Don't Smile So Big

For as long as I can remember, I've had a love hate relationship with smiling.  I was a thumb sucker until the sixth grade, a few months into having braces, so for most of my life, there was an obvious overbite in my smile.  My mom reminded me of this fact often when she told me to smile with my mouth closed.  Smile less.  Keep those gums hidden.

When we were kids, the dessert slices of oranges at Chinese restaurants were used to stick into our mouth to make alternative "orange slice smiles."  It was hilarious because the slices fit perfectly, wedged into our mouth, the orange peel took the place of our teeth and gums!  My cousins and I would always shove orange slices into our entire mouth as our parents yelled as us to stop, mainly because our mouth might permanently become large.  To this day, my mom will remind me that had I been a more obedient Chinese daughter and avoided stuffing oranges into my mouth, I'd likely have a smaller and more delightful smile.

In the second grade... I kept my mouth closed for the school photos, resulting in a weird asian Wednesday Adams death stare.  The pigtails and the collar didn't help either.  Where were my big bangs and big bows?  I hate that photo so much.  I'm the awkward asian girl not smiling because her mom told her not to.  When I came home with this photo, she clarified that she meant I should just smile with my mouth closed, not close my mouth and not smile.  It's confusing... I know. 

The relationship with smiling became more complicated once I got braces.  Braces involve miniature metal boxes glued onto your teeth then connected through a wire.  Besides the constant sores and food stuck between your teeth, there was also the added space that now made it harder for your mouth to sit comfortably over the metal bulge.  My pre-existing overbite combined with the brace face made for a big mouth.  I was reminded of this constantly from my mom, who told me to laugh a little lighter, smile a little smaller, and basically, hide that huge brace face from the rest of the world for fear of scaring them off.

As a an impressionable 11 year old, it was hard to be laughing one moment and then hear my mom yelling to tone it down and close that big mouth of braces.  I felt like she was embarrassed for me. She seemed to cringe when I opened my mouth too large.  My gums were too big.  My smile was too gross.  My laugh too much.   

I felt isolated.  Not only was the pain of each monthly tightening so physically tormenting, but the random reminders that beauty was pain flew in through periodic canker sores created by the wire ends that were not properly cut off by the orthodontist.  No scars were ever left, in fact I don't think there are any remnants of braces leftover in my mouth today, but the painful memories of bloody canker sores that resided in the insides of my cheeks made my mouth a temporarily permanent living hell.  The head gear, though only required at night, was even worse.  The metal device confined me to a painful existence of expediting that overbite by pulling my teeth in towards me, as hard and as tight as possible.  It was so incredible painful, that most nights I'd go to sleep with it on only to then slip it off in the middle of the night.  At monthly appointments, I'd perfect the art of lying when my orthodontist asked if I was using it correctly.  I'd respond with an innocent and obedient nod and a harmless assertion that I indeed was, sometimes I'd even ask questions about if I was doing it correctly to over emphasize that I was indeed using it.  Often, I'd hear affirmations such as, "looks like that head gear is working!" - accolades I'd snicker but gracefully collect, month after month, until one day, the orthodontist said I could stop wearing my head gear.  What a sucker. I remember thinking about my orthodontist, the man I'd grow to hate for everything he represented on a monthly basis (seriously, does anyone like their orthodontist or dentist?...)  

On top of the pain... there was the recommendation to stop smiling.  Combined, it was overbearingly awful. 

I was fairly confident that my moms reminders to stop smiling meant I was ugly.  What else could it mean?  Well technically I was beautiful, just not when I smiled so big or so much.  

In middle school, still brace faced, and still insecure about my smile, I came home with a school picture of myself with a dark brown lipstick (that was cool then) and..... *gasp... a smile.  My hair was down and to the side, and I thought it was a great photo.  I showed the picture to my mom proudly, and she told me, as a matter of factly, "You should have smiled less." 

I looked at the photo over and over.  I analyzed my smile.  I thought about her words.  Slowly, I began to agree with her.  What was wrong with my goofy clown smile?!  Why did I smile so big? 

I started to obsess in front of a mirror.  I'd smile, look at my smile with content approval, and then, I'd smile, take the mirror away, go back in front of the mirror, and see if the smile stayed.  Once I was advanced at this, I'd try smiling without a mirror first, then get a mirror in front of me and see what the smile looked like.  I practiced over and over, trying to memorize the muscles used to smile when it looked okay, and when it looked too big.  I had to make sure I had a good smile.  I found that the less I smiled, but just sort of opened my mouth, the better it seemed to look.  

