Tiger Babies Strike Back

by Kim Wong Keltner

  I read and reread this story and have even saved it all these years, still flipping through it from time to time. I’m not sure how to feel about Iris Chang, her accomplishments, and her death. There’s the sickness I feel over her tragic end, and then there are the details we had in common that add a macabre quality. Mostly, though, what pained me and troubles me still about her death is that she was someone I looked up to, who gave me hope and a little bit more courage. I had considered her a better, more respectable version of myself. When someone whom you’ve always admired can’t stand the heat in the kitchen and decides to off herself, what are you supposed to do?

  I think about Iris Chang all the time. When I’m tired, when I want to stop writing altogether, or when I need a pep talk, I consider all the ways in which Iris could’ve been easier on herself. Since I didn’t know her personally, I have no firsthand knowledge of her foibles, her intensity, or her work habits. Her being gone and my being alive to wipe up baby barf and write books about interracial dating and preteen, smutty high jinks seemed unfair.

  Sometimes when I want to give up everything and not get out of bed, I think of Iris. Not because she would’ve definitely gotten out of bed, but because I can. I have a chance to write about all these things that happen to me, and somewhere there’s someone whom I may never meet and she is reading my books. Maybe my words can make her feel better, or inspire her to be the next writer who makes a difference. We all keep passing the baton to the next person who can tell the truth, and that humble continuity is what we’ll need to break apart the abstract wall of Chinese silence that keeps us separate, each alone within ourselves.

  20

  The Wheels Start to Come Loose

  I knew it was time to leave San Francisco when the police shot and killed the tiger at the city zoo. We’d been going there three times a week for the past four years and had just visited the tiger’s grotto that very same morning. Lucy and I had spent her early childhood watching Tatiana pace her enclosure. We had crouched dozens of times behind the thick Plexiglas and quivered as she meandered by, six inches away with those white whiskers and clear yellow-green eyes. And now she had died in a hail of bullets on Christmas Day.

  As for us, truthfully, we were not doing too well in San Francisco either. Entrenched in those hard years of early parenthood, Rolf and I had divvied up the responsibilities of family life and, as a result, hardly spent any time together anymore. He was working long hours in the school district, and I was watching Lucy and writing my second and third books, Buddha Baby and I Want Candy. I didn’t venture out of the house very often, but when I did, it seemed like everywhere we went, the rage and unhappiness of the world accosted us at every turn. A complete stranger in a Safeway parking lot ran up to me as I balanced my sleeping toddler across my chest while lugging three bags of groceries and screamed at me for not returning my cart to the designated area. On a daily basis, Chinese passersby scolded me for not wrapping Lucy in a sweater and tighter blankets, and once in the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park someone called me a “f*cking chink” under her breath as I waited in line for the bathroom.

  Before I had a baby, I often jokingly described myself as a freak magnet, meaning that I somehow attracted people’s bad behavior, and I do believe it has something to do with looking like a Harmless Asian Girl. Guys walked up to me all the time and said lewd things. On a crowded Muni bus, a man reached over and palmed my ass. Homeless guys made sexual gestures at me frequently. Mind you, none of this crap ever happened if I was with Rolf. It was only when I was alone, or alone with Lucy. If you’ve ever been a new mom, you know that you find yourself unaccompanied a lot of the time, living your lonely life at the height of your body’s and baby’s vulnerability.

  If I ignored these behaviors, more often than not, I would hear muttered expletives as I passed. If I saw a potentially unsavory character up ahead on the sidewalk and crossed the street, I’d also get an insult hurled my way or at the very least a scornful gaze and wad of spit aimed in my direction. None of this was ever fine with me, but I accepted and endured it as part of city living.

  My body had been ripped apart, I wasn’t sleeping very much, and I was trying to figure out how to take care of this helpless creature whose wide-eyed stare told me she depended on me completely. Under the strain and complexity of having this new and innocent person, the crass behavior of strangers became unbearable.

