Surviving my Tiger Mother (with a lot of water)

My mother was a tower of a Tiger mom (to me) who stood a mighty 5 feet even.  I witnessed her paws vanquish stall owners in Hong Kong, international waiters and hotel managers, with my swallowed discomfiture.

My mother’s early admonishments were standard Chinese fare yet indelibly imprinted.  ‘For every grain of rice you don’t eat, your wife will have a pockmark (from smallpox) on her face – you better eat each and every one!’ Fortunately for Teri, I was a very exacting eater and saved her skin.  Perhaps a bit too fastidious, as I became overweight by age 10.  ‘If you don’t study hard, you will become a garbageman (lop sop low [Cantonese])!”  As 1^stgrader, I had little awareness of various occupations but could tell from her disgust that that was to be avoided at all costs.  She also told me in 4^th grade, ‘it’s good enough to know something, you don’t have to raise your hand and show off.’  This turned out to be misguided advice in a system that values initiative, participation and discussion, even verbiage. 

Yes, that is me

In 1^st grade, we began daily summer school including math problems, reading, Chinese characters and eventually violin.  I think the math rote-tine was the precursor ‘Kumom’ (ku being the character for bitter) with the fire-breathing scrutiny for errors.  The neighborhood kids would stop by and ask ‘can B come out to play, we need another for …’  She would obstruct the doorway, ‘NO, he can’t come out, he has homework to do.’  I would peer forlornly from behind, my playmates equally downtrodden.  I remember one memorable benefit.  On the first day of 4^th grade, when Mr. Wolfe asked if anyone knew division … my hand was the only that solved the blackboard problem to my classmates’ amazement.  

The pivotal moment occurred when I was 11 and summer school was in session.  Our one family activity was swimming where a season pass allowed my parents to swim laps and me to play with friends.  They presciently enrolled me in continuous swim and lifesaving lessons.  In fact, spoiler alert ‘lifesaving’ might be a clue.  The bronzed Adonis swim coach Dave Linder was omnipresent and the BMOSP.  One day, he asked me to swim the breaststroke as fast as I could.  He yelled ‘Start’ and off I went, down and back.  As I gasped for air and looked up, he exclaimed, ‘You just tied the city record!  You have to join the swim team!’  I was thrilled because my good friends Joseph and Malcolm were on the team.  But that was just the beginning …

I bubbled with anticipation as I told my mother about this unforeseen invitation, but my mother remained subdued and noncommittal.  That night, Coach Linder called and I heard my mother’s response:  ‘NO!  He cannot join the swim team!  It will interfere with his studies, his violin, his Chinese!’  I was devasted and could not comprehend it.  I wanted to be on the team with my friends.  Neither Coach nor my mother conceded and the impasse lasted several days over several phone calls.  Finally, my mother brokered, ‘if you do all your work … AND you scrub the bathroom floor every Friday night on your knees after which I will inspect it and if there is any dirt … ’  What did I know about Faustian bargains, I yelped a resounding ‘YES’ (I’ll do anything you ask).

Joseph is 3rd from right 1st row, Malcolm is middle of 3rd row

If I may say, I fulfilled my Coach’s prescience with mostly 1^sts in the 50-yard breaststroke.  Then, as a 13-14 year old, I set several Iowa and state records in the 100-yard and meter breaststroke.  At the annual Dave Armbruster (creator of the butterfly stroke) Swim Meet in our home pool, we (my two buddies, Joseph and Malcolm) swept the top three places and our photo landed in the sports section!  In an unanswerable ‘what if’, I could lower the record in same age group next summer, but my father’s year-long sabbatical in the Far East ...  In Hong Kong, they go by height (5’6” was B Grade) not age, so I competed against even 20 year-old’s in the HK School Championships.  I won the 100-meter breaststroke and another in the final freestyle relay would win the overall team competition.  Starting out in 3^rd place on my anchor leg, I passed the other two… and we won!  In the school assembly I received my medals, the championship banner, and a handwritten note from the fearsome British headmaster who said it was the most exciting race he had ever seen.  

