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

Keep an Open Mind

My dad's relationship with my grandmother soured much like mine did with my mother, albeit forced. Bonded by mutual struggle for survival in poverty and a lack of education, they were each other's salvation. When my grandmother could no longer carry herself, weighed down by debilitating sickness and old age, my dad took on the responsibility. As for my grandfather? He was a man faded in memories and photos, never seemingly significant enough for my father to mention.

With a grandfather that never amounted to anything great, came a focus on shelter and food insecurity. There was a tale that my father used to tell about his hunger: how he could down more than 5 full bowls of rice, an Asian staple that came by in abundance with little financial sacrifice. When rice wasn't enough, he would take trips down to the beach with my grandmother, plucking crabs straight out from the ocean and the sand. Whenever that story peaked out from the corners of my mind, my imagination would vividly paint an endearing scene: my dad without the wrinkles of time, hands soft without the calluses of work, digging up a crab from the sand. He would triumphantly lift up that day's dinner in his sodded fist, clumps of sediment dripping off in ugly chunks onto the wetness beneath him. The earth was his hope. But never to me.

He was my hope.

My dad made it so that crabs were served cleaned, boiled, and on a shiny metal plate. Contrary to conventional stories, my mom didn't really know how to cook. She wasn't terrible, but her culinary expertise consisted largely of breakfast items like beans and jellyfish that only required heating or cutting and plating. In spite of their simplicity, they tasted as amazing and warm in the chill of winter as my father's cooking after a full day of busy two times threes and running around on the sidewalk. Her rusty cooking skills probably originated from her more privileged background, coming from parents who owned a tools store. It was all alright, as she made it up in other aspects such as taking care of me and my brother, cleaning, working, working, working, and more of that working, especially more when my dad ran away to his nightly rendezvous.

He was no longer anyone to me after all those nights, especially not my hope.

But I, begrudgingly, became his hope.

It was after my mom had left, that I found myself frequenting the cold of the backseat, the car purring egregiously as it defrosted in the winter morning. There, I would clutch my father's phone in my hands, glancing between the lit screen, his expectant eyes, and the desolate streets covered in white sleet. It was a time when I was tired of crying. I was tired of hoping, waiting, and being disappointed every time I had called her on my own will. Every single time, I had pleaded with her under the shelter of the night, to come back. And every day after, I would never see her. She makes hope a fragile thing, one I had lost to the emptiness that took its place. With those phone calls, it was shattered glass, with the pieces scattered to the earth, wind, and ocean.

Hope is also a dangerous thing, trapping the beholder and everyone around him. Each time the phone would ring in the car, and my mother's voice came through the choppy speakers, I was forced to cry. To sound sad and to plead. Of course I felt sad, but grief lends itself to anger and indifference in time, and I was done with lingering on the idea that my life was over without my mother. I had moved on to indifference as a way of shielding myself from the hurt. But beyond the screen, little did my mother know, a tiger was orchestrating the whole scene.

No amount of crying and pleading would get my mother back to America, and I knew that. But my father didn't. Tears and a voice slurred by melancholic delirium became a habit, so much so that even the thought of family and parents brings me to tears faster than a tear could even reach my chin. I couldn't even recognize my own, true grief, from the one I masked myself with on the phone. Even so, I acted for him and for her, to placate his sudden consideration for my mother, when all the nightly escapades and liver destruction said otherwise. When the phone clicked to a close, that was when the attitude change came. Suddenly, it was all about my mother being useless, a bitch, and a cheater. That was my father: the epitome of the hypocrisy of human nature.