When retakes were offered, I immediately signed up.  This time, I would utilize the practice I had painfully subjected myself to for hours.  

The result was a weird open mouth non-smile picture.  

Defeated, I hid all the photos ordered and didn't pass any of them out.  When the yearbook came out at the end of the year, they had used the original wide mouth smile and embarrassed, I ripped out the picture of me out.  I was mortified by my own bad photo and sorely disappointed that my smiling practice hadn't worked.

When my mom asked to see my yearbook, and saw a photo ripped out, she flipped.  She did not teach me to be insecure and hate myself (or did she?)  In a fit of rage, she ripped my entire yearbook, screaming that if I couldn't handle one bad photo of myself, what would the rest of my life be like?  And if I decided I could rip out my own photo, then I didn't deserve a yearbook at all.  I sometimes wonder if she enjoyed shredding my yearbook with her bare hands.  It sure seemed like it at the time.  I was stunned... and felt like I had brought this torment upon myself.  

I did not get spanked.  I did not get grounded.  I just did not have a yearbook commemorating the year.  

When seventh grade finished, I was sure of one thing... not to smile too big.  

And then drill team try outs for captain began.  I absolutely LOVED the drill team.  I was a drilling machine, and to this day, I can still do the try-out routine perfectly, as well as my captain tryout routine.  My friends who had been in local drill team competitions in neighboring cities, helped me with my tryout routine, and since they had been local champions two years in a row, the drills they helped me perfect were quite spectacular, unlike anything our own team had seen before.  

But when tryouts came around, I did not smile.  I launched the static smile I had been working on to fulfill my mother's requests of not smiling too big.  My braces did not want to shine, they wanted to be peeked at slightly, so I made sure my smile was small but present.  Throughout the tryouts, the former captains kept shooting back at me these weird and almost uncomfortable, but surprisingly large smiles, as if to convey I should mirror them back.  I refused.  I knew a large smile would be too much, my mother had made this minor detail quite clear to me over the past few years. And frankly, I wasn't brave enough to defy my mother again... I'd seen the consequences of self hating my own photo, this was the only way to redeem myself.   

Despite having one of the best tryout routines, I did not make captain.  I was one of six line leaders, and I was frankly, a bit surprised.  Everyone knew that the best routines made captain, and I was one of the best drill team members with the best routine.  While everyone else did repeated iterations of the existing parade routine, I had amazing new moves (copied from my champion drill friends, but nobody knew that...) and I hadn't made a single error.  I had even seen some of the routines the other girls had prepared, and none of them were anywhere close to the technical difficulty of my drill routine.  

Something clicked inside me that day.  I was mad, sad... and then I was rejuvenated with a newfound understanding and power in the form of knowing.  I suddenly understood that my mom was not always right, and that she had in fact, unintentionally sabotaged my try outs.  All of a sudden, the awkward smiles the leaders watching my try out kept shooting at me, made perfect sense.  Of course they would want someone confident with both drill team moves AND a smile!  What was I thinking?!  From that day forth, I have smiled as big and loud and as proud as ever.  And I have never stopped.  

I smiled my way to multiple dance teams, ones that I may not have technically be qualified for, but heck if I wasn't going to try.  If I didn't make a team, it wasn't going to be because I didn't smile, it was going to be because I messed up a turn or a leap or didn't have a great routine. And I kept on smiling, even when my mom whispered it may have been a little too much.  No Mom!  You do NOT get to dictate my smiles anymore!!!

Sadly, I did not learn this lesson in time for my eighth grade photos.  Everytime I saw my yearbook photo, I was reminded of the stoic face I had throughout my entire tryout routine.  Ugh.

On the day of my wedding, if you listened closely to the sounds of frantic excitement and happiness, you could hear my mom reminding me not to smile too big.  "Zuǐbā bu yào zhāng nàme dà! (don't make your mouth so big!) When she saw some of the professional photos from the wedding afterward, she made some comments about this photo my mouth was too big, and that photo - oh, what a big mouth you have.

Ignore and smile, bigger if possible, sometimes to irritate her even more.

