Danielle Davis lives in Los Angeles where she walks, hikes, bikes, and blogs. She grew up in Singapore and
Hong Kong. She is ever, always terrible at math. She is the green living contributor for Your Daily Thread and
writes an eco/conscious living blog: Less Is More (Balanced). Having earned an M.A. in literature and creative
writing from Claremont Graduate University, her creative work has appeared in Ghoti, Night Train, and Carve
Magazine. Currently, she is polishing her first novella and looking to get a number of books for the youngest
readers into the world. http://www.lessimorebalanced.com and http://www.yourdailythread.com
Hong Kong. She is ever, always terrible at math. She is the green living contributor for Your Daily Thread and
writes an eco/conscious living blog: Less Is More (Balanced). Having earned an M.A. in literature and creative
writing from Claremont Graduate University, her creative work has appeared in Ghoti, Night Train, and Carve
Magazine. Currently, she is polishing her first novella and looking to get a number of books for the youngest
readers into the world. http://www.lessimorebalanced.com and http://www.yourdailythread.com
None of the above
At Thanksgiving last year, my mother handed me a packet of papers and keepsakes from my childhood, all
bundled into a two-pocket folder bearing the name and picture of my elementary school. Since I grew up away
from my birthplace in the States and sometimes forget that fact, it took me a moment to figure out what I was
looking at. Was it an airport? The campus of a prestigious college? The United Nations building? Nope. It was
Singapore American School.
From kindergarten to seventh grade, I took math and handwriting and science and language arts at a school with
an Olympic sized swimming pool, a football field, two gyms — one for gymnastics and one for all the other indoor
sports, along with annual events like the one for which we dressed up like people from all over the world to
celebrate different cultures and we “Americans” for the day wore cowboy boots and bandanas — and an
auditorium in which Roald Dahl, the Spoonman and President George H.W. Bush all spoke or performed.
What a shock it was for me, years later, to show up at a public high school in a small Southern California town
where the biggest architectural boasts were doors painted blue and both ding-dongs and cupcakes at the snack
bar.
Thanksgiving night, I sat and unpacked the flotsam from the folder my mother had given me. Among the first
grade reports and postcards from places we’ve lived and visited, I found something I hadn’t seen since I was
fifteen and didn’t actually remember ever having completed. It was even more memory-jogging than the drawing
on the front of the folder. The title read “Royal Hong Kong Police Force: Record of Interview.” This “keepsake” was
from the time I was arrested for shoplifting a few years after my days at the luxurious elementary school and a
move to Hong Kong where I attended a similarly luxurious high school.
My first thought: This is an amazing record to own and revisit.
My second thought: Why in the world did my mother slip this into the stroll down memory lane folder without
mentioning it?
My third thought: This should not be a surprise.
After all, while cleaning out my parent’s garage and deciding which mementos to throw out and which to keep and
pass on to her daughter for posterity, my mom also chose to give me a math test from probably second or third
grade on which I got a 60%. That’s a D minus, even to mathematical dimwits like me. I can’t even begin to fathom
why she saved it in the first place, or furthermore, why she decided I would want it for my own filing cabinet (or
perhaps display shelf?). But this is the kind of mother she was. She didn’t save the English tests with stickers of
kittens and smiley faces and comments like, “Very creative work,” but only the near F on a math test I took in
grade school. In fact, I wonder if she stuck that test to the refrigerator with a fluorescent-yellow “Smile, Jesus
Loves You” magnet when I brought it home, sniffling in my school uniform.
Luckily, I don’t feel at all bad about that math test now. I mean, really. Dividing fractions? I haven’t used that once
in the twenty intermediary years since I filled in all those circles with my No. 2 pencil. Not understanding concepts
like that, in my mind, is a sign of higher intellect. I haven’t got time for word problems about trains and puppy
toys; I’ve got bigger fish to fry. Like figuring out that even if the teacher doesn’t see my hand up and thus can’t
excuse me, I should probably get up and go to the bathroom anyway to avoid peeing all over myself in my chair.
That happened in a third grade math class, and may very well have been one of the reasons for my low score on
that blasted test.
Anyway, I shouldn’t have been surprised that my mother would keep the police interview from a day marked
indelibly as one of our family’s soberest. She made an entire parental career out of not memorializing my brothers’
and my successes so that we wouldn’t get big heads. Saving terrible tests and shameful police records fits right in
with her philosophy of keeping us humble.
