Listen to the Squawking Chicken: When Mother Knows Best, What's a Daughter To Do? A Memoir (Sort Of) by Elaine Lui Page B

Hong Kong carried around on her victory lap. I worked on my smile in the mirror, hoping to achieve a combination of sweetness and whatever my idea of intrigue was at the time.
    My biggest concern in previous years had been the question-and-answer section. I worried that my Chinese answers wouldn’t be good enough, since English was my first language and I couldn’t read or write in Chinese. But Joyce took care of that. Joyce’s Chinese wasn’t great either, and all the aunties talked about how this was an advantage because being a foreign-raised candidate was considered exotic.
    That afternoon, Ma’s sister was on her way to get her hair done. Ma wanted me out of the way for a while so she toldme to tag along. One of the other stylists at the salon had extra time and ended up curling my hair into ringlets, just like Joyce Godenzi (sort of). When we returned to Grandmother’s, all the mah-jong aunties, and Grandmother too, went bananas over how pretty I looked. They said I was so pretty, I could enter the Miss Hong Kong pageant in a few years. This made my life . . . for about thirty seconds. Until the Squawking Chicken weighed in: “You’re not pretty enough to be Miss Hong Kong.
I
could have been Miss Hong Kong. But Miss Hong Kong is a whore.”
    It’s true. Ma was a first-class beauty. I’ve seen the photos—because she shows them to me all the time. While I do resemble her, I’m also half my father, and she reminds me of this all the time too. “It’s too bad you got your stocky body and thick legs from your dad’s side.”
    All the aunties reacted like you’re probably reacting right now. How could she say that to a little girl? Let her dream. But for Ma, dreaming was the problem. “Dream? Stop putting dreams in her head. You think I bust my ass raising a daughter just so she could be a beauty pageant whore?”
    Most people in Hong Kong believe that the Hong Kong entertainment system is corrupt. And many people believed that Miss Hong Kongs were just glorified escorts for the rich old men who ran the industry. The following year a public uproar broke out when the winner was revealed tobe someone people considered inadequate (she was pretty average-looking and short), and their suspicions seemed to be confirmed when she started dating the geriatric chairman of the network.
    So it’s not that Ma meant to be cruel when she told me that I could never be Miss Hong Kong. She had her reasons. First, obviously, she didn’t want me sleeping my way to success. But being “beautiful” also wasn’t an attribute she considered to be important in my case. Or, for that matter, all that useful. From her personal experience, beauty, her beauty, didn’t fix anything and it didn’t make anything either. In Ma’s mind, being beautiful only caused her to be exploited by her parents, and their neglect caused her to be violated as a young girl, and, later, resulted in her being dependent on men—first my father and then my stepfather.
    I met him for the first time when Ma finally sent for me to spend the summer with her in Hong Kong a year after she and Dad broke up. I was seven. By this point, I was afraid to leave Dad. I was afraid to get on the plane by myself as an Unaccompanied Minor. But I was more afraid of who I would encounter on the other side.
    A gorgeous young woman met me in the airport arrivals area. Her hair was parted in the middle, hanging down each shoulder, held back by jeweled clips on either side. This was not the tired, harried woman who worked two jobs that Iremembered. She lifted a multi-ring adorned hand. And her long red nails beckoned me forward. A glimmer of recognition. And then . . . the voice. “ELAINE!” The Squawking Chicken. My mother. I was claimed. “This is Uncle.”

     
    Ma introduced me to an older man standing next to her with benevolent eyes and a goofy expression. He had no hair and wore glasses. He was tall, taller than Dad, with a soft belly and a round face, the