Sure, it took me 13 years, but that epiphany of mother not always being right, has never left me. Knowing that has helped me smile larger and prouder than ever before, from every moment after that, regardless of what my mom might say.

Double Eyelids

Plastic surgery is not a big deal in the Asian culture.  In fact, double eyelid surgery is one of the most common surgeries Asians undergo in an attempt to have bigger eyes.  Ask any white person what it means to have “double eyelids” and you’ll get a blank stare.  Ask any Asian person what it means to have “double eyelids” and they will tell you it is great, it is lucky, it is beauty!

All my life, I heard how unfortunate I was to have fallen into the category of single eyelid Asian.  Not as pretty, not as lucky, not as privileged as those with the big crease in their lid Asians.  I had one girl cousin growing up and she had some fat double eyelids.  I would hear, well she has double eyelids, you have long legs.  You got the consolation prize of long legs but she got the double eyelids.  But hey, you can’t get surgery to make your legs long, you can get surgery to make your eyes big! Yeah, they never said that but I’m sure that’s what they were thinking. 

For as long as I can remember, my aunt was going to “gift” me double eyelids as part of my high school graduation celebration.  This way, my eyes would be double by the time I got to college and nobody would remember from high school and nobody would know from college.  Except anytime I see an Asian girl walk by with fake double eyelids, I can spot ‘em like fake tits at a girls’ neck that have not yet fallen with gravity.  I just know they’re not real.  Most of the time, the crease is made so high above the eye that the cut is just poorly done and only camaflouged with some serious eye make-up.  It’s sort of like boob jobs, nobody goes in to get boob implants that are small A’s or even B’s – go big or go home!  So nobody really goes in to get their eyelid surgery asking for a smaller thinner, less obvious lid.  And the lengths we will go to sport a double eyelid if we do not already have one! 

In 1996, my freshman year of high school, someone mentioned something about tape to create a double eyelid in math class.  I was intrigued, and then I was hooked.  There was no going back.  I had to know more.  I had to get myself some.  This was too good to be true.  My best friend had heard the same thing.  So we both asked around – who said it first?  Who used it first?  Does it actually work?  And what kind of tape was it?  How did you cut it?  How long did it last?  Did it really work?!

A bunch of older sophomore girls had experience with the so called tape.  They let us in on the secret.  It was so simple.  Why hadn’t we thought of it first?! 

Scotch. Freaking. Tape.  It was uncomfortable.  It was itchy.  It was probably not sanitary.  It was a temporary solution.  But let me be the first to tell you, it was incredible, extraordinary, and absolutely amazing!!!

I remember the first time I busted out a pair of scissors to cut out a small rectangle just the perfect width of my eye, with enough height to create a fake fold in my eyelid.  It took a few tries, but once I snuggled the tape onto my eyelid right at the base above my eyelashes, it was incredible.  Well, as long as I kept my eye open – it was incredible!  Big eyes!  Round eye!  Like white people!  So so beautiful.  I stood in front of the mirror on my closet door perfecting the cut of tape.  I still remember the little shreds of tape I practiced cutting that sat on the edge of the mirror as I attempted, one after another, to find the perfect one that would fit on my lid, stay in my lid when my eyes open, and hopefully not poke out too much when I closed my eye.  Most of the time, I’d blink and the tape would fold outward… with extended wear, the tape would start to wear off and it’d come off at the ends and I’d have an awkwardly hangnail of a scotch tape on my eye.  I tried not to blink often.  If only I could just keep my eyes open longer.  People would politely tell me that I had some tape on my eye.  Not immediately though, after staring closely at my eyes everytime I blinked because of the shine that would catch from the scotch tape. 

“There’s something on your eye.” 

“Wait, is that TAPE on your eye?”  The questions were always asked disbelievingly so. 

As if I had stepped into an asylum with a diagnosis of “wanting to be too white and have larger round eyes.” 

But guess who got the last laugh?  A few months into taping my eyes (yes, I did it every morning, and sometimes I redid it during the afternoon… it was high school after all), a natural super thin crease found its way to my eye all on its own.  I remember blinking in disbelief, looking at my own reflection of a double eyelid thinking – maybe I won’t need the eyelid surgery after graduation after all!  I took special care and made sure to wash my face gently as to not disturb the lid fold, in fear it would disappear on me if I washed too hard.  I felt good about the fact that I wouldn’t have to go under the knife.  I mean, it was a routine surgery, completely normal and almost expected.. but it was still surgery after all! Girls I knew would go to Taiwan for a quick trip and come back with some huge eyelids and some professional photos (more on that later too)!  Sometimes, girls would say it was because their eyes were too small and it was corrective, not cosmetic surgery.  Kind of like how white girls who get nose jobs blame it on a deviated septum. Every. Single. Time.  Whatever.  They looked good, especially with make-up on.  They made eyelid surgery very tempting except now I had one lid fold and only had to tape the other… so, how would the surgery work? 

