinese at all. WTF! Apparently, though, she gave the world what it wanted to see and hear.

With China joining the Allied Powers after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Chinese American women could now participate in war relief work. They raised funds, worked in defense plants, and even served in the armed forces. World War II gave both male and female Chinese Americans the opportunity to become more integrated into American society as a whole. Now Chinese American women were able to get jobs in businesses that were previously unavailable because of race. Careers were now an option in private industries, just as they now were for American women as a whole. Opportunities in more sectors of professional life became increasingly available.

By the 1950s, prosperity had come to many Chinese American families, including my own. In photos of my relatives' high school classes, the Chinese gals wear cat-eye glasses, pedal pushers, and teenybopper outfits identical to those of their blond-haired, blue-eyed classmates. In other pictures from this decade, I've come across Chinese American girls in bathing suit contests, or dressed as cheerleaders, or sitting in soda fountains, all resembling black-haired Bettys and Veronicas from
Archie
comics.

As far as the 1960s are concerned, I don't picture too many young, Chinese American women running off to become flower children, despite Chinatown's relative proximity to Golden Gate Park. During this decade, Chinese Americans were still working diligently to achieve their goals of assimilation. Despite the phenomenon of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury scene at the time, I think there was a huge disconnect between America's then-burgeoning counterculture and Chinese Americans. We weren't ready yet to embrace hippie insouciance and bad hygiene. In contrast, many were still holding on to their identity as patriotic Americans. Those second-generation Number One Sons had just earned their engineering degrees on the GI Bill and went to work for Boeing and Lockheed Corporation. We were still pursuing the American Dream, not trying to debunk its myths and dismantle it.