Without a Net

by Michelle Tea

  I came into this life carved out of poverty and half Blackness. Grew up on Lucky Charms and public-access television, I thought, like everybody else. I was cared for by my mother, an immigrant from Burma who shifted from Chinese restaurant waitress jobs to working as a baby sitter. I was punished by a Black father who came home tired and hungry from punching numbers at a shipping company on the Oakland waterfront.

  My mother reminded me that it was her idea to wait in line overnight while pregnant with me back in the early ’80s to try and get a loan from the bank to buy a house. She asserts (usually implying my father’s failures) that without her, our family would be nothing. She wanted to make things work for herself and for her daughter. She needed to prove something to her family after getting kicked out and disowned for “going Black” and shaming the family name.

  My African-American father grew up hard. He didn’t hustle and was always intent on making money the “honest” way. He still had hope that this white man’s world would be just, that they’d cut a little Black boy from San Francisco some slack. But he was angry and could not change the spiral of his own small life and stayed trapped in the menial-labor pool while his white coworkers got the raises and vacation time slots. All he got was some damn sweater with the company logo on it after twenty-plus years of “excellent service.”

  So this was my beginning, growing up in a lopsided house with my father’s burnt-out anger and my mother’s shaky dreams. We lived in Oakland between gunshots and freeway overpasses. My parents always had ambitions of making enough money to buy us out of the urban streets. Of course they wanted to give all three of us a nice little house with a picket fence and green grass to hide our abuse and sadness in. Not with nights of barricaded doors because a boy armed with a loaded weapon was loose in the neighborhood. Not with the neighbors across the street hosting gang parties and someone being fatally stabbed in a whirl of music and beer. Not with prostitution and a stabbing on the corner, a vague picture of a Black man being passed around as the suspect.

  But this is the compromise—we were not white, we were not rich, we were not privileged. My mother couldn’t speak English and my father was trying to swallow the whole of employment discrimination and a new family. In my own world, I was trying to save my skin from getting beaten up by classmates because of the poor Salvation Army clothes I wore or the way my half-breed awkwardness caused them to feel ill at ease. I got driven to the “good school” in the hills because my parents wanted the best for me. Not for me to break down at eleven and start fucking the neighborhood boys, getting drunk, and cutting school with a baby on the way. No, not that.

  My mother wanted me to be a good little Asian daughter; my father wanted me to be able to escape the violence and dejection of growing up Black. They both wanted me to have a “chance” and make it in this world.

  My mother wanted me to be a good little Asian daughter; my father wanted me to be able to escape the violence and dejection of growing up Black. They both wanted me to have a “chance” and make it in this world. So my father beat me to make me grow up tall and straight. My mother taught me to stay away from Blackness, to carefully construct myself so that I would not fuck up, and to hold it together until we reached the safety of suburbia and the middle class. Maybe, they thought, the whiteness would rub off on me. Maybe it would save me from cutting my arms with broken glass and running away with drunk homeless boyfriends.

  But after all my father’s efforts to beat me straight and my mother’s insistence that I stop “acting ghetto” (read: an exaggerated performance of what I thought was Black), I ran away anyway. It wasn’t the two-story house that I wanted so much, but this was beyond their comprehension.

  Poverty and race, then, like stealing napkins from McDonald’s for our own kitchen table or buying in bulk when my mother would steal from my father’s tight wallet, were one and the same to me. I had grown up half Black and poor and had felt ashamed of myself and where I came from ever since I got thrown into schools with other kids who could afford to buy their social status. Those kids, the ones who were worth being called on, the milky White Rabbit candy–hands raised to a teacher’s ambitious question. And the girls—from elementary to high school—always had the luxury of looking pretty, while I had only what I could afford, and even if I could afford it, would it ever be enough?

  From this I became the unwanted, dusty half-breed girl from the other side of the tracks. I ate old food wrapped up in aluminum foil for lunch. Stinky food sometimes. Chinese food.

  I do not know when I began to relate racism to whiteness, class and poverty to supremacy and economic/corporate tyranny, my family in the bottom of the curved belly of American lies. This kind of consciousness wasn’t entirely mine at a young age since I lacked the framework and mental capacity to understand it all, but in the little ways that I could formulate it, I learned that I wielded a power and strength that these little Richie Rich kids would never have. They had all the privilege in the world, all the workings on their side, but I was still standing, still surviving after a thousand-year captivity that their world and their books constantly tried to erase from history, from memory and re-create as myth.

  For so long, they—politicians, pastors, teachers, the three-car-garage rich—pushed the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” theory. They said, “You Black people are so lazy. If you got off welfare and worked hard, maybe you could make something of yourselves in life.”

  But we Black people have been making something of ourselves in life, not only for ourselves but also for white people, for generations.

  They never seem to hear us, though.

  BEING HALF BLACK MEANS HAVING THICKER BLOOD AND BONES to withstand breaking, and eyes with a raw, wide-open perspective. (Not all of us choose to live or see, but those of us who do know the difficulties of staying on top and navigating the currents of life.) Being poor is knowing how to make old milk and some bread go pretty far over the course of a week. Being a woman is learning from a young age what you can get in return for sex. So, my mother fed me on what she could make work, and what I didn’t get from my parents, I received in exchange for my body, for all I was worth. And it isn’t worth too much in this society, Blackness in the female form. Especially when you have to eat and have no skills, or are underage. Blame it on history.