            When my dad and mom caught on to my newfound love of scotch tape cut into little rectangles that sat atop my eyelids, they told me that I could get precut tape from Taiwan easily. 

            And they were holding this coveted information from me for how long?!  For almost sixteen years, they said nothing of the sort to me at all!  There was no mention of this incredible magical “tape” that was already PRECUT!  I was absolutely floored.  I couldn’t wait to get my hands on some.  I had all my friends who visited Taiwan annually get me some, I told my aunts and uncles who lived overseas to bring me back some in the summer, and I bought enough to last me a lifetime the summer of 2002.  Yes, I used tape from 1996 to 2002 and some….   

            The legit precut Taiwan eye tape was just as obvious as my DIY-Scotch tape version, only it was less itchy and because it was precut, I started to get creative with putting black eyeliner on it before taping it onto my lids.  But still, every time I blinked, this huge black thing would stick out of my eye, making people think I had some weird thing on my eye.  Except the other Asian girls who did the same thing, they always understood and silently approved and fist bumped me in the air every time we walked by each other. 

            My best friend was one of these so called Asian gals.  We couldn’t get enough of taping our eyes.  It was free plastic surgery with no pain (the itchiness that came with the tape grew on us and we honestly never felt any pain from the rough edges of the tape when we used the tape dispenser’s knife). 

            And then one magical day, a few years into our college years, our eyelid lives got even better when I stumbled across … eye glue! 

            It was absolutely transforming.  We went from taping our eyelids everyday to gluing our eyelids everyday.  The packaging was direct from Japan, land of more Asians probably taping their eyes – but since Japan was on the verge of all fashion outbreaks even before Taiwan, they already had eye glue!

            The bottle looked just like a mascara bottle.  Only there was a funky little rake that came on top of the lid (this would be used to rake the eyelid into a double lid once the glue was applied).  Inside, it was glue – think eyelash glue, with a little brush that could be used to apply it softly across your lids.  Then, you’d utilize the rake to fold your eyelid in  and boom – you had double eyelids! 

            The downside to eyelid glue was that it was glue.  Glue is sticky.  Glue is unforgiving.  Mess up your fold and your eyelids would become victim to harsh rubbing and prying to rid the eyelid of the glue which would do its job and guess what?  Stick on!  Sometimes eyelashes were sacrificed.  Other times the folds were done too drastic and the eye would be WAY TOO BIG due to a humongous eyelid fold.  Most of the times though, it was absolutely wonderful. 

            Grace and I used eye glue everyday on our one lone eye without lids (she also had one lid miraculously show up after using eye tape for a few months).  We confessed to each other that we weren’t sure how this would play out once we had a serious boyfriend.  Would we let them in on the fact that one of our eyes was *gasp … a single eyelid?!  Or would we always make sure our eyelids were glued, even after marriage – we’d wake up in the morning and glue our eyelids before our husbands saw our heaven forbid – single eyelids?!   

And then a funny thing happened in my 20’s.  The left eyelid, the one I glued everyday.. it became more permanent after each gluing session and slowly, I had hope that it might one day become permanent!  I’d glue my eyelid every morning for a week, and sometimes, it’d still be there in the morning at the end of a long week.  I’d go by months before waking up to an eyelid that didn’t disappear.  But these few instances of a double eyelid on its own gave me hope.  Maybe I could get one without glue one day!  In the meantime, I kept at the eye glue.  Every single day.  I never work make-up religiously, but my eye glue?  I wouldn’t go out without it.  I even carried a little bottle with me in case I had to wash my face and the glue off and would need to reapply.  And with time, it slowly became more prominent of a lid without glue. Instead of months between an eyelid that stuck around in the morning, it’d become weeks, then days… and then one day, it just stuck around.  

they may be small folds, but they be folds regardless

I Wanted to Be White

For as long as I can remember, I've wanted to be white.  I blame much of that on my own ignorance and assumptions based on watching TV and just the lack of Asians in the media.  I can recall the moment I watched Boy Meets World and an asian girl was on the show.  I'd later find out she was actually half, but even that was sufficient for me.  My best friends all felt the same.  She was the most beautiful Asian girl we had ever seen.  To this day, she's the only true celebrity I follow on Instagram and I still absolutely adore her (it's Lindsay Price for inquiring minds, she'd later go onto Beverly Hills 90210 also).

