Warrior Lessons: An Asian American Woman's Journey into Power - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Phoebe Eng, a former corporate attorney who practiced in New York, Hong Kong, and Paris, is a past publisher of A. Magazine, the highly acclaimed national magazine for Asian Americans. She is a national lecturer and director of The Different Mirror, which advised the U.S. Department of Justice, the Ford Foundation, the Urban League, Fortune 500 companies, media and technology groups, and universities. An award-winning social activist, Eng was a member of the Ms. Foundation delegation to the 1995 U.N. World Conference on Women in Beijing. She participated in the creation of the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum, and served as an adviser on several Asian American task forces.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Welcome to the world of the modern Asian American woman, where the willingness to cause "trouble" -- to stir the waters, think deeply, and go against what is expected -- is the first of many steps to self-discovery and power. Now, Phoebe Eng shatters stereotypes and offers a bold new vision for American-raised daughters like herself.

A second-generation eldest daughter, caught between cultures, codes of behavior, and colliding worlds, Eng had to learn that in order to be true to herself, conflict and tough choices were necessary. But with those, she found, came a wonderful payoff: the doors to opportunity flew open.

Serving as both guide and mentor, Eng addresses the range of issues Asian American women face, including:
-- How can we deal with family expectations?
-- What is "false power" and how do we recognize it in our lives?
-- Can we trust one another?
-- How do we build healthy relationships in the face of "geisha girl" stereotypes?
-- How can we find a sense of "home"?

WARRIOR LESSONS signifies a generation and goes far beyond the limiting portrayal of what Eng calls "The Good Little Model Minority Girl". At last, here is a manual for today's woman warrior as she channels her rage and cultivates her power.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Lesson One: SHE CASTS OFF EXPECTATIONS

We know very well what it's like to live with family expectations breathing down our backs:

Get married! (and to the right man)

Have children! (meaning more than one)

Make money! (and lots of it)

Can't you be like ________? (Fill in the blank with the name of your nerd cousin, valedictorian friend, or other mother-appointed rival.)

When we don't live up to expectation, we don't need words to know. It's Asian mother telepathy. We can see it in their faces. The downcast eyes, the wistful, concerned look, the deep breath. No matter how much we try to ignore it, it still hits us hard. What do we do with the heavy burden of family honor? And do we ever escape it? Let's start with a story.

My mother and Rita were like sisters. They grew up together in Taiwan. They came to America together on a lark and found a way to stay here by enrolling in nursing school. They slept in the same bed in a cramped dorm room, head to foot, for a year. And Rita's feet stank like smelly cheese! my mother adds. They doubledated and ended up marrying two Chinese American guys who were also best friends. Their children grew up together. And when Mom and Rita hit forty-five, they shared their stories about disappointment and sometimes even depression.

After a while Rita's calls to my mother started to spin out of control. Rita would wail about whether it was worth living anymore until her gentle husband took the phone out of Rita's hard-clenched hand, apologized, and hung up. Rita said that her kids never did what she asked. She didn't know what had gone wrong. Her son was living with a hippie and smoked pot. Her daughter had two babies with her American boyfriend, didn't marry him, and left Rita to take care of her children. Rita told my mother that she had started to take Valium to calm down. And then her calls got wilder. She'd call my mother sounding drugged and crazy, again saying that her life had been worth nothing.

One spring about ten years ago, we got a call from Rita's husband, telling us that Rita had died. It seems that her nightgown had caught on fire while she was making tea, and despite her husband's desperate attempts to smother the flames that engulfed her body, Rita had burned to death. My mother and I often wonder if Rita killed herself, or was so drugged with Valium that she fell asleep on top of the stove. My mother ends the story sometimes by saying that Rita's tormented soul is really what killed her.

