Listen to the Squawking Chicken: When Mother Knows Best, What's a Daughter To Do? A Memoir (Sort Of) (12 page)

“So what pretty?” Ma would always tell me if I ever talked about someone’s looks.

“So what pretty” was one of the Squawking Chicken’s favorite expressions. She’d say it anytime I complimented a
girl’s looks. And she’d be extra loud about it too, with an exaggerated shrug of the shoulders, one red-nailed hand tossed off to the side, and scorn on her face.

“So what pretty? Pretty can go like this,” and she’d snap her fingers and tell the Legend of Butcher Chow’s Daughter.

Butcher Chow had a thriving business. He was so skilled, people from neighboring villages would walk miles just to buy from his stand. Chow was able to cut his meats in such a way that they’d be much more receptive to flavoring. If two pounds of meat from two different butchers were prepared the exact same way, Chow’s pound would always taste better, time after time, because of his special slicing technique, a family secret that was passed down from his ancestors.

Butcher Chow had only one child, a daughter so pretty, so delicate he refused to teach her the family trade, believing it to be beneath her beauty. Instead, when his daughter became of age, Butcher Chow held meat-cutting competitions to find her a suitable husband to which he could pass on his coveted skill. Families sent their sons from neighboring villages far and wide in hope they not only marry the loveliest girl in the land, but also would learn a trade that would bring fortune and fame to their home.

The son of a produce merchant was the eventual winner. He was to apprentice with Chow for a year before the wedding. On the day of the groom’s final lesson, he purposefully
let his hand slip during a complicated maneuver. The knife went flying toward Butcher Chow’s daughter, slicing open her face, and cutting off one of her fingers. It would leave a gash from her ear to her mouth.

The produce merchant now refused to marry his son to a disfigured bride. The wedding was called off. And, perhaps even worse, Butcher Chow’s secret was compromised. His daughter, now with only nine fingers, was incapable of taking over his business. The produce merchant’s son became a master butcher, and since his family’s stall now offered produce as well as high-end meats, their business soon took over Chow’s. Chow died without an heir to his legacy. And since he taught his daughter nothing, she eventually had to go work as a scullery maid in the produce merchant’s household.

“So what pretty?” Without knowledge, Daughter Chow’s pretty was fleeting. Deprived of a useful skill because she was pretty, Daughter Chow was dependent on others—her father, her scoundrel of a fiancé. In Ma’s mind, being pretty was infinitely less serviceable than being knowledgeable.

Pretty was only useful for so long. Growing up, I was always made to cut my hair short, in a bowl. I longed to grow it out. I used to put towels over my head and pretend it was long, luscious hair because Ma kept denying my pleas, instead choosing practicality over high maintenance. The
Squawking Chicken rationale was that there was still time. “Why rushing? If you lucky enough to be pretty like Mama, why you want pretty so early? Your whole life you can be pretty. Pretty now and the people they get boring.”

Instead of getting pretty, Ma preferred that I get smart. Ma never had the opportunity to develop any skills, practical, useful skills that could lift her circumstances and allow her to be self-sufficient. The Squawking Chicken, like Daughter Chow, was a great beauty too. But because she never finished high school, all that was left for her was work that was demeaning. Even beautiful girls have to do shitty work. But Ma was determined that my work would not be shitty. Ma was determined that my work would not be based on appearance but on my mind. Education was the priority. For both me and my dad, but no longer for her. She felt that her window of opportunity had closed. So she transferred her ambitions to both of us.

Ma divorcing my father was the impetus he needed to get going. She’d taken off without me. He was now responsible for me. He could no longer spend his evenings smoking in front of the television, lamenting his fate and feeling sorry for himself. And Dad took Ma at her word.
I will come back to you if you make something of yourself.

He was working an office job in the accounting department at a computer company when he and Ma divorced.
There was opportunity there to advance. Dad took on extra work on the weekends to make money for tuition fees. In the evenings he’d go to night school. It took three years. Three years of no rest, not a day to spare, no downtime, no relaxing, just work and school, work and school, saving, saving, saving, so that somehow there was enough money to send me to private school, one of the best in Toronto. Eventually Dad became a Certified General Accountant and rose within the company. He was tenacious, he was now educated and he was making something of himself. Ma expected this of me too.

