Double Bind

by Robin Romm

  There were no complicated feelings, and no double messages, about ambition. Hesitation and ambivalence, it seems, are of concern only to people who hold the hope of meeting some ideal of American womanhood or possess the approval of authority, privilege. In other words, people who have something to lose. We could no more achieve the ideal of American womanhood through our choices about careers and families than we could the ideal of American beauty. In the seventies, the ideal American woman was the frost-maned Farrah Fawcett. One look in the mirror at our black hair, brown skin, and slanted eyes freed us from the necessity, and the possibility, of striving in her direction. Our ambition was unencumbered by reluctance.

  The Chang girls were the only Asian girls in Appleton, Wisconsin. We looked through a plate-glass window at our small-town society with the studious curiosity of newcomers, outsiders. We observed the doctors’ daughters, who every holiday helped their mothers decorate hundreds of elaborate Christmas cookies. The working-class girls, who went bowling and whose parents worked in the mill. The rich girls. The loose girls. The deliberately eccentric girls. On Wednesday afternoons, everyone went to catechism. Our parents were Buddhists. There was no model for us, no parental encouragement that we should buy into what my father called “small-town potato thinking.” Moreover, we had no choice but to hold fast to our ambition: Without the impulse to strive, to bring ourselves up, we would have had no other options. We were sustained by the knowledge that we had nothing to fall back on.

  Every morning, our father rose shortly after six o’clock and made each of us a fried egg, served with soy sauce. He claimed that eggs were the best food for fueling our brains. He drove my oldest sister to high school on his way to work. The rest of us finished breakfast before turning to homework or musical instruments. My mother practiced the violin with my sister and me every day: forty-five minutes before school and more in the evening. She had been trained on the piano and she coached us, sounding out the notes. Over time, she was able to earn a degree in piano pedagogy and work from home as an instructor of children.

  The development of her career as a teacher, beginning with one student and building to a weekly workload of more than sixty students before her health eventually failed her, was a success story we all watched unfold over the years. She believed that no child was unteachable: She coached a mentally disabled girl from “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to a Beethoven sonatina. She brought flocks of students each year to the state piano competitions, and many earned first place. Every few years, she was able to afford a better piano, and in 1985, she purchased a Steinway grand piano for our living room. But she was not entirely satisfied with these accomplishments. In her darker moments, she thought of her own life as a cautionary tale. “My problem is that I didn’t have a plan,” she sometimes said to me when we were alone, sewing or ironing (our preferred household tasks). “I could have had a different career.” She was proud of her domestic skills but never idealized her years at home with us when we were babies and toddlers. “I was so bored with small kids, at home, alone,” she told me.

  Our mother’s teaching money made it possible for our parents to pay for our own music lessons, clothing, and small allowances when we left home for college. Our parents had a plan for each of us: good grades, a good college most likely far from home, then medical school. But perhaps they’d trained us too much toward independence. As it turned out, we all invented our own narratives. My sister, Tai, the oldest, was in the basement of our house in the late 1960s, watching television, when she saw the woman she wanted to be.

  “It was the GE College Bowl,” she explained recently to me, “one of my favorite shows.” Our father approved of this program, a quiz show that pitted students from different colleges against one another. He believed it valorized education, intelligence, hard work. “This was one of few things that Dad let me watch because he thought it would be inspiration to do well,” my sister said. “And it was—but not in the way he thought.” On the GE College Bowl, the contestants sat behind rows of high podiums, visible only from the shoulders up. Most of the contestants, my sister said, were men, many wearing glasses. On the night my sister found her ambition, there was only one female contestant, and she caught Tai’s attention.

  “There was something about her,” my sister said. “All of the men wore suits with skinny ties and white shirts. I’m sure she had on a twin set. I’m sure she was wearing a string of pearls. She was very pretty; she was very feminine, but it had nothing to do with a man. She was extremely well spoken and she was more put together than many of the people I’d seen on College Bowl. I thought: I want to be that person. I didn’t want to be on the College Bowl. I just wanted to be that person. I think I largely did become that person.”

  A few years later, my sister found her way out of Appleton. Her chance came in the form of a homemaker test, sponsored by Betty Crocker. My sister, a crafty seamstress who made most of her own clothes, decided to take the test, she says, to avoid a pop quiz in advanced biology. She became the Wisconsin state winner and traveled to Washington, DC, where her eyes were opened to the possibilities of American life. “I don’t think the trip changed me, per se, but I did get a preview of the future: fifty super-smart, geographically diverse, interesting people and not a single home ec major amongst us.”

  At Yale she met and mingled with just exactly the kind of women she had seen on the College Bowl—immaculate, poised, feminine, brainy—and she did become one of them. Forty-five years later, my sister has just retired after a long and successful career as an attorney. She brought up her family in Manhattan, and her three children are attending good colleges.

  My second sister, Tina, was a high achiever since grade school. In one of my most vivid early memories of Tina, she is bent over a ruled notebook, carefully writing each cursive letter of the alphabet (lower and uppercase) dozens of times. She had been told she had messy handwriting and was determined to correct it. She is now a physician—as my parents had hoped—a rheumatologist with perfect penmanship.

