A Tiger in the Kitchen Read Free Page A

Africa” last night. Do you know that it won 6 Academy Awards or “Oscars” as they call it in the movie world? The movie’s great but I think would be boring for you. It shows or rather teaches us FORTITUDE and DETERMINATION. Love, Papa.
    On religion, and my growing curiosity about Catholicism: It is not easy to understand or appreciate the Taoist religion that my family has practiced and followed for generations. (To confess, I don’t quite understand it either.) But I guess that since Mum and I embraced it when my father passed away in 1976 as a matter of duty to my father and mother . . . the Taoist faith has become a part of our lives. That does not mean that you are bound by tradition to follow the same course. Having a religion is important in life—whether it is Buddhism, Catholic, Islamic etc. We are all children of God and religion helps us to communicate better with God. So feel free to believe in the Catholic faith if it helps you to communicate with God better. . . . Well, this is a rather long letter. I love you, Daphne and Mummy & miss you all. (Ooops. I forgot Erny.) Love, Papa.
    September 6, 1987: Dearest Cheryl, Please forgive if my handwriting does not look steady. I am having a sore eye and have been applying eye lotion. . . . I have to keep the affected eye closed to allow the lotion to work. . . . Before I go on, I must be frank that I am shocked that you have not mastered the art of “paragraphing” yet—or at least not in the letters you write to me. A good and well written letter deserves at the same time proper paragraphing—it strains the eyes of the reader! Now, I have just found out the reason for my sore eye.
    Each of my father’s stories had a point. He was determined not to be the father that he had had. He wanted to show me the world and all its possibilities. And while he had a tremendously successful career—at one point becoming the director of marketing for Vitasoy, one of the largest beverage companies in Asia—he was even more determined that his firstborn would go further than he himself had, having had the advantages of a loving, supportive father that he had so craved. But as I got older, I broke my father’s heart and chose journalism over law. Then I broke my mother’s heart by insisting on coming to the United States for college. My family protested. I would be too far, I was a girl, and why journalism? But my father had always told me I could be and do anything, and he wasn’t going to stop me. He simply asked, “How much will it cost?”
    On occasions such as these, my mother often would sigh, shake her head, and blame the fact that I was born in the year of the Tiger. “Why did I have to have a Tiger daughter?” she would lament. “So stubborn and rebellious. If you were born in the olden days in China, you would have been killed at birth!” Sometimes, however, faced with my horrified looks, she would end on a reassuring note: “You know,” she once said, “with Tiger girls, they used to pull out one of her teeth so she wouldn’t be so fierce and eat up her husband. But don’t worry, I didn’t do that with you.”
    Once I moved to the United States, my father visited me at least twice a year. We didn’t have the fried shrimp noodles, but we started having a beer after dinner some nights. Now, during my college years, my Singaporean male friends—and even less so my female ones—were hardly ever granted the privilege of bonding with their dads over a beer. (Nice girls didn’t drink.) But in my father’s eyes, my independence in school, in building my career, had given me the license. Even so, our bar visits often began with “Your mum would kill me if she knew,” and “I won’t tell her if you won’t, Dad.” (We also never told her about the cigarettes we would smoke surreptitiously.)
    As I built my own career, my father’s ambitions became my fuel. And I could never shake the feeling that he was disappointed, somehow. In my early twenties,