Elaine Lui’s mother was a teenager when she was raped on her way home from work. She was so ashamed that she tried to kill herself by taking an overdose of pills. It was while she was hovering in that mental fog between life and death that she heard her parents debate whether they should take her to the hospital.
If they helped her live, they argued, then the family’s secrets — her father’s “alcohol-fuelled mah-jong benders”, her mother’s affair and subsequent abortion, the all-night gambling sessions that left them in debt — would be revealed. It was better, they decided, to let their daughter, and the secrets, die.
And that’s when the Squawking Chicken came to life. After forcing herself to throw up the pills, Lui’s mother started to yell, and yell and yell, as if her soul was finally bursting out after years of suppression. She was determined that from that day forward, she would always be heard.
“You can’t imagine that something so loud can come out so effortlessly and without warning,” Lui writes in the opening chapters of Listen to The Squawking Chicken, her deeply insightful book about her relationship with her mother. “The Squawking Chicken doesn’t give you time to acclimate to her decibel. It’s one level, and it’s all-out assault. But it’s also the tone — sharp, edged and quick, not so much a booming roar that leaves silence after it lands, but a wailing siren that invades your mind, kind of like acid on the brain that results in permanent scarring.”
Without that story being told so early in the book, Ma would have seemed like an annoyingly interfering, bossy, rude and insensitive woman. She is indeed all of those things — and then some — but Lui does for her readers what her mother did for her — she explains why her mother behaves the way she does.
It’s by revealing these truths, and understanding their importance, that Lui transforms what could have been a Mommy Dearest memoir into a Psychology 101 credit course.
“I don’t harbour any bitterness,” Lui says in a telephone interview a few days before the book’s April 1 release. “Everything she did for me and at me and to me came from a place of love. You feel the sting [of her words] but she never let that grow into a wound. Her intention was to sting but she always backed it up with reasons.”
For instance, Lui’s television fans — she’s a host on CTV’s eTalk and The Social — would disagree with her mother’s assessment that Lui wasn’t pretty enough to be Miss Hong Kong. “It’s too bad you got your stocky body and thick legs from your dad’s side,” her mother told the 10-year-old Elaine in front of Elaine’s horrified aunties. Why not let the girl dream, the aunties protested.
But her mother knew that looks were not what was going to get Elaine ahead in life. It’s not just that Elaine’s mother’s beauty had not ensured her happiness; pageant winners had a reputation for being “glorified escorts for the rich old men who ran the [entertainment] industry.”
Ma felt it was her job to be tough with Elaine. After all, that’s what the monk had written when he was presented with Elaine as a baby. Yem Gah Goon Gao (Strict Family Control Teach), he told them.
Whether it was a self-fulfilling prophecy or not, it worked. “I believe my mother developed her methods, philosophy and approach based on an understanding of who I was and what I needed,” says Lui, whose Lainey Gossop blog has made her one of the most respected voices in the celebrity gossip industry.
“I can’t separate what I want from what she wanted for me.”
There are generations of adults who’ve spent hours on a psychiatrist’s couch trying to come to peace with their parents’ behaviour. Many others have not been able to make the mental leap that allows them to see their parents as flawed human beings struggling to cope with the challenges that life throws at them, and their own scars from childhood.
Apart from never forgiving her parents for having sex in the same room (they thought she was asleep if that’s any consolation), Lui has confronted and accepted the reasons behind her parents’ actions. She allows herself an emotional detachment; their story is not seen only through the prism of how it has affected her.
As a result, even though as a child she was justifiably angry, hurt and resentful when her mother left her and her father behind in Toronto and moved to Hong Kong to marry a more successful man, it’s as a woman aware of her own frailties that she absorbs and accepts her mother’s reasons.
“There’s a persepective you take if you’re cast as a supporting character,” she says in the interviewing, explaining that in her family’s drama, she’s the supporting character. “There’s a fundamental truth you accept and that is you’re not number one on the call sheet, you’re number four.
“Having Ma as the star in every movie prepares you for a little less ‘me’ mentality. I have no resentment about that. I prefer to observe. I watch people and I talk about other people. In a crowded room, I’ll be the one watching everything unfold.”
Equally important to her is that everyone understand that Listen to the Squawking Chicken is essentially a tale about immigrants.
“I really wanted it to be something that people figure out about me. Being a child of immigrants is who I am to the core.”
She watched her father work multiple jobs and study late into the night while raising her single-handedly. (Elaine’s mother had told him that if he made something of himself, she’d return. He did and she did.) As a result, Lui honours that dedication by working really hard even when to everyone else she’s earned the right to coast.
“People talk about work/life balance. I don’t give it a thought. People who worry about work/life balance are people who have the privilege of worrying about it. It’s a First World problem.
“If I worked any less than my father did, I would feel like I would be disrespecting him.”
So it’s not just the Squawking Chicken that Lui listens to...
Elaine Lui will be in conversation with the Globe and Mail’s Marsha Lederman April 11 at the Villa Amato Ballroom at 5pm. Ticket information at GlobeRecognition.com or 1-866-545-0016.
