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

Eat Only What You Have

Dinner time was when I ate with everyone—my parents, brother, and the employees of my dad's restaurant.

Asian dinners consist of personalized bowls of rice and a spread of main dishes to be shared by everyone who could stab, poke, or squeeze with wooden chopsticks. As the daughter of the owner, I had the privilege of semi-limited time at the seat of the metal dinner table. Where employees were often interrupted by incoming customers and orders, I was only interrupted with more food being shoved into my rice bowl by chopsticks slammed down in frustration. However, expectations called for stuffed cheeks and pseudo-shovels (chopsticks) that pushed more food into a mouth overrun by half chewed rice and a mixture of sauces and meats. Ridiculously, I never enjoyed slow-paced eating. Overcome by the desire to gain my parent's favor, I would quickly clean my bowl just to run back to the front counter to refill sauces and tend to customers, when employees of the tiger simply wished to be able to stay in front of their bowls for a minute longer. Even now, inhaling food is an innate behavior that amassed curious stares.

The few times I did reflect the employee's wishes were when there was orange chicken, inauthentic curry, or buffalo wings. It was not a sickeningly sweet orange sauce that presided over fried chicken catered to the pallets of our customers, or a curry recipe from a professional, or even a toned down spice that I loved. Rather, it was an orange chicken rich in savory soy and real, dried orange peels, that garnered my rapt attention. It was a simmered yellow curry sauce bright with powder and dark with spices that I could drink like soup, but best eaten with potatoes, warming me with its all-consuming flavor like blankets during winter. It was buffalo wings red with hot sauce and chopped for a small mouth's ease. It was the care, time, and love for cooking for a child that could be so clearly tasted with each mouthful, felt through its heat, seen through the delicate steam, and heard through the bubbling and sizzling. It was the purpose behind each dish, meant to nurture, to warm stomachs on a cold evening, and to collect smiles like tokens that left its mark on my list of favorite foods, even after years of trial and error.

A taste like those dishes lasts a lifetime in memory. And you would think that as long as my dad was alive, that I would never have to remember how they taste, as I would always be able to live the experience real time. But this reality, one that allows time to rot. It turns all things beautiful, like culinary passion, and degredates it. It rots and disintegrates until there is nothing left but an unrecognizable carcass and a faint sweet smell of end to remember by.

Family dinners became a simple memory, one that looked like blurred smiles and smelt faintly of spice and life. A brightly lit dinner table was darkened by downed, rusty roll-up security gates. Without the bustle of customers and the natural light beaming through glass walls, I felt cold and enclosed under dim flickering lights, the musky smell of old oil and a restaurant out-of-business being my only company. Instead of delicious home-cooked meals that had me prancing at the balls of my feet, I was left with rice noodle rolls in the mornings that made me gag, and unsold fried chicken and fries in the afternoon. Mornings were iPad time with my brother, and afternoons were crying time with my dad. With nimble fingers, I would pick up a drumstick from a large metal bowl dropped carelessly on the table. They were not dressed with a familiar yellow, fruit-based, or red pepper sauce, but the salt of tears. One hand hesitantly lifted chicken whilst the back of the other wiped my eyes clear of the evidence of grief, grease and salty tears leaving a familiar coating on my hands and my lips.

I loved fried chicken as much as any other child sick of the monotony of daily meals. I would beg my mother to fry an extra piece every time a customer ordered some, watching intently as she counted the pieces as she plopped them into the frying basket. Many times, I was sorely disappointed when I had counted exactly the number our customer ordered, instead of a few extra that might have been for me. She would notice the look on my face, shaking her head and replying with a no. Playfully, she would pinch my cheeks and the squishy weight on my stomach, reminding me of the few pounds I had that pushed me beyond the overweight threshold. That Lia, the one whose eyes sparkled and shined at the sight of a single piece of fried chicken, would've been absolutely ecstatic to see such a giant bowl of both chicken and fries for my consumption, hands shooting across the table with no hesitation. But not this time. Nothing ever tasted right; the salty, thick buildup of my saliva as I cried never allowed me to reminisce on the classic taste of our family fried chicken recipe. The joy of one of my favorite foods set right in front of me couldn't penetrate the overwhelming sense of bitter nostalgia and misery that came with a food tied so strongly to my mother.