Tiger Babies Strike Back Read Free Page A

were Chinese Kids Lite. We ran around Chinatown like a Spanky and Our Gang cluster of urban urchins, and while my brothers and cousin went to Joe Jung’s or Jackson Café for French fries, I ran off to my tap-dancing lesson at the YMCA with Tony Wing.
    As the years went by and I grew from five years old to ten, I incrementally began to notice differences between other kids in Chinatown and me. Their hand-knit and dollar-store clothes looked weird to me (not that my I’M WITH STUPID T-shirt and tube socks were the height of fashion either), and their haltingly spoken, heavily accented English—that is, when they weren’t speaking in Chinese—was something I found exasperating.
    And I was equally foreign to them as well. If I encountered girls my age, we eyeballed each other warily, taking in all the visual cues that might tell us who was American-born and who was fresh-off-the-boat. If I said “Hello” to a girl and didn’t get a reply, I knew she didn’t speak English, and if she said something in Cantonese and I remained mute, it was sufficient proof that I didn’t speak Chinese. Our faces may have looked similar, but we had nothing further to say to each other.
    Somehow, looking alike but having nothing in common made us instant enemies. The standoff between other little girls and me was proof that animosity within the Chinese population could start from an early age. An us-versus-them mentality between assimilated and immigrant groups simmered within all Chinatown. In sidelong glances, hostile stares, and gruff behavior, I noticed the hostility among older kids and adults as well. We were all of Chinese descent, but we were still suspicious of each other. To have other Chinese kids cut their eyes at me or insult me in a language I couldn’t understand embarrassed and humiliated me. And likewise, when I matched their chiding by disparaging them in English to my brothers, I’m sure I made them feel dumb.
    Back then it had never occurred to me that my mother and grandmother had started out not speaking English, just like these girls I disdained. If my grandmother had been a young girl, and if we were meeting for the first time on this Chinese playground, we, too, would have been separated by language and customs. We might have been enemies simply because our rates of assimilation into American culture were staggered in time. But none of that mattered then. As a kid I was not making connections in my head about layers of experience within my cultural diaspora. I just wanted to hurl a ball at other kids’ heads and laugh at them. Which is what my brothers and I did to them, and what they did to us.
    Saturday was our day in Chinatown, but during the week my brothers and I also went to daily Chinese school after regular school. St. Mary’s was the imposing gulag on the corner of Stockton and Clay Streets, and we reluctantly took the bus there from St. Brigid’s on Franklin and Broadway Streets. Two schools and two sets of peers required switching personalities each afternoon. So from my efforts of being an American from 8:30 A.M. to 2:30 P.M. , and then trying to be Chinese between 4:00 P.M. and 7:00 P.M. , there was always a constant, consistent feeling of being not American enough, or not Chinese enough, or always lacking a little bit of both simultaneously.
    To reconcile both sides of my life, I learned to remain safely vague and noncommittal when answering questions. I relied heavily on the time-tested phrase “I don’t know” when talking to my peers. Girls from St. Brigid’s asked, “Why don’t you join Girl Scouts?” and instead of replying, “Because I have to go to Chinese school every afternoon,” I just said, “I don’t know.” And at St. Mary’s, when kids asked, “Why aren’t you making kites and lanterns for Harvest Moon Festival?” once again I simply stated, “I don’t know.” It