Mama-ese Mama-eseAfter we collect my big brother, Abe, who’s been poring over Japanese comic books in a manga store, Mama conducts the Chinese Food Census, her preferred method for selecting a restaurant. No studying of menus or trusting food critics for Mama. Instead, she stares into a window—never mind if she freaks out some poor diner who happens to be eating by said window—and tallies the number of black-haired heads inside a restaurant.
Her theory is straightforward and accurate: a high black-hair-to-blond ratio equals a good Chinese restaurant. High blond-to-black-hair equals food fit for pigs. I would have said dogs, but some people are under the misconception that all Asian people eat man’s best friend. We don’t. The only part of a dog I have tasted—by accident when I laughed while within licking distance of a golden retriever—was its slobbery tongue. However, inquiring minds want to know why we don’t hear people retching over the Rudolph-the-Red-Nosed-Reindeer-eating Norwegians or the whatever-the-hell-is-haggis-chewing Scottish.
Mama squints, shakes her head and scurries on, passing one restaurant after another. Finally, we’re sitting inside a Cantonese restaurant, packed with huge families, loud chattering intergenerational micro-villages. Our tiny family of three is a raft bobbing in a sea of Chinese conversations. A lone wave of English washes over from a Tourist Family, who are goggling like they’ve flown into Shanghai, not Seattle. Over in the corner by the fish tank, a herd of kids pounds on the aquarium, but the fish don’t swim away. I want to warn those cooped-up fish, Beware of the Big Net. Since fighting is futile, I don’t say a word.
Above the Mandarin and Cantonese, the clicking of chopsticks, the pouring of tea, Mama and I face off. We sit across the table from each other like two generals negotiating a delicate truce. At the far side is Abe, Switzerland in this battle of words. His dark eyes are locked on the dumbed-down English menu like he’s cramming for a final tomorrow in a class I could teach: Multiple Disorders of Dysfunctional Half-Asian Families.
“You going to summer camp,” Mama announces to me without looking down at her menu.
My heart stops. I can already picture the hell that my mother wants to send me to. You can bet that this is no camp with horseback riding or archery. There’ll be no in-depth sessions on anything remotely cool, say multidimensional printmaking or Italian cooking. My stomach starts making worrisome gurgling noises as I recall the “accelerated learning programs” Mama made me apply to for the summer.
All I know is that I better parry back, and fast. “No, I’m going to be working. Remember, you said I had to get a job this summer.”
“You don’t have job.”
Five points for Mama. But I recover quickly: “I’ve got three weeks before summer starts. And Belly-button Grandmother said that I was going to find a great job.”
Shoot, Mama frowns and leans toward me. “When you out of college. No job at mall again. You spent more than earned last summer.”
Ouch. Ten points for Mama. From the grim look in her eyes, I can tell she’s not finished with this volley. Like always, she goes from our current fight to future doom-and-gloom in two seconds flat. “You need save money. Work hard. Go to good college. Get good job. Take care of self. No one take care of you once I gone.” Her lips purse the way they do whenever she makes an oblique reference to my long-gone father, still a sour memory after thirteen years.
I make a tactical error; I hesitate when I should push back hard with a comeback.
Like the brilliant fighter that she is, Mama drops the bomb just as a stocky waiter stops at our table: “You going to math camp.”
“Math camp?”
“At Stanford.” Mama becomes too engrossed in ordering our dinner to embellish further. Anyway, she’s won this skirmish.
While Mama’s conferring with our waiter about the freshness of the pea vines, I’m steaming like braised cod. A week with geeks while my friends are funning in the sun? I deliberately torpedoed my application to math camp by asking the one teacher I was sure hated me to write the mandatory recommendation. Obviously, my torpedo was a dud. Or was it? Mr. Powell couldn’t be taking revenge on me for me talking one too many times in his Geometry class, could he? Con sidering that we were studying tangents, I thought my own about maximum heel height before you approach sluttiness was an appropriate application of the concept. (Inci dentally, the consensus was three inches for the optimal sexy-to-slutty ratio.)