There’s a joke in my family that you’re nothing if you don’t have at least two jobs. Ma had two jobs when she immigrated to Canada. Dad had two jobs as an immigrant, not unlike many immigrants who find themselves in a new country, shocked by a new culture, but with no time to indulge in feeling sorry for themselves. Survival comes first. Survival comes before feelings. You do what you need to do to get it done. You work as many jobs as you can, and you go to school, and you raise a child, and you don’t complain. Who has time to complain anyway? Immigrants of my parents’ generation were too busy to complain.

This is the immigrant philosophy Ma used to guide me. Hard work is all there is. Hard work produces results. Pretty does not produce results. Neither does being special.

Modern Western parents tell their kids they’re special all the time. For many modern Western parents, telling a child she is neither pretty nor special is harsh and cruel. For the Squawking Chicken, telling me I was neither pretty nor special was just about getting real. And it was her duty as my mother to get real with me. “Mama will always tell you the truth. Mama will never lie to you. I am the only one. Sometimes the truth hurts. But the truth will also protect you. I am not here to be nice to you. I am here to protect you.”

Ma was protecting me from silly dreams. Dreams that were unattainable. Dreams that were a waste of time. Ma killed my dreams often. She killed the dreams that she knew were impossible, dreams based on attributes I didn’t have. Like becoming Miss Hong Kong when I was eleven years old. Sure, maybe it’s harmless, letting a young girl fantasize about beauty pageants. For the Squawking Chicken, though, setting a child up for disappointment by allowing her to believe in impossible dreams is the ultimate failure of a parent. In the Squawking Chicken’s mind, the parent who allows her child to dream the impossible dream is the parent who is doing her child a great disservice. As she says, the parent who tells her child that even her shit smells good is the parent who’ll end up picking up her child’s shit when she grows up.

Ma made that comment once when we were on a holiday
cruise together in 1996. Back then, there was an assigned dinner seating plan for every guest on board. This meant that we’d share each meal with the same people for the duration of the cruise. Our dining partners were a young couple with a daughter, around three or four years old. She was an active girl, and she was constantly twirling and jumping. According to her parents, she loved dancing. She danced through the entire first dinner, at one point knocking over Ma’s water. The girl’s mother apologized, but didn’t stop her daughter’s leg-kicking, explaining, “She’s so good at it, we don’t want to discourage her.”

This went on for a few days. And every time the child would stumble, or cause a minor accident from her flailing, the parents would behave like she was the next Anna Pavlova who simply could not be stopped. Ma was not impressed. After a particularly eventful dinner, during which Anna Pavlova Jr. had tripped over her own feet, hitting her head on the corner of the table, and wailing for the next hour, Ma had had enough. “She dance? You’re sure?”

The amazing thing is that they didn’t actually process what Ma was saying. They just kept repeating the mantra:
She just loves to dance! We couldn’t stop her if we tried!
Ma was properly disgusted when we left the dining room. “They clap when she falls. They clap when she farts. People are
going to point and laugh at that girl when she grows up. You watch. All because they keep letting her think she’s so special.”

We are living in a culture of “special.” Evidence of this is all over prime-time television. Every off-tune
American Idol
hopeful is told he or she is special, indulged in the pursuit of a reality that happens for very, very few people. Like Anna Pavlova Jr. We never saw Anna Pavlova Jr. and her parents again after the cruise but I can promise you she never became a dancer, even though her parents would have kept encouraging it.

Ma refused to encourage me in areas where she knew I could not succeed. Ma believed that Anna Pavlova Jr.’s parents’ insistence on her (lack of) dancing ability would only set her up for failure and disappointment. So the Squawking Chicken never let me believe I was special. Instead she encouraged me to pursue dreams that could be realized on my own actual, tangible strengths: tenacity, curiosity, an aptitude for communication.

Not surprisingly, she was also very stingy with praise. “Why you need so many compliments? Why you not satisfied for doing a good job? Do I need to throw a party every time you fart?” This was her way of never letting me get too high. Though I was rewarded now and again for good marks—
with mah-jong chips or allowance bonuses—Ma never flattered me excessively, if at all. The Squawking Chicken was always my reality check.

For the same reason she checked me for not being special, she also checked me for needing to celebrate my achievements. It’s the immigrant mentality: there’s no time to celebrate yourself, there’s always more to do. Ma was happy when I did well, when I brought home a good score on a test. But her praise was measured, never over the top. Because she never wanted me to coast and boast. And if I ever did boast, well, Mrs. Chiang would come for a visit.

