Tiger Babies Strike Back (2 page)

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
by Amy Chua was a book that claimed that Chinese parenting is superior to Western ways of child rearing. Pitting Chinese against Caucasians certainly made for dramatic reading. The power play of juxtaposing permissive American moms versus Tiger Mothers amped up everyone's insecurities, and suddenly there was a new dragon lady in town.

But not every Chinese parent rules the home with an iron fist of fury. Tiger Moms might think they're kickin' it old school, but Tiger Babies like me are tired of feeling kicked around. I was raised by a Tiger Mom, and yet I choose to raise my own daughter with more tenderness and hugs than I ever received. I don't believe in threatening children, calling them names, or pushing their limits until they are screaming or in tears.

Why does Chua call herself a Tiger Mother anyway? Because her Chinese zodiac sign is a tiger? All right, if that's how she wants to play it. On that note, a few years ago, when my daughter, Lucy, was six years old, we were at a Chinese restaurant, and she was checking out a placemat with Chinese horoscopes printed on it. Carefully studying the animal pictures with the corresponding dates, she asked me in what year I was born. Tracing her tiny finger over the drawing of the rooster, she looked up with excited eyes and said, “Mommy! Are you a COCK?”

I smiled the awkward, slightly chagrined smile of tired moms everywhere. I did not launch into an explanation of this alternate name for a rooster, which now enjoys more colloquial popularity in pornographic movies. I wanted to affirm her abilities, and not stammer out a definition that would only serve to betray my own hang-ups. I gave her the only logical answer.

“Yes,” I said with a straight face. “Mommy is a cock.”

Tiger Mother meet Cock Mommy.

Every Asian mother I know has now been asked if she is a Tiger Mom. Our ethnic background alone seems to elicit this question. I always answer no, but maybe the Tiger Mother moniker is attractive to some women who like the idea of not being viewed as pushovers anymore. Being perceived as a Stage 4 stage mom is perhaps preferable after decades—no, centuries—of being seen only as a pretty face.

And Asian women know all about saving face, don't we? But on playgrounds I've always had my own nickname for these extreme
mompetitors
. I didn't know Tiger Mother is what these ladies wanted to be called. When they turned their backs to adjust the straps on their four-thousand-dollar jog strollers, I'd just say, “Nice wheels.” Then just out of earshot, I'd add a piquant “
Bitchface
.”

As a child I never knew what dirt felt like on bare feet, and I never once ran through a sprinkler on a hot day. My parents, being Chinese, thought I might catch stupid that way. In contrast, in raising my own child, I want her to focus her attention on having fun. I want her to play. And I don't mean I want her to play piano at Carnegie Hall by the time she turns fourteen. I mean I want her to play. I'm not going to force her into nonstop extracurricular activities and academic supremacy at the cost of having no sleepovers, no friends, and no fun at all. I know that's not very Chinese of me.

Not everybody can be Number One in birth order, academic ability, and physical prowess. I say we need to put the brakes on exalting achievement at the cost of everything else. Kindness, compassion, and friendliness are not second-rate qualities, nor are children who get Bs second-class citizens. All this competition obscures the truth that between cultures and across class lines, we are not enemies. Let's hold each other up, not step on and over each other in pursuit of the false distinction of superiority. Let's open our hands and our hearts because there is no “better than.”

Tiger parenting makes lonely fools of us all. Being raised in an environment of intense competition, endless nitpicking, and zero tenderness leaves one suspicious and disoriented, not knowing whom to trust since the place that should have been your hearth and home is more like catfight central.

And now that we're older and a little wiser, we may still never fully feel our parents' approval, get the attention we deserve, or achieve pinnacles of success good enough for their specifications. Even someone who looks like a perfect son or daughter on the outside feels like a square peg in a round hole sometimes. Instead of all of us trying to fit into the confines of a Chinese box, we can rewrite the scripts for our own lives and become whom we want to be.

With our own young children now, what are we to make of our Tiger Mothers? Even if we have been wronged, and if we are still dealing with the consequences of our own strict upbringing, let's put down our imaginary hatchets, sharpened knitting needles, and sidelong glances as cutting as daggers. These days, when my mother still occasionally takes a jab at me, I try to remember Yoda from
The Empire Strikes Back
. He says, “Away put your weapon, I mean you no harm.”

That's right, Tiger Mama! I mean you no harm. But still, I've got some stuff I'm gonna say.

To paraphrase Philip Larkin, “They fuck you up, your [Chinese] mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.”

Tiger Babies, let's strike back. After all,
The
Chinese
Kids Are All Right
.