I think part of the desire to be white rang even louder for me because I was so Chinese in every sense.  I learned Chinese as my first language, we watched Chinese soap operas and sitcoms at home, and we ate Chinese food every single night.  My immigrant parents had moved us from St. Louis to the suburbs of Los Angeles in an effort to be with more like-minded, black hair, brown eyed, Chinese peoples.  Even when we ate out, it was mostly at a Chinese restaurant, where they cooked fancier stuff like lobster noodles, crabs, and fried dim sum or other delicacies that my own mom would not waste her time in the kitchen on.  Looking into the white person's world was so foreign to me.  The only taste I'd get was an occasional spaghetti from Bob's Big Boy or a hamburger from McDonald's.  It wouldn't be until I was older that we'd go to an American restaurant (or non-Chinese) every Friday as a family to venture out into the world of food from other cultures.

The other thing was white people seemed to do fun stuff like go to the beach or amusement parks or camping or cabins for the weekend with their families all the time.  My parents definitely took us out a lot on the weekends, but we did a lot of swap meets, malls, and a few parks here and there.  They took me to Disneyland when I was about 2, and we took my brother and cousins once when I was in the sixth grade.  I don't think my own kids can count the number of times we've taken them, but it's not because my parents didn't care, they just didn't find it as fun as we do now.  It was always kind of a drag for them, they still did it though, and later as we grew older, they'd always willingly chauffeur 45 minutes times four to shuttle us to Six Flags or Disneyland with our friends.  We ventured to the beach a few times with family growing up on vacation, but it wasn't a weekend thing, more like a special occasion thing.  The first time I went camping was with Andy after we were married.

I get it, it's expensive and a lot of work, and to be honest, none of it is truly associated with the fact that my parents weren't really American, it was probably more of a do we have enough money to do that or they didn't think it was as important as us doing piano, dance and taekwondo lessons, but as a kid, I just assumed it was because those were American past times that we weren't accustomed to.  It didn't help that my other immigrant children friends all had similar experiences.

Luckily, as I've grown up, matured, and gained new perspective on my childhood as an immigrant child, I've come to appreciate and be grateful for the different experiences.  Despite not loving Chinese school every weekend for 3 hours, I'm glad I speak pretty good basic Mandarin and can communicate in secrecy with other Mandarin speakers as I choose.  I'm grateful for my open and inviting palate and love for different textures, trained by weekends of odd dim sum delicacies like pig's blood, pig's ear, chicken's feet, and stomach lining.  I'm grateful for the way my parents pushed me to excel, even if it was by traditional Chinese means.  I wonder what it would have been like to do a sport growing up.  Or to not get grounded and spanked for getting a C in PE in the seventh grade.  Or to have parents who might say, "grades aren't everything."  But really, it's not so bad.

I still sometimes want blonde hair and blue eyes.  But there's hair dye and colored contacts that can solve that.  In the meantime, I'm grateful for my black eyes and brown hair, but moreover, for my Chinese culture and experiences.  And for my love of fried intestines.  I was a bit in shock when I realized they were actual intestines, growing up I always used the Chinese name and never really thought to translate to English.  I didn't know what actual intestines (in Chinese did), but when I connected the two.. I was a tad bit grossed out by it.  Really I was just sickened by the raw white ones we grilled at an AYCE BBQ with my Asian friends, the fried ones already cut thinly and eaten with salt?  Awesome still!!

Typical Chinese Mom

I've been trying really hard to lose the baby weight I gained from having three kids.  I finally made some progress, took a photo of my backside (in a kind of loose shirt so the mushroom top didn't look so bad), and sent it to my mom in anticipation of some praise.

She called me back.  This was it.  I was going to hear how awesome I had been.  I had thought about cropping my face out of the image (I did a selfie with the mirror in the back), but the lighting was bad anyway - she'd hopefully ignore it.

