Tiger Babies Strike Back (7 page)

8

If Chinese families can have Tiger Moms, then inevitably there must be Tiger Runts,
n'est-ce pas
? No one will admit to their existence. They live, but they are shunted aside. Passed over. Insulted and hidden away. Just like in the wild, the weak are often left to perish. And yet here we are, not going away anytime soon.

We are oftentimes the youngest children in our families, we the artists, writers, truth tellers, and whistle-blowers. We are the deal breakers. This statement does not come from scientific evidence. I'm just saying that some of us are usually the ones who are accommodating everyone. We change our schedules to fit around parents and elder children because everyone else is more adept at playing My Time Is More Important Than Yours.

How many daughters are out there like me, just doing everything because . . . just because? We've always been marshmallows, but now we've been left out in the cold so long that we're starting to develop an unpleasant crust.

Unpleasant crust, here we come!

I think when a woman turns forty she has the right to finally decide she's no longer gonna do crap she doesn't wanna do. I'm busy and I'm tired.

When is enough, enough? For some, never. I have a few relatives who will live with their parents until the very end. They are not boomerang babies, going off to college and then returning to freeload for the rest of their lives. Rather, they never left. They are the family sacrifices. As hard as it is to say, there are some Asian parents who will willfully keep down a child just to ensure that they themselves will never be alone. It's a big thing in Chinese culture: Who will look after me when I'm old? Who will tend to my grave? Get over it, Granny! You've ruined your kid's life just so you wouldn't have to watch TV alone. Just so you could have someone to complain to, and to keep down.

I've seen it happen. And it happens a lot to youngests. What, exactly, is happening here? You are clung to and kept at home. You are the default maid, butler, companion, surrogate spouse, best friend, and adult child forever. You are kept alive to serve others. You might look just fine from the outside, but out in public, on your invisible choke chain called Love, you look shell-shocked. Your parents still monitor your every move and won't or can't let you go. As the father says to the son in
Flower Drum Song
, “When that day come when you can think for yourself, I will let you know!”

Except that your Chinese parents might never let you know. Maybe you're the most succulent piglet of the litter, and they believe no one will ever be good enough for you. Or, conversely, they can take the opposite tactic and make you think no one will love or tolerate you but them. Either way, they've pulled you in like the Death Star with magnetic power, and you can't escape.

Perhaps you are just collateral damage. A Tiger Parent who exalts one kid into high achievement might keep you on the side to quell his or her loneliness while Number One is off ruling the world. Hey, someone's gotta stay home and do the dishes. Someone's gotta dust the portraits of accomplished Chinese Americans like Michelle Kwan that your parents place prominently on top of the outdated VCR seemingly just to mock you.

It's all very unfair, and we have to not fall for these parental ruses. Maybe the parents themselves don't even know they are pushing us into these limited roles. Your brother is off to Little League, but you stay with your mom. Or your sister is off to dance class, but you stay at home. Are you the sacrifice? Maybe you are too shy to do anything, but by the time you decide you can risk making a peep to express your outside interests, it's too late. Maybe the family has become dependent on your staying home. You might not even be out of your teens, but your role in your family, and in life, has already swallowed you whole.

I have one family friend like this. I'll call her Allison. Strangely enough, her birth order blows my theory because she is, in fact, the eldest of her siblings. But this does happen, too. In her case, starting from childhood, she had always been The Favorite. As Allison got older, it was as if her mom really couldn't bear the thought of her dearest darling out in the world. Maybe the mom transferred all her own fears onto Allison, and to make sure nothing bad ever happened to her, she didn't let anything at all happen to her, not even the potentially good things. So Allison's mom shrank her world, until there was only mom to live for.

Allison is always by her mother's side. She doesn't go anywhere or do anything without her mother. She is a grown woman, now way past forty. She cooks and cleans, and what else does she do all day? She is in the house, sleeping in the twin bed where she slept as a child, the empty bunk beds of her siblings who've all left home still stacked there. The old beds are abandoned, still affixed with their decals and stickers, left there with only Allison for company. It's just Allison and the old stuffed animals, with her parents in the adjacent room.

Creepy. Safe. A catch-22.

She's taken care of financially. She will always have a roof over her head, and her clothing and food are provided. Her mom takes her shopping at department stores, and they go to the grocery store and she does have some say in what gets bought. But she doesn't drive. Never goes on dates, and never has. She will never be a hostess at her own party or have her own friends. In a way, she is just like a Victorian spinster, except with a flat-screen TV and a freezer full of salted caramel gelato.