One clear reason for her deflating posture toward her children? Her own mother. Upon receiving one of my tender
childhood letters, my dear grandmother proceeded to get the red pen out of her desk and correct each and every
grammatical error. Then she sent it back to me.
Today, there are Oprah shows about how parents spoil their kids and see them as perfect angels who do no
wrong. As Emily Bazelon tells it in a May 2007 article in Slate: “A personality test for narcissism given to college
students every year shows an inexorable rise, with today's students being on average 30 percent more narcissistic
than the students of 1982.” The whole shift in parenting seems to have swung to: my kid is the smartest, most
attractive human ever to grace the earth end of the spectrum. And it shows. How I would like to have been born in
2003 and be a highly praised toddler sporting $40 dollar shoes and toting designer sippy cups by now.
My mom was the kind of parent who always sided with the teacher and deflected any compliment directed toward
me. After I performed in a musical, she was obligated to say I did a good job but only in the most cursory way.
Then she proceeded to give accolades to other children that we knew about their unmistakable beauty, talent,
intellect and manners. As I got older it went something like this: “Your daughter is so thin and lovely.” “Oh, she’s
just young.”
Unfortunately, her techniques worked. I still have trouble accepting a compliment graciously and get exceedingly
nervous when talking about myself. Because of this kind of upbringing, I have to fight letting conversations turn
into me asking twenty questions and my interlocutor answering them all at length, leaving me practically out of the
conversation altogether. This compulsion must make me popular because either people are narcissists from
actually getting praise from their parents or in great need of attention because theirs were exactly like mine and
they’re starved for it. To them, talking to me is like someone who has gone hungry being invited to a Millie’s all-
you-can-eat buffet.
I’ve always wondered if it was Asia’s influence on my mother, though I suspect its roots go much farther back
than our family’s fifteen-year stint on that continent. But she does fit right in with the mothers in The Joy Luck
Club who are never outwardly affectionate with their daughters and show them love by disapproving of every
decision they make, from the partners they choose to the way they style their hair. “So what do you think of
Rich?” Waverly asks about her just-met boyfriend. “So many spots on his face,” her mother replies.
The day I was arrested, I was shopping on Granville Road with a couple of girlfriends. Granville Road, like many
shopping havens in Hong Kong, is a dirty street filled with store after store of cheap clothes, most of which got
there by virtue of being flawed in some way and unacceptable for North American stores. Think Marshall’s or Ross,
but in stalls book-ended by shops selling medicinal herbs and dried mushrooms that smell of ginger and Tiger
Balm, and on streets crammed with people, most of whom are smoking, shouting, hustling to get around
everyone else, or hawking a loogie onto the pavement.
For a few months, my friends and I had developed a habit of shoplifting, what we referred to with a chant of “steal
it, swipe it, any way you like it.” (I hate to report that it also had hand movements, à la cheerleading.) We liked the
intrigue and excitement that stealing an item of clothing evoked in our fifteen year-old psyches and it was relatively
easy given the chaos of most of our favorite haunts. We did this even though we were all teeming with money our
parents gave us to keep us occupied in the foreign land. I was not unaccustomed to carrying three or four
hundred Hong Kong dollars with me at a time, what amounts to about fifty bucks in the States, if my calculation
can be trusted, which would easily buy five or six fashionable vestments.
I see now, after getting caught stealing one beige GAP shirt, priced at 79 Hong Kong dollars, by a shopkeeper and
not being able to buy her off, hence waiting for the police to arrive, being shuttled to the nearest police station,
saying goodbye to my friends, missing the production of Guys and Dolls I was scheduled to perform in that
evening, being strip-searched by a policewoman with a black bob and white gloves, getting fingerprinted and
having to call my parents and inform them of these events as they were dressing for the musical, that I did
something wrong and something stupid. Here I was, a privileged American who could afford to buy almost
anything hanging in the establishment, called something like “Sample Look” by the way, stealing from a working
woman busting her butt selling defective GAP shirts. But as an adolescent, it was an important incident for me. I
can honestly say that I learned something and changed my ways. I, and my friends, never stole or swiped any way
we liked anything ever again. And I have embraced this blemish on my record as a necessary part of my growing
up.
For my mother, however, embrace is not quite the word. My parents dealt with my criminal act by referring to me
as sticky fingers for a couple of years; my mother cried her eyes out (I’ll give her that, the next day was Mother’s
Day); they kept it a secret from my siblings; and they probably never whisper it to anyone they know to this day
out of shame.