As my mother didn’t drive, I two-wheeled across town at 7 am every summer morning to practice in the chilly air and cool water.  The draft of wind gave me my first tactile sense of ‘freeDOM’, a feeling that embraces each ride today.  I began to creep out from under my mom’s thumb and the water-based transformation was lifechanging.  From overweight to 1 pack.  From slow Chinese to fast food, sleepovers, TV (we didn’t have one) ...  From Chinese solo to American team-based.  From nerd to nerd-athlete with a bit of kool.  From B to ‘flea’.  From violin to electric guitar.  From Chinese-American to all-American.  Swimming became my lifeline to a more self-confident self that assuaged being the only Asian American kid in my class or anywhere … the looks, the comments, the bullying.  

Back to my mother.  I knew that she wanted me to be successful, but why so controlling, so hard on me?  Why the recurring adult nightmares about an unjust incident at age 4.  With her family stories and with my therapy and a tincture of time I began to appreciate the lifelong effects of her losing her mother at age 6.  After her father remarried and started another family, she and her two siblings were shunted from aunt to grandparents without a ‘home’ during war-time China.  Then at age 22, she is instantly transplanted to the US, a foreigner studying in English, cooking as a ‘maid’ for the first time ... migrant stress.  In Stephanie Foo’s harrowing journey recounted in ‘What my bones know: A memoir of healing from complex trauma’, she discovers that both the effects family and immigrant stress are transmitted across generations through both behavioral (upbringing) and genetic means.  I conjecture that my mother’s indelible early loss and superimposed immigrant stress led her to exert excessive control on the one little being she could.  And unfortunately, I had neither siblings nor involved father to mitigate her all-powerful persona.  

No doubt, my mother provided the underpinning for my professional success, through her constant admonitions about failure, forged discipline through her iron will, the daily deferred gratification, and my survivalist persistence throughout childhood.  Unintended were her vocal timbre that would continue to raise my prickly nuchal hackles well into middle age, my lifelong paralysis in dealing with authoritarian figures, and of course, the years of therapy spent to comprehend our dysfunctional relationship.  But water, so much a freeing aspect of my adolescence, fluidly opened the floodgates just enough to allow me to swim to an outside shore.  

In simplified calculus of hindsight, was the harsh upbringing worth the professional success?  Indeed, the accomplishments came with significant lifelong costs. With the help of therapy (exorcised the nightmare), much reading and many friends, at long last, I reached a post-humous peace with her.  So, in the end, I remain deeply appreciative, a subdued survivor and … profoundly ambivalent.

My favorite picture of my mother.

Wherefore of three Ulysses?

My namesake(s) resurfaced with the release of The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan and my arduous plough through Ulysses S. Grant by Ronald Chernow (1149 pages).  Did my parents choose from one of these two heroic figures?

Nolan, the director of Memento and Oppenheimer, has produced a visually breathtaking IMAX epic of the two decade-long journey of Odysseus, marked by the fall of Troy (Trojan Horse), to return to Penelope in Ithaca beset by numerous nefarious suitors who presumed her husband to be dead.  Challenged by the unending calamities in the man-eating Cyclops, Circe who transforms his men into pigs (very graphic), Sirens, sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis, and nymph Calypso who enraptured him for 7 years, he survives, slays the usurpers and reunites with his faithful.  Of course, critics have judged it ‘banal’ without the gods (except Athena), sex, and appropriate casting.  Interestingly, others point out that Nolan renders this a morality play in which violation of the sacrosanct Zeus’ law – sacred hospitality to strangers and foreigners – leads to the downfall of civilization … with contemporary relevance.  I think the nearly 3-hour film is definitely worth a widescreen if not IMAX view.  [*on poster]

Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) was the Brigadier (1*) General of the Western Army, the General (4*) of the Union Army, never losing a battle, and the 18^th two-term President of the U.S.  On a trivial note, the initial-only S., due to a clerical error at West Point, lead to nicknames ‘Uncle Sam’ (at West Point) and Unconditional Surrender (during Civil War).  Chernow has compiled another exhaustive (and exhausting) tour de force (recently read Mark Twain) that quite frankly reframes Grant’s entire career and character which had been variously distilled to a ignoramus, drunkard, butcher, philistine, undeserved battle victories, and guileless, naïve and as a consequence corrupt.  Upon deep reexamination Grant was an astute military strategist who could quickly envision the entire battlefield (and overall war strategy) in 3D and swiftly alter tactics in real-time.  Despite the military advantages, three Eastern Generals before him could not vanquish the pesky Robert E. Lee.  Grant singlehandedly crafted the conciliatory surrender at Appomattox that permitted confederates to return home with a horse and pistol without facing treason and thus paved the way for the re-unification.  Grant’s humility was notable.  His height and unprepossessing appearance led other generals to mistake his patrician-appearing physician to be him – but he never took offense.  On the eve of his inauguration, he slipped into Washington by train, rode a public coach to the White House completely undetected and to his relief no reporters.  He was completely respectful and faithful to his wife Julia despite many years apart and a hands-on doting father.  Grant constantly lamented the loss of life and never gloated in victory, visiting the injured after battle.  In the military and political realms, he was the first to sanction an African American (freed slaves) troop under his command, to advocate not only for freedom from slavery (with Lincoln), but also birthright citizenship and the right to vote (Amendments 13, 14 and 15) especially the latter, unlike many Northern abolitionists.  He actively supported Reconstruction (education of blacks) and initially quelled the domestic terrorists in the KKK.  He appointed the first black African American ambassadors, 5,000 postmistresses, the first Native American as head of Indian Affairs and invited African Americans, including Frederick Douglass, to the White House, to the chagrin of many colleagues.  He began national park system, advocated for civil service and for public education for all!  He never took a bribe himself, but his Achilles heel was to trust to a fault that colleagues and patronages were cut from the same ethical cloth as he, resulting in valid charges of corruption.  At the outset of the Civil War at age 39, he was by any account an abject failure.  He had been discharged from the Army for drunkenness, failed in business and farming falling deep into debt, finally reduced to a store clerk under his younger brothers.  And then in the most improbable transformation, the war provided opportunity and elicited the best of his abilities, and within four years he rose to the top General, never losing a battle.  Unimaginable, but I can relate to his essential character traits, core ethics and humanity.

Ulysses Macauley is a fictional 4 year-old growing during 1940’s in William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy a coming-of-age story set during 1940’s wartime.  He represents observant innocence full of curiosity and wonder.  “He smiled the smile of the Macauley people – the gentle, wise, secret smile that said ‘Hello’ to all things.”  My father, a graduate student in English (fortunately he didn't select the James Joyce namesake - I could never read it) had given me this inscribed pocketbook.  After my mother passed, we decluttered and donated this book to a local secondhand book shop.  Imagine my gentle surprise, when it reemerged as a recycled Christmas present to me, confirmed by the original inscription.  My father treasured this book, frequented bookstores (definitely), and retethered me to this tome.

So … what's in a name and which namesake ‘Ulysses’ is most like me?  Did I ‘inherit’ my peripatetic nature from the Greek’s interminable sojourn, or my passion from his fearsome intensity?   Did my parents ever consider, even perversely, me straddling the Mason-Dixon Line by juxtaposing Ulysses and Lee?  Indeed, as just discovered, I am completely sympatico with the General’s genuinely understated self, his bedrock ethics and moral character, and deference (including federal protection) for diversity.  And, like our fictional preschooler, I was exuberant and curious youngster, more desirous of being outside than in, and at times wish I could recapture a modicum of that wondrous  self.   So which one was I named after?  The one behind … door #3.  No, I don’t respond to Ulysses (knowing the speaker knows naught of me) or Hey U., and so U. mains a remnant to honor my parents’ intent.  And so I remain a firmly entrenched, unencumbered B with no trailing i or period … simply A B ... C?  (also American-born Chinese)

*the Ulysses in the foreground is actually a 4’ 6” Canadian woman stuntwoman – now that’s a role reversal!