“Bo po mo fo,” mutters Abe, sneaking a peek over his menu. He’s barely containing a laugh.
I choke on my jasmine tea. Suddenly I’m tripping down memory lane to the year when Mama read an article about China’s enormous potential as a trade partner. Never mind that Abe was in third grade and I was in kindergarten. No matter, the two of us were going to learn Mandarin, our first baby step to financial security. While all the three-year-olds sailed through to the conversation classes, Abe bo-po-mo-fo’ed his way through the Chinese alphabet for an entire year. Mama finally realized she was just wasting her money on Abe, and he became a proud Chinese School Dropout. Unlike me, the Chinese School Drudge who had to keep going until ju nior high.
“What’s Abe doing this summer?” I ask as soon as Mama finishes with the waiter. I figure, whatever Abe’s doing, I’ll do, too. After all, this is my survival, my summer, my reputation at stake.
Abe reluctantly hands over his shield of a menu to the waiter. Vulnerable to attack, but highly trained in survival tactics, Abe gives up neutrality. He cracks his knuckles the way he does before pitching a no-hit game, and blurts out, “I’m going to be so busy preparing for Harvard.”
The Harvard card, I should have guessed he’d play it. Three hundred points for Abe.
Mama nods, looking at him proudly. Bonus, twenty points.
Since the thick crimson ac cep tance packet was wedged in our mailbox a couple of months ago, Abe has transformed from Boy Who Wasted His Time Weight Lifting to the Pride of the Potluck Party. For once, Abe is the kid all other Asian parents compare their children to. I mean, why else is Mama so thrilled to host the upcoming potluck party? Abe’s given her a free pass for the next century to boast, brag, and generally rub his brilliance in the envious faces of her so-called friends.
“Like what?” I demand. “What do you have to ‘prepare’?”
Abe shoots me a dirty look.
“I’ve got to pack my room, and I’ve got a job,” Abe, the perfect eldest son, responds.
Presto-chango! Witness another magical transformation, care of Harvard. Suddenly, being a lifeguard trumps tutoring for big bucks like he did last summer.
“You meet some nice girls,” says Mama to me, wiping her chopsticks on the paper napkin before arranging them straight on her plate. “And boys.”
I have a reasonable handle on English, can speak Taiwanese as well as a preschooler and could find my way around in Spain. My grasp of Mandarin has faded to the first four letters of the alphabet, “thank you,” “this is delicious,” and “you are a bad daughter.” But I am absolutely fluent in Mama-ese: a “nice” boy means he’s Taiwanese.
Not Japanese.
Not Korean.
Not even gua-shing lan—those Nationalist Chinese who fled the mainland and overran Mama’s beloved Taiwan some fifty years ago.
And certainly not white. Having two half-Asian kids obviously hasn’t made up for the great regret in Ho Mei-Li’s life: marrying that yang gweilo. Well, what do you know? Two more Chinese words I remember. How can I forget such an appropriate term to describe my father—the white foreigner ghost whose absence haunts our lives?
“Great, I get to date geeks,” I mutter.
“Not date!” Mama shakes her head emphatically. “It take long time know someone. Find Good One first. Then be friends long time. Then marry.”
Subtext: don’t pick a Bad One the way Mama did.
I check my watch. At that second, the only Good One I want, Mark, is probably slow dancing with his date, the most beautiful, blond ju nior varsity cheerleader in Lincoln High history. That thought mummifies my heart, wrapping it in endless layers of wanting but not having.
I don’t need to go to summer math camp to add one plus one. One: Mama must be so rattled by Belly-button Grandmother’s prediction that I’m going to end up with a white guy that she’s pushing me to fish for a nice Taiwanese boy. Plus one: said Taiwanese fishing hellhole is math camp at Stanford. Equals: I am so screwed.
