Tiger Babies Strike Back Read Online Free Page A

one word would detonate a small but highly effective bomb throughout my psyche, body, and entire being? I have no way of knowing what was going on in my mother’s head or heart back then. She was younger at the time than I am now.
    But still. A word like that can sink into the pit of one’s stomach like emotional shrapnel. As the years went on, I could form my flesh around that word, take that hard speck of grit, internalize it, and somehow make it into a pearl.
    Or not. If my mom had bile crystallizing in her innards, it didn’t have anything to do with me. As a matter of fact, years later my mother did have several gallstones removed. I remember when she returned home from the hospital, the doctor had given her the actual gallstones that had been taken out of her body. They were in a little plastic container and looked like tiny bits of black rock. Could they have been a physical manifestation of whatever was eating her up from the inside?
    And most important, how can I take the formative experience of having been a pudgy kid, and the memory of my own mother calling me “disgusting,” and do something positive? What might be the silver lining, if any? The resulting pearl is the fact that I have vowed to never make my own daughter feel anything even vaguely akin to disgusting to me. There are many physically repulsive aspects of life in a body, even a nine-year-old body, such as stomach flu, snot, grime, and everything else dirty, squishy, and smelly.
    But my daughter is not disgusting. She is never disgusting. I teach her to take care of bodily functions. I am very aware of never belittling her or her body, the things she does, or what she is curious about. I respect her body and her privacy. And yes, I still kiss her good night.

5
Tough Love, Tough Luck
    My parents constantly tell me I’ve got to “toughen up.” But I’m a marshmallow, and I want to stay that way. They say I need to grow a backbone, but they’re so stiff they can’t even move.
    We need to be soft and malleable inside because we have to be contortionists to work around our parents’ fixed, hardened state. We might make them uncomfortable with our uncertainty, our tears, and our occasional moping. Maybe they believe that showing even a tiny bit of sympathy, or even acknowledging hardship or a tender heart, will cause a psychological upheaval so cataclysmic that all hell will break loose. Don’t open Pandora’s box, right?
    But I don’t want to be a sealed box. No air can even get in. I see a lot of these stiff, tight-lipped Chinese adults at family banquets, and they are so stoic and far away they might as well be in China. They are that inaccessible.
    Parents, we adult children are messy, but we are what you’ve got. How about a compromise? How about controlled chaos, like nature in a sprawling state park, where there are some paths and paved trails, but flowers and foliage are still able to flourish? You’re missing out on a potentially fantastic rose garden.
    In the Sunset District of San Francisco where I once lived, there used to be a lot more small patches of grass and plants lining the walkways. Most homes were planned and built with two or more little plots of greenery, but as Chinese families moved into the houses, they ripped out the sod and any flowers, removed the dirt, and poured concrete over the area. Often they went one step further and painted the concrete green, as if this easy-to-clean slab of pavement was just as good as actual grass, but now improved with no mess and no fuss. My grandma Ruby once suggested we perform this same makeover on our entryway and balked when we declined to do so.
    We liked it a little messy, with room to grow stuff. But she thought we were nuts. “Pave it, Kimi. So easy!”
    More than anything, she was probably just miffed that we didn’t follow her advice. But this is exactly what I’m talking about. I want to break through the