EPISODE 43: WHEN KIDS CAN’T BE KIDS
SHOW NOTES
This episode of F*ck Saving Face features an intimate story from my own childhood. It’s about how I created a different kind of life despite the family culture I grew up in, and my endeavor to find and create moments and snippets of happy with my own daughter. When Cheryl Strayed wrote about her love for her mother in Wild, I have always wondered what that was like — what must it be like to love your mother like that? To have that deep of a bond? It’s beyond my realm of comprehension, and it’s not for my lack of wanting or trying. Chinese cultures aren’t the only ones that share how challenging it is to navigate the mother-daughter bond, especially due to tiger parenting and tiger moms. It’s in countless books about Southern women, about all sorts of women.
I hope this episode inspires others to know that you can stop intergenerational trauma. That you can have compassion for what your parents went through, for what they also needed and didn’t get, and to still honor your own experience as well. I hope kids can be kids and when they’re ready to grow up to be healthy adults.
We also cover:
Eunice and Sabrina Moyle’s, Hello Lucky
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the F*ck Saving Face podcast. I'm your host, Judy Tsuei, and together we'll explore mental and emotional health for Asian Americans, especially breaking through any taboo topics. Like may not always be pretty, but it is indeed beautiful. Let's make your story beautiful today.
Do you all remember those green frogs that I saw in Junior High that were part of like the Hello Kitty franchise called Kero Kero Keroppi, I think. And there used to be something that said like “happy, happy, joy, joy” all the time.
Anyways this week, we are going to explore joy. And this is a very unique topic for me because in my family of origin, I didn't experience a lot of levity or just easy-going kind of laughter. I feel like there was a lot of judgment, a lot of heaviness in the house that I grew up in.
So I really endeavored to create something different for my daughter. And it's actually one of the things that my ex-husband observed about me when I became a mother, is that I kind of transformed from a, I wouldn't say a very serious person, but definitely someone who took things more seriously into a more playful personality.
It's going to be super fun because in Wednesday's episode, episode 43, I'll be interviewing Sisters, Eunice and Sabrina Moyle. They're in illustrator writer, duo team behind hello, lucky, which is a woman owned and operated design studio in San Francisco, California. And they make these super adorable, fun pun loving.
You know, cards for the young and the young at heart. And then they also have a series of bestselling children's books that when you see them, they're just too adorable. They have a book called thanks a ton, another one that's slough and smell the roses, or I believe in you, which has a unicorn on it. And you know, let's be real. Unicorns are awesome.
And another one called you are fantastic, which has the most adorable pink Lama with Palm Palm. We'll talk about their experience as they're biracial, and they've also lived around the world. So they had a very unique kind of third culture experience. And I'm excited because I'll be bringing on a future guest who will talk about what that whole third culture experience is, where you're ethnically one identity, and then you go and live in other cultures that are not affiliated with any of the identities, the racial identities that you are made up with, or even grew up with.
And so there's a whole kind of observational stance of being able to see your heritage and your lineage in different ways, from the way that the outside world views it, as well as your personal experience when living in different regions around the world and how you experience who you are and developing your identity in that.
So lots of great interviews to come, but today we are going to go back to the, that idea that I mentioned at the beginning, which is happy, happy, joy, joy.
I wrote this down the other day, that one of the greatest heartbreaks that you can experience as a child is seeing your parents be indifferent to you. When I was growing up, my mom would often say your piano isn't as good as Cindy or Wendy's.
And there are these two girls who grew up in this family that we were very close to. And the older one was my age. The younger one was my sisters. So Cindy had skipped a grade, which growing up that was a big, big deal. And it proved that she was smart and in my mom's eyes smarter than me. And then the both of them practice piano, and I just never wanted to practice.
I never wanted to memorize these pieces. I had a big, big, broad shoulder, big belly, Chinese man with rectangular glasses who would come to the house every week and teach piano. And I think it was very clear to him too, that I just didn't want to be there one time when I had a fever and I was actually sick.
My mother forced me to still sit at the piano bench and do this lesson, nevermind that I was probably spreading germs all over the place. Cindy. And when he would do piano recitals and we never did. I definitely never did. Cause I don't think I was even close to being on par with anything that anybody else would want to hear.
My mom was the Chinese school speech teacher and she forced me to participate. We'd have to memorize these ancient Chinese poems in Mandarin complete with hand gestures where I'd have to look up to the side and follow the direction of my fingertips or look down in a way. I had no idea what I was saying about 85% of the time.
