Tiger Babies Strike Back (11 page)

Obviously at her wit's end, she deployed her youngest sister, Deanna, to talk to me. My aunt picked me up in her dazzling, two-tone Mercedes-Benz that she has since totaled and told me several things:

You know, thanks, Auntie, but I don't really want to drive around in your Benz and party with you. Just wanna stay home with my lumbering albino and watch
The X-Files
. But thanks, anyway!

Thankfully, my brothers were on my side. What was not to like about Rolf? He could throw a football, play golf, and talk sports statistics for hours. Many, many hours. And to them, that was a good thing. Sure, he drove a crappy Sentra, but at least he knew to wear long pants and a long-sleeved shirt to dinner to meet my parents. Heck, he even cleaned the bread crumbs off the tablecloth with
his own
crumber
that he brought along in his pocket. Do you know what a crumber is? It's that little metal thing that waiters use to comb the detritus off the table, and I never knew any regular person who carried around one of those things. What a freak! He was my freak.

Nowadays, my parents really don't like to acknowledge how shortsighted they'd been. He vacuums the cars, digs ditches for them, helps put the Christmas lights on the roof, and does all the other tasks that no one else wants to do. He shucks all the oysters, and cracks the Dungeness crab at dinner, then cleans up all the guts and stinky stuff. When my brother's Australian Shepherd got skunked on Christmas Eve, it was Rolf who took a shower with the dog and cleaned her up. When another pet bolted into the forest on a rainy night, it was Rolf who went after him. At a restaurant where there was no elevator, he carried my grandmother up two flights of stairs, aluminum walker and all, since she refused to let go of it and no one could wrest the cumbersome contraption from her iron grip. And yet another time, Rolf unloaded countless crates of decorations and beverages for my brother's wedding by double-parking several cars in succession in Chinatown in a torrential downpour. You would have thought he was a seasoned valet at Trader Vic's. All these examples serve to illustrate how Rolf will do all that needs to be done. He might be sweating like a pig, but he would never make you feel like he wasn't happy to help you. He is the ultimate Chinese son-in-law. Except that he's so white he's almost see-through.

On the upside, after seventeen years of marriage, my husband's name has finally been changed. When my relatives used to see him at Chinese banquets, everyone would say, “Who's that white guy?” But after so many years of seeing his nonblack head in the crowd, now they just say, “
There's
that white guy.”

Interestingly, although my parents had had their doubts, it was my grandma Lucy who was always very enthusiastic about Rolf. Maybe because she had survived bombs falling on her head in China, she knew some things weren't worth getting upset about. She said to me once, “He is very . . . refined.”

“Refined?” I sort of wanted to laugh. She made it sound like he drank fine wines with his pinkie in the air.

“Yes. His mother is teacher so he is very refined.”

Okay, Pau Pau, if you say so. I wasn't going to dispel any good things she thought about him. She added, “It okay that he not Chinese. You are in love, so it okay.”

She was completely nonchalant, and unconcerned about Rolf's whiteness. He had mopped her kitchen floor so she was all good with him. After our little chat, she sat with an unconcerned look on her face, and just went back to watching
Gunsmoke
.

And the rest is history. When the family matriarch gives a thumbs-up to your kind, sweaty, pastel-hued primate, your parents and party-loving auntie just have to shut their yaps.

13

After graduating from UC Berkeley, I was a butterball bred for high achievement, but I didn't have any idea how I was going to get where I wanted. I held a series of jobs, including five years as a museum bookstore clerk, a year as a high school admissions officer, and six months as a customer service representative at Levi Strauss & Co. I'd always wanted to be a writer and thought a parody called
Wage Slave Luck Club
might make a million dollars. Nonetheless, despite a yearning for a more artistic life, I didn't know how to commit myself to writing while simultaneously earning a living. It was easy to tell myself I was too busy to write. A person could go on for years telling herself that.

