It's not Mother's Day anytime soon nor my Mom's birthday, but I was reading a Facebook friend's posts about his Mom which reminded me of the book TV show "Shit my Dad says." For me, my mom is the one who has conjured very memorable stories for me, and mostly because she was not afraid to stand up to people and ask hard questions, or make demands. I wish I took more after her in that regard; I admit that I can be too meek about asking for things from other people, often shying away even if I know I'm right or not asserting my opinion or not even having the guts to ask, just rejecting myself before putting the onus on the other person to give a response. I'm sure I've lost out on valuable things in this regard, and if there's anything that my mom taught me it's not to be afraid to ask.
1.) My mom likes to argue (in my ways, she'd be the better litigator in court with her ferocity). When the bills arrived in the mail to our house back when I was a kid, my mom would rip open the envelopes and inspect the line items thoroughly to make sure the calculations were all correct. If they weren't, she'd call the customer service number for that bill (utilities, phone bill, whatever) and take a brusque tone with the customer service representative, demanding that the charges be reversed. One memorable episode ended with my mom apparently not getting her way, and half yelling and exclaiming, "You WILL reverse the charge or I'm no longer a customer!" (this is in broken English btw, my Mom has done very well to learn English as best as she could but it isn't perfect) and slammed down the phone with a click. I still remember this moment from like 1998 as if it happened today. The charges were reversed and my Mom got what she wanted. As the Korean idiom goes, "the screaming baby gets the food." I need to be the screaming baby more.
2.) Our family actually liked to go on family vacations when I was a child, probably due to the freedom that America allowed us to drive anywhere in the country (as long as you have a car) and such wide open spaces, so much room and not as many people (as China, the world's largest population). My mom got on the phone with a travel agent as part of a travel package we purchased to go to Las Vegas. She hadn't researched everything about Las Vegas yet, and the primary focus was going to the Grand Canyon, a natural phenomenon that didn't have any rivals in China......but she had a burning question about the city of Las Vegas itself: "What is the Strip?" A natural question, but one full of fear that it would be related to a strip/gentlemen's club (there are actually strip clubs on or near the Strip) and that it wasn't a family friendly environment. The word "Strip" certainly has some adult connotations, if one didn't know that it also could be used to describe a strip of land with a lot of casinos/hotels on it, as the Strip is. The lesson is, if you don't know what something is, no matter how obvious it might seem, don't be afraid to ask. Plenty of times I've chickened out asking about something more obvious, like "What is Coachella?" or "Scientology doesn't have anything to do with science?"
3.) The last story is when my sister was a baby and we still lived in suburban Chicago. On a trip to downtown Chicago (probably Chinatown, where we usually went to get groceries) we stopped somewhere near the United Center, a moderately sketchy part of the city, at a KFC or some other fast-food establishment. While waiting in line, my mom got anxious holding onto Emily in her arms, and when finally our turn came she hurriedly placed an order for chicken sandwiches (or something of the sort) and added at the end, "Hurry, my baby is hungry!" in a loud, rude-customer sort of way. It got a rousing round of "oooooohhhhhh" and "ahhhhh's" but in a bad way from the surrounding customers, one of those exclamations that happens after someone lays a diss on a victim in a group of high school friends. Except we were in a sketchy area of town, and everyone in the store except our family was African American, not exactly the best place to put someone in their place. There was an a noticeable pause after my mom made her demand, and the lady behind the counter hesitated, but ultimately didn't say anything and went on to get the order. To this day I'm not sure if she would have lashed out if my mom wasn't carrying a baby or circumstances were different, but I suspect we narrowly avoided getting a reprimand or rebuke or something that would have made a scene.
I admire my mom for having the courage to express herself even as an immigrant in a new country where she's unfamiliar with the rules, the customs, and sometimes the place names. Her aggressive tone has sometimes gotten us in a bit of trouble (we got stopped at the Canadian border), but in many cases we were better off making a strong show of force and not being walked all over by other people. Lesson learned, mom!
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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