Rita's death showed me in a heart-wrenching way what can happen to a woman who is isolated and desperate and whose cries for help go unanswered. It showed me how our self-destructive sides can get the better of us, no matter how happy and carefree we might once have been. But for me, Rita's death carries even more of a punch. It has become for me a parable about disappointing one's Chinese parents. That is how deep expectations run. Don't live up to them and you run the risk of your parents going mad and dying of disappointment and shame.

Expectations: A key word in the Asian American coming-of-age lexicon that I have come to know so well. As the older of two daughters, I became the stand-in son that my parents never had. In those shoes, I received the windfall of their expectations and, to the detriment of my very deserving younger sister, the greater part of their attention. I also had to bear the crushing weight of their hopes. So what did I do with all that expectation? I did what any self-preserving person would do -- I tried as hard as I could to duck it.

At eighteen, I chose a college clear across the country and left my suburban New York home, ending up in the San Francisco Bay Area, home of the counterculture, hot tubs, and acid parties, the place where I pushed through some very important rites of passage and finally came of age. My choice to attend school three thousand miles away wouldn't be the first time that I would perplex my parents, and it certainly wouldn't be the last time I would disappoint them. When it became clear that I was not, in fact, going to Harvard (through no choice of my own, although filling out my application with a fat, blue Magic Marker pen probably didn't help my chances), I think they finally realized that they would have to begin to accept compromises in their American Dream daughter. So for the next twenty years, I have pushed the envelope of their willingness to compromise, pushed them to accept progressively more incomprehensible choices, like my decision to write these stories. That choice will mean having to deal with the fallout that will no doubt accompany the decision to write them as true stories, without the safety net that fiction can provide. Take it from this well-seasoned prodigal daughter: There is often nothing worse than not living up to parental expectation, and yet, when on a path to self-discovery, there is absolutely nothing better. That must be the tiger blood in me. Always stirring up trouble.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE?

"Aiyo! Ah-Phee! Why do you write those bad things? People will think you are either stupid or crazy!"

That's Mom talking, the relentless voice of reason. She has just read the past few pages and is justifiably freaking out about her daughter airing dirty laundry.

"I want to connect with women that I care about; that's why I'm writing this book, Mom." I'm trying to explain a philosophy to her that I can already feel she won't understand. It's an American idea, this truth-telling process, probably grounded in some Christian notion of absolution. To my mom, truth is pretty useless unless it helps you get ahead. She believes in images, specifically, the image of her successful lawyer daughter, and that my salary and status should pave the way to a life free of problems. Certainly free from the necessity of writing what she surely views as a scathing tell-all, like something Roseanne would write.

"We have to have the courage to talk truthfully -- to admit that we have questions and that we're fallible. Saying so can be an act of power." I'm still not getting through to her. I give her a publisher's legal waiver and ask her to sign it.

"I am trying to create a special language of activism for people like you and me who need it, and to do that requires honesty."

"Let someone else connect and do activism," she says. "You worked too hard, you have such a good resume. You're throwing it all away! Oh, and by the way, if you're really going to write this book, I hope you're not going to write bad things about me, too. Are you?"

I begin to get a sinking feeling that we are in for one of our long discussions that pits me against her. It is the same dynamic that has kicked in every time I have reached a turning point in my life, where, instead of choosing the path of least resistance she lays out before me, I choose a dusty road of questionable adventure, strewn with rocks and potholes and thieves.

I have made a life out of defying Mom. She wanted me to go to a college close to home, so I found one as far away as I possibly could. She thought that I should go straight to law school after college, so I took a backpack and went around the world on five dollars a day for two years instead. When I hit twenty-five, she thought it was a good time to settle down with a nice Chinese boy. I decided to move in with a guy from southern Italy who chain-smoked. Now I was about to defy her one more time, by leaving the legal profession, the coveted prize for a mother's job well done, so that I could join a bunch of young writers with little in their bank accounts to publish a magazine for Asian Americans. I thought it was the opportunity of a lifetime. My parents thought I had gone off the deep end.

The struggle to meet the demands of fulfilling...