The idea of accents is pretty triggering for a one-and-a-half gen like Baby Tiger. Recently, she felt the strong emotions she has kept repressed within her articulated. One was the seemingly innocuous question, “Where are you from?” which never fails to put Baby Tiger in her place, a jab at her being origin-less. Origin is our genealogy pre-America, our roots which take place overseas, a seventeen-plus-hours flight away. It is our former motherland that we waved goodbye to for opportunities on this shore. Like all true Americans, Baby Tiger was an opportunist.
In graduate school not so long ago, Baby Tiger was praised for her lack of accent by a professor who she wanted to say [insert expletive here] back to. Baby Tiger kept her cool and responded in her best impression of a high-pitched, “Oh! Thank you so much.” The irony was that he didn’t get it. He believed she should be grateful for such praise. Baby Tiger wondered what sin she’d ever committed for me to be stuck in a room with and to be taught by this fool? She was taught to be “color-blind” but it was hard on days to see herself as someone who deserved to be there: Why the hell am I being praised for my accent when I don’t see a need to praise his?, she thought.
When Baby Tiger was the saddest, she’d blast Judy Collins singing Amazing Grace at max volume on a loop and lose herself in weeping. The days she was sad far outnumbered the days when she was not. She struggled to be accepted as an American even when she was born one, no matter her accomplishments and how truly sincerely she believed in American values. The professor slept as usual while Baby Tiger stayed up; she remains troubled to this day. She cannot find home if home is defined as a place where she would score brownie points for her assimilation, which posits me as the “other.” She cannot find home if the only place where she belonged was an ethnic enclave. Maybe what she needed to do was to adjust her expectations and be grateful to be safe with people who looked just like her, who won’t push her off the tracks for that reason. That idea was antithetical to the America Baby Tiger have once dreamed of.
Welcome to adulthood, Baby Tiger, I quipped, on being raised by a Tiger Parent on steroids. She told me to shut up and jump in a lake.
For the group Society calls Asian-Americans, usually in reference to there being “too many of us”, as if we’re some cheap overstocked, disposable goods, this assimilation is conceived of by our Masters as a form of betrayal, from the loss of language and culture which accompanies migration. Baby Tiger’s very being is revolting, proof that if they only worked hard enough, they could achieve fluency in the English language. That’s why pundits thought it necessary to bash the parents of Peter Wang for grieving separately from the English-speaking parents of the Parkland shooting. The common comment come in the form of scorn: Why can’t they learn English if they’ve been here for so long? I’ve learned English in less years. Baby Tiger hears Laufey’s “blah blah blah” in these people who makes her physically gag.
Baby Tiger reacts both to the White man as well as to her Master and the Community, who tell her to: “Speak Chinese, oh my god.” “Why are you so lazy?,” they ask, as Baby Tiger slumped on the chair and leaned on Master’s shoulders, sitting next to him and telling him, “I am so tired,” giving him a big hug as he pushed her away.
That scene of rise, shine, and drop back to sleep is a recurring bit that replays itself each day while the metronome of the model minority myth beats on. Its flip side is that her failure is deserved and self-wrought. It is a distraction every time when Baby Tiger scans a space on alert to see whether she would be the token spokesperson without the privilege to say [insert expletive here] the way a White Lady might approach her again at public events to tell her how awful she looked. That scene replayed itself again and again in her nightmares.
Why couldn’t have Baby Tiger stopped this sooner, I ask. Baby Tiger never responded to such questions but we both know that had the roles been reversed, Baby Tiger would have been physically restrained. To verbalize this frustration, this petty inconvenience, is “boring” much as people don’t care about how Baby Tiger’s Chinese has a regional accent, only that she has yellow skin, black hair and brown eyes. It is convenient to be categorizable, it is marketable, and it makes one look “smart” the way folks who don’t read have a lot of generalizations or high-minded theories that blow empty in the wind.
Baby Tiger is constantly goaded to perform better, faster, and smile wider in deep appreciation of this born privilege. This privilege that Master never fails to remind her that he does not have.
And so today, this idea of accents, even after Baby Tiger had gotten out of the double bind maze sent her down a spiral as she wondered whether a grandchild can indeed have an accent, one that is a “foreign” instead of the “regional” Fred Armisen demonstrated accent. It takes privilege to delight in dappled beauty and to believe in salvation. It takes privilege to look in a mirror and not be disgusted by who you see and not want to wipe all that privilege away with the tears that come out. Asian kids are not supposed to cry.
Yesterday, Baby Tiger studied how sexual harassment was a vehicle of power rather than the result of desire. It taught the victim that nothing will change, no matter what you do. In the stiffness of the law which called for severity or pervasiveness, the central question would be: If it is so in fact so hostile as to be unbearable, why did you endure it for so long? In thinking about the stainless steel pillars of American society, the same fallacious argument of if it is so hard to endure, why did you endure for so long applies. The answer is probably less that the system is perfect but that Baby Tiger is breaking apart. We are breaking apart.
Now, when Baby Tiger sat in the tub to take in her sadness, she thought of the fracture of the diasporic self as a casualty of a society that casually demeans her each day, chipping at her heart that beats to a Yankee doodle. Until she resorted to the same tricks pulled by those clowns she despised because her ambitious Master beat her to a pulp to tell us she was a Nobody, that she should go lay down and die, and who is he except for being physically intimidating. In her illness for being perennial disappointments, nobodys, and sickos, she has told Master repeatedly what she don’t mean. She tells Master, in the same innocuous tone laced with scorn as the professor who praised her used, that he can’t even speak good English. Her shame filled the tub and filled her skin with hives. Through her tears she thought of how very Asian her diligence is, in being parachuted to this or that other place to conquer the quests for our Uncle Sams, who are constantly scrutinizing us to chastise her for each minor mistake that she made and will make, in the name of tough love.
She gets up, dries herself with a towel, and lies down. She thinks that in her next life she didn’t want to be a Tiger but a White-Nosed Cat which in Mama’s retelling just lays there all day for mice to approach, thinking the nose is a grain of rice. Then chump, yum, and rinse and repeat. A life of total ease, naps, bright sun, and plenty of sleep. Mama has forgotten this retelling of the story, of course, and even Baby Tiger’s retelling of Mama’s retelling to her, twice. Baby Tiger would like to say that she did not blame her, except she does. It’s like her ingrown toe that had festered with ooze without Baby Tiger noticing. Or Baby Tiger, who had grown up before Mama who was too busy with work had a chance to remember to call her.
Baby Tiger will call her later tonight, if she finds the time to. If so, she’d listen to Mama talk while Mama watches the TV on mute. Master, who tells Baby Tiger that the home is where the root is, would remind Baby Tiger to call Mama. He would also tell her that she does not deserve to have a home as she limped with her toe, trying to endure the pain until she sees the Doctor, who pulled up Google on his desktop to show how an ingrown toe can be treated with a big smile. In her next life, Baby Tiger hopes to have a home she can call her own.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote, and Co-Editor of Matter.
The Marbled Sigh 