  My younger sister, Ling, attained the highest level of education of our group. She earned multiple graduate degrees. She made up her mind not to become a medical doctor, earning instead a doctorate in psychology. She is highly nenggan, and she has also taken on the values of the girls we observed back at home: She’s an expert cookie baker, a devoted wife and friend, and a former beauty pageant contestant.

  The significance of leaving home, the value of a good education, the study of a profession: all of these are part of a traditional American immigrant story. Although it respects the past, this narrative is forward-looking. Ambition is a given. Tai says, “I don’t think there’s anything complicated about ambition. It’s only about desire.” I asked her why she thought the issue might be a complex thing for some people. She replied that perhaps there is so much ambivalence about ambition because “maybe some people don’t have desire, and they want to have desire. That’s when it gets complicated. If you don’t want anything, then you won’t have ambition because ambition is about wanting something.”

  My sister’s definition of desire seems to cancel out any possibility of ambivalence. In her mind, it seems, desire means wanting something so much that one is willing to pursue it utterly and disregard potential obstacles.

  This was true in my own experience. My clearest ambitions stemmed directly from a childhood deprived of space and privacy. The seven of us—my maternal grandmother, my mother and father, my three sisters, and I—lived in a three-bedroom house. The six females shared the full bathroom and my father, the sole male, commandeered the half bath. Held securely in the middle of this group of very passionate, verbal people, surrounded at all times, with no privacy except sometimes during the midday when I was able to lock myself in the bathroom to think or read, I wanted to become a writer. What luxury!—to sit alone, in the pleasure of solitude, and think for a living. Since early childhood, I felt a powerful desire to make things and an equally powerful desire to be unanswerable to
any person or rule. I was drawn to words and stories because they created a private space for me, however imaginary; I sought an inner life because there were limited resources for having an outer one.

  Throughout my formative years, my dream was precious to me. It helped me to distinguish what I truly wanted from what I was told—even by my parents—that I should want. It helped me to define what happiness might mean. It was, always, the purest form of desire.

  Many books I read and loved as a child and adolescent—­written by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather—were about young American women who sought education and accomplishment of some kind and went on to achieve it. I was inspired that Laura Ingalls and Jo March, also from families of four sisters, grew up to become novelists. As I myself turned to writing, one of my favorite novels was Cather’s Song of the Lark—an entirely unapologetic Künstlerroman about the oldest daughter from a large family in a Colorado mining town who grows up to become a world-class opera singer. Thea Kronborg aims for greatness—and so focused is the novel on her development as a singer that Cather later added the ending of the romantic subplot as an afterthought.

  Ultimately, my parents’ focus on our education, determination, and development as human beings made it possible for me to rebel, to stand up to them when I realized that they would never approve of my desire to become a writer. Inspired, perhaps, by my parents’ break with China, their focus on independence, even their isolation, I abandoned their plan for me even in the face of their disapproval and dismay. It would be years before I saw their quandary: that by wishing achievement in a foreign country for their children, they were in some ways pushing their children away from themselves and their own dreams. But I had to make my own way. I had nothing else. The writer and editor William Maxwell once said that deprivation is the key: “It’s deprivation that makes people writers, if they have it in them to be a writer.” Perhaps growing up in a life that was so bare and clean made ambition one of the few pleasures I could afford.

  Over five decades, my sisters and I assembled an armory of nenggan, wit, advanced degrees, ruthlessness, and volition. My parents’ initial hopes and fears for us evolved from anxiety (when we left school and made our ways into the world) to relief (when we began to marry and have children) and, finally, to pride. We fulfilled our parents’ wishes for us, perhaps in ways they had not expected.

  A few years ago, the four of us returned to Appleton for my mother’s memorial service. Tina, who had been a ferociously devoted medical advocate for my mother until she died, planned a beautiful event, which was attended by hundreds, including a formidable family contingent—poised and well turned out, visual evidence of our American success. My sisters and I each delivered a eulogy. Tai was witty and incisive; Tina was heartfelt; Ling was eloquent and moving. As each of my sisters spoke, I felt her invincibility fill the room. The loss of our mother was a terrible blow, but she had ensured that we would survive.

  My father, now ninety-four years old, keeps a careful eye on his six grandchildren. He’s particularly aware of his three granddaughters. He doesn’t hang the same desperate hopes on them as he did on his own children. He doesn’t need to. Sometimes I wonder what this will mean for them: Will the next generation of women in our family forget the Chang girls’ pure faith in ambition? Will growing up with so much to lose quell our daughters’ desires, make them unsure of what they want or timid about getting it?

  Not if we have anything to say about it.

  Goal Your Own Way

  EVANY THOMAS

  When I was growing up, my mom’s big goal in life was to get me to figure out my big goal in life. She checked self-help books out of the library for me, supplied me with fresh journals for recording my hopes for the future, and signed me up for weird goal-setting classes at the local community college. But no matter how much I tried to visualize Future Evany raising a “First Place at Life” trophy triumphantly into the air, I could not for the life of me imagine what I could ever do to earn it.

