Listen to the Squawking Chicken: When Mother Knows Best, What's a Daughter To Do? A Memoir (Sort Of) (9 page)

My husband, Jacek, and I have decided not to have children. It wasn’t always this way. Even after we got married, we always assumed it would happen. Mostly because that’s just
what people do. And then I was asked to babysit my brother-in-law’s three children, two boys and a girl, who were then five, three and just under a year old. It was a devastating afternoon. There were bathroom accidents. They were so full of need, unrelenting need. I was exhausted when I came home. And it was only three hours! So we started asking ourselves—do we really want to be parents? Did I really want to be a mother?

And I came to accept that I don’t for all the “superficial” reasons—the time, the sacrifice, my career, the desire to travel without having to worry about dependents, the freedom to sleep in, to spend my money on myself. And I’m now at the age when even if I were to change my mind, and I haven’t, I couldn’t do anything about it.

I have no doubts about this. Neither does Ma. The Squawking Chicken has never pressured for grandchildren. She doesn’t want them. Specifically she doesn’t want them because she doesn’t want to be asked to take care of them.

I, then, will never reap the rewards of Filial Piety. I will never have a child who is obligated to pay me back. I will never have a daughter who says one day that our relationship is the greatest, most important relationship of her life. I will never have a child who will be responsible for my happiness, or whose happiness is predicated upon mine. Because Filial
Piety worked on me. Because my mother’s happiness is the greatest happiness of my life. And if she was selfish in achieving it, what it taught me was selflessness. What makes me happiest is that my happiness is not singular. It is not my own. I share it with her. I owe it to her. It belongs to her. And that is enough.

Ma knew from the very beginning that I was a child who would require a controlling and firm hand. My father’s monk master told her so. Dad’s monk master, Sifu, was a true Buddhist monk. He lived in poverty and prayed at a run-down temple just outside Dad’s home village. When Dad was thirteen, he used to pass him every day on the way to school. Unlike the other boys, Dad was never mean to the monk. Dad wouldn’t make fun of him for being dirty. He wouldn’t make a big production out of stepping away from the monk on the street.

The first time they talked, it was pouring rain and Dad’s clothes were soaked as he walked home. The monk invited him to take shelter for a while in his shabby hut. My father has always been an introvert. He was the quiet, studious one among his nine brothers and sisters. Dad enjoyed the
tranquility he experienced in the monk’s presence. He appreciated that the monk was at peace with quietness and solitude. So he began stopping by the monk’s every day after school. Their conversations were spare. Instead, they connected through silence. Later on, the monk explained to Dad that comfort in silence is a fundamental Buddhist principle on the path to enlightenment. The monk became dad’s Buddhist mentor and, as I’ve mentioned before, Dad seriously considered becoming a monk himself before he met Ma. She ended up redirecting him, but Dad was still very devoted to his monk master and always consulted him, when possible, on important matters. Ma respected Dad’s relationship with Sifu. It set him apart from many of the other young men of his generation, whom she described as “fah-fah feet-feet,” too slick, too smooth, all playboys. Dad was totally not a playboy. He would rather hang out in Sifu’s shack than at the bar. One of my parents’ great regrets about moving to Canada was that they were no longer in regular contact with Sifu.

I was only a few months old when my parents brought me back to Hong Kong for the first time. Dad wanted to present me to Sifu for a blessing. Sifu took me, all bundled up in blankets, in his arms. Ma remembers that he and I were very still together. I had stopped fussing as soon as he
put his hand on my head. He stayed like that for a while and then asked Dad to fetch him some ink and scroll paper. Sifu wrote out four words:

Yeem Gah Goon Gao
(Strict Family Control Teach)

We don’t use connecting words in Chinese like “to” or “by” or “at.” The traditional written language is spare, nouns and verbs only, but the meaning is made clear by how the words are ordered.
Yeem gah goon gao
means that proper instruction comes from discipline and control. Sifu was telling my parents that they would need to be strict with me. That I would require close and constant governance to stay on course.

Ma took Sifu’s counsel very seriously. If she ever doubted her parenting tactics, if she ever worried that she was too harsh, she would pull out Sifu’s scroll and it would strengthen her resolve. She would be strict with me to keep me on course. And she would do this by shaming me.

