The Allure of The Tiger Mother (Confessions of a Voyeur)

A couple of weeks ago while listening to the radio on a long commute, I heard a review of Amy Chua's book, Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother, and ever since I've been hooked. The review was provocative, as has been every article, blog post and facebook status update I've read in response to this Type A, upper middle class Yale law professor who raised her daughters to be the best at everything they tried. The first review I read said that the controversial book (a memoir, although that is mentioned less than it should be) was sure to be the subject of online "mom" discussions for weeks to come. They were right. I was set up.

Chua is Chinese, the daughter of immigrants married to a fellow professor who is Jewish. When they agreed to have kids, he insisted they be raised Jewish, she insisted they be raised "The Chinese Way." They were two affluent over-achievers with intensely different backgrounds who made agreements about how they would raise their children, as if life were simply a matter of contracts and marital handshakes. Or so the shtick goes. In at least one interview with Chua (I'm reading them all), she admits that her husband asked her to take him out of the story because he felt she didn't represent him correctly.

For years I've been fascinated by extremists - those people who are so strong in their beliefs that nothing else gets in. When my step-sister and her husband lived in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles, I sat on the porch on Saturday morning enthralled with the Hasidim walking to and from shul. If I could have gone down the stairs, crossed the street and followed them throughout their day of worship and rest, I would have. What did it take to be so devout? What did it mean to stand out so distinctly? Was it hot under all that black and wigs? When was the last time the husband touched the wife intimately? Which lights were left on back at home? Was anyone unhappy?

Similarly, when I flew back from Madrid on the day after the volcano erupted in Iceland on what would be one of the last flights out, I sat next to an oil and gas engineer (ironic, considering I work in renewable energy) who was also LDS. I learned the short-hand for Latter Day Saints from the television show Big Love. This made me feel both smart and subversive. As we were talking, I easily figured out my neighbor as he told me about his large family while turning down caffeinated beverages offered to him by the flight attendants and mentioning, in code, being on mission when he was younger.

I was sitting in the window seat, he in the aisle, on a long, cramped flight stale with the air of too many people who had all barely made it out of Europe. What better opportunity than to grill him for hours about the Mormon version of heaven (on earth as far as I could surmise), whether any of his 8 kids were gay (none that he knew of) and his stance on gay parents (not supportive, but not unkind). While trying to convince him that Big Love actually made me appreciate his people, I learned about the angel Moroni, Jesus' stay in Central America and I almost walked off the plane with The Book of Mormon. I might have actually taken were it written like a novel, but I admitted to him I can only handle so many "begets" and “begots” before I fall into a stupor.

As a teenager, I remember getting very upset with my mother and her boyfriend when they wouldn't agree to send me to the Scientology boarding school outside of town. Never mind that it was for rich kids or the fact that we weren't Scientologists. I was in love with vocal jazz and two students, the daughter and son of jazz pianist Chick Corea, had a Manhattan Transfer cover band called Time Out that I loved so much I snuck into bars with my mom to hear them play. I sang along to every song, tears in my eyes, imagining what it would be like to go to school with them, in a place with strict rules and beliefs, one that would shape me and turn me into something or someone, maybe even a famous (and beautiful) singer.

With the same fascination and enthusiasm, I picked up Chua's book, eager to read her reflections on her extreme parenting methods. Not because I wanted to emulate them, but because I am simply riveted by those whose lives are both outside my own experience and somewhat austere. Here was a book presenting the antitheses of "Western Parenting" which, according to Chua, lacks focus, discipline or inherent respect of the children for their parents. The first few chapters were so funny they made me laugh out loud. I couldn’t believe the reviewers missed the obvious self-depreciation and hilarity. But they were also disturbing. This was the story of a women hell bent on turning out brilliant students and classical musicians.
 

Also, I'll admit, if every white liberal woman around me was reacting with horror (as they were, as I did the first time I heard about it), I felt compelled to check it out and discover if that response was one of cultural misunderstanding. I really appreciated reading a Chinese woman's perspective on parenting. I crave cultural specificity. I don't like the way the "norm" erases people and experiences and tells us we are all the same (whatever that norm happens to be at the moment, it's always in flux based on the latest research or product or PR campaign).