3

In pictures of my mother from the late 1960s, she looked like Betty Draper from
Mad Men
, but Chinese. She wore pearls like Jackie Kennedy, and a little wiglet to fluff out her hairdo. She watched over two little Chinese boys and me, a blob on her lap. My dad was rockin' the pocket protector and short-sleeved, button-down shirt, nerd glasses, and flattop. He was an engineer (natch!) and my mom was a housewife.

When I ask her why we moved to San Francisco, my mom claims she wanted us to have more Chinese culture and be closer to our grandparents, both sets of whom resided in the city. My mother also says she didn't want us playing exclusively with white kids. Okay. So we moved to the City by the Bay, and not long thereafter began Chinese school, tap-dancing class, piano lessons, and many trips into Chinatown even though we lived several miles away, in the Twin Peaks neighborhood.

My mom's parents lived near Chinatown, and I was frequently parked at their apartment. There at Pau Pau and Gung Gung's place is where Chineseness and Americanness really blended. I'd watch
The Brady Bunch
while eating black-vinegared chicken soup, then
Happy Days
with
cha siu bao
, or sticky rice and Chinese sausages while
Leave It to Beaver
was on. And all the while, my grandpa, Gung Gung, would be shouting into the phone, in either Cantonese or Shanghainese, emphasizing his points with the occasional cuss word in English.

My grandparents ran a travel agency in Chinatown, and when I was four, I spent every day there. Behind the main office in a closet-sized room, I sat on a swivel chair at a small table, equipped with colored pencils, paper, crappy mucilage, and a Royal typewriter. Watching over me was a glamour shot of Miss Chinatown 1973, hanging crooked on the wall.

Tours to Hong Kong were being brokered in the front office, but back behind that gold-and-copper-colored curtain, I was left alone and scheming, typing out gibberish words until one day those black letters tap-snapping off that inky ribbon became, before my very eyes, actual sentences.
Tap! Snap!
A funeral motorcade for a Chinatown bigwig would be dolorously passing before the sunlit window, but ghosts couldn't eat me alive when I was typing furiously, a Dixon Ticonderoga between my baby teeth that weren't even loose yet.

At lunchtime, my grandma Lucy would take me across the street to Uncle's Café for sweetened, grass-flavored black gelatin with cream poured over it. Sounds weird, but it was excellent. Then there'd be vanilla ice cream the color of unsalted butter that tasted rich and eggy like custard. Did everything taste better as a kid? Or perhaps the mind was so new and the taste buds not deadened yet, so flavors and coffee smells were just brighter and more pungent, permanently staining my imagination.

Walking down Grant Avenue, we said hello to the residents of Chinatown. They seemed to love my grandma Lucy with her pretty, bouffant hairdo, and Grandpa Lemuel in his brown suit and fedora that made him look like Jimmy Stewart in
Vertigo
, only shorter, and more Chinese. I strolled between them, taking in the sights and sounds, bitter odors and grown-ups' shoes. Where was everybody going so fast? Where had they come from, and why was everyone smiling so brightly, reaching out and clasping my small hand so tightly? They looked in my eyes with such sadness, those adults.

I was a kid wanting something I couldn't describe, wanting to know everything. If I could only get these adults to talk to me, to tell me their stories, I knew it would be like walking through a book, just like Gumby.

But it would take years before even my own relatives would tell me anything. For instance, my grandparents who were walking right beside me with my miniature body between them had a very dramatic story of their own that I would not find out about until many years later.

Gung Gung's name was Lemuel Jen, and he was a Chinese man with distinct American bombast. He came to Angel Island in 1913 at age six with an “uncle” who may or may not have been actually related to him. Lemuel always claimed to have lived in the Spreckels Mansion as a boy, and no one could really refute his story, so for all purposes we believed him. The mansion still sits atop Washington Street in San Francisco, and with its Beaux-Arts grandeur it's easy to imagine a Chinese cook living in the servants' quarters with a little Chinese boy playing underfoot. The white family that owned the house took a liking to my grandpa as a boy, and they especially were concerned with his education. After Galileo High School, Lemuel attended UC Berkeley and George Washington University, assisted financially by his pseudoadoptive white parents. When I asked my relatives more about those early days, the uncle fades from everyone's memory and all that is left is whatever we can glean from two black-and-white photos of my grandpa as a young man, standing between an elderly white couple, everyone smiling and proud.

My grandpa spoke a lot about playing football and being such a fast runner that he was known in school as “Chinese Lightning.” When he asked the coach why he was never put in any games, this man whom my grandpa claimed had great fondness for him gave him the news straight. “I wish I could, Lem. But I can't on account of you being Chinese.”

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.