Tiger Babies Strike Back (12 page)

Across the street was a giant cross at Old St. Mary's Catholic Church, and everywhere there were signs in both English and Chinese, a neon peacock, and tourist shops selling kimonos displayed on mannequins standing in elegant poses. None of the mannequins were Chinese; they were all white, like gigantic Barbie dolls. You'd think an impressionable child might be confounded by all the conflicting imagery, the cacophony of sounds resulting from the constant colliding of two disparate languages. What did I see, hear, and experience in that day-to-day, back-and-forth existence between American life and being Chinese? Was it confusing? Horrifying? Outrageous?

No, Kind Reader.

It was fabulous.

14

At my grandma Lucy's funeral I was a blubbering mess, as were all my mother's sisters. At the end of a Chinese service, it is customary for people to line up and each approach the casket to bow three times to the deceased to pay final respects and to say good-bye. While my aunties and uncle spontaneously engaged in a collective grief circle, through my teary haze I noticed they were all sort of hovering, waiting for my mother to join them. In that horrible moment, they somehow needed her despair to match theirs, to make the intense farewell to my grandmother complete.

Through my own sadness and soggy Kleenex, I watched this scenario unfold. My mother is the least sentimental of her siblings, and I wondered what was going through her sisters' and brother's minds as they wailed with fervor and she stood sad, but still stoic. Their sorrow was real, of course, but was hers any less so because she held in her emotions? Demonstrative outbursts are cathartic, but as I think back now, I wonder if there wasn't also a smidgen of competition going on, as if my mother's siblings were each trying to imply, “Mom and I were the closest, and to prove it, I am going to cry the loudest.”

It would be facile to say that my mother's lack of tears was proof of a lack of connection between her and her own mother. However, these days, other facets of my mother's relationship with her own parents come to my mind. In the years of both my grandparents' illnesses and subsequent deaths, it now occurs to me that it had always been my mother who drove them to appointments, got their prescriptions refilled, argued bills on their behalf, completed various chunks of paperwork, and took responsibility for all the tedious, complicated tasks and duties of theirs that would have otherwise fallen through the cracks had she not stepped up. Someone had to be responsible. Most likely, she didn't even want to be the one, but she stepped up to the plate. Over and over again.

My mother was also the busiest of her siblings during that time. As in their earlier years, while her sisters were pursuing pleasures, she, again, was the stalwart. Yes, maybe she was crabby. And difficult. And mad. But as I think back, she was working a full-time job, was still dealing with us three kids as we were each successively leaving the nest, and she was probably going through menopause. But despite these challenges and all her daily duties, there is no way to deny the fact that the Reamer. Got. Things. Done.

So who is to say that crying loudly for two hours at a funeral service is a greater show of love than spending countless weeks, months, and years chauffeuring, tabulating, corresponding, and bookkeeping for one's mother? I see now that even I myself have misinterpreted my mom's lack of showy sentiment. She cared enough and loved enough to do all the crap that no one else wanted to do. She took up the nonglamorous tasks, all the very necessary but mundane, tedious chores like writing to insurance companies and filing tax forms.

And maybe this willingness, this stamina, this recognition of the unsung duties and the meticulous follow-through in completing these tasks has roots in a specific Chinese way of thinking. The humility is actually the strength. She attended to these clerical and practical matters as a show of love and, yes, duty, but didn't expect praise or reward.

When the moment finally did come for my mother to approach the altar to say good-bye to her mother, my pau pau, her siblings cleared a path and waited to see what she would do. They surrounded her, as if to close in on her and squeeze emotion out of her whether she wanted to or not. As I watched from the directly adjacent bench, my mother placed her hand on the casket, emitted the briefest of sobs, like a tiny hiccup, and then just as quickly pulled herself back together. Her sisters were like a chorus waiting for the lead singer's cue, wanting to unabashedly express their collective sorrow. But my mom, even in her grief, would have none of that ballyhoo. After wavering ever so slightly, she sucked in her tears. Her siblings seemed confused, as if their chance to wail en masse had been within such close reach but had now been cruelly denied.

When my mother lost her footing for a moment, several of her sisters grabbed at her shoulders to hold her up. Their fervor just seemed to irk my mom. She steadied herself on the side of the pew and stood up straight. Shrugging off their clinging hands, she said, “I GOT IT.”

As the crowd dispersed, various relatives were still crying their eyes out, myself included. We were wrung out, slumped over, and otherwise incoherent. We were all a collective, tearstained mess, but where was my mother?

I scanned the room, and eventually spotted her, standing next to the funeral director. She appeared sharp as a tack and was going over some paperwork. Oh, that's what my mom was doing. I was glad that someone still had her wits about her. Someone had to pay the bill and make sure the family wasn't getting ripped off.

That was my mother on that very sad day. Looking back, I have gained newfound, albeit very belated, respect for her. My mother is practical. Badass. Even in what must have been her darkest hour.

15

“Hey, Mom. Check it out. My book is mentioned here.”

I was holding a local magazine with an earmarked page that referred to my writing, but my mom was too excited about something else to notice it. Nor did she seem to hear me. Instead she handed me a clipping she had carefully cut from the newspaper. It was a picture of California state assemblywoman Fiona Ma.

We didn't personally know Ma. She was not a family friend. But somehow, any Chinese person who has risen to prominence or public celebrity is someone all Chinese people get to take credit for.

“Did you see Fiona's picture in the paper? She got married! Doesn't she look great?”

“Um, I guess.”

My mom went on to summarize points from the article, marveling out loud about how Fiona and her fiancé met, and the challenges they might face with her busy schedule as a member of the assembly.

I tried to slink away, not all that interested in hearing about Fiona's nuptials.

“What's wrong? Don't you want to see the picture?”

I ducked into my mom's office near the kitchen. I took a seat at the desk and tried to figure out why I felt so crappy.

I once got a letter in the mail from Fiona Ma. When we lived in the Sunset District, we had painted the outside of our house, and when we pulled off a strip of masking tape from the façade, a portion of paint from the neighbors' house that abutted ours had flaked off with it. The area was small, about one inch by five inches, and we hadn't noticed it.

But our Chinese neighbors did. About a month after we painted the house, we got a letter in the mail from Fiona Ma, who was then San Francisco's District Four city supervisor. The missive requested, in a businesslike manner, that we settle this dispute with our next-door neighbors.

What was she talking about? Our neighbors hadn't even said anything to us, and now we were the recipients of this nice-but-vaguely-threatening letter with an official seal from the City of San Francisco.

It was a big WTF moment, and somehow so typical of our then neighbors. They were a Chinese couple in their fifties, and the only time they ever talked to either of us was when the woman would stop my husband, Rolf, on the sidewalk to scold him because I didn't speak Chinese. To further describe their neighborly ways, they used to leave notes on our car saying not to park in the space between both our houses. They thought they owned that public space on the street. And although they were both able-bodied, they most certainly expected us to reserve that spot just for them. I was irritated enough by the notes they left on our car, but then that official letter in the mail about the house really riled me. Instead of just telling us in person about the small patch of paint, which we would have gladly fixed, they went all insular Chinese Mafia on our asses and got the district supervisor involved.

I wondered if they were related to Ma or knew her parents. Or had they cold-called her office, and we had simply been sent a standard form letter?

Rolf rang our neighbors' doorbell and asked when it would be convenient to fix the paint patch. Obviously, he is so much nicer than I am. I had advised him against it, saying it would be rewarding their backhanded behavior.

I said, “How can you give them exactly what they want when they've gone about the whole thing like such jerks?”