I admire Chua for putting it out there. I don't think she's written a unique tale (what’s unique is that she wrote it). I do believe there are kids all over the world that are pushed to practice to perfection in order to achieve what is labeled as "greatness." Images of the opening ceremonies from the Olympics held in China keep popping in my mind. I remember stories circulating about the unbelievable hours required of the performers, the grueling rehearsals, the lack of bathroom breaks, the requirement of perfection. I have an outsider's fascination with these experiences, and yet as a daughter and a mother, I feel close to the story being told.

Each time I pick up the book and read a chapter, I'm momentarily a little more strict in response to my children as I secretly eye the piano and think about starting the kids on lessons. This response is always short-lived and often followed by a sudden urge play with them in their rooms or give them treats. After all, I'm 3rd or 4th generation white semi-Jew, a wishy-washy magical thinker with positive parenting tendencies and, if you ask certain daycare providers of the past, a lack of follow-through.

I appreciate reading about a life so different from my own, even as I question whether there are universal truths about "right" and "wrong" ways to raise children and about childhood itself, a relatively new concept in the history of humanity as far as I know. I'm also guessing that if you took all the ways my friends and I were raised, and wrote them down as a parenting philosophy, there would be equally aghast responses.

My takeaways:

1. I'm a sucker for a great PR campaign. Amy Chua’s publicists have got to be pretty happy with themselves right now.

2. There's not one way to do anything, even something that seems as "universal" as parenting.

3. I either do or do not have control of how my kids turn out. I'm guessing Chua might say the same.

A Double Chin Dietribe (take that resolution and shove it)

Almost every day there is media coverage about that horror of horrors, the "obesity epidemic." It's in the mainstream as well as the anti-establishment alternative media. The folks that eschew traditional medicine for alternative healing are just as righteously indignant about the shame of obesity as the hospital crowd. And whether it is Dr. Phil, or Oz, the CEO of an organic foods company, or a woman working to create local foodsheds in New Mexico, everyone uses misconstrued statistics about fat people to elicit shock and disgust from their audiences.

Often the news stinks so obviously of corporate interests that it's hard to believe anyone would take it seriously. A recently published study, sponsored by NCCI Holdings, "the nation's largest provider of worker's compensation data" posited that fat people are more likely to suffer medical complications after workplace injuries (to the tune of an average of 75 visits to the doctor versus 3 for the thin-bodied according to one reporter, or 30-60 times higher costs for the worker's comp claim). Studies like that don't bode well for the future of medical care available to the fat.

Sometimes the stories are about breakthroughs by a medical community obsessed with eradicating the causes of obesity (for which I should be grateful?). According to one recent article fat is literally caused by the dirty air we breathe. Another points back to how women behave during pregnancy.  One can only imagine that in the not-too-distant future medical insurance will only available for those fat people who can afford to self-insure and obese women will be barred from having kids.  If thin women accidentally pop out fat kids, there will be hell to pay (or, at the least, huge medical bills and the threat of having one's children taken away "for their own good"). There have already been cases where fat kids were taken from their parents, who are assumed to have been abusing the kids by "letting them" get fat.

Aside from the medicalization of fat and its supposed antidotes, modern U.S. culture is one obsessed with myths of “instant” transformations from fat to thin. Perhaps this has something to do with movies - where time is compressed into only the most compelling moments, where GI Jane transforms herself into a hard-bodied fighting machine in less than an hour. Or TV, where from the comfort of our couches we can witness fat people suffer for a few weeks to see who will come out The Biggest Loser.

We love to watch other people survive punishment and come out victorious. The problem is, we don't do much analysis of what’s at stake with our misconstrued notion of victory. Nor do we seem to be able to see the larger issues at play (power, the misrepresentation and skewing of information, the accumulation of capital, blaming the individual, warped ideas of beauty and, of course, all those “isms” we were supposed to get over in the 90s).

Whether we are being bombarded by hard news or shown gruesomely optimistic photos of someone’s “before” and “after” transformation, at all times the message is being sent that fat people (women more than men) are unhealthy, untoward and must be changed. This is both outrageous and painful and something we should all be working to stop.

Whether you are thin or fat, whether you love your body or can’t stand to look in the mirror, you should be incredulous about the so-called obesity epidemic and about the interests behind the manipulated statistics. This creates fat people as easy targets who can’t hide (unlike those reporters who occasionally put on a “fat suit” to see what it’s like to live for a day as an object of scorn, I have no such option to appear other than as I am). And the targeting leads to fat people who mindlessly accept themselves as weak and diseased. They internalize the exterior forces at play and believe they would be happier, healthier, live longer and make everyone around them more relaxed if only they could lose that pesky weight.