  For me, being half Black, poor, and troublesome somehow took the crime out of my rape and battery. It wasn’t necessarily a legal issue that a young woman from that side was out in the streets getting beat up because she refused to give sex without some compensation. It wasn’t a crime that she was being neglected in her home, it wasn’t a crime that she went into the streets to look for an alternate family system. In that respect, I became a statistic, a government-study number, what talk-show hosts might call “a troubled girl looking for a father figure and love.” But it wasn’t severe enough for intervention when a young, poor woman who was labeled “gifted” by teachers in school but “mentally unstable” by psychiatrists was being battered and seeking alternatives—but found too many bricks instead that, in the end, created dead-end walls.

  Still, I was literate. I loved English and my Anatomy class, even. And I stuck through school and graduated. During that time, I kept in my company a transient boyfriend who was also mixed-race but looked white, the same one who did the majority of the assaults on my body. My liberation came when he went away to boot camp the summer after senior year. At eighteen I was referred, as a “bright and qualified student,” to college, and began yet another adjustment at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the U.C. notorious for being unable to keep students of color at the institution. It was a four-year fraternity party from which I bailed after just two years because of severe depression, alienation, and a climax of threatening to knuckle up with some of the white girls who constantly harassed me in the dorms.

  I was not the first in my extended family to go away to college, but coming from an immediate family with a Chinese mother with minimal Eng
lish skills and an African-American father who went to a city college and hit the glass ceiling hard, my attending a four-year university was not some minor thing. I transferred schools, determined to complete my bachelor’s degree, unfinished with the fight.

  I was still recovering from the earlier abuse, physical and mental, from boyfriends and other men. I was still trying to find my space to surface and not drown in academia, a place I was not totally prepared for after so many years in the California public school system, where I was channeled into underachieving classes because the school had already filled their “quota” for the honors courses. I was still cutting up my body periodically as my own way of coping, and would sometimes go out drinking to forget my difficulties. When I did study, I had to beg to borrow other kids’ books because if I spent my financial aid money on the textbooks for my courses, I wouldn’t be able to buy a Greyhound ticket back home to visit my family for the holidays.

  I endured financially in school by depending on loans and painful budgeting. Even now, nothing for me is ever a luxury. I learned to stretch money and sometimes starve because something else is always much more important than food, something else always comes first. It’s the sacrifice I have learned to live with while my mother supports the two younger additions to our family—two more girls—on minimum wage earned as a cashier at a fast-food restaurant. I used to be very ashamed to admit to people where she worked. Admitting these personal things can still remind me of the hurt I felt growing up poor and being made fun of.

  It’s our (brown) bodies that this society was built on and is still being built on, our backs, our hands still in the dirt. And it’s easy for someone from outside this “class” to discredit the everyday struggle, simple for them to dissociate themselves from our shame, our labor, our humility, our anger. My mother has never been ashamed of who she is, even after her Chinese relatives cussed her out for going with a “nigger” and having half-breed babies without being able to support them. She fought to stand firm with her choices and stay proud of her work—owning a home and a car, helping one kid through college with two more to go. But what she does is regarded by American society as “nothing,” a dirty shit job: mopping up someone else’s floor and taking in their shame; probably even serving from a drive-through window some of the people who will read this book. Same as the work done by my father—refilling paper clips, photocopying papers, running Post-it note messages to court superiors—a “go get my coffee, boy.” No one seems to notice that my parents, two underprivileged people, are doing the body work, the labor that keeps part of this world functioning.

  Some of us survive, even as the world is caving in on us under the spread of capitalism and global industry. Some of us find new ways to pay the rent, pull together a family in a one-bedroom apartment, pay for an education with hope that a back will be spared—and hands too—while dealing with the persisting circumstances of poverty. There is a desire to close the gap between privileged and poor in this country, but it seems that regardless of the amount or quality of labor performed, the demarcations remain. The borders between the upper class and the working class stand to define more than just the amount on a paycheck. They classify language, culture, body, and self. It keeps us apart from one another while also keeping us connected in a never-ending struggle for social and economic balance. The middle ground is where I locate myself.

  THE SOUND OF POVERTY

  EILEEN MYLES

  WHEN I THINK ABOUT THE TYPE OF POVERTY I GREW UP WITH I’M INCLINED to call it “enough.” We had just enough. I guess we were what they call now the working poor. We weren’t really poor, but my parents were afraid of that—poverty. So there were many actions and choices in between us and poverty and we lived in that in-between place where you were always slightly reminded that you didn’t have enough or you had barely enough.

