Tiger Babies Strike Back (6 page)

In the 1970s, I was just a kid in a
Star Wars
T-shirt, riding my banana-seat bicycle and making detailed drawings of R2-D2 and C-3PO after Chinese school and piano lessons. I was eating rice gruel with salted pork and washing that fatty Chinese goodness down with a Shamrock Shake.

At that time, my mother's youngest siblings boasted feathered hair, KC and the Sunshine Band records, and Camaros. I watched them with fascination as they talked about dates, making out, and drinking tequila sunrises at local fern bars like Henry Africa's and Lord Jim's. Would I have been like them if I had been an adult then? I'd like to think not, but who knows?

As it was, in the 1980s I morphed into a Flock of Seagulls fan with a wedge hairdo. It was during this period that
Newsweek
put Asian Americans on its cover, declaring us model minorities. Ice skater Tiffany Chin was the latest incarnation of the Asian good girl, Connie Chung was on TV, and the model Ariane starred with Mickey Rourke in
Year of the Dragon
. Movies like
Big Trouble in Little China
and
Tai-Pan
were evidence that Hollywood still projected Asians through a distorted lens, but I did see enough Asian representation in the media to feel like any profession was within my grasp. There were local newscasters like Jan Yanehiro on
Evening Magazine
, and bylines by Ben Fong-Torres in
Rolling Stone
. I didn't particularly feel like a minority, especially in San Francisco.

And I guess I wasn't. At the time, criticism was just coming to the forefront regarding the University of California and admissions requirements that were possibly biased against Asian Americans. Apparently, we were outperforming white applicants on either test scores or GPAs or both and were being held to higher standards in order to be offered acceptance letters. The bottom line was that the order of the universe might have come crashing down if there were more Asians than whites on campus. Well, so much for thinking we were ideal minorities. Now we were just too good for our own good, and our numbers needed to be controlled. It was 1987, but hadn't we heard “The Chinese Must Go” one hundred years earlier? Admissions requirements were subsequently tweaked and retweaked, and to this day the debates rage on about affirmative action and racial quotas in college admissions.

The options for Chinese women in America have evolved from limited to limitless. The doors of access have been thrown open so we can now achieve the pinnacle of every field. So naturally, it seems, Chinese women would crush any and all competition on the playing field of motherhood, too, right?

But raising and loving human beings is different from studying for tests and rising through the professional ranks. In academics and the corporate world, crucial skills that lead to success are memorization, the application of logic, and delineating sharp goals and adhering to those lines and properties. Parenthood, however, is not about memorization but requires total improvisation. You must deal with your gurgling spawn whose non-sequitur style of talking and bathroom needs defy logic. And last, in this new reality, all concepts of hygiene, discipline, social hierarchy, and sometimes morals become blurred. Boundaries once clearly drawn, as well as your sanity, dissolve.

Motherhood is not about outlining a foolproof plan, because none exists when it comes to your baby. So when all your skills of diligence and exactitude prove to be ineffective, how can you not just succeed, but win? Failure is most certainly never an option. So maybe women who are accustomed to high levels of perfection then take the logical route, and just try to clamp down harder to gain control of an uncontrollable situation.

Et voilà! That's when the Tiger Mother enters stage right. (And of course, she is always right.)

The Tiger Mom is like a modern, virulent strain of the dragon lady that, with each generation, becomes more and more resistant to the human body's natural ability to fight back. And we are the ones who've let this infectious personality rage out of control and ravage our systems. Tiger Babies, there are currently no antibiotics that can help us combat this formidable foe that flows through our bloodstreams. Our hearts will have to pump out the courage to fight back with love and empathy for our Tiger Parents. They are missing the chromosome for tenderness, and we must somehow be the stem cell donors to help them.

The generations that came before us were working so hard to survive, to earn money, and to get a foothold in work and society that many of us were left to raise ourselves. Or at least that's what it felt like. Even if we were lucky enough to have food and clothes, and our other basic needs were otherwise provided for, we did not necessarily ever feel emotionally, psychologically, or spiritually sustained.

Chinese Americans have achieved so much from the first waves of immigration to the present. The next frontier is an abstract one. We are not strangers on a different physical shore, but in our hearts and minds. Our houses may be already built, but we the children of the first and second generations are still begging to be let in.