But in February 2000, my grandma Lucy died. I was afraid that I would too soon forget how great she was—so kind, quirky, and matter-of-fact. So I started writing little remembrances of her. I wrote little stuff like how she picked her teeth behind one cupped hand and how she'd sometimes just laugh in someone's face when she knew they were full of hot air. Because she was the essence of real, all-encompassing love in my life, I wanted to do her memory justice by recalling her details with clarity and authenticity. My writing that came from thinking about her was something I finally felt was truly honest, not boring or phony. I didn't want to be lazy about remembering her. I wanted to get it right. I was writing about my grandmother, the original Lucy. She was my only Lucy, before my daughter.

I didn't know then that the paragraphs I was writing would become my first book,
The Dim Sum of All Things
. I found that having one idea led me to another, and then another. I just kept going. I told myself I didn't need to know
where
I was going, but it was just important to
keep
going. I didn't have it all planned out.

So I wrote about her in all the in-between times of my life. Back then, my husband was in graduate school, and while he studied, at home I would write just a paragraph or two between doing dishes or folding laundry. I was an office manager at
Mother Jones
magazine, and I jotted down ideas when I was on my fifteen-minute break at work, or even when I was on the bus, scribbling two-word phrases on my Muni transfers.

Frankly, my life greatly resembled that of the book's main character, Lindsey Owyang. I was a receptionist and office manager whose creative bursts at work were relegated to posting pithy threats on the vending machine about not leaving Diet Cokes in the freezer to eventually explode all over the frozen packets of tofu burgers.

In between unjamming the copier and fulfilling the sandwich needs of my superiors, I harbored my secret wish of becoming a writer:

That part of Lindsey Owyang's character was me, and in retrospect, I recognize now that my real motivation to write a novel began when I started to write about my grandmother. And although I hadn't consciously realized it, apparently I had a lot to say about being Chinese. Having spent so many years trying to identify myself without the Chinese thing, interestingly, the themes of identity and feeling caught in the middle of two cultures was exactly what ended up propelling me.

Every day it became clearer to me that I needed to write a book about being Chinese American. I actually felt sick to my stomach sometimes, nauseated by anxiety and ambition. At Browser Books on Fillmore Street I once saw Jade Snow Wong's
Fifth Chinese Daughter
on the shelf and had to run out and immediately go to the bathroom next door at Peet's Coffee. When going to a bookstore spelled immediate bowel problems, I knew I needed either a writing career or a lifetime supply of Pepto-Bismol.

At night I would sneak out of the bedroom as Rolf slept, and I'd write stuff in the kitchen. I wrote descriptions, small paragraphs, single sentences, or single words that happened to be on my mind that day. It was
something
, and that something was better than nothing. I told myself it was okay not to have a master plan, or even an end result in mind. I remember one night I just got out of bed and wrote down some stuff I was remembering about my grandmother:

I had no idea how or when I was going to use this description, but I felt the need to remember it. I suspended judgment and told myself not to worry about the outcome. It was many months later that I incorporated these paragraphs into a scene with Lindsey going shopping with her grandmother. But if I had never written this little passage, maybe I never would have gotten started. And if I hadn't first taken those small steps in writing remembrances of my grandmother,
The Dim Sum of All Things
would not have existed. Years later, when I would do book readings in stores, it was always so flattering when people would say, “The character of Pau Pau was so real. She made the book come alive.”

And I owe it to her that my writing life came alive. Growing up in the 1970s with frequent trips to San Francisco's Chinatown, I strolled with my grandma Lucy, my pau pau, under neon signs that crackled with electricity and spelled out
IMPERIAL, EMPRESS, COCA-COLA, FAR EAST, CHOW MEIN
, and
PEPSI
. The Transamerica Pyramid rose up from the east of the Financial District, and cable cars click-clacked straight up California Street like the city's own roller coaster. From the same corner you could see pagoda-shaped turquoise and red streetlamps, and lacquered crimson pillars encircled by golden dragons just like the columns found in the Forbidden City in Beijing. But instead of marking the entrance to the Temple of Heaven, these stately embellishments marked the front door to the neighborhood's temple of finance, the Bank of America.