The notion that the obese are hiding behind our fat is incongruous with the experience of walking out the door into the public eye as a fat woman. Believe me, hiding is one thing fat people do not have the option of doing.  God forbid you are a fat and diseased. Then you are simply the worst (and expected) outcome imaginable, a hopeless cause, a suck on the economy and a physical reminder of death. After all, I’m not just fat, I’m morbidly obese. There’s not a bigger downer in this culture than someone who reminds us of our own inescapable future.

I stopped dieting years ago. I made the choice as a political act of rebellion, recognizing that a society which continually reinforces how bad I am because of my body must really be messed up. There's a word for it. Hegemony. But making that choice to fight the power doesn’t make it easy.

Over Scentsitive

I'm having a massive crisis of ego. See, I've been invited to a party tomorrow which I can't wait to attend, to celebrate the birth of a friend I love and whom I see much too infrequently. The thing is, it's a scent free party. No big deal right? Except that one was not to use any body products or laundry soaps containing scents for days ahead of time. And here is where I have my version of a fat Jewish femme freak out. Without hair products, I'm just a throwback to my former self as an awkward late 1970s teenager with hair I could not tame into styles that weren't meant for people like me. When everyone else was feathering their beautiful and shiny straight hair after VO5 hot oil treatments, I was standing in the bathroom crying as I stared at myself in the mirror.

There was nothing kind about these

I was the picture of imperfection: a chubby girl with bushy eyebrows, foundation a shade too dark applied all over my face and neck, black eyeliner softened in the flame of a Bic lighter smeared onto the rims of my eyes and powder-blue eye shadow unevenly coating my eyelids. But the real problem was my hair. The wisdom of black women had not yet been passed to white girls like me. There were no special curly-hair products to be found next to the Herbal Essence shampoo, and Farrah was all the rage.

What I lacked in straight hair, I made up for in blow dryers, hot rollers and curling irons. I routinely lit my hair on fire when it got sucked into the motor of the dryer. Once it was crisp and brittle, I would apply not one, but two sets of hot rollers and then when my curls were set, rip them out, along with chunks of my hair tangled on the sharp little points meant to hold the rollers in place.  After that I inevitably burned the side of my face with the curling iron. Every day. I'm convinced now that the person who invented bobble-heads was a teenage girl in the 70s.

It didn't improve all that much in the 80s when I came out as a lesbian in the time of Andrea Dworkin and mullets. It was a do-it-yourself era. Unfortunately, I applied this logic and sat with glee as my best friend, and unrequited crush, cut my hair and buzzed my head.

Honestly, I would have done anything to feel her hands on me and if it meant a horribly coiffed head, that was a small price to pay (not to mention that she did it for free). There was even an unfortunate time when I grew a tail, and then had it cut off, saved, and glued onto the side of my head for a whole new look. My mom liked the tail, she thought it made me look more feminine.

~

By the time I moved to San Francisco a month after the big earthquake, my hair was neither short nor long. It was, however, a huge brown frizzy wedge.

Shortly after I moved, I discovered and claimed my femme identity, so I just let my hair grow, and grow, and grow. It was easy, feminine and the closest I could get to the rock-and-roll glamor I admired. That was fine until I had kids and then I almost always wore it in a messy knot held together with a large plastic alligator clip (which looked not unlike a clip one might use to close a bag of chips).

One of my better long hair days

It wasn't until after my daughter was born a few years ago that I finally got a good stylist, the right hair products and learned to own my curls. Now my hair is ice blond, sassy, and takes no time. I wash it twice a week, apply two kinds of hair products when it's wet and then add more every day after my shower. The more days that pass, the better it looks. The key, besides a great cut, are the products. They are probably all petroleum based. I have no idea really. One is a clear gel, the other looks like Noxema. All I know is that without them, my hair looks like the dust bunnies you pull off the broom when you are done sweeping.

So, back to the party. I put a lot of hair stuff on today so that when I wake up tomorrow I can get away with only using water to set my curls. But I'm worried today's scent will linger. I don't want to make anyone sick because of my beauty routine, but I also do not want to forgo my self-confidence in order to be scent free. There may be a time in the dy istopic future when I have no access to shampoo or hair gel and I will have to settle for what I get. I imagine if that awful day comes, my hair will be the least of my concerns.

