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.
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 jus
t 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
Origin of the Tiger Mother Species
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 th
e 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.
Tiger Babies Strike Back Page 3
