After earning a political science degree from George Washington University, my grandpa looked for a job, but encountered much discrimination. So he went back to China in search of work. He was a newspaperman in Shanghai when he met my grandmother. It was the early 1930s and Shanghai was known as the Paris of the East, with colonial-style buildings on the Bund and fancy dance halls. Of course, there also existed extreme poverty and people dying in the streets, but as my mind conjures the family lore, these unsavory truths are expunged. Sticking with the Chinese American fairy tale, Lemuel Jen spotted a young woman named Lucy Chow, thinking she was a rich debutante. My grandmother told me many years later that she was actually wearing a borrowed dress the night she met Gung Gung. Her family had once been rich but her father had been killed fighting for Sun Yat-sen’s Republic in the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty. Her mother remarried, to a “fat, old man” who would not have accepted a woman who’d been wed before, so my grandma was forced to pretend she was her mother’s niece, not her daughter. Her mother had begged the new husband to allow her niece to work in the house as a maid. My grandma Lucy, Pau Pau, would tell me these things as she nibbled Pepperidge Farm butter cookies in her Russian Hill apartment, over commercials during Bonanza.
Eventually my grandpa Lemuel got a job with the U.S. government in the Lend-Lease program. Before the United States officially joined the Allied Forces in World War II, it was “lending” military supplies to other countries and needed people like him to translate and work as liaisons.
In 1949, they left Hong Kong on USS General Gordon and landed in San Francisco, my grandpa’s adopted hometown. They scrambled for money with odd jobs such as peeling pounds of shrimp for local restaurants, delivering newspapers, and helping out in Chinese-owned grocery stores and curio shops. They eventually started a travel agency on Clay Street in Chinatown. Meanwhile, in addition to my mother and aunt, my grandparents also had five other children. In pictures from those days, Pau Pau looks elegant with her perfectly coiffed hair and tight cheongsams, the Chinese-style dress with a high Mandarin collar, side zipper, and slit up the side. Her style and aplomb combined with Grandpa Lemuel’s chutzpah epitomized for me the can-do attitude that propelled them toward the American Dream.
And that was how I came to be walking down Grant Avenue with them as a wide-eyed four-year-old. I felt safe with them. At the time, I was just a content little kid, and surrounded in the ethnic cocoon that was Chinatown, I made no distinction between myself and the other Chinese I saw around me. After that year with my grandparents, I started kindergarten and didn’t go to their office as often, but throughout my childhood, I still visited Chinatown every Saturday morning. My parents would help Gung Gung and Pau Pau with travel agency work, and my brothers and I would goof around on the streets, hanging around our cousin’s grandpa’s grocery store. It was the first market in Chinatown to carry both Chinese and American products, so you could get your dried cuttlefish and Cap’n Crunch all in one stop. We would run in the aisles as Yeh Yeh watched us bemusedly in his greengrocer’s apron.
My brothers and I were American kids for most of the week, Chinese kids on Saturdays. We were Chinese Kids Lite. We ran around Chinatown like a Spanky and Our Gang cluster of urban urchins, and while my brothers and cousin went to Joe Jung’s or Jackson Café for French fries, I ran off to my tap-dancing lesson at the YMCA with Tony Wing.
As the years went by and I grew from five years old to ten, I incrementally began to notice differences between other kids in Chinatown and me. Their hand-knit and dollar-store clothes looked weird to me (not that my I’M WITH STUPID T-shirt and tube socks were the height of fashion either), and their haltingly spoken, heavily accented English—that is, when they weren’t speaking in Chinese—was something I found exasperating.
And I was equally foreign to them as well. If I encountered girls my age, we eyeballed each other warily, taking in all the visual cues that might tell us who was American-born and who was fresh-off-the-boat. If I said “Hello” to a girl and didn’t get a reply, I knew she didn’t speak English, and if she said something in Cantonese and I remained mute, it was sufficient proof that I didn’t speak Chinese. Our faces may have looked similar, but we had nothing further to say to each other.