In the meantime, my good hair  is one of the reasons I can walk with confidence in the world. Take away my hair products and you take away my sense of wholeness. Which leads me to believe I may not have my priorities straight.

I wrote to the party hosts today to check in on this issue. They promise me they will have someone sniff me out at the door. I only hope my hair is up to the challenge.

Call Me When It's Over

If I never hear about Mercury going retrograde again, it will not be soon enough. Seriously people, I'm living my life with its ups and downs, doing okay most of the time, and then I see half my friends on facebook talk about Mercury. I'm one for astrology. I know my sun sign, my rising and my moon. I know my Chinese sign, including the element for my particular year. I even know my Mayan sign (Red Electric Dragon). I've had my palm read, numbers done and handwriting analyzed. But honest to god, I do not need to know when the planet of Mercury is about to swing into some sort of backwards void in which machinery breaks down, connections are missed, communications go awry and the postal service loses packages. If things are going to go wrong for the next two weeks, or three, or months, or however long this event goes on I'd rather just assume that's life rather than looking over my shoulder worried about what's coming after me.



I know this helps explain the mysteries of broken down cars and software glitches. I understand that it will provide a convenient explanation when I can't start my car one morning soon, or I drunk dial the wrong person. I get it. But I just can't handle worrying about stepping on the cracks so much.

Mercury in retrograde seems to be some kind of liberal/new age/hippie version of Murphy's law and it does nothing to help me prepare (as far as I know, no one has ever figured out how to foil that Mercury trickster). What it does do is fill me with the dread of anticipation.

I don't believe in censorship, but I swear, if there was a Mercury retrograde "hide" button on facebook, I'd be all over that.


Deep breaths Jenny. Deep breaths.

(Don't) Fear the Beard

I couldn't reach the hot dogs at the store tonight. I’m making the traditional and very popular “Pigs in a Blanket” for the preschool holiday potluck on Friday and I needed a lot of them. I never understand why they put things that far back and up high in certain stores, when there are short fat people like me around. I couldn't reach it and I dared not step on the refrigerated case as I might have done years ago lest the whole thing come tumbling down. The manager who helped me wasn't that much taller than me, but he had good arm length and agility.

He was also mostly bald, which caused a hilarious conversation to ensue between he and my daughter. She told him he had a really REALLY big haircut. He said he cut his hair twice a week. She said he wasn't bald because he had a beard. He asked her if she thought that counted and then she told him that her mama also has a beard that she shaves.

Yep. Right there in Trader Joe’s.

In such situations, I have come to find that the following two tactics work best:

1. Brazenly say who and what and how you are before someone else has the chance (over share)
2. If you hide whatever feature you don't necessarily want the world to know and it gets out, loudly acknowledge it with a matter-of-fact hubris (be bombastic and crass)

Perhaps this is why I have a special fondness for certain comedians – Roseanne, in her day; Margaret Cho; Louis C.K. I like the ones who tell it like it is and aren’t afraid to acknowledge the body. I like the ones that talk about food and fat and shit and sex. If they talked about girls with whiskers, I’d like that too, even as I self-consciously felt my face to see if I had stubble.

Because I have learned to cope using the tactics of #1 and #2 above, there’s a lot you may already know about my so-called imperfections. I’m tempted to list more here so you won’t look me up and down the next time we meet trying to figure out what else about me is “outside the box” of traditional beauty. I do this because really, when it comes down to it, this is my way of avoiding the surprise. You can’t humiliate me if I put it all out there first. I oughta know; I was humiliated a lot as a child by other children.

Intellectually, I know I should not be embarrassed about how I look. And I’ll fight you in public if you tell me that I need to lose weight. It’s not that I’m not a product of my particular social class, upbringing or our shared historical moment, but I have worked for years to extricate myself from the half-truths that would have me torture myself rather than try to change the world.

Still, while I admire women who let their whiskers grow (that takes chutzpah!), it’s not for me. I thank god for Mach 3 Turbo action and coconut-vanilla shaving cream. I’ve tried lasers but that was almost as painful as back labor and didn’t work for my “hormonally based” problems. Not to mention the cost.