  I would have loved to be one of those people who grow up knowing exactly where they wanted life to take them. The Olympic gymnast who started cartwheeling before she could walk. The little girl who tells everyone who’ll listen that she wants to be an astronaut when she grows up, and look: fifteen years later she’s in orbit, her hair floating weightless behind her.

  But the closest I ever got to setting a life goal was “Have goals someday.” (My mom’s response: epic motherly sighhhhhh. . . .) But I meant it. My inability to set goals always felt like a freaky deficiency in me, and I was uncomfortably sure it meant I wouldn’t be able to succeed at anything. As I learned in weird goal-­setting class, people who write down their goals are ten times more likely to achieve them. And oh how I wished I could take advantage of that ten-times-goal payoff promise!

  Strain as I might, the clear life vision I so hoped for never materialized. I’m not sure if this ambition constipation was some kind of innate intellectual shortcoming, or whether it was pure youthful rebellion. Maybe if my mother hadn’t been quite so keen to have her daughter dream big, I wouldn’t have resisted it quite so much? Or maybe there was some sort of gross growing-up-female thing going on, where I subconsciously suppressed any budding ambitions because ambitious women are frowned upon.

  Whatever the cause, my shortcomings in the goal-setting department stuck with me my whole life. It’s become one of the ways I define myself—as the many bosses I’ve had over the years can corroborate. I always assumed that at some point in my career, I’d find a solid groove and the path forward would finally be clear. But it hasn’t happened yet. And as I slide into legit middle age, I am pretty sure it never will. But now I’ve finally accumulated enough past to be able to look back and see that I’ve done okay even without the goals.

  I had a baby late in life at age thirty-nine—nine pounds four ounces and twenty-nine hours of labor and no painkillers—­which I must say is very ambitious. Then I managed, as an ancient, sleep-deprived new mother, to land a widely coveted, competitive job at male- and youth-dominated Facebook. Three years later, I parlayed my work at Facebook into a job at Pinterest, another we-only-hire-the-best tech giant. I’ve spoken at conferences attended by paying professionals and written industry think pieces that received multiple likes from people who aren’t my mother. All things I achieved without ever setting out to do so.

  Looking back on my successes, I see patterns emerge. The things I’m proudest of are the outcomes of my own set of personal rules, which I’ve evolved over the years as my own special brand of ersatz ambition. Shine a flashlight into the cobwebby space behind my face, and these are the eight guiding truths you’ll see crawling around in the darkness.

  Evany axiom #1—Listen to your rat brain

  If you imagine the path of the typical goal-driven person’s success story as one steady diagonal line rising ever upward, then my career path would look more like a random series of lines bouncing off the sides (Waitressing! No wait, advertising! No wait, advice columning! No wait, tech!), criss-crossing each other as if drawn by a child learning how to make a star. By not having a long-term game plan, I have the flexibility to jump on any interesting opportunities that come my way.

  I know an opportunity is “interesting” when my rat brain, the part of me that sees and smells something tasty and runs through the maze to get it, starts squeaking: What if I don’t do this thing? What if someone else comes along and does it instead and it turns out awesome, and I’m left feeling all jealous and riddled with regret? My rat brain has an almost superstitious dread of missing out.

  When I first got wind of a job opening at Facebook (from a friend’s post on Facebook, fittingly enough), my rat brain hummed. It was 2010, and the already-epic social network was the most promising pre-IPO place to work in all of Silicon Valley, and pretty much everyone in tech was trying to friend their way into a job. Also: free tampons.

  I pounced. I spent three hours updating my résumé and two more writing the p
erfect cover letter. One phone screen with the recruiter led to a phone call from the head of the team, which led to an invitation to come in and deliver an on-site presentation, for which I spent a good twenty hours preparing and practicing. After my presentation, I had five one-on-one interviews, followed by an invitation to do some freelance work, followed by one final one-on-one with a very important VP and . . . pow! Six months later, they offered me the job. So easy! But by that point, I wasn’t even sure if I should take it.

  Evany axiom #2—Do the terrifying thing

  The champagne bubbles were still bubbling over my hard-won Facebook job offer when the yays suddenly curdled to terror. Gahhhh, what was I thinking?! I had a sleep-depriving new baby on my hands. I’d done the startup thing in my twenties, and then again in my thirties, and I had the pink slips to show for it. The job I already had (working on the website for Wells Fargo bank) was safe and reliable, with a sane 9 AM to 5 PM schedule. Facebook, it was already clear, was more of a clock-rounding 9 AM to 9 AM kind of deal. Then there was the commute, which was an epic two and a half hours each way.

  During one of my many, many interviews at Facebook, a bright-faced twenty-nothing designer asked me, “You work at Wells Fargo, right? I bet you can’t wait to get out of there!” I just laughed. Like pretty much everyone I met at Facebook, he was young enough that I could have been his mother, like with years to spare. No, none of these kids were parents. They had no context as to why, after a lifetime of leaping, I’d suddenly pause now.