35
Do My Dreaming and My Scheming, Laugh at Yesterday
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.
36
Bring On the Playdates
A Tiger Mom might say, “No playdates. Absolutely not.” Well, that would certainly limit the level of chaos in one’s home. But as much as I enjoy a clean house, there are more important things than crumb-free countertops.
I want all my daughter’s little pals to feel welcome here, and that s
imple desire, when broken down into details, requires more willpower, patience, and flexibility than I’ve ever needed to summon in school or in a paid job.
Playdates, which occur on many weekdays after school and on Saturdays, are when my daughter and her friends gleefully and unintentionally destroy our house. These afternoon sessions are by far the most difficult, ongoing tests of my mental stability, physical stamina, and psychological elasticity.
Recently, Lucy had a couple of friends over, and I had made cupcakes for them. I kept saying, “Eat over your bowl,” and “Don’t drop any crumbs,” but without exception, each one, at some point, accidentally dumped her bowlful of crumbs either all over herself or sent it skittering across the floor. I was fit to be tied. Moments before, the kitchen had been perfect. I had just finished cleaning because we were having a dinner party that same night. I had spent the whole morning cooking and straightening up, and now that crumbs had rained down everywhere like ant-attracting confetti, I was ready to pitch a fit. You have no idea how much I wanted to scream, “Didn’t I just warn you about that?” or “What the f*ck!”
But instead, I said, “Are you okay?”
I have noticed that in moments like these, there is always a split second when a kid looks at you, and you can just tell that in her head she is performing lightning-quick calculations as to whether or not you’re gonna go Captain Insane-O on her. A wide-eyed stare, panicked facial expression, or barely perceptible flinch signals that she is ready for the worst-case scenario, your anger. If you blow your stack, trust pops like a bubble.
Of course, sometimes a kid does that one thing you said not to do on purpose. I’ve witnessed a kid pick up his drink, make sure I was watching, and calmly and evilly turn over his cup so that the milk I just poured went splashing across the table. In that instance, he really deserved a well-timed, scathing expletive aimed his way. However, bellowing at piglets, petulant or just clumsy, doesn’t help anyone.
In any case, after I swept up the cupcake messes, my daughter and one of her friends ran upstairs to play, and I stayed downstairs with the other pal, and we watched a Harry Potter movie together.
Now this girl was a very big fan of this series and had already seen all the movies several times. She wielded the pause and fast-forward buttons of the remote control with her nimble fingers so quickly that the film went by in staggered snippets that were impossible to track with the human eye. But she was so excited to tell me every detail of every article of clothing, set design, green screen technological moment, and plot deviation that I was forced to adjust my mentality to the level of an eleven-year-old girl’s brain soaked in soda and sprinkled liberally with Pixy Stix.
It was okay. I could’ve fought with her but instead I told myself, Feel the force of the brain scramble flowing through you. I recalibrated myself to chatterbox light speed. Simultaneously, I ate some potato chips to distract myself from the thumping, crashing noises that were coming from upstairs.
People! This is what living with children is like.
After a while, I went upstairs to see what Lucy and her friend were up to. The carpet was littered with shredded toilet paper (clean) and tiny toy parts. Disassembled, minuscule bits of Japanese erasers were scattered everywhere. Also, a giant bucket of plastic Perler beads had been dumped and mashed into the carpet pile, and various stuffed animals, books, and other detritus of childhood had exploded across the beds and every square foot of the floor.
I stood there and winced in pain at the sight. As I collected my thoughts, all I said was, “Okaaaay.”
I couldn’t imagine how I or we were ever going to put everything back in order, but in those few moments in which I paused, I could see that they were in the middle of creating their own movie that they had carefully written and staged. They had a script, had set up all the scenes, and were now filming with the video setting of our digital camera. It was called Evil Taco’s Revenge! and starred a rather funny-looking, stuffed chinchilla named Chacho in a main role as a devious caterer.
How could I put a stop to such a thing? I couldn’t—and wouldn’t!
In the course of their elaborate play, these two cherubs had upended every container of toys, socks, pens, paper, and knickknacks in sight. Everything was mashed together in the scattered wake of their destruction. What had taken me five hours to clean that morning had been obliterated by them in twenty minutes.
It took all my strength not to lose my mind. I could feel the imaginary steam ready to blow out my ears like in a cartoon.
And yet. I stopped myself. I reminded myself that they were doing exactly what children should be doing. This freedom to play as children would influence them for the rest of their lives and would lay the foundation for all their future work as adults. This inventive play was expanding the crevices of their mind, like the universe expands, creating new spiral galaxies where once there was only black nothingness.