  Add to these incidents the regular annoyances of city life. Nearly getting killed in the crosswalk as a pedestrian was no joke. Drivers zoomed straight at our stroller all the time, just to stop on a dime and get pissed off if I gave them a dirty look. No one seemed to ever stop at stop signs, and cars turning right against the red light often honked or peeled out inches from my heels if I wasn’t moving fast enough for them. Once when I was in the crosswalk with the light in my favor, Lucy’s sweater slipped into the street and I stopped to pick it up only to have a turning car come to a screeching halt. I could see the driver inside screaming obscenities at me.

  Needless to say, my nerves were shot.

  Meanwhile, Rolf was working like a dog. Because he was often one of the only male teachers at the various sites he covered, he was frequently asked to restrain kids, break up fights, and defuse angry parents. Several families were suing the school district, and in some neighborhoods where he worked, violence was prevalent. He’d come home exhausted, and I wouldn’t tell him anything that might stress him out further. I didn’t mention the off-leash psychotic pit bull that chased me down the sidewalk, and I kept quiet about the skateboarder who barreled down Stanyan Street and nearly knocked both Lucy and me to the ground.

  Also, every weekend it seemed we were required by my family to go to one event or another. So-and-So was having a recital, baby shower, wedding, birthday, you name it. Don’t you remember their daughter? Sure you do. You have to be there. My brothers would somehow get a pass and avoid going to these events, but because I was the daughter and had a baby for my parents to show off I was always given the hard sell. So we’d end up going to something every weekend, sometimes on both Saturday and Sunday, and then the week would start up again on Monday without much relaxation having happened at all.

  Not that we remembered how to relax or would recognize it if it bit us in the rump. Rolf had work reports to write on his own time at home; our toddler required constant feeding, wiping, washing, and entertaining; and I was trying to carve out time and space to write. I could barely scrawl out a grocery list in my sleep-deprived state, and yet my deadlines loomed closer. You’ve heard the phrase “time marches on”? Well, dishes, diapers, and laundry marched on for us.

  We saved time by not talking to each other very much anymore. We knew what we had to do—slog through. And we did slog through. For about five years. And with each passing year, the talking became more minimal. We lived in completely different realms. He was working and trying to soothe overwrought kids and crazed parents, then coming home to write up the status reports under constant threat of the school district’s lapsed compliance to federal standards and impending lawsuits. I was writing novels, wiping up yucky things in a world of Elmo and Yo Gabba Gabba!, and making organic baby meals churned through a hand grinder and popped into ice cube trays for future single servings.

  Within this time, everyone under the sun was also asking us when we were going to have another baby. Strangers asked me how old I was or told me that I was running out of time. Random people would scrutinize my stomach or actually reach out and pat my postpregnancy tummy pooch and inquire if there was another bun in the oven, hopefully a boy this time. Or else they’d ask when I was going to lose that weight. Someone once even checked out my chest and said it looked like there was still a lot of milk in there.

  I pretty much wanted to die.

  But instead, I began to act out in other, small ways.

  For instance, I tried to steal a Radio Flyer peanut-shaped tricycle. I was foiled by an early-bird parent who showed up at the Walter Haas
Playground at seven in the morning with her adorable toddler just as I was plotting to hoist the minitransportation device into the back of my hooptie rust-bucket roller skate of a car. The tricycle had been at the playground for weeks! Someone was bound to eventually take it. Why couldn’t that someone be me? I chickened out because of the potential mommy narc, and when I went back the next day to the scene of the near crime, the peanut trike was gone. Someone who was either less of a coward or more of a brazen criminal had beaten me to the punch.

  So then I focused my wayward tendencies on people’s misplaced wallets.

