Listen to the Squawking Chicken: When Mother Knows Best, What's a Daughter To Do? A Memoir (Sort Of) (18 page)

There was a girl I had a crush on in my first year in college. Not in a romantic way, but in the platonic way that girls crush on other girls: we want to dress like them, we want to move like them, act like them, have friends like they have,
be
them. I called her Annabelle, because Annabelle was my favorite name then—and she looked like an Annabelle: effortlessly confident, comfortable in any environment, a person people seemed to gravitate to.

The first time I saw my girl crush was at the D. B. Weldon Library at the University of Western Ontario. It was the first month of school, when I was still motivated to go to class and do my readings, not so much because I was dedicated to my studies, but because it was fun to play the part of “college student.” Being at the library seemed like a scene
from a movie—during the montage, when the main character, a Winona Ryder type, could be found perusing Jane Austen, as Shanice’s “I Love Your Smile” played in the background.

But pretending your life is a rom-com movie montage gets old really quickly. I had just started to get bored with pretending to be learning when I looked up and there she was, my new obsession, the girl who should have been the Winona Ryder character in my movie montage, striding toward my table.

She had long, wavy brown hair—thick and rich, the exact style I had always wanted to grow myself—creamy olive skin; big, warm, green eyes; perfect teeth; a few freckles here and there; and a very becoming summer tan, even though the weather had just started to cool. Also, her clothes were amazing: a thin tan sweater over khaki pants and riding boots. She carried a leather backpack with her textbooks in her arms, folded over her chest as two surfer boys followed behind her. When I died, I decided, that was how I wanted to come back to life.

It turns out that I was occupying her regular spot. She wasn’t a bitch about it though. Instead, my Annabelle was friendly: “Oh hey, haven’t seen you around here before. Are you in first year?” Annabelle sat down. I felt like a loser.
Smiling meekly, I nodded and went back to not reading my French.

After a few minutes, it became too much; I knew if I stayed there, I’d eventually beg her to be my friend. So I packed up and left, preferring instead to creep on her without her knowing, which is what I did for the next few weeks. I think I even cut a few classes just to spy on her. It was never for long, my stalking. Ten minutes at a time, max. Just enough so that I could see who she was with—always a really fun party crowd (they went out a lot but they weren’t total fuck-ups either)—and what she was doing and how she looked. She was perfect every single time. Until the one time that changed everything.

It was December. It was exam season. We were all a little harried and dry-skinned. Except, of course, for my Annabelle, who wore cute glasses and managed to stay moisturized. I was taking a break in the early evening at the food court at the university community center, facing the library. Light snow was falling outside and she came in, wearing a black wool coat, snow in her hair, her face flushed from the cold, like Ali MacGraw in
Love Story
. I was
so
happy I’d decided to be hungry at exactly the right time.

She was with a few friends. They ordered and sat down at a table across the hall where, facing forward, I could see
the side of her body. She was seated closest to me. And that’s when it happened. That’s when I saw her doing it. She was doing the leg thing. As she ate, she bounced her leg up and down, jiggling it incessantly. My immaculate idol was leg twitching like the junkies Ma used to point out with disdain on the street in Yuen Long. I was
so
mad I had decided to be hungry at exactly the wrong time. It turns out Annabelle, my immaculate idol, was Low Classy.

Low Classy is the term the Squawking Chicken uses to describe coarse behavior. Leg jiggling is a coarse motion. There is no elegance in leg jiggling. There is no refinement. On the few occasions I jiggled my leg as a child, Ma would slap me on the thigh, stare me down with the death eyes, and scold me, loudly, of course: “That’s so Low Classy. I don’t care if you’re the Queen, if you’re jiggling your leg you may as well be a degenerate on the street corner.”

