Tiger Babies Strike Back (28 page)

Tiger Babies, let's talk about you.

I started writing this to feel closer to you. I imagine your shallow breathing as you decide whether to go to bed or to get some work done. I wonder what you are thinking now, or on any Thursday night at ten thirty. What do your eyes look like as they read, or as they rest, asleep in your head? Are you talking to someone, or thinking about your weekend errands?

When I see other Asian Americans, sometimes I feel like we are in an impossible situation. Even if we say hello or have a brief transaction in a store or business, we will never really get to know each other, and yet I feel a kinship that I want to acknowledge.

Maybe there are too many people around, watching and listening, for me to feel comfortable. I try not to look directly at you, but I'm sure my eyes show everything. And you. Your eyes give you away, too. I know I shouldn't say that, but look at us. Probably no one else can tell. But you know it. And I know it. Our Asianness is a common thing between us, maybe the only thing, but it's really obvious. We don't know if we should acknowledge it, or if that would be embarrassing.

After I go home, I wonder what you think when you're alone. Are other Asian Americans consciously thinking about their place in the world as I am? To some extent, everyone must be constantly thinking and scheming, right? We are each Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys singing “In My Room.” I wonder what it would be like to be with you and listen to your tattered, long-playing record, your
Pet Sounds
.

But we talk about the weather, don't we? Current events are a-okay, but really, who the hell cares when everything alive between us goes unsaid?

We were raised by Tiger Parents, but maybe we are a different type of tiger. Biding our time on the atoll of the swampy mangrove forest, we remain motionless. We are not exactly cavorting with cobras, but we see them swimming in the muddy river water and feel them slithering beneath our forepaws. We live in the wild but conserve energy and stay alive. We hold our heads high as we navigate the water, even as the leeches try to penetrate our fur.

We, the Asian Americans who still have feelings in our veins, who dare to be vulnerable, we are somehow invisible to the world. We are tigers, too, and just as endangered.

People like us, we wind up dead because we feel too much, and hurt too much. We're not tough. That's why we often just wander deeper into the forest, never to be counted again.

But our numbers do exist. This weary species of tiger is everywhere, just hiding. If you were to stand in the moonlight, after your eyes adjusted to the dimness, you might see that we are here. Our eyes are glittering in the darkness, if you would only see us.

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Who are we when no one is looking? What are we squirreling away in our hope chests? Is your heart breaking for a first kiss of inspiration? We tend to the needs of the body, to its inconvenient desires and functions, but contained inside our flesh is an invisible part of us that is too shy to demand attention but needs care and waits for us to look inward. Your inner self sits against the underside of your skin like a Chinese wallflower waiting to be asked to dance. She's got glasses and skinned knees. Every night until you acknowledge her is yet another midnight crying in the bathtub.

Maybe we are all hiding in plain sight, even from ourselves.

As for me, in Nevada City I walk around at dusk because sometimes it seems impossible that any real thinking can happen in daylight. Sometimes ideas can only come under cover of darkness. I keep moving, hoping to discover what the early evening can show me.

Wherever I go, my Chinese Americanness goes with me. If I've had the kind of day where I was out talking to a lot of people, I often need an evening walk to clear my thoughts. Being in the open air helps me to reach into that locked box, into that heart-shaped cage. Around my neck is the skeleton key, one that was made to look antique, but really is just vintage 1969.

There's a small notebook for writing stuff down tucked under my left arm. I need my right arm to do other things, like press my finger to green velvet moss growing under a cast-iron fence or touch that dewy camellia petal on a blooming tree.

Oh, there you are, Reader. I see the light on where you live. Maybe I see your silhouette near the stained-glass lampshade, or maybe you're there making dinner. Sometimes you're right near the window as night is falling. Meanwhile, I'm strolling by and I'm peeking through the pages of my notebook. Out of the corner of my eye I see the light blue of you. Throughout the neighborhood, a Morse code of kitchen lights and table lamps click on in the houses as the sky gradually dims. The air here smells fragrant with night-blooming daphne and holds the heavy electricity of impending rain.

A little farther and it's really getting dark now. I pass a cluster of white roses lit only by the streetlight, and it's eerily quiet. At an abandoned construction site is an old iron safe, cracked wide open with its door hanging off its hinges, and the only sound around is its faint creaking. No people are in sight as I turn the corner, but in this hour of darkness I can feel the eyes of hiding pets watching me.