I resisted with all my might the urge to scream. Besides, in deep space, no one can hear you anyway.
The chaos was not entirely destruction, but creation. They had literally made a holy mess. The chaos was a result of their sacred play.
Spills can be cleaned. Rugs can be vacuumed and sheets washed. Sure I want a clean home, and I would love it if clothes that I folded an hour ago actually stayed in a neat pile.
But look! How could I argue with their excitement and pure focus as they carefully measured out their screen shots and exclaimed, “Turn Chacho to the left! Okay, wait . . . chain him up in Mardi Gras beads! Now roll out the toilet paper . . .” and so forth.
I left them alone. These nine-year-olds were creating new worlds. These worlds were portals to their future, and their dreams. This imaginative play was their work. And they were creating a wonderful, lively, brilliant universe along with their mess.
And in the mix, eventually math homework still got done. Top grades were still achieved. I did clean a little more, but it was worth it to allow them their freedom. I mean, how many years left do children have to explore the far reaches of their nonsensical, quirky, malleable minds? Of course, hopefully, that creativity would never stop, even far into adulthood. That would be the most beautiful ability of all, to always have hearts and minds bursting with exuberant ideas. If only all our years could continue to be filled with that kind of self-generating happiness and wonderment. By allowing kids to play uninterrupted, if we can give our kids the gift of never feeling stuck in life, well, dang, we all deserve that.
37
Friends Don’t Let Friends Be Tiger Moms
Now that I’ve ventured out from my separate cage, I’ve found female friends who can be described as neither Tiger Moms nor cougars. All are hardworking women, and each maintains her own independence in the face of balancing professional and domestic lives, personhood and motherhood. Any one of these remarkable women would lift a freaking car off my child if need be. And they would gently send me home if they ever found me in public wearing head-to-toe nonironic leopard print.
If I were a Tiger Mom, I don’t think I’d ever have gotten close enough to these friends to know that we all deal with the same challenges every day. We are each doing all that needs to be done: lugging tons of heavy backpacks and groceries, making breakfasts and packing lunches, helping with homework, and coordinating multiple schedules. Someone is always jostling our bodies, ripping open the shower curtain to talk to us, pilfering that special snack we were saving in the fridge, or crashing our computers with games and “inappropriate” movies.
Resisting the Tigerish tendency to think I can do everything all on my own has been a years-long process. I am proud to say that I don’t feel in competition with my other mother-friends. I feel cooperative.
But this trust did not happen immediately. Because I hadn’t had a lot of experience with close relationships up to this point, and had mostly just confined myself to my isolating Chinese box, I wasn’t quite sure how to go about feeling comfortable with a new group of friends. And even when I was giving
lavish, weekly dinner parties and had stepped over the line to the Dark Side of Perfect Wife, I was still using that posture as dazzle camouflage. I may have looked like I was inviting people in, even as I was simultaneously keeping them at arm’s length.
Without being too conscious of it, I must have been figuring that I would only show people what I wanted them to see. If I then ended up getting hurt, I could take solace in the fact that they never knew the real me.
It was as if my insides were constructed like the Titanic. The ship consisted of five compartments that could fill up with water, and if the hull took a direct hit and one part filled up, the other four were still intact to keep the vessel afloat. The engineering strategy was to avoid a huge gouge across all five sections that would result in a nonsurvivable situation like the one that sank that ill-fated ship. Letting people only see one side of me was like filling up just one quadrant of my heart. If moving here and making these friends turned out to be an epic fail, I could still survive. At least, that was my initial thinking.
But slowly, ever so incrementally, I did allow myself to let in one friend at a time. I discovered that we are all in the same boat. We are all bailing water with Dixie cups. My friends showed me I was not alone in this endeavor, or in my loneliness. I did not have to pretend I was a perfect anything. I could be myself and feel welcome. And loved, for real.
Parenthood is like volunteering for an overnight field trip that lasts eighteen-plus years. I feel lucky to have discovered other sane adults who are my cochaperones. Boxes must be hauled, car rides must be arranged, and we are each forever picking up the slack. Figuratively, and sometimes literally, we do the heavy lifting, and we put down the hammer.
As mothers, we pick up kids, and in between driving everyone everywhere, we are also forced to pick ourselves up over and over again. We coax splinters out of soft little feet, soothe inexplicably hurt feelings, and wipe away hot tears rolling down cheeks, sometimes our very own.
Tiger Babies Strike Back Page 18