Ma curtailed my leg jiggling early. And then I started judging the leg jigglers. Like Annabelle. After the leg-jiggling incident, Annabelle was dead to me. Leg jiggling has become a deal-breaker, not only for girl crushes but also for proper romantic crushes. I once ended a date midway through dinner because of leg jiggling. I used to be a big fan of a certain male movie star until he started leg jiggling during our interview. I have since stopped seeing his films. Due to the Squawking Chicken’s classification of the Low
Classiness of leg jiggling, it is as repellent to me as it is to her, although I’m much more subtle about my disdain. Annabelle never knew that I stopped caring about her. (Hopefully she never knew that I cared about her in the first place.) Ma, on the other hand, regularly goes around hissing at the people doing Low Classy things. Her top Low Classy moves include:

Ma smoked well into her late forties, until her kidneys started failing. But she only smoked when she was sitting down. It’s ladylike and elegant to smoke in a seated position, to take time in between drags, indulging in the habit gracefully. Those who walked and smoked were hustlers, gangsters on the move, rolling from one crime to the next. Or a hooker rushing from one john to the other.

Ma also considers it Low Classy to talk with a cigarette hanging from your mouth. A well-bred person waits between inhales, and exhales before speaking instead of letting her words dangle from her lips along with the cigarette. My uncle’s ex-wife, Heidi, used to speak with a cigarette between her teeth all the time at the mah-jong table. Heidi
was a rough woman with a low voice who used to bartend at sketchy pubs in the worst parts of town. She was kind and meant well but she had the worst manners ever. Ma was always correcting her Low Classiness and whenever she started saying something with a smoke in her mouth, Ma would rag on her right away, sometimes even telling her that that’s why her husband left her. Heidi just laughed. She was too entrenched in her habits to change. Though she and my uncle are no longer married, she and Ma have remained friends. In fact, the Squawking Chicken probably likes her more than she likes her own brother. Heidi’s Low Classy talking and smoking was not a friendship deal-breaker. Some Low Classy behaviors can be balanced by character and Heidi has a good heart. Other Low Classy behaviors, however, are a direct result of major character flaws. And that kind of Low Classiness can never be forgiven.

I’ve never been to France with the Squawking Chicken, but I’ve always wondered whether or not she’d spend the whole time in Paris yelling at people for being Low Classy. Then
again, seeing as France is the land of the name brand, perhaps she’d be more forgiving. But French girls are famous for the pout. And according to the Squawking Chicken, pouting, or any kind of mouth twitch, like the “duck face” pictures people post of themselves on social media these days (pushing your lips together like you want to give someone the fattest, wettest kiss of all time), is super Low Classy. Mostly because, in Ma’s mind, it suggests that the pouter is horny.

I used to pout a lot when I was a kid and through my teens. When I was in a shitty mood, when something didn’t go my way, when a cute boy was around and I wanted to seem grown-up. But when you’re sitting at the same table as a guy you’re trying to impress, nothing kills a pout like being told that when you’re pouting you look like a hooker ready to perform a blow job. I was fourteen when that happened. We were at a group dinner at the country club in Hong Kong with some mah-jong aunties and their families. One of the aunties, Mrs. Leung, had an older son, about twenty, who was home for summer holiday from England, where he went to college. David wore a smart pink shirt with the collar turned up and had his hair styled like George Michael. (It was the eighties. What do you want from me?) I was thrilled when we ended up sitting with the Leungs. Naturally I played it nonchalant and cool, not speaking much and
feigning boredom during the entire meal, pouting in between bites like the models—Linda, Naomi, Christy!—who were plastered all over my bedroom, torn from the pages of
Vogue
and
Elle
. The Squawking Chicken was clearly not feeling my mysterious, woman-of-the-world vibe. Instead: “What’s wrong with you? Why are you doing that with your mouth? I told you to stop doing that with your mouth. Only women who want to use their mouths on men do that with their mouths.” Then, to everyone else: “I hate people who pout. That’s so Low Classy.”

I don’t blush. It’s a physiological impossibility for me. And I was grateful for this at that moment. As teenagers do, I claimed I wasn’t feeling well instead so I was allowed to ride my bike home and contemplate suicide for the rest of the night. Needless to say, I avoided David the rest of that summer and never saw him again.

Ma hates leaners as much as she hates pouters. One day Ma and I pulled up at a 7-Eleven for some snacks and there were some teenagers outside loitering. She started muttering about how Low Classy they were and how they must have shitty
parents. I was around twelve at the time, fascinated by kids older than me, cooler than me. I didn’t see the problem. She pointed out that half of them were leaning against the side of the store. This was lazy. Young people who couldn’t stand up straight were lazy. The whole world could see that they were leaning and lazy and useless and therefore unproductive. People who are raised well, from good families, do not lean.