Tiger Babies Strike Back Read Online Free

when Tsai Chin struts down the street proudly displaying the magazine that shows Waverly’s chess championship photo? Every Asian mom wants your accomplishments, and hence her own, plastered on the front page so she can walk around triumphantly gloating.
    And if you’re a fatty, Mom can’t gloat. Strangely, it is all about the gloating, isn’t it? Or alternately, about saving face. And moms are never too pleased when your blubber is making your face unrecognizable, your skin swelling like a stretched-tight balloon that threatens to obscure your facial features. In my Wonder Woman T-shirt, I looked like a loaf of Wonder Bread, with eyes. People kept admonishing me to lose weight, but also kept feeding me. Then I was blamed for being Gigantor, like I was being embarrassing on purpose.
    I was a fat kid. Maybe I couldn’t express my dissatisfaction and melancholy in words, so I used my own body as a silent protest against perfection. Or maybe I packed on the pounds to protect myself from those who disapproved of me, to create a physical distance between me and them. Either way, being a jumbo prawn was just one way of being defiant.
    For example, one time when I was little, my mom was trying to get me to do something, like vacuum, but I refused. We went back and forth in a typical way.
    â€œGo do it.”
    â€œWhy should I?”
    â€œBecause.”
    â€œBecause why?”
    â€œBecause I said so.”
    â€œWhy should I have to do whatever you say?”
    My mom was so over my backtalk. She finally yelled, “Because I’m the person who MADE you!”
    Oh, please. Was she really going there? I calmly retorted, “I came through you, but I am not of you.”
    That week at school we must have been studying prepositions and something about Jesus informing Joseph that he was but his earthly father.
    My mom looked at me like I was nuts. Who was this little creep she had made? She stared at me mutely but was probably thinking she should start supervising my reading material.
    After all these years, I still remember that exchange because it was such a clear moment in which I was declaring my separation from my mother. I didn’t know it at the time, but from that moment onward, we were indeed on completely different wavelengths. She saw me as an extension of her own body and still wanted me to be an obedient baby. I was about ten years old and already considered myself an individual.
    Another defining moment of separation between us came soon thereafter. One evening, after I had just brushed my teeth, I called to my mom to say that I was ready for bed. I waited in the hallway while she finished up whatever she was doing. I was hoping to win her attention and approval by making her laugh. As she approached, I stuck out my behind and pursed my lips in an exaggerated way like I’d seen on wooden, Chinese bobblehead dolls in a souvenir shop in Chinatown. I posed, bent at the waist and elbows akimbo with my lips out, ready for a smooch.
    However, my attempt to delight her didn’t go the way I planned. My mom recoiled from me and said, “If you’re going to be disgusting, I’m not going to kiss you!”
    Then she stormed off. And she never kissed me good night ever again.
    I went to bed feeling like I’d done something wrong. As an adult now, thinking back, I wonder if my mom thought I was mocking her, or just being sassy, which wouldn’t be tolerated. Maybe she was worried about bills, or that I was displaying some kind of early, repugnant sexuality. Whatever the reason, the thing I remembered clearly was the operative word, disgusting .
    Disgusting. That one moment in time, more than thirty years ago . . . how can I hold my mother responsible for one word, one moment in her own harried life as a person, wife, mother, daughter, secretary, and everything else she was and was trying to be for herself and others?
    Disgusting. How could she possibly know that this