She is in the locked Chinese box. But maybe she doesn't even know she is in one. Or maybe she has realized it and has decided to make the best of it. I don't know. I wonder if she ever tried the doorknob and found it locked, or maybe being locked in is the only way she can function at all. I doubt anyone ever asked her if she wanted to go to college, move anywhere, or have her own life away from the family. Perhaps she likes it that way.

Maybe Allison has found a certain freedom in never having to worry about working, having a significant other, or caring for a dependent child of her own. Technically, she can do whatever she likes with her time, provided it takes place inside her parents' house. Perhaps I am simply unable to see the upside of such an arrangement.

Allison's parents have let her other siblings go. They have lives, jobs, friends, and romantic relationships. But, hey, then again, who says Allison can't be happy? For all I know, she has a slamming inner life and is really into fan fiction and has an outrageous online persona known by millions as NakedUnderMyCape3000.

Every time I see an Asian American family with an adult kid like Allison on a tight tether, it strikes me as against type that any Chinese parent would keep any of their kids from a path of ambition. Nonetheless, I think it's pretty common. We just don't hear very much about it because these adult kids never leave the freaking house.

Rock on, NakedUnderMyCape3000!

Or . . . what am I saying? Don't rock on, NakedUnderMyCape3000! Bust outta there, for heaven's sake. Grab some chopsticks and dig a tunnel under the washing machine. Is it too late for you? It's never too late. Find a way to change yourself. Don't settle for not speaking up.

Maybe give someone a sign.

Give
me
a sign, at the next Family Association dinner. After all, we are both hiding in plain sight.

I might be sociable on the outside, but I feel like a separate person inside. It's the only way I know how to be. As I think about you, Allison, maybe we are more alike than I realize. We are similar animals in a shared landscape. I see you crouched there in the sagebrush. You see that I see you. I see you because I'm coiled behind the rock, at your same eye level. We spy on each other from this low vantage point.

But I don't think we're concealing ourselves for the same reasons. In fact, who's hiding and who's hunting is indiscernible. We're both as still as stones, calm as unrippled water. We both appear as if we have all day to wait here, but either one of us could bolt at any moment, if we have to.

Shy Allisons of the world, hiding in your Chinese American enclosures, I see you, and you see me. We are two fuzzy creatures, one behind the fence, another out in the meadow. The houses are just beyond, and I wonder if we have an unspoken pact; I won't let anyone know that I saw you, even if I get captured.

I'll watch where you get taken. Signal me if you can.

You've been crouched there in the sage for a very long time. I've been observing you. You've got one eye slightly larger than the other. When you are weary, I've noticed that your right eye gets squinty.

I know you're thinking what I'm thinking. Even if no one knows, even if no one recognizes it, I can see that you have very serious aspirations. Even if you are the only player, the game is still on.

You feel the blood gurgling in your throat. No matter how captivated the world is with entertainment's distractions, for you the internal world still remains. Just as it remains and waits for me as well. We tune in to it. We can still hear ourselves think, even if we don't share our thoughts with anyone. People drink alcoholic beverages to drown out their inner voices, the humming and birdsong. Can you still discern the deep growling, and five-year-olds' laughter? Some children's eyes have only seen innocence, and a part of that remains in you.

But you are afraid of breaking out of your routine. You know there's danger in the shallows. You can still drown in two inches of bathwater.

If you won't give someone a sign of your desire to change, no one can help you. Allison, give me a sign. I'll be waiting.

Likewise, on my dad's side of the family, Uncle Bill was a Tiger Runt, for sure. My grandma Ruby was the eldest of seven children, and he was the last born of her siblings, and the most timid. If the meek really do inherit the earth, Uncle Bill must own prime real estate on all seven continents. He would've made Walter Mitty look like a rock star.

Uncle Bill had wanted to marry a girl named Christine. I am not sure if she had Down syndrome or any other specific ailment, but the general consensus from what older relatives will actually tell me is that she was not in perfect, A-plus, gonna-play-at-Carnegie-Hall condition. But Bill and Christine were inseparable. They even went to the same Health Farm for Misfit Broken Toys in Santa Rosa in the 1940s because they were both asthmatics.

After Uncle Bill died, I found a lovingly cared-for photo album with pictures of the two of them chastely feeding pigeons and enjoying each other's company. I asked my aunts what had happened to them. Apparently, my grandmother Ruby busted them up. She was Bill's older sister, and since their parents were deceased, I suppose she had de facto Tiger Mom jurisdiction over him and effectively got rid of Christine. Grandma Ruby didn't throw her down a well or anything, but I imagine she somehow told Christine's family to keep her retarded ass away from her little brother.

When I remarked to my mother that what happened with Bill and Christine was really horrible, in a moment of surprising clarity, my mom shrugged and rhetorically asked, “See what happens when you listen to your family?”