Every Chinese kid must have a Mrs. Chiang. Mrs. Chiang is the Chinese way of motivating your kids. Because Mrs. Chiang’s kid was always the gold standard. Mrs. Chiang’s kid reminded you that you still had a long way to go. Mrs. Chiang’s kid reminded me after acing a math test in Grade 7 that this wasn’t all that big of a deal.

It was March break and I was visiting Ma in Hong Kong. We were at Grandmother’s mah-jong den, as usual, and Dad had called to tell me that my math results had arrived in the mail—93 percent, among the highest in the class.

As soon as I put down the phone, I announced the news to Ma and all the aunties. Everyone was really proud of me. Ma gave me a one-hundred-dollar chip. With the exchange
rate then, it would have amounted to twenty dollars. I was thrilled. Not only had Ma complimented me, she also publicly rewarded me. That almost never happened. So I decided to milk it for all it was worth. I went on and on about myself. I bragged about how smart I was. I bragged about how no one else in the class was able to understand the math concepts as quickly as I did. I bragged about how easy that exam was. I bragged about how quickly I finished. I could not stop bragging.

Until Ma decided it was time to check me with Mrs. Chiang. She turned to the auntie playing to her right, the one sitting closest to me: “Mrs. Chiang’s daughter is a doctor now. What a hardworking, humble girl. So conscientious! Five years and she didn’t even go out once, not even to see a movie. And now she’s a doctor at the big hospital. Mrs. Chiang is so lucky. Poor me. All I got was a girl who did well on one test. So what? One test and she’s shaking her ass all over the block. Mrs. Chiang’s daughter is healing people and saving lives. My daughter just knows how to shake her ass.” Looking into my eyes now, “Shake your ass when you show me your doctor’s diploma. Otherwise, don’t bother me. I can’t concentrate on the game.”

Mrs. Chiang’s daughter is the reason why I rarely pause to celebrate my wins. As of this writing, I have three jobs.
It’s been seven years since my last real holiday. Last summer Ma called while I was out playing a round of golf on a rare light Friday afternoon. Golf is a long game. It was five hours later when I called her back.

“That was almost the whole day,” she observed. “Are you working this weekend?” Ma will never let me coast.

The first thing I do when I wake up is lubricate my eyes with eye drops. Then I boil water and drink hot water throughout the day. I also eat a papaya every day. And an orange. My husband starts his day the same way. Eye drops, hot water, but the difference is that he eats a banana.

This is not a habit. This is not by preference. This routine comes by order from the Squawking Chicken. And it has everything to do with feng shui.

“Feng” means wind in Chinese. “Shui” is water. When the wind blows in the right direction, when the water flows toward the right places, life is in balance, harmony is achieved, and conditions are ideal for happiness and prosperity. The goal of feng shui is to find the most auspicious wind-water formula. And the formula for each person is different; we are born to different parents, in different years, during different
months, at different times of day, in different locations, and these differences mean that different variables can affect our individual wind-water dynamics.

Feng shui is an ancient practice. Over the centuries, feng shui has evolved from its original principles, modifying and expanding with the evolution of Chinese culture, influenced by local traditions, social advancements and then interpreted, sometimes indiscriminately, by modern feng shui masters. Feng shui books are now sold in Asian markets like almanacs, with some people preferring one master over the other, eagerly waiting for the New Year to learn their fates over the next year, and the recommendations made so that they can adjust their own wind-water equations to either boost success or prevent calamity.

Adherence to feng shui is not unlike devotion to religion. There are certain standard commandments. Every sin, or deliberate rejection of a feng shui commandment, carries a consequence. Redemption is not impossible, but sacrifices must be made. The nonbelievers are regarded with compassion and pity. They cannot be saved.

The Squawking Chicken is a devout believer. And, much like a pious Christian might be drawn to Jesus as a way of coping with the unpredictable, often devastating currents of life, as a way to explain and accept tragedy and in the hope of mitigating future misfortune, Ma embraced feng
shui. To Ma, feng shui defends her against the sadness and betrayal that seems to follow her. It helps her manage expectations about future disappointments. And it guides me so that I might not only avoid the same experiences but be in a position to have better ones. For feng shui isn’t so much a path to good luck, but a way to open oneself to the arrival of good luck and, more importantly, to prepare for the inevitable onset of bad luck.

Ma has structured my life around feng shui principles for the same reason she told me ghost stories instead of reading princess fairy tales when I was a child. Because no one has to be prepared in advance for when great things are about to happen. There’s nothing to worry about when great things are about to happen. But you should worry when shit goes down. And shit
will
always go down. No one rides a winning streak forever.