  I always think of the powdered milk. What kid didn’t like to drink milk, tons of it—a half gallon was plunked down on the table at supper and at lunch. But sometimes my mother sank down a pitcher and there were tiny bubbles at the top of it and we’d scream: No, Mom, it has bubbles. It’s powdered! It’s not, she’d insist. Then she’d give in. O.K., she’d admit. It’s half and half. Everything was always getting stretched a little bit. At a moment when everyone was proudly aware of the pop glamour of American products, we didn’t use Welch’s grape jelly—we used Ann Page, the A&P brand. Or Finast from First National. When it came to ice cream it was Marvel, whatever that was, and it was also neapolitan so that nobody could have their favorite flavor, everybody could have striped ice cream or nothing. Neapolitan is strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate. You probably know that. We didn’t have Kool-Aid, we had Cheeri-ade, our supermarket’s brand. I loved when we ran out of something just before supper because I’d jump on my bike and go to the Monument market in the center which was run by some Italian guy who wore a straw hat and the Monument only carried brand names, we were locked in to something known. But usually we weren’t. As a result, there were certain things that actually seemed disgusting to me. Like butter. Too rich. I preferred margarine. I had to develop a taste for butter in college so that I wouldn’t embarrass myself by my preference for blandness. I’m afraid to taste margarine now because I think I would still like it too much and I would think about home. Growing up poor—growing up anything other than middle class situates you strangely in the culture. For instance, I don’t like television. Unlike every middle-class girlfriend I’ve ever had, I watched it plenty growing up. No one ever stopped me. Also, it was the sixties. TV was like a national sport. Those people who were questioning whether it was good for kids were total outsiders. Conceited and rich. Probably the same people who were willing to put their entire family on TV, like the Louds. My family would eat supper and then my mother would make about three dozen chocolate-chip cookies and we’d watch TV until it went off. We’d watch Johnny Carson and then we’d watch American jets fly over Buddhist temples and “The Star Spangled Banner” would play and we’d call it a day. Nobody did homework. Nobody asked. There was no future.

  Nobody did homework. Nobody asked. My brother was considered a brain and he got good grades somehow and I didn’t but it didn’t matter, because I was a girl.

  We were just there. My brother was considered a brain and he got good grades somehow and I didn’t but it didn’t matter, because I was a girl. So right from the beginning it seemed that being female was another occasion of poverty. In fact there were two of us in my family. We were referred to as “the girls.” Immediately I was part of a group. It’s been pointed out to me that in photography kids of color are generally photographed in groups rather than in individual portraits like white kids. In general, it seems to me, girls are less white than boys, or white in the wrong way. And again, there were two of us, so the more, the worse. And I was more a part of the group of my family than the group at school. My family was kind of Old-World. If all the females were getting permanents, I would get a permanent. There was no personal self, no point of resistance. Whatever style was tearing through the legions of other girls at school had no effect on the fashions of my family. Since there were two girls we would often get the same thing: two dresses, identical. My brother was a little different from us. There was the sense that he would go to a brand-name college, and my mother helped him buy a car in high school—a Volkswagen; yet still in the most basic ways he was just like us. He watched TV and he went to bed. He got up and the jelly and the margarine were there and—let me show you our lunch boxes. It was cool to have your sandwich on a big bulky roll—but of course instead I had Wonder Bread—oddly one of the brands that broke through to the working class. Everyone had it. I think Wonder Bread was considered good because of all those ways it built the body and it was also great to have a Drake’s cake in your lunch box, but I did not have a Drake’s cake, I had an apple with a bruise. It’s better for you, my mother would defend it. And she was right. But still I couldn’t believe those lucky kids would open their boxes or their
bags and a product in cellophane would gleam out at them. And they would tear it open and the whipped cream would be stuck to the paper and it was theirs.

  IN SCHOOL THERE WAS A BAND. I DREAMED ABOUT IT—A MARCHING band with drums and clarinets and saxophones—the best. I desperately wanted to join the band and play music with everyone. But my mother simply said no. We couldn’t afford it. My brother had a paper route so he could afford it, but Terry didn’t practice. Why would my mother waste the money on a horn I wouldn’t play, she explained snootily. She actually had distaste for the idea. But I would, I believed, my hopes fading into the wallpapered walls of our two-family house that we owned. See, we weren’t poor. We were World War II white average. My parents bought our house on the G.I. bill. Obviously other guys went to college on it as well. Not my father. My father decided to drink himself to death and die instead. When we wanted something my mother would immediately compare her experience—orphan, to our experience—lucky ducks with two parents, and then even one. It was easy to say no to me. She would think of what she had had—what they had taken away from her. At the point at which both of her parents died, there was a pianola in her house and she believed it was hers and the Polish relatives came and carted it away. People take everything. That’s what my mother believed. I think we kids were “people” too. By the time I was eleven and had given up the possibility of ever playing the trumpet, or the clarinet or the saxophone, and merely sat on a chair in the parlor tooting on my harmonica, my mother would lean in and say, You know, I always wanted to play the piano when I was a child. She looked at me sadly. We were a couple of kids. So it’s really difficult when I think about growing up without money, not much of it anyhow—to figure out what in fact was the weirdness of our exact economic situation and what was the kind of mourning that people endlessly express through dollars. My mother couldn’t let me replace her loss with a living kid with a horn. I had to stay empty too. And I did. I really think of language as a replacement for everything. Sitting here at my computer it’s like the revenge of nothing. I make my constant claim in silence. I toot my horn.