Tiger Babies Strike Back (23 page)

I forgot all about our bathtime conversation until the next morning. I was lying on my foam mat stretching because I feel about ninety years old if I don't exercise, when suddenly I remembered what Lucy had said about the school play. From my curled-up position on the floor, I shot upright and thought,
WTF?
I was alone, so I felt the freedom to be completely angry now. I paced and tried to figure out what to do. I seethed. I had to find out what really happened.

Be calm
, I told myself. I wanted to honor that my kid felt angry, but I also knew that kids get upset about a lot of things that eventually fizzle out. Also, it was possible that maybe her perception was not exactly how things had happened. I wanted to give the people in charge the benefit of the doubt. And yet. When you see your own daughter sad and hurt, you want to lash out. But here was a situation where someone had to be the adult, and in our household, that responsibility does not fall to the little one who's playing with a mermaid Polly Pocket.

So I called the school. I asked a woman there whom I trust if she had seen the play. I didn't want to accuse. I didn't want to rush right out the gate foaming at the mouth. I wanted to catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. (Once I caught the flies, then I could burn their bodies in a vat of industrial-strength acid.)

I carefully described the situation and admitted that I wasn't sure what to do exactly, but felt that I did need to do
something
. This longtime educator and member of the school community suggested that if a kid, any kid, felt that strong of a negative reaction, the teachers putting on the play should at least know about it.

So I hung up the phone and decided to e-mail the teachers. An hour later, when I arrived at the school for pickup, a kind of buzz had already occurred. Apparently, the recipients of my e-mail had already forwarded my message to others. Several teachers and parents pulled me aside to offer their support. Two were glad I had said something, and another expressed relief. Another opined, “I think it's great that you stand up for what you believe in.”

I hadn't expected anyone else to read that e-mail, nor did I think that word would travel so fast. After I met Lucy in front of her classroom, we walked up to the corner where I knew the teacher who'd organized the play performed afternoon crosswalk duty.

Once we got talking, I was glad I had given him the benefit of the doubt before I charged at him with accusations. He described the scene to me and offered to show me the script for my opinion and input. We ended up having an extensive conversation about California history, early relations between the Irish and Chinese, institutionalized racism, and the teaching of children at different grade levels.

I was happy that Lucy was witness to the fact that we don't have to bury our feelings. We can confront them.

For many weeks after this incident, the whole experience stayed with me. I thought about the quiet way Lucy brought this subject to my attention, how I had forgotten about it because daily life had distracted me, and then how irate I had become despite simultaneously being unsure of myself. I thought about how difficult it is to separate one's child's feelings from one's own.

I surmised that if I were my grandma Ruby on my dad's side, I would have not said or done anything. I would have “not made trouble.” And if I were my grandma Lucy on my mom's side, I would've blown my stack immediately and would've been heard shouting from blocks away. My grannies had two very different approaches to handling disagreements. Maybe throughout my childhood I had observed and absorbed the various effects of these two ways of Chinese being—deferential as a matter of survival, versus hotheaded to one's own detriment—and having witnessed these two disparate ways of interacting with the world, I realized that neither way felt right for me.

The trick in standing up for oneself is to do so without having to step on someone else. All in all, I was glad I had handled this incident at school in my own way.

For some reason, this incident reminded me of an obituary I'd read several years ago for the actress Miyoshi Umeki. In it, one of her costars from the past had mentioned that he had at one time attempted to contact Umeki, but he couldn't find an address or number for her anywhere, and that no one else he'd asked knew of her whereabouts. I remember the words in the article, “She did not want to be found.”

She did not want to be found. I had remembered thinking that that strategy sounded very reasonable. Umeki had been a big star for many years and was the first and only Asian to win a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award, for 1957's
Sayonara
. She was one of the main characters in 1961's
Flower Drum Song
, but I knew her mostly as Mrs. Livingston on
The Courtship of Eddie's Father
. I can only imagine what kind of treatment she encountered as one of Hollywood's most prominent Asian stars, particularly in an era that spanned World War II with intense anti-Japanese sentiment.

I began to think about how, in a way, I hadn't wanted to be found either. After living in hyperpoliticized San Francisco and Berkeley, where race awareness is always set on DEFCON 1, my own experiences with racial slights, weird looks, well-meaning yet nonetheless irritating remarks, and occasional outright hostility had worn me out. I had wanted to move away because, frankly, my nerves were shot.

The Bay Area is so politicized that everywhere you go, you signify something to someone. American-born or fresh-off-the-boat? Speak Chinese or English? Married or single? Gay or straight? Kids or dogs? Bike or car? Omnivore or herbivore? Lacto-ovo or vegan? Butch or femme? Democrat or Republican? Working mother or stay-at-home mom?