I wish my skin were smooth and carefree. I wish I could go camping without worrying about how to shave before everyone wakes up in the morning. I wish I were less pre-occupied with a post-apocalyptic world in which I imagine there are no more razors or straight edges. But in the mean time, I just take really long showers, shave closer than you might think possible, tell the truth to my kids (and anyone else who will listen) and try to keep my chin up, as it were.

Holidaze

Anyone who knows me knows that I love Christmas and that, as a partial Jew, I feel conflicted every year around this time when I feel the need to surround myself with lights, pine needles, elves, holly and the mythical (to a West Coast girl like me) snow.

What's a partial Jew, you ask? Someone who is neither here nor there, a perpetual state in my life and one I've come to embrace, more or less. It relates to being Jewish through my paternal bloodlines (on my mother and father's sides) and growing up without traditional, conservative or specific religion. Instead mine was a more free-form interpretive childhood in which ethics and morality were always important but not handed to me wrapped up in Torah scroll or a book with onion-skin-thin gilded pages. My world was one of gurus from India, monks from Tibet, yogurt from the Golden Temple in Eugene, Oregon and a charismatic white guy named Werner in whose kitchen I volunteered for a time, fascinated by his house with fabric palm trees curving up into the Victorian ceiling in the off-limits living room.

When I was eight my friend Dawn and I traipsed into a church after being barefoot in the rain and, for cookies, I accepted Jesus into my heart, confused when he didn't open up my chest and walk right in. Once the cookies were consumed and we went home, that was the end of my so called rebirth. Then when I was twelve I started going to a liberal reform temple with my mom and brothers, but by then I already knew I didn't fit in and I was self-conscious enough not to do a good job faking-it. I also had a hell of a time with the "ch" sound in Hebrew.

I adore the kitsch and beauty and the incredible potential that an unwrapped present under the Christmas tree evokes. I want every year to get lost in that world, the way I did sometimes as a child when I would lay on the floor under the lowest branches of the lit-up tree decorated with my mom's beloved wooden ornaments and strings of popcorn and cranberries. To look up into the magic of the tree was to imagine myself a princess, or snow queen, or poor little rich girl. I felt transported. This is the feeling I get every year at Christmas, when I'm not obsessed with "getting it all done" or worried about being a bad Jew or bourgeois consumer.

Sometimes I'm right in the feeling, and sometimes I'm outside it, wishing I could get in, which means that I am imagining there is someone else out there who is having a more authentic experience than me. They are actually rich. Or Christian. Or happy. Or they are Jewish, annoyed by the celebrations in a country that doesn't try to mask its conflation of church and state while trying to protect themselves and their children from that horrible feeling of being continually othered.

I am wise enough to know all experience is authentic, but if I let myself, I can get lost in the fantasy of being someone else. Thank god, somewhere along the way I discovered irony. It's gotten me through a lot. I can be both inside and outside my experience - enjoying the moment, laughing about it as I observe the hilarity and teeter-totter on the edge of many identities. I am not one thing or another, but some of this and some of that. I don't fit into one specific box, but as I've discovered, neither does anyone else really. And depending on how strong or weak I am feeling on a given day, I may be no more than my skin, flesh and gender. Depends whose doing the looking and how far they push their projections. Not to mention my hormones, they seem to color an awful lot lately.

So - last night me and my partner Em and two good friends went to see Margaret Cho, a rebel Korean American in your face raunchy-mouthed beautiful wonder. I wore my dreidel earrings and laughed until I peed over thumb-nail porn, butch women who turn out to be straight, pot lollipops, sex and more sex, and because it was Margaret, poop. She is profane and hilarious and makes me feel embraced for being exactly who I am.

Afterward, we traipsed through the elegant old-money lobbies of two Nob Hill hotels in San Francisco. I was taken by the huge bright Christmas trees, the fancy society ladies with their mink stoles and holiday bouquets and the elaborate Corinthian-inspired columns. I was reminded of The Breakers, a Vanderbilt house in Newport, RI built by the wealth produced during the Industrial Revolution. I visited the mansion one Christmas years ago and found myself overcome with emotion, crying as we toured the giant remant of wealth, so beautiful, disturbing and dreamy.

But it was the giant gingerbread house in the lobby of The Fairmont that really got me last night. It smelled so spicy and sweet I had the urge to spread myself across its surface and lick it from one candy to another, like an oral dot-to-dot. It made me feel both childlike and perverse. This is sort of how I feel about my love of Christmas.