Somehow, looking alike but having nothing in common made us instant enemies. The standoff between other little girls and me was proof that animosity within the Chinese population could start from an early age. An us-versus-them mentality between assimilated and immigrant groups simmered within all Chinatown. In sidelong glances, hostile stares, and gruff behavior, I noticed the hostility among older kids and adults as well. We were all of Chinese descent, but we were still suspicious of each other. To have other Chinese kids cut their eyes at me or insult me in a language I couldn’t understand embarrassed and humiliated me. And likewise, when I matched their chiding by disparaging them in English to my brothers, I’m sure I made them feel dumb.
Back then it had never occurred to me that my mother and grandmother had started out not speaking English, just like these girls I disdained. If my grandmother had been a young girl, and if we were meeting for the first time on this Chinese playground, we, too, would have been separated by language and customs. We might have been enemies simply because our rates of assimilation into American culture were staggered in time. But none of that mattered then. As a kid I was not making connections in my head about layers of experience within my cultural diaspora. I just wanted to hurl a ball at other kids’ heads and laugh at them. Which is what my brothers and I did to them, and what they did to us.
Saturday was our day in Chinatown, but during the week my brothers and I also went to daily Chinese school after regular school. St. Mary’s was the imposing gulag on the corner of Stockton and Clay Streets, and we reluctantly took the bus there from St. Brigid’s on Franklin and Broadway Streets. Two schools and two sets of peers required switching personalities each afternoon. So from my efforts of being an American from 8:30 A.M. to 2:30 P.M., and then trying to be Chinese between 4:00 P.M. and 7:00 P.M., there was always a constant, consistent feeling of being not American enough, or not Chinese enough, or always lacking a little bit of both simultaneously.
To reconcile both sides of my life, I learned to remain safely vague and noncommittal when answering questions. I relied heavily on the time-tested phrase “I don’t know” when talking to my peers. Girls from St. Brigid’s asked, “Why don’t you join Girl Scouts?” and instead of replying, “Because I have to go to Chinese school every afternoon,” I just said, “I don’t know.” And at St. Mary’s, when kids asked, “Why aren’t you making kites and lanterns for Harvest Moon Festival?” once again I simply stated, “I don’t know.” It was a lot easier than explaining to ESL students that I had to glue together my Pilgrim diorama, memorize the Beatitudes, and finish a report titled “Gruesome Deaths of the Saints.”
Back in those days, I was just making my way in my grammar-school-aged world. Although I started out as a little kid feeling totally comfortable in Chinatown, lovingly holding my grandma Lucy’s hand as we strolled down the sidewalks, by the time I was a preteen, I already felt like a stranger in the community that first embraced my family.
Looking back now, I can’t help but superimpose knowledge I’ve gained over the years—the history of Chinese gold seekers, coolie railroad workers, house servants, and thousands of little girls sold, stolen, or given away—on every memory I have of San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Everything converges in my mind—my grandparents’ early days, my own childhood memories, and the Chinese history I have since learned. All the information and feelings churn inside me as I walk, present day, down those same narrow city streets. I take in the garish colors and silent stares, bright souvenirs and dirty alleys. Glancing around, filled with both humility and pride, I know I am not alone. This convergence of past and present, of old and new, of quietude and bravado, is a particular melancholy familiar to almost every Chinese American.
4
The Defiant Chinese Body
As a kid, the conflict of feeling both Chinese and American continued to bubble inside me, cooling down or heating up to a rolling boil depending on where I was or whom I was with. Meanwhile, on the outside, my appearance caused its own quiet tension between me and those who inhabited my immediate surroundings. Unlike most other Chinese girls, I was not a flat-chested willow with noodly arms or a long, thin neck. I was a chunky chibbles. What kind of Chinese kid was I? The overweight, American kind.