The first time Ma publicly shamed me I was nine years old. It was an ordinary summer evening, and we were at my grandmother’s mah-jong den in Hong Kong. After dim sum (around lunchtime) three or four times a week, Ma and I
would head over to Grandmother’s for a game. I spent hours there watching and memorizing Ma’s mannerisms—her long red nails rearranging and stacking tiles, doing it all with one hand if she was smoking—and watching and memorizing Chinese kung fu soap operas. The soap operas were serialized, broadcast in prime time every night, Monday to Friday. That year, I was obsessed with
The Legend of the Condor Heroes
. I was a total fangirl.

The female lead in
The
Legend of
the Condor Heroes
was an actress named Barbara Yung Mei Ling who played the iconic Wong Yung character. The television series was based on a popular book series set during the Song Dynasty in China about the adventures of a young couple, Wong Yung and Guo Jing. Wong Yung was different from the girls typically depicted in Chinese folklore. For starters, she was brilliant, one of the most brilliant minds in all of Chinese literature. She outsmarted the boys all the time. And she had an attitude. She talked back. She wouldn’t take shit from anybody. And, obviously, she was really pretty. She wore the best traditional robes. And her hair was awesome, always in pretty braids arranged in complicated loops and tails that fell adorably around her face. She had an expressive face, as played by Barbara Yung. Yung had dancing, mischievous eyes and a precocious smile, features that she used to great effect in taking on the role. She had two prominent front teeth that were slightly
crooked, giving her mouth an overbite effect that only added to her appeal. Barbara was the most famous actress in Hong Kong at the time. Even Ma found her irresistible. She would always say that Barbara Yung is very
sahng mahng
. It’s an expression used to describe someone who is very active, who never stops.
Sahng
literally means “alive.” And
mahng
means “strong.” Barbara Yung was alive and strong. Or so we thought.

After every episode of
The Legend of the Condor Heroes
, I would pretend to be Wong Yung, reenacting the plot and imitating her moves. That night, Wong Yung had been made temporary leader of the Beggars’ Tribe. Her master, Old Beggar Hong, the proper leader of the Beggars’ Tribe, had been poisoned and had gone into exile for several months so that he could heal in time for the Mount Wah kung fu tournament. The tournament was the pinnacle of the
Legend of the Condor Heroes
story line. The victor of the tournament was declared the greatest kung fu artist of the time. Wong Yung’s master was considered one of the four favorites to win. Before leaving for rehabilitation so that he could compete at full strength, Old Beggar Hong declared that Wong Yung would be the boss of his tribe during his absence. The only problem was that his Fighting Jade Stick, his signature weapon, had been stolen by the dastardly Yeung Kuo. Wong Yung was charged with mobilizing the Beggars’ Tribe
against Yeung and retrieving the Jade Stick. To prove that she was a true pupil of Old Beggar Hong and the rightful heir of the Fighting Jade Stick, though, Wong had to demonstrate that she knew how to use it. The martial arts specialty that accompanied the Fighting Jade Stick was called the Dog Fighting Technique, a series of moves that made its opponents look like a pack of sorry dogs.

My Fighting Jade Stick was a ruler. I used it to fight imaginary dogs all around my grandmother’s living room, cramped with three tables of mah-jong players, four people to a table. I slashed my Jade Stick ruler through the air, hitting my imaginary adversary in the head before drop-kicking him to the ground. I turned quickly to intercept an
incoming punch to the back of my neck, blocking it with my ruler in one hand and using the other hand to slap the insurgent twice across the face. Wong Yung had just done this on television with great panache. Then I swiveled to my right, lunging forward with the elegance of a gymnast, striking the next opponent in the throat, precisely hitting his Adam’s apple . . . which happened to be Ma’s thigh. She was just then picking up her next tile, which also happened to be the winning tile. And since I’d just jabbed her leg like a dog with the Fighting Jade Stick, the tile fell out of her hand, tumbling off the mah-jong board, scattering the blocks all over the floor, defaulting the entire hand and resulting in her losing a huge pot.

