A High School Drop-Out's Guide to Tiger Parenting

Let It Be In Mind, Out of Sight

Unlike the once-upon-a-times, there was nothing conventional about the way my dad and my mom found each other: in the airport. I mean, there is nothing ever conventional about immigration and confusion. It was never really something either of them wanted to explain, just that they met each other in the airport and everything started from there. My mom was described as a beauty, overheard in conversations and in snide comments from movers as they carried my parent's large wedding photo encased in glass. They took their time to take in the scene of my mom's youthful image, one I had forgotten in time, as they leered indiscreetly like predators at my mother's décolletage. I remembered that photo. It captured a time way before me, when my father's eyes weren't haunted by the darkness of exhaustion, and my mom's pale skin shone with health and joy. It had been hidden away in the back of my brother's closet, my dad refusing to throw it away yet also refusing to even glance at it for himself. The beauty frozen in the photo was what had attracted my dad, who bragged about being a particularly attractive bachelor (translation: a player) back in his days. His cockiness and differing generational origins leant to this condition as being something of positive value. The soft beauty and the popular player, a classic dynamic in tropey stories.

However, you will come to realize nothing is ever like the stories. This is reality, and the reality was that they had (to) become each other's constants in a foreign land of foreign faces and foreign languages, a testament of the supposed "love" that never stood the testament of time. In retrospect, I know why my parents never liked to talk about their "love story"; there might have never been a love to begin with, because how else could a relationship sour to such an extent as it had? Like any other couple, they had their issues, except these issues were beyond verbal disagreements. And unlike any other couple, these issues just fermented and rotted. And do you know what happens when things ferment for too long? Gasses build up and when the seal is released, everything explodes. That was what happened between them, and I was none the wiser as a child. The tiger had pulled a veil over my eyes.

No matter how my mind was silenced and my eyes distracted by colorful screens, I could still feel the pressure beneath my fingertips. I could feel the thin skin and bones of my mother, her frail frame trembling in winter and skin dulled by long work hours, contrasting the bustling of a lively restaurant. She was like a flower trampled by the weight of winter's snow and a tiger's paw.

I could also hear the female voice coming from my dad's phone that wasn't my mom every time he sat on his throne and visibly raised the phone to his ear. I could hear the rising profanities in arguments, and the clatter of various restaurant equipment, metal against metal. Above it all, I could hear the fractures of a glass heart under turmoil.

A tiger likes to play, right? And I'm a good learner. I learned to play, to be curious, and to pull the veil from my eyes to connect the horrors of a sound and touch, to sight. I saw the tender skin I had felt, the blue, black, and yellow. I saw the tears I had heard, the glistening manifestation of the wails and cries of pain. And I saw the tiger who had caused it all, whose claws tore my family to pieces and whose roar foreshadowed them.

As quick as the stem of a summer flower snapped under the collapse of snow, my naivety morphed into constricting fear. No amount of courage built up from a childish lack of self-preservation encouraged me to look straight into yellow eyes as an act of defiance. Fear throttled my vocal cords each time I was confronted with the sound of his voice. His touch meant the suppression to recoil from hands that stank of cigarettes and another woman. But all this paled in comparison to a later realization: the extent of human disregard. In anger and in frustration, his hands would land on anything and anyone, and the boom of his roars would all the same. We were no exceptions. We were left to grapple at the tiled grout with shaky hands after his anger had swept through each and every one of us, the destruction evident in the red flowering on our skins.