by Anchee Min
If I had to pinpoint a moment when I felt that I rose to the challenge as a mother, I would say this was it. I could feel the leap taking place, transforming me from a Chinese mother with limited tools to an American mother blessed and empowered by love and the understanding of the art of loving. The information and the knowledge were there, from what I had learned in my own life and from others, but the transformation hadn’t occurred until now. I could hear the grand sound of the imaginary click. I couldn’t change the past or transform Qigu into a more attentive father. But I could resist the urge to blame him and instead speak to my own role in my daughter’s life. I would catch the chance my mother never had, a chance to truly connect with my child. There was no hesitation or fear. There was no what if, perhaps, or maybe later, but a sense of certainty.
“A mother’s love can contaminate, poison, harm, and destroy as well as empower and protect,” I began.
A little surprised, Lauryann pushed away the blankets that wrapped around her bare shoulders. She sat on the sofa and leaned forward toward me.
I told Lauryann that I had never been cruel in my life, but that I had done a cruel thing to my mother after I came to America. “In retrospect, I still wonder if the cost was not too great,” I said. It was an act of liberation, a necessity on my part. Like pulling off the strips of cloth that bound the feet of so many Chinese women, I had to make the cut myself. “American education had changed my character. I felt strong enough to speak in my own voice, the voice of my honest self for the first time, to my mother, the person I loved most in the world, and the person who knew me the least.”
I began writing letters to destroy my mother’s perfect image of me. I had become disgusted with my own dishonesty. I was so sick of my mother pretending not to see my flaws. I wrote to tell her that I had never been perfect. Her model child, her flagship, had never existed. I had stolen from her. I had sold my father’s books to buy a piece of candy. I had lied to my mother as an adult. I told her that everything was fine while I was in trouble and having an affair. I was depressed because I was unable to get out of my troubles. It didn’t occur to me that I had altered my own reality.
“My mother didn’t want to hear the news that Qigu and I were divorced,” I continued. “But I kept reporting what I wanted her to hear. I was determined to penetrate her, to break her down, to force her to accept me as I was. I told my mother how I was not making it in America, that I was working as a maid and a cleaning hand at construction sites, that I was not able to get a normal job that would lead to US citizenship. I wanted her to like the me who was trying her best to achieve her full potential. I needed her support and approval.
“But she wouldn’t give it to me. She refused to accept the flawed me. She was disgusted with the real me. She shut her eyes and turned her head. My father said that she used to wait for my letters. She looked forward to the sound of the postman’s bell the moment she woke up. But now she was scared. She refused to open my letters. She said, ‘No!’ when my father offered to read them to her.
“When I visited China, I revealed the worst news. I showed my mother the scar, told her about the rape, and I described my failed suicide attempt in the past.”
The image of my mother covering her ears with her hands stuck with me. Her eyes shut tightly. Her frame was shaking as she pleaded, “No more. Please. No more.”
I remembered continuing, spilling the hurtful words, crying and sobbing at the same time.
“You are killing your mother,” my father said. “She doesn’t deserve it.”
Outside the widows, the sun began to set. Darkness descended and turned the trees into patterns of black paper cuts. “Not until I had you did I start to understand my mother,” I said to Lauryann. “My mother lived to protect me even as she spoke the hurtful words, ‘Shame on you.’ Her philosophy that love can’t hurt backfired. I did everything I could to defeat her purpose. It’s not the rice but too little firewood that causes the rice to be half cooked, the Chinese saying goes. My mother didn’t have sufficient firewood. She died not knowing the real me. If there is regret, this is it. I loved her so much. I wanted her to know me, but she never allowed me access. I appreciate the chance you are giving me now. I want to get to know you, the real you. It means everything to me.”
Tears welled up in Lauryann’s eyes. She reached out to hold my hands.
I continued, “The moment I smashed the mirror in which my mother saw the perfect me, she experienced an internal crash. I was sure. But she held her composure and sat straight-faced. That’s the way she fought. She held on to her belief silently day after day, month after month, and year after year. She must have felt that she deserved to be punished, that she hadn’t raised me right. She once told me that she considered her life a failure because she never got to be the schoolteacher she wanted to be. She was a teacher who never got to hold a class. I was her only chance to show the world that she was not the ‘Teacher Idiot.’ I was her pride, her creation, her only work of art. I was her integrity and dignity. My success would be the proof that she hadn’t wasted her life. I was the embodiment of her worth. Yet I couldn’t let her have that.
“Now that she is dead, and now that I understand her love, I hate myself for making her suffer. I live with the misery that I let my mother down. I want you to be free of such dreadful remorse. I want you to know that I don’t desire a perfect child. Because that wouldn’t be the real you. It’d be impossible. It’d be fake. One can go to the trophy store and buy a wall of awards and banners. You’d fool everyone but yourself. I love the real you, the one who keeps hitting the steel wall and hoping that it will turn into a wall of flowers. I believe that you are perfect. Your bravery and courage to be the real you makes you the perfect child. You have been pleasing me, and you have my acceptance and approval.”