Negative infinity points for me.
“Oh, dis-GUST-ing!”
For a split second, I think I’ve yelled out loud. But no, it’s Teenage Tourist Girl leaping out of her chair. Glowering, the waiter holds a bucket before her table. A fishtail flops over the brim, and Mom Tourist joins in with a shriek. The waiter stalks off, his face tight because how would you like to be part of some strangers’ anecdote for the next twenty-five years? Look! They actually bring you a live fish! Can you imagine that?
The same waiter hauls a bucket to our table, glaring like he’s practically daring me to make a scene, too. But it’s not me the waiter should be worried about. Mama nods fine to him and our netted fish, and turns her eyes back to me.
“I don’t want to go,” I say feebly, knowing it’s futile to fight The Big Net that is my math summer camp.
Mama glowers at me. Oh, no, here we go again…
And she bites out the dreaded words: “You have it so easy.”
Greetings and welcome to The Mama Lecture Series, brought to you by the first-generation Mamas who left the Old Country for Brand-New America. But first, a message from our proud sponsors. While audience participation, such as talking back, is forbidden, tears of guilt and effusive apologies are more than welcome. Please be advised that there is no need for copious note-taking. These lectures are freely given at every possible opportunity. And we do mean, Every. Possible. Opportunity. Thank you so much and enjoy the show.
“You have it so easy,” Mama repeats, jabbing her chopsticks in the air at me with each point she makes, not caring that her voice is escalating or that everyone in the restaurant is watching. “Whenever you want something, you hold your hand out. You need a new book? I give it to you.” Jab. “You need some new pants. I give it to you.” Poke on the table. “You need, you need. When I was little, we so poor even though my father was dentist. But who could pay him? Not with money.” A couple of raps on her empty plate. “Maybe a little rice. Or a chicken. We were so poor sometimes my mother grind up cockroaches for us to eat.”
At this point, I know better than to gasp in disbelief or contort my face into a disgusted expression. Audience interaction like this usually means an unwanted and often-prolonged jaunt into Ingrate Land.
Still, Mama sniffs indignantly, as if to say, Can you believe how much I have suffered in my life? Trust me, I can. I stare down at my hands clenched tightly on my lap. Honestly, what’s unbelievable is that I’m not hunchbacked with guilt from the number of times she’s told me and Abe how easy her life would have been if she had only married her Taiwanese suitor. Not our white guy of a dad. As if we chose our father, not she.
Mama breathes in sharply. She must be smelling my exasperation polluting the air.
“You think you too good to eat ground-up cockroach?” Mama scowls at me. “If you starving, you hold your hand out for cockroach. You say, please don’t grind up. I eat whole.”
I catch Teenage Tourist Girl looking like she’s going to projectile vomit. She shrieks, “Gross!” while staring at me with her mouth misshapened with disgust like I am a Teenage Tourist Girl from some primitive civilization. For the first time since this miserable day started, I am glad that the all-school dance is tonight because it means that no one I know, especially Mark, can waltz in and witness just one more moment in the Patty Ho Hall of Mothering Shame.
Mama finally recalls the purpose of her lecture, which is not to reminisce unhappily about long-ago hard times so much as to give me a hard time for my in-her-face too cushy of a life. She shakes her head like it’s a saltshaker full of self-pity: “I would have given every thing to attend math camp if I had the opportunity.”
The coup de grace, like always, gets delivered in a tone of deep disappointment: “You are so lucky.”
When this lecture is delivered in the comfort of our own home, my shriveled-up shitake mushroom of a heart usually gets a good rehydration when I cry on my bed. One that I am so lucky not to have to share with a sister the way Mama did growing up.
Here in the restaurant, the bad part of me (OK, the ungrateful daughter in me) wants to say, “If I’m so lucky, then why did Daddy leave me here with you?”
But of course, I keep my mouth shut.