My So-Flawed Life
Medium • San Francisco Magazine
A portrait of the artist as a tiger mother’s worst nightmare.
By Kristina Wong
I often say that the boat that brought my grandparents to America was actually the Mayflower. To me, the Puritans’ witch trials, scarlet letters, and rampant paranoia seemed none too different from growing up Chinese-American in the Inner Sunset. There was not a social infraction minor enough that it couldn’t bring down the Wong family name. Messy hair, asking for spending money (even for the essentials, like scrunchies), or speaking in public about anything less impressive than academic achievement — any one of these could single-handedly, inexplicably, disgrace our family.
As a Chinese-American teenager, I was expected to be a perfectly behaved scholar, the exemplar of three generations of advancement in San Francisco. My parents, both working professionals who held respectable nine-to-five desk jobs, were not interested in any repeat of their immigrant parents’ blue-collar struggles. I was not to be seduced by the clandestine advances of Western trash culture. I was not to daydream about sex, worry about puberty, or set my sights on anything lower than the Ivy Leagues (or, at the very least, UC Berkeley). The objectives were simple: Do your homework, get straight As, marry a bilingual Chinese doctor.
The trouble is, San Francisco was full of the very temptations that I’d been taught to believe did not exist. And I wasn’t blind to them.
At age five, having seen the Condor’s indecorous sign in North Beach, I was convinced that all white women had red lightbulbs for nipples. When we went to family banquets in Chinatown, the drive home would sometimes take us down Polk Street, where sex workers stood alone on dimly lit sidewalks. I’d sometimes catch an actual solicitation, and my father would bark from the driver’s seat, “Aiyah! Prostitutes! Don’t look, Kristina!”
When we had a lesson on sexual reproduction in the seventh grade, I devoured the information like a starving peasant. My fellow Chinese-American 12-year-olds (of which there were many at Herbert Hoover Middle School) were as freaked out as I was, gagging, squealing, and screaming in disbelief. I was not the only one who’d thought that procreation consisted of two stomachs rubbing together, followed nine months later by a stork carrying a baby. The process of sexual intercourse seemed so unbelievable: Why would you want a penis to squirt living sperm inside of you? How has our global population managed to grow through such a horrifying process?
Imagine the public high schools as the Kardashians. Now imagine Lowell High as Kim’s ass. It was the moneymaker. And I didn’t get in.
But I was a moth to a flame. In anticipation of the crimson wave that would mark my body’s dark passage to grownup-hood, I covertly collected menstrual products for years before my first period at 14. My collection was organized meticulously inside a nondescript box that was hidden inside another nondescript box under my bed, as if it held government secrets. Wings, overnight pads, no-applicator tampons, panty liners with baking powder — I was armed and ready to go. The way that women today stalk pictures of their ex on Facebook, I would open this box of pads each night and run my finger over the layers of virgin cotton. I was peering into the future, imagining a wilderness of puberty that I had no compass to navigate.