Tiger Babies Strike Back Read online

  Contents

  Dedication

  Part 1: Here’s Where the Fun Begins

  1 Tiger Babies Strike Back

  2 Tiger Mom, I’m Just Not That into You

  3 How the Unformed, Chinese American Blob Takes Shape

  4 The Defiant Chinese Body

  5 Tough Love, Tough Luck

  6 Origin of the Tiger Mother Species

  7 Rise of the 3.2 GPAs

  Part 2: Peek Behind the Curtain

  8 A Tale of Two Runts

  9 Alpha Females in Separate Cages

  10 Show Me to the Foxes

  11 The Garden of Perfect Brightness Resides Within You

  12 Love, Chinese American Style

  13 Grandma Lucy on the Page

  14 Misery Is Not a Contest

  Part 3: Breaking Out of the Locked Chinese Box

  15 My Mom Loves Fiona Ma More Than Me

  16 Nothing Is for Free . . . Except Breast Milk

  17 Tiger Mom’s Heart Grew Two Sizes That Day

  18 Mompetitors, Start Your Engines!

  19 Iris Chang It

  20 The Wheels Start to Come Loose

  21 The Mice Go On

  22 Aeon Flux Capacitor

  Part 4: Emerging from the Shadows and into the Light

  23 Trying to Calm the Inner Hysteria

  24 Flap Your Wings

  25 Who’s Biting Your Style?

  26 Welcome to What I Didn’t Know

  27 Dragon Lady Versus Pearl Concubine

  28 Dispatches from the Front Lines of Third Grade

  Part 5: Older and Wiser

  29 Mommy, I Know What the F-Word Is!

  30 Dismantling the Lonely Honeycomb of Your Inner Wasp’s Nest

  31 Don’t Wash Pinky, Okay?

  32 Before You Vanish Out of View

  33 Scrambling Past the Dahlias

  34 Place Your Hand in the Beast’s Mouth

  35 Do My Dreaming and My Scheming, Laugh at Yesterday

  36 Bring On the Playdates

  37 Friends Don’t Let Friends Be Tiger Moms

  38 The Reamer Can’t Hide the Pride

  39 Something Rejected Is the Key to Your Heart

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Ad

  Other Books By

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Dedication

  For Lucy

  PART 1

  Here’s Where the Fun Begins

  1

  Tiger Babies Strike Back

  We are the survivors of the tap dance brigade, Chinese school, and interminable piano lessons. We are frustrated by our parents and spending a small fortune on therapy. My Chinese auntie once told me that if I wasn’t driving a Mercedes-Benz by the time I turned thirty years old, I’d be a total loser. And even though I’d gotten straight As my whole life, earned a bachelor’s degree with a double major at UC Berkeley in four years, worked a full-time job while my husband was in graduate school, wrote three novels before I turned thirty-eight, and am raising one great kid, do you know what my mother thinks of me? She thinks I am lazy.

  I am writing this book because I’ve just returned from vacation with my parents, and the only way I could stand the bickering, silent criticism, and their tiger vibe was to sit still in the backseat and pretend I was dead. I pretended I was DEAD. I sat there and visualized myself floating just outside the car window, out there on the California landscape, floating like a ghost, or a harrier, and tried to find peaceful death while Johnny Mathis crooned on the CD player.

  Why? Because this is what happens when you are raised by a Tiger Mother. You get a liberal arts education and use it against her. The New York Times speculates that the study of the humanities is obsolete on college campuses. Oh, no. You need the arsenal of history and literature behind you if you’re going to take on a Machiavellian Tiger Mom.

  For survivors of a Chinese upbringing, turnabout is fair play. The culture of my ancestors made me obedient up to a point, but then my American side couldn’t help but want to blow stuff up. I was forced into a life of high academics, Chinese school, and rote memorization of the Five Chinese Classics, but I didn’t learn a thing. Well, except how to sneak out at night and have dirty fun somewhere else, away from the watchful eyes of my control-freaky Tiger Parents.

  The history of Chinese in America consists of railroad building, tunnel excavating, and gold mining. But that is the story predominantly of Chinese men. Meanwhile, we girls were drowned in wells or sold for a few dollars by our very own parents who didn’t seem to care that we’d be auctioned to the highest bidder in the Gold Mountain of San Francisco.

  But now we’re doctors, lawyers, and CEOs. Nonetheless, no matter how different our personalities or professions are these days, it seems that all anyone wants to know is if we are Tiger Moms. And is it just me, or does the world only want to hear from a woman if she has been deemed hot? We’ve come a long way, baby! From concubines to MILFs in one century.

  What does go on inside the Chinese American mind? We’d better start thinking about it before China takes over the whole world with insane pollution, supertall basketball hunkies, and fake Ming vases selling for millions. Oh, and don’t forget that all the little hooks that make up every bra, from Warner’s to La Perla, are made in China. American breasts depend on China. Your rack depends on China. And hence, the world depends on understanding us, Chinese American women. We are more than a design on someone’s biceps. Our individuality is a chink in the armor of one of the world’s largest economies.

  We have an interior life that no one can touch. We rule ourselves behind a yellow screen, like the empress dowager ruling China behind a transparent scrim. The world still sees Suzie Wong, but we are many faces at once. We are simultaneously the forgotten girl in the well, an adorable adopted baby, the queen of the Western Palace, the Tiger Mom, the sexy siren, or dominatrix doormat in men’s minds, and all the while dutiful daughters, good girls, and faceless sewing women.

  Why does a Tiger Mother feel like she has to be one? Maybe because there’s an emotional aspect to Chinese American history that our organs are steeped in, like strong tea, but this vital part of our existence goes unexamined and unrecognized. We are the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but the tattoo is on our hearts, stitched with an embroidery needle in the forbidden stitch.

  Our mothers have raised kids who are more American than Chinese, and we want to lob a Molotov cocktail into the family courtyard so it rolls into the red chamber. Praise Asian nerds and raise the red lantern to comic book geeks, Goth girls, and Ph.D.s who hate Hello Kitty. Our Chinese parents sent us to college, unwittingly giving us the tools to dismantle the family home, brick by brick, wall by wall, just like the old neighborhoods in Beijing that are being demolished, sold piece by piece as antiques, relics of an old way, auctioned off for the highest dollar. We teach our elders how to get on Facebook, and then we unfriend them.

  Please allow me to pull back a velvet curtain and show you what an American of Chinese descent really thinks about daily life, motherhood, and navigating the world’s misperceptions. I will hold up this viewfinder just for you, and if you can’t decipher some of the Mandarin or Cantonese subtitles, I am happy to be your American translator.

  2

  Tiger Mom, I’m Just Not That into You

  If William Blake were alive today and writing parenting books, he might rework the beginning of his famous poem as, “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the midlife crisis of the night . . .”

  Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua was a book that claimed that Chinese parenting is superior to Western ways of child rea
ring. 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

  How the Unformed, Chinese American Blob Takes Shape

  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 e
veryone 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.”