“Of all my flaws, doubts, and confusion?” Lauryann said, wiping first her tears away and then mine.
“Of all your flaws, doubts, and confusion.” I smiled, pulling her toward me, and hugged her the way I did when she was a little girl.
Part Six
{ Chapter 35 }
Lauryann’s PSAT scores were considered low in comparison to other kids from Asian-American families. A few years before, I had researched the tests with the same zeal I had when applying for my US visa a quarter century before. What I discovered was that college admissions offices, especially at the elite colleges, would compare Lauryann’s scores with other Asian-American applicants’. Although Lauryann was one of the best students at her public high school, her test scores might hold her back.
Brave as Lauryann masked herself to be, fear and nervousness crippled her ability to perform to the best of her ability during tests.
Lloyd encouraged Lauryann. “Fear is the best motivation,” he said. “I stopped chewing my fingernails. See? I used to chew them until they bled. The marines set me straight. The drill instructor saw me and said, ‘Stop it, you maggot!’ And I stopped. You must learn to stare fear in the eye and say the same thing.”
“Yeah, stop it, you maggot. Like that would work for me,” Lauryann replied. “It’s not a magic wand.”
An SAT score below 2200 meant that Lauryann would have less of a chance to be accepted to an elite college. Within the Asian-American community, the racial glass ceiling was an unspoken yet known reality. Chinese-American families accepted what they couldn’t change and worked all the harder.
Like other Chinese parents, I kept repeating this to Lauryann: “America will grab you and offer you the best if you prove yourself to be gold-medal material. It’s all about what you can do for America.”
I suggested that Lauryann consider herself a second-class citizen. “It’s better that you’re taught the truth. If America honored race-blind competition, the nation’s elite colleges would be filled with the hardworking Asians. Have you heard of the American saying ‘You don’t stand a Chinaman’s chance’? Chinaman, that’s who you are.”
I asked Lloyd to work with me to he
lp Lauryann improve her writing skills. Although Lauryann’s reading and writing were considered excellent at her school, her scores for the PSAT test were low, especially in writing. Out of 800, Lauryann scored 620.
Lloyd was glad to help, but he had one condition. “I’ll only use a red-colored pen,” he said.
“What kind of condition is that?” I asked.
Lloyd explained that in America, in order to protect students’ self-esteem, teachers (at least in the high school where he worked) were encouraged to stop using red pens when grading student papers. The students didn’t like their teachers’ remarks in red ink, a district administrator once told the teachers at a staff meeting. The parents had protested that their kids were uncomfortable with the red ink.
“Well, in China, for thousands of years, teachers never used any other ink but red,” I remarked.
“I was so mad that I bought two dozen red ink pens after I was told not to use them!” Lloyd said.
“Did you use them?” Lauryann asked.
“No. I didn’t want to lose my job.”
“I will welcome your red ink,” Lauryann said.
Lloyd went online and found over forty SAT prompts for writing topics. It was enough for Lauryann to practice writing one essay a week for the entire school year.
Before practicing, Lauryann set her alarm clock for twenty-five minutes. It took time for her to get used to writing an essay in such a short time. Lauryann would then give the essay to Lloyd, who would correct it and give the essay a grade. We celebrated when Lauryann earned a rare six on a scale of six. We felt good when Lauryann earned a five, but if she earned a four or a three, we sat and discussed what the problem was. Lauryann and I would study Lloyd’s red-colored criticisms. Lauryann would rewrite the entire essay, sometimes several times, until she achieved a six. Occasionally I disagreed with Lloyd’s view. The three of us would then discuss the essay further and decide on the best approach for revisions.
After a year of these drills, Lauryann was able to achieve a five or a six on every essay. Lloyd and I felt confident that Lauryann was ready. She was able to come up with a unique and balanced point of view on any given topic and could compose the essay in twenty-five minutes—the time limit given for the SAT essay. Lauryann’s command of the English language was efficient, and her grammar was sound. For nine years Lloyd had restricted his presents to Lauryann to books he thought she would enjoy and learn from, and it had had the desired effect. Lloyd loaned Lauryann his Lord of the Rings, and I loaned her my Jane Eyre. I had also been providing Lauryann with a wide range of quotations that had inspired me in my own life. I was not only surprised at the speed of Lauryann’s improvement but with the maturity of her views. Lauryann also seemed confident that she would do well on the written part of the test.
We waited for the results of the SAT. To our great disappointment, Lauryann’s score failed to improve significantly. She received 650 out of 800—only 30 points higher than her previous score. Based on Lauryann’s account of how she had handled the prompt, Lloyd and I couldn’t understand why her essay had been graded so low. What went wrong? Was it because we had taught her not to be afraid of trying creative ways of presenting her thesis? Lauryann said that she was comfortable during the test, that she was not nervous or scared.
I was more devastated than Lauryann. I felt that it was my defeat.
“A grader is supposed to be unbiased, and most of them are fair,” Lloyd said, “but the human factor always plays a role in the scoring. The grader could have taken points off your essay because you failed to follow the expected formula. We just didn’t believe in teaching you that way.”