My mother coached winners. There are these twin girls with these adorable bowl cut hair with bangs and they'd win every single award, every competition that we'd ever go to. But my mouth felt like it was filled with marbles. It could not grasp my mother tongue. We had to do these competitions either as a group or on our own.
She put me up there on that stage. And when we were in a group, I stood in the back and was always half a second off from everyone else because I couldn't memorize the lines at home, the stanzas. And so I'd use these other students cues to keep up with them. I especially could not learn when my mother was yelling at me.
“Why can't you get this Nina? You're so stupid.” My mother was this most creative teacher. I watched all of the other Chinese school teachers on Saturday. Praise her, give her adulation, share how much their kids, all the other kindergarteners loved learning from her. She made these dancing dragons out of large buckets and baskets covered with cotton and yellow mesh and shiny decorations to make them look like tiger stripes for the festivals that were performed in the Junior High Gym that we would use for our Chinese school.
She'd buy pipe cleaners from the 99 cent store and decorate all sorts of things. She could take any supply from anywhere and turn it into a magnificent artistic prop or use them as different ways to engage her students, to get them to learn better.
And you could see that she really shown when her speech competitions won round after round and competed with other Chinese schools in the region.
I know that my mom hustled all throughout the week, working at different businesses with my dad, that she didn't want to work at, and then feeling this mounting pressure of her marriage and of having a parent for young children. And I can see that now as an adult, how she would stay up late and try to scramble to get all of these lessons ready, because that's what she knew how to do in Taiwan.
And she also knew that she was really good at it. So she definitely developed personal pride and satisfaction. From doing this thing that was untouched by anyone else in her life. Not her husband, not her children, not anyone else. We even had this luxurious copy machine in my dad's office. And I would see her photocopy sheet after sheet, after sheet of fun activities for her students to learn Mandarin.
She did not call the other students stupid. She prized those twin girls and smelled so broadly when they would recite the lines back. Sometimes we would practice at the cheese steak hoagie shop on Pico Boulevard that my parents owned. And after the restaurant closed for the day, it was an opportunity to give us some space where we could really amplify and project our voices while the other students figured their lines out.
I just wanted to sneak into the kitchen for more slices of American cheese and mayonnaise.
I remember once getting on a large raised stage at some high school in the Eastern part of Los Angeles. They called my name and I cried and cried at the bottom of the stairs. Not wanting to go up because I knew I was not ready.
I would never be ready. I pushed away from my mother who grabbed my arms and then shoved me onto the stage. They called my name again. They said sway honing. And now there was no more time to delay. My mother would not back away from the bottom of the stairs. So I couldn't go past her and her eyes were fierce with rage.
Her look told me that I better get up on that stage. And at that point she didn't care how I did, but I was not, not going to show up. I went up to the stage. I watched all of the people in the audience and through gasps of air, I repeated the lines as best as I knew how. Then I hurried off the stage and into the audience wanting to rip off the color construction paper number on my shirt that said who I was.
I didn't want to be who I was. I didn't want to be my mother's daughter. And I didn't want to bring her the shame of always losing of never winning of never being enough. When other people asked my mother why she never taught her own children and Chinese school, she would respond. I never want to teach my own children.
Everyone else loved her. They thought she was so much fun. She had the best attendance to everything she did. She had the best turnout. And I just remember thinking that she gave everything she had to everyone else's kids, but we never saw that side of her at home. One summer. My mother went to Taiwan for a visit.
She left me, my younger sister and the older of my two younger brothers at home with my dad. She took my youngest brother and my grandmother to Taiwan. My dad was never home. And I guess my mom thought that at this point in time, I was old enough to help watch my two other siblings unsupervised. She had brought TV dinners, then shoved them in the freezer and they were disgusting.
We microwave them and I couldn't understand the brown meat or the brown gravy and why anybody would eat this food. But I was happy that she was. I miss my grandmother and my youngest brother, but now I could watch TV and didn't have anyone to yell at me cause my dad was never home. Anyways. It had been a couple of weeks since she had been away.
I think she was gone for an entire month and I knew she'd come back with these mothball smelling suitcases of clothes that had a little bit of English on it. That didn't make any sense. Some Chinglish. And she would bring back snacks that we couldn't yet get from 99 ranch or any of the San Gabriel Monterey park or Rowland Heights restaurants.
One evening, she called and I answered the landline eating. She said excited. I responded monotone eating. She said again, as though I didn't know who she were, she was calling internationally. This was an expensive call. Yeah. I said board, it's not just a mama. You know, this is your mom. Yeah, I could hear the hurt in her voice across the 6,698 miles of silence that now settled between us.
