Read Online Tiger Babies Strike Back by Kim Wong Keltner - Free Book Online Page B

as the puffy clouds receded into the distance. I became silent, knowing that my mother was wrong. What insanity was this? How could my mom be wrong when I was still just a little kid? It was my first lesson regarding life being a game that moves as you play.
    Folks who haven’t been paying attention to the power shift that has brought the East to the forefront are like clueless adults who haven’t noticed that the clouds are constantly moving.
    Meanwhile, Asian Americans are up and running, and it’s GAME ON. We used to be viewed as the model minority. Call us what you want, but we’re breaking out of that mold, too. We’re not waiting for approval. We’re not the droids you’re looking for. You don’t need to see our identification. Go ahead and think of us in some kind of old way, as last year’s model, but we’ve moved on.
    In fact, we are grown up. Maybe we’ve got children of our own now. So even if we were willing before to not want better for ourselves, from now on, all that hot mess that we endured as kids just ain’t gonna cut it. Hybrid life is the wave of the future, whether anyone likes it or not. We have to live in the in-between times, between the blurred borders of East and West, Tiger parenting and vulnerability, between running fast and enjoying the stillness.
    Without our knowledge or consent, the world sees us in many different ways: academic cyborg, materialistic princess, dragon lady, or Hong Kong bar waitress. Often, we are defined as “other.” But to us, we’re not an “other,” we’re just us. We are kind people, dutiful daughters, good friends, hard workers, or maybe emerging artists. Maybe we’re finding our way, trying on new ways of being, or defining ourselves by comparing ourselves to others. Or maybe it never even occurred to us to be, or not be, what other people projected onto us. What do we want for ourselves?
    We are not fixed constellations. We are constantly morphing, changing our ambitions and desires, figuring out what we want, and mashing it up. We have the right to evolve any way we want, at any time we want. The sky is moving all the time, and even supernovas explode. Then where are you, Superstar? You’re in a black hole. So keep moving cuz ya don’t wanna get sucked into a dark, dead zone and find you can’t escape.
    And how, exactly, are we going to carve out our identity in this in-between time, between expectation and reality? How will we manage not to get pulled toward the dark side, that is, a life by default that was never of our own choosing?
    By being shape-shifters. We can be what we want to be, but are often many things at once: loyal daughter, workingwoman, athlete, caretaker, stone-cold fox. We can be all these things in one day, changing from one type of person to the next, soft one moment, competitive the next. Throughout these changes, inside we are always ourselves, but we keep that hidden from view. Inside is where we live, where the alchemy happens.
    I am referring to women and our myriad opportunities and responsibilities now, but even in ancient China, women were perceived as shape-shifters. Men were believed to be fixed in nature, and not fluid like women. Male “yang” energy was threatened by too much female “yin,” which is often described as watery, and hence women were sometimes portrayed in tales as eels, or water snakes.
    In stories from the Ming Dynasty, there were legends of “fox fairies,” beings that appeared in the form of women who were really tricksters with half-animal bodies. Men could be married unknowingly to fox fairies who stole into bed at night with animal prowess. During the day, however, the wife would never be seen without clothes. Why not? Because she was hiding her fox tail, of course! And further, a great part of the allure of bound feet was because women were seen as enchantresses, who were these half-fox beings. The foot