Now, even when the country that Granville Road inhabits is mentioned, my mother’s shoulders tense and
conversation is stifled. It is as if she only sees that one big, bad failure when she thinks of the place. And what I
wonder after finding that police record amid 13th birthday photos and travel brochures is if it’s not really my
failures she’s always lugged around in folders and stuck up on fridges, but her own.
I retook that math test with the help of my husband who never got a D on one and scored a lot better the second
time around. I didn’t get every question right, but it turns out that sometimes a negative minus a negative equals
a positive and that the train that Johnny rode to Pittsburgh arrived at the station at 4:00 p.m.
At Thanksgiving last year, my mother handed me a packet of papers and keepsakes from my childhood, all
bundled into a two-pocket folder bearing the name and picture of my elementary school. Since I grew up away
from my birthplace in the States and sometimes forget that fact, it took me a moment to figure out what I was
looking at. Was it an airport? The campus of a prestigious college? The United Nations building? Nope. It was
Singapore American School.
From kindergarten to seventh grade, I took math and handwriting and science and language arts at a school with
an Olympic sized swimming pool, a football field, two gyms — one for gymnastics and one for all the other indoor
sports, along with annual events like the one for which we dressed up like people from all over the world to
celebrate different cultures and we “Americans” for the day wore cowboy boots and bandanas — and an
auditorium in which Roald Dahl, the Spoonman and President George H.W. Bush all spoke or performed.
What a shock it was for me, years later, to show up at a public high school in a small Southern California town
where the biggest architectural boasts were doors painted blue and both ding-dongs and cupcakes at the snack
bar.
Thanksgiving night, I sat and unpacked the flotsam from the folder my mother had given me. Among the first
grade reports and postcards from places we’ve lived and visited, I found something I hadn’t seen since I was
fifteen and didn’t actually remember ever having completed. It was even more memory-jogging than the drawing
on the front of the folder. The title read “Royal Hong Kong Police Force: Record of Interview.” This “keepsake” was
from the time I was arrested for shoplifting a few years after my days at the luxurious elementary school and a
move to Hong Kong where I attended a similarly luxurious high school.
My first thought: This is an amazing record to own and revisit.
My second thought: Why in the world did my mother slip this into the stroll down memory lane folder without
mentioning it?
My third thought: This should not be a surprise.
After all, while cleaning out my parent’s garage and deciding which mementos to throw out and which to keep and
pass on to her daughter for posterity, my mom also chose to give me a math test from probably second or third
grade on which I got a 60%. That’s a D minus, even to mathematical dimwits like me. I can’t even begin to fathom
why she saved it in the first place, or furthermore, why she decided I would want it for my own filing cabinet (or
perhaps display shelf?). But this is the kind of mother she was. She didn’t save the English tests with stickers of
kittens and smiley faces and comments like, “Very creative work,” but only the near F on a math test I took in
grade school. In fact, I wonder if she stuck that test to the refrigerator with a fluorescent-yellow “Smile, Jesus
Loves You” magnet when I brought it home, sniffling in my school uniform.
Luckily, I don’t feel at all bad about that math test now. I mean, really. Dividing fractions? I haven’t used that once
in the twenty intermediary years since I filled in all those circles with my No. 2 pencil. Not understanding concepts
like that, in my mind, is a sign of higher intellect. I haven’t got time for word problems about trains and puppy
toys; I’ve got bigger fish to fry. Like figuring out that even if the teacher doesn’t see my hand up and thus can’t
excuse me, I should probably get up and go to the bathroom anyway to avoid peeing all over myself in my chair.
That happened in a third grade math class, and may very well have been one of the reasons for my low score on
that blasted test.
Anyway, I shouldn’t have been surprised that my mother would keep the police interview from a day marked
indelibly as one of our family’s soberest. She made an entire parental career out of not memorializing my brothers’
and my successes so that we wouldn’t get big heads. Saving terrible tests and shameful police records fits right in
with her philosophy of keeping us humble.
One clear reason for her deflating posture toward her children? Her own mother. Upon receiving one of my tender
childhood letters, my dear grandmother proceeded to get the red pen out of her desk and correct each and every
grammatical error. Then she sent it back to me.