I needed a respite from soaking in racial controversy 24/7, a break from a life where going to Walgreens and buying tampons once attracted an old Chinese lady who took it upon herself to inform me that “only stupid and no respect American Chinese use tampon because don't care about virgin.”

Moving from San Francisco to Nevada City, I thought I didn't want to be found, but something sure found me. Speaking up about that scene in the play changed me.

Our daily tasks are many, and it's easy to blow stuff off, especially small things that we can convince ourselves are no big deal. But this was a big deal. It was one detail in life's myriad details, but it showed me that if someone like me—fairly educated, outgoing, physically able—feels the pull of inertia, then what about people whose obstacles are pronounced? How unsure of themselves must they be? And if I don't speak up, who will?

That small confrontation about the school play was a turning point in my development as an adult. It made me realize I couldn't cower. I'm forty-three, and tired. My body had been taken apart and put back together through pregnancy, and having written three novels about growing up Chinese American, I've been snickered at, chided, figuratively spat on, and had arrows pointed at me. Nonetheless, I can't just hide out and hope not to be found.

Tiger Babies, I'm done cowering.

29

Is it . . . flummox?

I am a Tiger Mom only in that my back is killing me so I'm covered in Tiger Balm patches, smelling supersexy. Forty is the new eighty.

My goal for my daughter is a normal childhood, with more fun than I ever had. In pursuit of the hearth and home I want, I don't aim to replicate the fantasy of Norman Rockwell paintings, or even
Brady Bunch
episodes; rather, for our little family I just want safety, good times, and love.

Instead of overscheduling every moment of the week, I think it's important to have time just to sit and stare at a tree. If you are Chinese, you just read that and thought,
Yes, but couldn't you do calculus at the same time?

As my kid would say, “Missing the point!”

Sometimes we just sit on the couch and hug each other. She might say, in her guileless way, “I just want to lie here and squeeze your fat.”

Don't you mean 100 percent muscle?

I've read that brain development needs fat. Yes, in one's diet, and also squeezing your loved ones' fat. We're happy as clams. (Yeah, until she doesn't get into Harvard, then we'll see who's happy . . .)

In any case, we have a lot of “at home” afternoons and weekends, and that's what we like. I am glad we make time just to hang around each other and do nothing. But it's really not as easy as you might think. It's a conscious decision to do less, not more. And this choice is not about laziness.

It takes a certain kind of discipline to carve out time to be together, doing what looks like nothing. For me it's the first step in showing Lucy how we are the only ones responsible for hollowing out our own inner space to think. I've learned that no one is ever going to say it's okay to sit and stare at the sky. Maybe no authority figure is ever going to give you permission to do what you want to do with your life. Whether it's looking at the clouds, becoming a writer, or making some other big decision for yourself, no one else will ease your distractions or definitively tell you, “Now is the time.”

Also, I don't want Lucy to feel like she is constantly being shuttled from place to place. I've learned that lesson from other parents, and other kids as well. One particular sentence uttered by my niece sticks in my mind. Someone asked her, “Where do you live?”

And without missing a beat, she replied, “I live in the car.”

I don't want Lucy to live in the car.

A Tiger Mom might say, “What, are you aiming for mediocrity?”

Not at all. I'm striving to excel in the things I consider crucial to becoming an excellent human being, in all such categories not measured in grades or test scores, unquantifiable in awards or number of fake friends on Facebook. My husband and I are attempting the slow, cumulative work of exemplifying compassion, kindness, and gratitude. It's an incremental, drawn-out, marching-ever-forward process to teach your kid to be true to her word, and to figure out what it means to have personal integrity. Thoughtful explanations take time, and in accelerated Adult Land there is already too little of that, as everyone knows. We need cleared space in our heads so that we may listen for the clues from a kid's interior world. My daughter's concerns are expressed like tiny yelps from Whoville, and I feel that if I'm not already listening for it, the small voice will be lost in the background noise of homework, dancing lessons, swim class, and everything else.

And you bet I'd sometimes rather be doing things other than living in the mind-set of a nine-year-old. Cuz, really, how much more can I possibly talk about Garfield, listen to knock-knock jokes, and write haikus about kittens? But someone has got to do it, and that someone is me. My brain would much rather be reading
The New Yorker
, but instead we're building a spaceship out of plastic scraps and paper towels for her school's egg-dropping contest. She has named her raw egg “Captain Yolkandwhites,” and he is going to be tossed off the school roof in the morning. If the egg breaks, so will her little heart, and that ain't gonna happen on my watch.