Let me in, Mom. I know the door to your heart isn't rusted shut.

7

There ought to be an explanatory parable:

Now that Chinese Americans have indeed attained and achieved so much, can we be big enough to admit that we are not Number One all the time?

Through many generations of physical and mental perseverance, backbreaking work, and the swallowing of our pride, Chinese people have always held steadfast to the concept of The Best. We like to think that we are the best at doing everything. We raise the best kids. We own and consume the best name brands. Chinese people are THE BEST. I guess it's inevitable that when the best doesn't quite work out, we've also got the best rate of offing ourselves. So we're the best, even in death. Those stupid other races. They think they can compete with Chinese! We even have suicide dialed.

My aunt who said I'd be a loser without a Mercedes-Benz? Her sister killed herself by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge before she turned twenty-seven years old. There's a connection somehow. That's proof right there that something sucks in Chinese thinking.

Wake up, overachievers. Wake up, underachievers. No one has to kill themselves anymore. We adhered to standards of superiority because throughout our history we have been treated blatantly as inferior. No wonder we subsequently claimed to have invented everything good: ice cream, spaghetti, pugs, the color pink, potstickers, and superior parenting à la Tiger Mom.

But now that we are sitting pretty, or at least have secured a growing claim to the American middle class, could we now ease up on the posture that we are the best at everything?

Not every Chinese kid is going to play Carnegie Hall, have his or her picture taken with the president of the United States, or become a city supervisor or state assemblywoman. We aren't all filet mignon. Statistically, some of us have to be the cheap cuts. Some of us are just stew meat.

The emperor of China has no clothes, but no one is talking about anything. And somebody has got to say something. Asian people usually won't voluntarily expose their own shortcomings, pain, petty jealousies, or embarrassing moments. That leaves a writer with only herself as subject matter. I hope that sharing my utterly human, world-class, stupid mistakes might drill a tiny hole in the Great Wall of Chinese silence. For you, Kind Reader, I undertake this alarming task with my bare hands. My only tools are words that I've linked together like a chain of paper clips. I hope that what I've written can pull someone through.

Anyone.

People like you and me.

Because of the hardships they endured, or maybe because they still have one foot in the old world, our Tiger Moms and Tiger Dads might never stop pushing us toward being the best. They might never concede that without being absolutely number one we are still fine people, or good sons and daughters. If we are just fairly accomplished in our careers, have great kids of our own, or are happy individuals or kind human beings, our achievements are somehow never enough for our Tiger Parents.

Then to add insult to injury, as time goes by, our stoic, unyielding, older parents will only see the past through their rose-colored eyewear. “What are you complaining about?” they might say. They are good at pretending not to notice the faint scars—on our bodies, our psyches, and our hearts. They'll shrug off any beatings we endured, saying we succeeded because of their toughness, not despite it.

We adult children of Tiger Parents want acknowledgment of the deep pains, emotional or physical, that our moms and dads caused. We want an apology. We might settle for an admission of regret, but we might never even get that.

My brother once confronted our mother about the spankings he suffered as a child. He was very brave to even bring up the subject. But her response was not all that satisfying. Our mother said, “If that did happen to you, then I am sorry.”

Please notice the evasive wording. I'm not sure how my mom can still sometimes mix up the pronouns
he
and
she
, but in a pinch, she instantaneously mastered the English language's conditional verb tense. Her sentence left plenty of room for interpretation. She did not at all own up to anything, really. And that totally sucked.

So in this way, when attempting to confront Tiger Parents, one might experience the futility in hauling them in for questioning. Our requests for accountability might never stick. They somehow always make bail.

They are not the ones in jail.

We are.

We are in emotional jail, on emotional death row.

Tiger Babies, since we can't do anything about our elders' emotional availability, maybe at least we can do something for ourselves.

Let's stop pretending that all this jockeying to be the best is working for any of us. Let's stop leasing those luxury cars for appearance's sake, and rise up in our hoopties to declare that we are here, so get used to us. Let's throw away those report cards, because we're not in high school anymore.

What matters is who we are now.