  For about a period of six months, everywhere I went I was finding people’s wayward billfolds. Leather, pleather, Velcro, Coach, with checkbooks, credit cards, and stuffed with cash. I found one by the drink machine at the zoo, one on the platform of the nineteenth-century carousel in the park, and several in malls and clothing stores. If the wallet was on the ground, I rolled over it with my secret weapon—a gigantic baby stroller containing my gigantic baby. Ah, the perfect cover. Who would suspect a nice Asian gal with a stroller to be une thief extraordinaire? I’d hover over the goods and then bend down to pretend I was procuring some Cheerios for my spawn, but instead I’d retrieve the wallet, filled with untold amounts of fabulous cash.

  After waffling for a few moments, I always did turn in the wallets to the proper authorities. But why didn’t I take the money and run? Mostly because I’m totally vain. Doing bad stuff like stealing money causes guilt and regret that eventually shows up as deep crevices on your face, and then you’re one of those people who coulda maybe been almost pretty but is disturbingly hagged out before her time, and who needs that? I can’t afford Botox, for criminy’s sake.

  I don’t know why these wallets were scattered around San Francisco for me to happen upon them. But of all morally ambiguous things, stealing money ain’t okay, right? That’s what I figured after I imagined all the wonderful things I could get on eBay with money that wasn’t mine.

  Which brings me here. Let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we?

  We didn’t have enough money to stay in San Francisco. Like a lot of people, we were siphoning liquid cash out of our home equity line, hoping to pay off the minimum balances until we won the California Lottery. We were $90K in the hole and had further debt stashed in various 0 percent APR accounts, but they were all coming due and ready to switch over to 29 percent interest rates with fees so numerous that I could only stare at the wall and helplessly, nonsensically ponder the name of the Tubes’ lead singer, Fee Waybill. Bills? Fees? No way. Way. Fee Waybill. Waived fees? No way. Way. Fee Waybill. And over and over.

  We wuz broke and I was considering morally questionable activities despite my deep fear of Satan.

  Something had to happen. We had to break out of our rut. I didn’t want to end up dead like Iris Chang or get thrown in the slammer for stealing wallets.

  I was a haggard mom with a beautiful baby, but we were slogging through our days. We lived in one of the most dynamic cities in the world, but didn’t feel happy. Something had to change.

  21

  The Mice Go On

  Let’s just say I was in despair but didn’t know it. Maybe it was best not to admit it to myself, because I figured there was no point in complaining. No one wants to hear it when someone talks about her vague feelings of impending doom. If any person noticed me looking dejected and said, “What’s your problem?” the only answer I could muster was, “Nothing. Everything’s fine.”

  One weekend, we took a drive up to the Sierra foothills and visited the town of Nevada City. We’d been there several times a few years earlier, before we’d had Lucy, to have lunch and sightsee. This time, while I was browsing in a shop, Rolf waited on the corner in front of a real estate office and absentmindedly scanned the home listings.

  “Check this out,” he said when I came out of the store. It was a Victorian house nearby, a place that didn’t end up being what we needed, but right then, an idea quietly began to germinate.

  Later that night, in the darkness, with both of us awake and knowing the other was up but not saying anything, I finally whispered, “What if we moved?”

  “You could never leave San Francisco.”

  “Well, why couldn’t I?”

  “Could you?”

  “You’re right. I couldn’t.”

  Variations of this terse conversation popped up for the next few nights. Meanwhile, during the daytime we were consumed with our frantic search for a public kindergarten for Lucy. San Francisco Unified School District uses a lottery system to place students in different schools. You are supposedly guaranteed one of your top seven choices, but we had been through the lottery twice, and neither time were we selected for any schools nearby or that I’d even heard of. There were ten schools in our neighborhood that would have been all right with us. But wanting a school assignment close to a kid’s home is treated as a petty, bourgeois request in the City by the Bay. The situation was further demoralizing because Rolf had been busting his butt for the district for six years, but despite his dedication, the impersonal kindergarten placement process continued to dog us.

  So on another night, without actually bringing up the question of moving, I said, “Do you want to go up to Nevada City again this weekend?”

  Rolf gave me a look. “Okay,” he said.