I did not want to care. And for the most part I didn't, but a little part of me did because I could hear how deeply I had wounded her. And even though I thought that that's what I wanted over all of this time for all that she had put me through it actually wasn't there was a mother reaching for her daughter.
But he was also a daughter who had been reaching for her mother, all of her life only to be treated like another woman competing for her husband's attention. A mother who blatantly loved one of her daughters and treated her very different from the other one, because one was like her husband and one was like her, can you get your dad?
She asked recovering, I couldn't do anything differently. I couldn't change my tone. I was being a teenager as well. So I put the phone down and I went to get my dad. And then I went back to watching TV. I remember that she had timed her call. Well, because I was surprised that he was at home the same time she was calling.
I will never forget that phone call. I will never forget the sound of disappointment and heartbreak and her. I have spent my life as a mother trying to do things differently, but I have no guarantee that my daughter will love me in the ways that I have hoped that I could love a woman who also gave me life.
Even at the age of 42 soon, turning 43, there is still so much to unpack there and so much that I wish were different so much that I think I could help to change and things that I think will never change. Every night that I have my daughter, we read stories together. We've gone through so many Nancy drew books, they made a whole second generation of these stories for younger kids.
And Nancy drew was my life in junior high. I went to the library and barred as many of these books as I could. I love the mystery. I love reading Harriet, the spy. I love getting stickers from the librarian for reading. I used to take my three younger siblings, the youngest two boys in their stroller up this big hill on Overland avenue, walking from my house to the library at the corner off the temporary.
I would take my siblings to get books. And then we play at the park. I was 12. I did this alone. Once we got to attend a summer camp at the same park, and I could not have been happier at being able to throw water balloons at learning. What a slip and slide was. I getting one of those monochrome t-shirts to delineate which group of the summer camp I was a part of.
I could almost forgive my mother for packing terrible butter and bologna sandwiches, which in retrospect, I don't really understand how she didn't know how to make a lunch. When the primary source of income for our family was a hoagie shop where they made delicious lunches for strangers every single day, they even used to cut.
What is a potatoes for fries from scratch, and then deep fry them into these amazing fries that I didn't like at the time, because we didn't really eat American food. So I was very confused by this whole exchange. I wanted that summer camp joy, that ability to be a kid, just like all of my other friends at Overland avenue elementary school or at palms junior high, where incidentally that's where we had Chinese school every Saturday.
I wanted what all of my friends around me seem to have with such ease, just to be happy and carefree without having to be a parent to siblings or a mediator to parents, or this navigator of a whole new world, because the adults around me were immigrants and had never done this before. A lot of the times they didn't know how to read the English.
It's now summer here in California. And my daughter's just graduated from kindergarten. She's a little nervous to start first grade. And we have this crew of parents who surfed together, who all had children later in life. And all of our kids happen to be the same age. So we schedule a get together. As we play at the beach, we do dinners.
We play in cul-de-sacs, we've done water balloon fights and t-shirt tie dying and driven to go camping. The kids will even skate on a skate ramp. These are the simple, basic things I want for my daughter to have her summers filled with so much joy. I want her to be able to have a childhood, to be a kid, to know what that freedom to simply be is like before any of the other stresses of life, start to Mount.
And then we have responsibilities. I want her to have a mother who knows that this mother loves her and champions her and is never indifferent. I want her to feel safe, to grow confident that there are people who have her back and that whatever the world brings throughout her life, that she will have begun on solid ground.
I see my mother being a different kind of maternal force with my daughter. And in a lot of ways, I think she channels everything that she had when she was teaching Chinese school. And at least my daughter gets to experience those elements of my mother that I saw radiate that I saw everyone else around her.
Appreciate so deeply. If I can create that unbridled, unadulterated, joy, then I will feel like I have done something right.
As I mentioned this week, I will be interviewing the sister duo Eunice and Sabrina Moyle, the illustrator writer team behind Hello Lucky and Hella Lucky has been featured in target, urban Outfitters, whole foods, buy, buy baby, and so many independent boutiques and booksellers worldwide.
They're on the show because their whole endeavor is to find and create joy, to create these moments and snippets of happy. And it's something that I hope to cultivate more and more of with my own family that I'm building. And then also with anybody who's ascending to this. They're a fascinating duo.
They grew up in Asia and Africa and they have this very unique way of approaching their lives, the families that they're creating, and then the team that they're building around their company and the people who they serve. They're also the first three people interview that I've done in a show. So that's super exciting.
I'm excited for you to hear from them.
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