Everything the Squawking Chicken taught me—values, morality, discipline—was a result of her own personal brand of feng shui combined with Chinese astrology and fortune-telling. The first time she directly applied her feng shui/astrology/fortune-telling hybrid to my life it was on my face. Almost right after I got off the plane in Hong Kong the summer I was eight, she noticed the mole between my eyes. It was small but she stared at it for days like she was trying to make it grow. She insisted it had grown very quickly,
claiming it was much less visible three months earlier when I was in Hong Kong for spring break. Grandmother and all the mah-jong aunties waved it off, said she was crazy and that they could barely see it. But Ma was obsessed. She was convinced it would keep getting larger and she kept flipping through her feng shui almanac, to a page with sketches of faces and arrows pointing to certain areas of the face, and then looking at my face, comparing it to the drawings.

The following week she made up her mind. She was taking me to the doctor to get rid of the mole. I didn’t want to go. I was just at that age where I’d started becoming vain. I worried that removing the mole would leave a major scar. Ma brushed off my concerns. She told me that the scar would heal quickly, that eventually I’d barely be able to find it, especially after the stitches came out. Stitches?! That made it even worse. So I’d be walking around with string sticking out of my face? But there was no arguing with her. I had no choice. Dr. Tang would take care of it. He cut into the space between my eyebrows, just above my nose, and dug that fucker out with Ma in the room right beside him, watching everything. To be honest, it didn’t hurt. I can barely remember the experience. But Ma was triumphant for days. Wherever we went, she gave a play-by-play of my mole removal, describing it in graphic detail.

According to her, the mole was a monster below the
surface. While it was tiny and unremarkable on my face, underneath it was the size of a fat sesame seed. Ma described Dr. Tang’s surprise at its depth, after he had painstakingly made an incision around it. She gave the mole a personality, and said it seemed determined to stay inside, that its root was strong and stubborn, and that Dr. Tang had to delicately dig around in there in order to be able to, in the end, successfully tweeze it out. The way Ma told the story, the mole seemed like a parasite and she was its conqueror, protecting me from its eventual domination over my face.

“You should have seen it, Ah Leuy! You should have seen it!” she’d repeat excitedly. “What we saw was just the tip of the volcano. And it would have kept rising! In a few years, that thing would have been spreading all over the place. You’d be a freak if it wasn’t for Mama.”

But the truth was that Ma wasn’t worried about the aesthetics of the mole. Her primary concern was my life, or, rather, my death. According to her feng shui almanac, someone with a mole in that position would die a premature death at the age of twenty-two by drowning. That’s the creepy thing about feng shui—it’s very specific. Uncomfortably specific.

Ma only revealed to me the reason she was so obsessed with killing my mole after Dr. Tang had taken it out. She showed me the feng shui face-mapping pages in her almanac,
pointing to the diagrams and Chinese words I didn’t understand, explaining that our lives follow a certain path on our faces. And that our features can dictate our fates and also our futures.

Ma has a mole on the right side of her chin, just above her jawline. When I asked her why she kept it after having mine removed, she said that a mole in that area meant that person would have “mouth luck”—eat well, speak well—but only until they’re sixty years old. At the age of sixty, the mole would lose its power. Ma was sixty when she was hospitalized for nine months with a rare illness called POEMS syndrome: polyneuropathy (peripheral nerve damage), organomegaly (abnormal enlargement of organs), endocrinopathy (damage to hormone-producing glands) or edema, M protein (an abnormal immunoglobulin) and skin abnormalities.

It actually started about eighteen months before her sixtieth birthday. Ma started feeling weak for no reason. Every night, around the same time, she’d feel numbness in her left arm. And she was losing weight. Just two pounds a month initially and then more and more until she was emaciated, just ninety-five pounds. At the time she was admitted to the hospital, it was three weeks after she turned sixty. By this point, she was unable to walk, paralyzed from the waist down, and her hands and fingers were starting to go too. She was examined by several specialists. They were baffled by
her symptoms, continually ruling out one disease after another. Finally, after two months in the hospital, they diagnosed her with POEMS and began treatment. Ma began to recover and was eventually transferred to a rehabilitation hospital to begin learning how to walk again. While there, she met the only other POEMS patient in the Toronto area. The woman was a year older than the Squawking Chicken. Her POEMS symptoms were almost identical to Ma’s, only they started a year earlier. And she too had a mole on the right side of her chin, just above her jawline.