Cutting over to Broad Street, I pass a store window that bears the name of a famous, petite street in my old hometown. It gets me to thinking about San Francisco, yet again, and I imagine the whole city paved with books like cobblestones on Maiden Lane.

I thought I knew what I was doing, moving to an area where the downtown is illuminated at night by gaslight. I thought it could show me something about the past, especially about my own past that perhaps I couldn't see from where I was standing in San Francisco. However, for all these months in Nevada City, some feeling of home should be humming through me by now, but I'm still waiting for it.

I hear laughter and duck down a darkened street. I'm still so forever citified that I make a mental note that I have sturdy shoes on, just in case I have to run from the Zodiac killer or an insane pit bull. I've got my ballpoint pen in my hand in case I've got to spontaneously jab it at a would-be attacker. Get any closer and this hardbound notebook could be lodged up against your Adam's apple. Go ahead and try it. At this moment I want one stereotype to be true: that all Chinese people are taught kung fu at birth. Don't make me get all Bruce Lee on your ass.

Forgive me. I really don't mean to be so suspicious. It's just that I was raised in the city—a loving, hardscrabble city, surrounded by water and clouds, a moody sky and scarred souls. And in this new place I've got nowhere to conceal myself. When it starts to drizzle, I remember that now I've got no San Francisco Public Library in which to hide on rainy days. I miss the creaking chairs and library smells and going up to look at the old, black-bound city directories from the 1870s. I could also flip through the phone books from the 1940s and see my grandmother's phone number from back then, or look up her old address on Stockton Street before the Broadway Tunnel was built. It was soothing to know that the San Francisco Main Library held these catacombs of information for all the Chinese people who came early to San Francisco and were brave enough to allow themselves to be counted in the census. They are long gone by now, but I can still see their names in black on the faded white pages of the old city directories.

We will never know the names of many Chinese settlers, or who they were. They, too, lived in the in-between time. They came on ships and lived temporarily in the hulls of those vessels, between China and America. Arriving just short of the North American continent, they were then detained in barracks on Angel Island, waiting for their turn to be called to see if they'd be allowed to travel the short distance to San Francisco. If they passed their interrogation, maybe they moved to Chinatown and lived in the alleyways between charred buildings rebuilt several times over the decades. Those early Chinese were often between jobs, between towns, between generations, and between worlds. There may be no remnants left of their existence, no names in books, but as I used to walk through the city, their joys and unspoken desires seeped up through the dirt and concrete and into the soles of my feet like a voodoo powder that electrified me.

In San Francisco, I felt a comfort in strolling the sidewalks where a Chinese person a hundred years ago would have feared to tread. Even in my dad's youth, he said he never liked to leave Chinatown because he knew he'd be fair game for a pummeling if he crossed any of the invisible borders past Powell Street or Kearny, Bush Street or Broadway.

These threads of city life still string me along as I go about living in my new town. Oh, tonight I'm missing you again, San Francisco. I'm missing the lapping waves against the concrete right there at the Embarcadero. I'm longing for that particular cornflower blue at twilight, with squawking parrots careening overhead, as if they don't really know how to fly, like they're just making it up as they go along.

This very evening, I can picture Upper Grant Avenue, where time must be standing still as the fragrance of bread and cookies from the Italian bakery leavens the air with nostalgia and sympathy. Somehow that smell is San Francisco saying she remembers me, recalls me when I was nine years old and strolling by with my grandmother, running an errand to Figone Hardware for some twine to wrap Sunday's roast. That bakery-diesel-and-soy-sauce smell is North Beach blending into Chinatown, right near Victoria Pastry, where the sign says
FIRENZE BY NIGHT
, but the foggy sky and dank cold spell San Francisco, California.

Sure, these words are sentimental. But having one's emotions close to the surface, when did that become such a bad thing? Chinese Americans, don't swallow your feelings.

Back here in Nevada City, it's really starting to rain now. The cherry blossom petals that had burst from their bud-studded boughs just yesterday are too soon melting down to the new asphalt. The pink petal teardrops on the wet blacktop make the street look like licorice-cherry candy, or an exotic, shiny kind of peppermint bark.

As I turn and head back the way I came, my index finger is pounding out its own backbeat since earlier in the day I accidentally slammed it in the car door. My hand knows it hurts, just as my heart knows it aches, too. The nerves in the body don't lie. But they both go on, my writing hand and my silly heart, and I can feel them both pulsating as I head back toward home.

Oh wow. There. I just said it. I'm walking back to my house in Nevada City, and I just called it home.

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