"You look skinny!  But what is going on with your face?  You look tired.  You can't just be skinny and not take care of your skin.  Skin is very important.  Have you been using the masks I got you every night?  You look so much older!"

.   ...

.....

I told her I was really busy and I had to go.  Thirty three years of this, and I have learned not to get mad.

"Oh, don't get mad," she told me.  "You just need to taking better care of your skin!"

.....

...
.

.....
...

And that is my typical Chinese mom.

There you go.

First Excerpt from Chinese-American or Something Like That...

I'm so excited to share an excerpt from what I have been working on since 2004.  No joke, for my college senior thesis, I wrote about what it was like growing up ABC (American born Chinese).  It's changed a lot along the way and I haven't really focused on it until 2012... but this year, my goal is to actually finish it so here's one excerpt.  Enjoy!

Chinese-American.  Is that what I actually am?  I’ve always felt like a foreigner.  To the white man, I’m just an Asian girl.  To the true Asians abroad, I’m just an ABC (American-born Chinese).  I love the USA.  I also love my Chinese heritage.  I speak English.  I speak Mandarin.  I speak Chinglish.  I’m really just sort of lost somewhere between American and Chinese.

In reality, I am part of a small minority of immigrant children who think they can speak Chinese fluently and eat all the food from Taiwan or China, only to venture to Taiwan or China and find out I’m too dark, too thick, have an American accent, and my weak stomach can’t actually handle any authentic Taiwanese street food.  Lost somewhere between generations and cultures, learning along the way what it actually means to be American, my life has been filled with struggles to figure it out. 

I remember it took some time for me to fully realize we just didn’t celebrate American holidays the same.  I remember learning about how the Indians and Pilgrims would celebrate that first Thanksgiving together and how the tradition of elaborate Thanksgiving meals complete with corn, mashed potatoes, gravy, turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce would make everyone giddy with excitement.  I remember spending weeks on end during our designated craft time at school carefully using a pencil to stick brown tissue paper all over a newspaper filled paper bag to make a grand master turkey centerpiece.  I remember taking it home to my mom, telling her it was supposed to be a used for our Thanksgiving dinner, and then coming home one day and finding out she had thrown it away because it took up space.  I remember another elaborate craft project tying red and green tissue paper around a wire hanger that we had molded into a circle to make a red and green and very festive wreath for our front door.  I remember the excitement of bringing it home to my mom who told me our door didn’t have any means to hang anything on it.  I remember never writing letters to Santa Claus.   I remember opening one present from my parents on Christmas Eve because there was no such thing as waking up early on Christmas morning.  

Part of me vowed never to throw away my kids’ art projects, but mostly, it didn’t matter much.  We might not have celebrated Thanksgiving or Christmas the way white people did on the television, but we always had family, all our cousins, lots of mah-jong, and lots of Chinese food.

I think it’s funny to look back at the things I missed out on because my parents were immigrants but also fun to think about the unique experiences I did have because of that.

While American mothers were teaching their kids how to make chocolate chip cookies, I was rolling glutinous rice balls for our red bean soup.  While American mothers were making baked goods for the school fundraisers, we were taking a trip to the American super market (a rare occurrence) to buy some already baked goods to donate. While American mothers were taking their daughters to brownies and girl scout meetings and activities and AYSO soccer practice, my mother was scheduling my private tutoring sessions, speed reading classes, piano lessons, Chinese school, and dance lessons.  While American mothers were planning grand Thanksgiving dinners with stuffing inside the turkey, we were stuffing our turkeys with Chinese sticky rice (which btw is way better than stuffing).   

There were just a lot of things my mother didn’t care to adapt to when it came to the American culture.  She never said I couldn’t do what the white kids were doing, she just didn’t bring it up if I didn’t.  And because she didn’t really understand the American pop culture of the time, we were essentially fresh off the boat (“FOBs”).  I looked like I was a byproduct of Taiwan, not America.  My mom dressed me in shirts with awkward improper English phrases (I can being your friend too!), and blouses and skirts adorned with unfamiliar Chinese cartoon characters.  My mom put my hair in pigtails with big fluffy balls instead of neon shoelaces and anything of American trend in the 80’s.  I didn’t have big hair or big bangs, I had straight black hair that was flat, never crimped or curled.  And yet I had a fantastic childhood… one filled with Chinese expectations and American struggles, but fantastic nevertheless.