  In retrospect, I can only say that maybe when you’re about to make a crazy, life-changing decision, like leaving the one home you’ve ever known, you can only summon the nerve by not thinking directly about it too much or you’ll scare yourself out of doing it. So we dropped Lucy off with my parents, and we spent the next few weekends looking at homes in Nevada City.

  And why there? It was only three hours away from San Francisco, close enough that we wouldn’t feel too cut off, and far enough to feel like my nerves could recover. And it is very beautiful. I feel most comfortable in old places, and Nevada City is one of the oldest in California, and there we would have snow in the winters and hot sunshine in the summer, something I definitely never had in San Francisco.

  During those weeks of driving back and forth I did wonder to myself if we were insane to uproot ourselves. We alternated between giddy excitement and cold sweats. I would wake up in the middle of the night and for a few seconds think, God, I had a horrifying dream that we moved out of San Francisco. The next day I might think, Thank goodness we didn’t do something stupid, and then I’d change my mind and say to Rolf, “Why not? People move all the time. We can do it!”

  The idea of leaving my hometown and my entire life as I knew it up to that point might sound impulsive, and I admit that it was. The thing I may not have emphasized, though, is the heavy, intense feeling of dread I felt every minute of every day. People could argue that there is crime everywhere, and most car accidents happen within a mile of home wherever you are. Also, it’s more likely you’ll slip in your own bathtub than get mugged at gunpoint. The general consensus is that you can’t let fear rule your life.

  But fear was definitely getting the better of me. And it wasn’t just because I was a hypersensitive mom with a toddler. I was that, true, but in the last three years, danger seemed to be escalating all around us. Parents at the schools where Rolf worked were choking and shooting each other, a girl was killed three blocks from our home in a case of mistaken identity, and a kid we knew was mauled to death by his family’s pet pit bull. In our neighborhood, residents were being robbed by criminals posing as service workers. So doom felt very, very close. In my anxious state, I spent hours in my own home planning and visualizing how I would kill an intruder by throwing stuffed animals at his head to distract him long enough to grab a paring knife to stab him in the eye socket. Then I would tie him to a chair and make him watch Baby Einstein and Teletubbies so in his last moments on earth he would feel totally nutty. Like me. At least someone would then finally know my pain.

  But unlike me, at least the intruder I killed would get to have a good night’s sleep. I was too busy to s
leep. We had about a month to sell our house, buy a house, procure a job for my husband, and find a new school for Lucy. We spent more days driving back and forth the three hours between San Francisco and Nevada City so that Rolf could go to job interviews. We’d park in the grocery store parking lot and he would change his clothes in the car with his butt hanging out the window, but we didn’t have anywhere else to go.

  Our Nevada County realtor was confused by our need-it-done-yesterday city slicker ways, but nonetheless, he showed us all the properties we’d downloaded from real estate websites the night before. We drove around and checked out all the possible schools Lucy might attend. The days ticked by. In San Francisco, the school year would be starting in two weeks. And we were still scrambling to get everything in place.

  Looking back to that hectic, gut-wrenching time period, I guess it’s not too surprising that Rolf’s appendix would burst. Ugh. Who had time to drop everything and have surgery? It’s possible that yes, he could have died, but that little extended vacay in the emergency room was highly inconvenient. I remember him lying on the gurney as I put a pen in his hand to sign papers like he was a dying octogenarian and I was Anna Nicole Smith. I remember thinking, Don’t die now, baby; we’re in the middle of escrow! Rolf doesn’t remember much from his hospital stay. As my mom, who is prone to malapropisms, would say, “It was all just a blurb.”

  After more lost sleep, and one fewer organ later, it was time to bust a move. Something inside me had snapped. We had to leave. I felt so beholden to an enormous, abstract responsibility in my hometown—to family members, to frenemies, to Chinese neighbors who expected me to talk or act differently. Strangers appeared hostile, and every corner of the city seemed overcrowded and outlandishly expensive. Affording an education for Lucy seemed out of reach, and we were already treading water in debt.