Chuy! Why was I so chubby? No one would hug me, but pinching my blubber was a family pastime. My stomach, thighs, face, and legs were all up for grabs. I was a kid who lived mostly in my head, but these pinches of my tender flesh reminded me that my body was not just my own, but also somewhat community property as far as my family was concerned. It was a terrorism of teasing that was often shrugged away as being benign, but kept me feeling bad about myself, mixed up with love. My relatives poked me and said it was all in fun. Moreover, it was somehow supposedly for my own good. You don’t want to be fat, do you? But then . . . What—why aren’t you eating? EAT! You’re lucky you have food. Do you know there are starving people in China? It made my elders happy to see me eat. Didn’t I want to make them happy? Oh. Now look at you. You’re getting husky. Do you want to embarrass me?
As a child, my body was being quietly, constantly scrutinized by adults. Parents, grandparents, extended relatives, and complete strangers could and would make comments out loud, or silently critique my physique with their smirks or expressions of disapproval. I learned to cover up, or run away.
Much has already been written about the impossible body standards that girls must navigate, but I think there is an added dimension in Asian culture. There is so much emphasis on saving face and reflecting well on your family that one is constantly scrutinized for the appearance of success. In the old days, maybe if you looked well fed, that could be considered an asset to your family, showing the community that your clan was wealthy and prosperous. That desire to parade you around like a prized pig is still there, and as always, your embarrassment or feelings are not valued. Your body is just one more way in which you reflect well or poorly on your parents and elders.
At times it seems that every Asian mom is genetically programmed to act like Waverly Jong’s mother in The Joy Luck Club. Remember the scene in the movie when Tsai Chin struts down the street proudly displaying the magazine that shows Waverly’s chess championship photo? Every Asian mom wants your accomplishments, and hence her own, plastered on the front page so she can walk around triumphantly gloating.
And if you’re a fatty, Mom can’t gloat. Strangely, it is all about the gloating, isn’t it? Or alternately, about saving face. And moms are never too pleased when your blubber is making your face unrecognizable, your skin swelling like a stretched-tight balloon that threatens to obscure your facial features. In my Wonder Woman T-shirt, I looked like a loaf of Wonder Bread, with eyes. People kept admonishing me to lose weight, but also kept feeding me. Then I was blamed for being Gigantor, like I was being embarrassing on purpose.
I was a fat kid. Maybe I couldn’t express my dissatisfaction and melancholy in words, so I used my own body as a silent protest against perfection. Or maybe I packed on the pounds to protect myself from those who disapproved of me, to create a physical distance between me and them. Either way, being a jumbo prawn was just one way of being defiant.
For example, one time when I was little, my mom was trying to get me to do something, like vacuum, but I refused. We went back and forth in a typical way.
“Go do it.”
“Why should I?”
“Because.”
“Because why?”
“Because I said so.”
“Why should I have to do whatever you say?”
My mom was so over my backtalk. She finally yelled, “Because I’m the person who MADE you!”
Oh, please. Was she really going there? I calmly retorted, “I came through you, but I am not of you.”
That week at school we must have been studying prepositions and something about Jesus informing Joseph that he was but his earthly father.
My mom looked at me like I was nuts. Who was this little creep she had made? She stared at me mutely but was probably thinking she should start supervising my reading material.
After all these years, I still remember that exchange because it was such a clear moment in which I was declaring my separation from my mother. I didn’t know it at the time, but from that moment onward, we were indeed on completely different wavelengths. She saw me as an extension of her own body and still wanted me to be an obedient baby. I was about ten years old and already considered myself an individual.
Another defining moment of separation between us came soon thereafter. One evening, after I had just brushed my teeth, I called to my mom to say that I was ready for bed. I waited in the hallway while she finished up whatever she was doing. I was hoping to win her attention and approval by making her laugh. As she approached, I stuck out my behind and pursed my lips in an exaggerated way like I’d seen on wooden, Chinese bobblehead dolls in a souvenir shop in Chinatown. I posed, bent at the waist and elbows akimbo with my lips out, ready for a smooch.
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
Tough Love, Tough Luck
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 back
bone, 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!”
Tiger Babies Strike Back Page 2
