The Cooked Seed (47 page)

I asked Lloyd to work with me to help 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.

THE FUN ENDS AT 18!

GET READY TO SURVIVE LIFE!

GOOD LUCK!

Words cannot describe my emotions when Lauryann was accepted to Stanford University. She had applied to major in biology. It wasn’t until Lauryann printed out the acceptance letter and I read it word for word that I believed it was real. Lloyd’s reaction was, “Gee, making her jump through all your hoops was worth it!”

The three of us celebrated. We reflected on how far we had come as a family. We shared laughter and tears. To Lloyd’s astonishment, Lauryann and I revealed our “secrets.” While Lauryann admitted that she
had once written “I hate my mom” in her diary, I admitted that I had plotted “a conspiracy” using Lloyd as my weapon. I often took advantage of Lloyd’s short fuse and set him up. I added fuel to Lloyd’s smoldering fire, sat back, and watched him explode.

“What do you say, Lloydee, now that I am a Stanford girl?” Lauryann held up her hands and the two of them gave each other a high five.

“Oh, you are going to be in hog heaven.” Lloyd laughed. “You are going to have
sooooo
much fun, and your mother and I won’t exist anymore. You will be a puppy wagging your tail when the tingling hits. I have paid attention to your body language. You get animated when you talk about boys. Yesterday our neighbor Betsy said to me, ‘Oh, you are going to be missing Lauryann terribly, she is such a sweetheart!’ I said, ‘No, I won’t.’ And she said, ‘Oh, you’re just saying that. You’ll miss her.’ And I thought, What’s wrong with this American woman? Kids have to leave. I went to Vietnam when I was her age. But she’s going to Stanford—to party!”

“Don’t get too carried away with your tough love, Lloydee.” Lauryann laughed. “I don’t talk back because I want to let you enjoy your senior moment. Just remember, you might one day need me to spoon-feed you when you turn a hundred and thirty years old. Be a good boy, Lloydee, behave and be reasonable.”

I beamed at my child, now a five-foot-six, 110-pound young woman glowing with beauty and health. Her grandma was extremely pleased that she beat the height predictor. Lauryann was now ready to go out into the world. In a few months, she would call home to thank us for preparing her well—she received A’s in her writing classes. “Apparently, professors here think that I can write,” she said, although she cared more about bringing her math, physics, and chemistry grades up to “the Stanford level.”

It’s been twenty years since my first book,
Red Azalea
, my first publication. Sandra Dijkstra, my agent, is still the lady I met in Chicago. She is a zest of passion—beautiful, ageless, and superior in what she does. She is known as the Gate Tiger, someone who has so successfully put unknown authors on the literary map. She has created and re-created sensations and is a legend herself.

My longtime editor, Mr. Anton Mueller, is responsible for the success of my books since
Becoming Madame Mao
. My first editor was Miss Julie Grau, who edited
Red Azalea
and who is a phenomenal publisher herself today. I still remember the first time I met Julie. She flew to Chicago from New York. I went up to her hotel room. When I knocked, a woman in her twenties opened the door. I looked past her because I assumed my editor would be an older woman with gray hair and perhaps smoking a cigarette. Julie Grau was too young and too stunningly beautiful to fit the picture.

It took years for Anton Mueller and me to develop a strong editor-author relationship. We had our moments of cultural clashing. Anton learned to deal with my stubbornness, sensitivity, and will. He has been an excellent navigator and was the one who convinced his house to publish
Becoming Madame Mao
when everyone else in the business decided to let it go. Anton had no doubt that
Becoming Madame Mao
had the potential to become a bestseller, and he was proved right.

A psychiatrist once told me that the reason I wrote about China was that I missed China. She convinced me that writing offered me a way to cope with my homesickness. I denied the analysis at first, but after twenty-seven years I realized that the psychiatrist was not wrong.

I came to identify with Pearl S. Buck, the American novelist who won the Nobel Prize for her work
The Good Earth.
I understood Pearl’s cry “My roots in China must die!” She was suffering from being unable to let go of China, her home of forty years. Pearl Buck carried her love for China to her grave. There were only three Chinese characters, her Chinese
name, carved on the stone tablet. There was nothing else. It moved me to tears when I visited her grave site at her home in Pennsylvania.