Moles aren’t the only facial characteristics that can affect our lives and personalities. When I was growing up, Ma would constantly drop her face-mapping wisdom into our conversations, especially when we were people watching. We have all been unfair judgy bitches when it comes to criticizing people’s appearances. Ma justified her judgy bitchiness with fortune-telling and face-mapping. A man might walk into a restaurant, the whites of his eyes more prominent than the dark center. If the end of his eyebrows are higher than the start of his eyebrows, even with a slight curvature, he’s deemed a pervert, and she’ll glare at him through the course of the entire meal, alerting everyone around that we’re in the midst of a rapist. If a woman’s mouth is too wide, it could be a problem too. This is generally considered an attractive feature in the Western world. For the
Squawking Chicken, a wide-mouthed woman, with all that space around her teeth, can’t be trusted, because she always wants to fit too much in, and in trying to be everything to everyone, she can’t have a solid sense of herself.

I never liked my nose. I always complained about it. My nose is a slightly less pronounced version of Ma’s nose. It’s a hook nose with a bump at the top that curves downward and, in my mind, looks sort of like a hawk’s. Or a chicken. Some kind of fowl. Ma loves her nose, and whenever I’d bitch about my nose, wishing it was smaller, narrower, pointier at the end and slightly turned up, she’d tell me I was stupid. That having a nose like mine was better than having a nose with “no meat.” Women with no-meat noses bring bad luck to their men. Whenever we’d see a woman with a no-meat nose, Ma would shake her head and feel sorry for the husband. “That poor man will slave away his whole life and because of his wife’s empty nose, it will never be enough. He will always come up short.”

A lifetime of listening to the Squawking Chicken judge people by facial fortunes has affected the way I see people too. We have a friend, Jon, who brought around a new girlfriend. Everyone liked her immediately except for me, even though she was lovely. I could not bring myself to warm to her. At home later that night, my husband asked me why I was so unfriendly to Jon’s girlfriend at the party. I had no
legitimate reason, other than the fact that she had a no-meat nose. Which to me meant that she was wrong for Jon because her no-meat nose would never be fulfilled. I would not be nice to a girl with an empty, no-meat nose who’d bring bad luck to my friend. (Jon ended up marrying someone else a few years later. Her nose had more meat on it.)

More and more, Ma started imposing her feng shui and face-mapping beliefs on my appearance just like she did with my mole. I was only eight when the mole came out, too young to refuse. As I got older, with a stronger will, Ma couldn’t just drag me to the doctor’s clinic whenever she detected a physical flaw in my face fortune. Then again, the mole scare was the groundwork. That incident in combination with all her other ghost/feng shui/fortune-telling stories began to make me more and more superstitious. And this is how she has manipulated me to this day, a formally educated, rational adult, into doing whatever she wants me to do, even when there’s no actual scientific reason for it.

I call it Feng Shui Blackmail.

Feng Shui Blackmail is why I can’t wear bangs. According to Chinese fortune-telling and face-mapping, our fates and our luck can be foretold on our faces. My mole predicted an early death by drowning. And so it was removed. While certain features can portend disaster, other features have the opposite effect. They can attract luck and, even more
significant, they can protect you from bad luck. Remember, the goal of feng shui and noble fortune-telling is not necessarily to profit from good luck but to harvest it, so that it can be relied upon to counter the inevitable valleys in life, those times when opportunities are scarce, and things don’t come quite so easily.

The forehead is one of the most prominent features of the human face. When we lower our heads, our foreheads lead us forward. In fortune-telling then, the forehead is our natural shield and warrior. It is the source of our fire, from where we draw the strength to guard ourselves and from where we fight. The Chinese believe that the forehead holds three flames. When we are lucky, our foreheads are bright—they glow. Our positive energy from within is reflected on the outside on our forehead “shields,” fueling the three flames. It is imperative to keep those flames stoked. They must be able to burn, unencumbered, as representations of our light. That way they can guard us, guard our luck, guard our resources. Ma always reminded me that if I were going somewhere that might be full of bad energy, like a hospital full of sick people and spirits, or to a funeral home, where death never leaves, to always wear my hair back, to make sure my forehead was at full power, those three soldier flames ready for battle.

Those three flames can’t be effective when they’re
covered, then, right? Cutting bangs would be cock-blocking their force. Cutting bangs is like snuffing them out. They’d be paralyzed and incapable of defending you. If they can’t defend you, you have to then deplete your energy and luck reserves, valuable commodities you might need later.