Lloyd and I were unable to convince Lauryann that nothing else mattered as long as she believed that she had done her best. Lauryann should be proud of the fact that both Lloyd and I had given her the highest score. But this did little to console her, and she remained doubtful of her writing abilities.
“Mommy’s Boot Camp” was how Lauryann described our next trip to China. Lauryann may have been committed to a home-study plan, but she had difficulty sticking to it. She was constantly distracted by party invitations, phone calls from friends, text messages, Skype and Facebook chatting requests, and the latest YouTube video fad. Lauryann clung to the Internet. When I threatened to pull the plug, she yelled, “Mom, I am waiting for a reply from a friend who’s helping me with my homework!”
I took Lauryann to China with me as soon as school was out for the summer. I didn’t ask whether she was interested in coming with me, and I did not reveal my plan. Paying fifteen dollars a day for a motel on the outskirts of Shanghai, I created an environment where Lauryann could concentrate on her SAT practice books while I worked on my manuscript. “We will not leave this room until we achieve the day’s goal,” I announced.
Lauryann knew that her mother was in a “dictator mood,” and she had no choice but to comply. Due to jet lag and the time difference, we rose at around three A.M. and immediately settled down to work. For breakfast and lunch, we ate at Mr. He’s Dishes across from the motel or the noodle shop down the street. To exercise, we walked to her grandparents’ flat. If Lauryann achieved a score of 720 after practicing her drills, she would earn my permission to go shopping in the center of Shanghai.
Math had always been Lauryann’s weakness. Lloyd and I couldn’t understand Lauryann’s math textbooks. All we could do was purchase more practice books. Qigu, on the other hand, did not worry. “Why make Lauryann suffer over math?” he said over the phone. “As long as she knows how to count money, she’ll do just fine.”
I had drilled Lauryann before, and the result had been rewarding. This was long ago, when Lauryann was seven years old and I had worked with her on the times tables. Lauryann was too slow. To speed her up, I trimmed the words between the numbers—for example, the words plus and equals from “two plus two equals four.” Lauryann would memorize the phrase as “two-two-four” to save time. Now, all these years later, we kept drilling until Lauryann achieved an average score of 720 on the practice units.
The drilling exercises exhausted and bored Lauryann. For breaks, I took her to a nearby hair salon for a five-dollar shampoo wash and a head massage. The girl who worked on Lauryann was her age, about sixteen. She was from Anhui province. She was pretty and fair skinned. We learned that she had started working as a hairdresser at fifteen. We noticed that the girl was in pain. The skin between her fingers was cracked. I asked the girl about her hands. She replied that this was the result of soaking her hands in shampoo for fourteen hours a day. “My hands don’t get a break,” she said.
“You can wear protective gloves, can’t you?” I asked.
“Yes, but customers don’t like it,” the girl said. “The customers like to feel the tips of my nails massaging their skulls.”
“What if you insisted on wearing gloves?” I asked.
“The customer will go to someone else,” the girl replied. “There are a lot of girls like me trying to find work.”
After we returned to the motel, I thought about the girl and her damaged hands. “She is somebody’s daughter,” I said to Lauryann. “I couldn’t bear to have you work like this. It’d kill me.”
Lauryann was up early the next morning and dived into the math drills without a word.
Five months later, Lauryann achieved 790 out of 800 on the SAT math test.
Throughout her school years, Lauryann was desperate for acceptance from her peers. She would go so far as to pretend to be dumb. She had done the same when she was young. In order to remain friends with Fooh-Fann, she chose to diminish herself. Her sense of self-doubt and unworthiness hurt me. I felt guilty because I believed that it had to do with my divorce.
“You let your grades drop on purpose,” Lloyd concluded after questioning Lauryann.
Lauryann confessed that it was true. “I don’t want people to hate me!” She had been scolded and called a bitch and a whore by some of her schoolmates because she did her homework. She was accused of
making everyone else look bad.
I had no idea of the extent of my daughter’s battles. I simply couldn’t understand it. Such a thing would never happen in China. Her classmates demanded that Lauryann stop raising her hand to answer teachers’ questions. When she didn’t stop, one boy took away her glasses and pushed her around between classes.
Lloyd decided to complain to the school district, but I stopped him. “You’ll make Lauryann a public enemy!” I would have let Lloyd do it if it had been just one individual giving Lauryann a hard time. “But it’s the entire school culture! It is a storm Lauryann can’t weather!”
After repeated incidents, there was only one option left: move. Although Lauryann had to endure a newcomer’s awkwardness once again, being bullied at the other school had toughened her. She adapted quickly.
Lloyd was proud when Lauryann was honored as a scholar athlete at graduation from her high school. The funny thing was that the multiple awards given to Lauryann didn’t stop Lloyd from writing her a boldface letter, which read:
High School Graduation means that you are:
No longer protected by the law.
You are expected to pay your own rent.
You are expected to pay your own medical insurance.
You lose the freedom to talk back to your boss.
You either bag groceries, or wait tables, or earn a degree at a university that leads to a secure income.
You are responsible for your college loans and debts.