Oh. Fuck.

There was no time to run. And I couldn’t have run even if there was. The Squawking Chicken’s eyes had kung fu powers of their own. They were capable of paralyzing their targets. They widened and narrowed at the same time, growing bigger from top to bottom, and stretching from side to side, a geometry-bending Chinese double Cyclops. It was terrifying. And that was only the prelude to the squawk. In my entire adult life I have never been as scared shitless as I was in that moment. Not bungee-jumping, not public speaking, not driving at 200 mph on a NASCAR racetrack—
never have I been so afraid as I was the night I stabbed the Squawking Chicken with a ruler during a mah-jong game.

So there I was, holding my Fighting Jade Stick that had turned back into a flimsy ruler, shrinking as my mother fixed her eyes on me, knowing that I’d just cost her a win. And that’s when she said it, a pronouncement she’d repeat throughout my childhood whenever I disappointed her: “I should have given birth to a piece of barbecue pork. It doesn’t last but at least it tastes good and doesn’t make trouble. Why did I give birth to something that only gives me trouble?!” I was embarrassed and ashamed. She basically told an entire room of mah-jong ladies that I was worth less than a piece of barbecue pork.

That wasn’t the only time Ma shamed me because of Barbara Yung. I had started wearing a retainer a couple of years after the ruler incident. My top two front teeth weren’t in line with the rest, and they were a little crooked . . . kinda like Barbara Yung’s. Barbara Yung was still my idol, even after
The Legend
of the Condor Heroes
had concluded. But on May 14, 1985, Barbara Yung committed suicide. The newspapers reported she was heartbroken over her boyfriend and, amid rumors that he may have been seeing someone else, left the gas on in her apartment, dying of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Barbara was twenty-six years old, at the height of her
fame. Hong Kong was practically shut down for her funeral. I was eleven, and I watched the news coverage in Canada on television. I made my dad buy every memorial magazine that was available at the Chinese supermarket. I wore Chinese traditional robes to school. I was despondent. So I decided to honor Barbara with my teeth. We would be teeth twins forever. It was how I would remember her: I threw out my retainer. Dumped it in the trash, not telling Dad about it until after the garbage had been collected.

Dad was furious. That retainer was expensive. And it was anathema to the immigrant mentality—to toss out something perfectly functional . . . for sentiment! But he didn’t punish me. Instead, he decided that I should be the one to tell Ma when I visited her in Hong Kong a month later for my school holidays. That year, I begged Dad not to send me to Hong Kong, knowing I’d be in deep shit with Ma about the retainer. Dad ignored me. I was sullen and bratty on the way to the airport. I gave him a really pissy hug before passing through the gates. When I looked back he was grinning.

Ma was there, as usual, waiting for me in the arrivals area of Hong Kong’s Kai Tak airport. As always, I noticed her right away. It’s not like you could miss her. As soon as she saw me she started squawking, both to get my attention and to draw attention to herself. She seemed like she was in a
good mood. I thought I might be able to get away with not mentioning my retainer immediately. Turns out that wasn’t an option. She asked me about it immediately.

“Why are your teeth still crooked? Where’s your retainer?”

I had no choice but to tell her. As briefly as possible, I told her that it ended up in the trash, like almost by accident. Ma wanted the details. So then I tried to play it off like it was uncomfortable and/or it wasn’t working anymore. The more I dodged, the worse I made it for myself. Ma is suspicious by default. She could always smell when I wasn’t being honest.

“You don’t have to tell me the truth. But this is your opportunity to tell me the way you want to tell me.”

Ma never had to elaborate on the “or else” part. It all came out then. My mourning over Barbara Yung. My desire to cement her memory with my teeth. My obsession to
be
Barbara, if only in the mouth. At the end of my confession, I became defiant. I told Ma that these were
my
teeth. It was
my
mouth. It was
my
face. I could do whatever I wanted. That she couldn’t make me get another retainer. I refused.

Ma’s reaction: “Fine. You’re the one who has to live with it.” And then she laughed and laughed and laughed. She laughed all the way home from the airport. She could not stop laughing. Her laughing only made me angrier. And more afraid.