Today, there are Oprah shows about how parents spoil their kids and see them as perfect angels who do no
wrong. As Emily Bazelon tells it in a May 2007 article in Slate: “A personality test for narcissism given to college
students every year shows an inexorable rise, with today's students being on average 30 percent more narcissistic
than the students of 1982.” The whole shift in parenting seems to have swung to: my kid is the smartest, most
attractive human ever to grace the earth end of the spectrum. And it shows. How I would like to have been born in
2003 and be a highly praised toddler sporting $40 dollar shoes and toting designer sippy cups by now.
My mom was the kind of parent who always sided with the teacher and deflected any compliment directed toward
me. After I performed in a musical, she was obligated to say I did a good job but only in the most cursory way.
Then she proceeded to give accolades to other children that we knew about their unmistakable beauty, talent,
intellect and manners. As I got older it went something like this: “Your daughter is so thin and lovely.” “Oh, she’s
just young.”
Unfortunately, her techniques worked. I still have trouble accepting a compliment graciously and get exceedingly
nervous when talking about myself. Because of this kind of upbringing, I have to fight letting conversations turn
into me asking twenty questions and my interlocutor answering them all at length, leaving me practically out of the
conversation altogether. This compulsion must make me popular because either people are narcissists from
actually getting praise from their parents or in great need of attention because theirs were exactly like mine and
they’re starved for it. To them, talking to me is like someone who has gone hungry being invited to a Millie’s all-
you-can-eat buffet.
I’ve always wondered if it was Asia’s influence on my mother, though I suspect its roots go much farther back
than our family’s fifteen-year stint on that continent. But she does fit right in with the mothers in The Joy Luck
Club who are never outwardly affectionate with their daughters and show them love by disapproving of every
decision they make, from the partners they choose to the way they style their hair. “So what do you think of
Rich?” Waverly asks about her just-met boyfriend. “So many spots on his face,” her mother replies.
The day I was arrested, I was shopping on Granville Road with a couple of girlfriends. Granville Road, like many
shopping havens in Hong Kong, is a dirty street filled with store after store of cheap clothes, most of which got
there by virtue of being flawed in some way and unacceptable for North American stores. Think Marshall’s or Ross,
but in stalls book-ended by shops selling medicinal herbs and dried mushrooms that smell of ginger and Tiger
Balm, and on streets crammed with people, most of whom are smoking, shouting, hustling to get around
everyone else, or hawking a loogie onto the pavement.
For a few months, my friends and I had developed a habit of shoplifting, what we referred to with a chant of “steal
it, swipe it, any way you like it.” (I hate to report that it also had hand movements, à la cheerleading.) We liked the
intrigue and excitement that stealing an item of clothing evoked in our fifteen year-old psyches and it was relatively
easy given the chaos of most of our favorite haunts. We did this even though we were all teeming with money our
parents gave us to keep us occupied in the foreign land. I was not unaccustomed to carrying three or four
hundred Hong Kong dollars with me at a time, what amounts to about fifty bucks in the States, if my calculation
can be trusted, which would easily buy five or six fashionable vestments.
I see now, after getting caught stealing one beige GAP shirt, priced at 79 Hong Kong dollars, by a shopkeeper and
not being able to buy her off, hence waiting for the police to arrive, being shuttled to the nearest police station,
saying goodbye to my friends, missing the production of Guys and Dolls I was scheduled to perform in that
evening, being strip-searched by a policewoman with a black bob and white gloves, getting fingerprinted and
having to call my parents and inform them of these events as they were dressing for the musical, that I did
something wrong and something stupid. Here I was, a privileged American who could afford to buy almost
anything hanging in the establishment, called something like “Sample Look” by the way, stealing from a working
woman busting her butt selling defective GAP shirts. But as an adolescent, it was an important incident for me. I
can honestly say that I learned something and changed my ways. I, and my friends, never stole or swiped any way
we liked anything ever again. And I have embraced this blemish on my record as a necessary part of my growing
up.
For my mother, however, embrace is not quite the word. My parents dealt with my criminal act by referring to me
as sticky fingers for a couple of years; my mother cried her eyes out (I’ll give her that, the next day was Mother’s
Day); they kept it a secret from my siblings; and they probably never whisper it to anyone they know to this day
out of shame.
Now, even when the country that Granville Road inhabits is mentioned, my mother’s shoulders tense and
conversation is stifled. It is as if she only sees that one big, bad failure when she thinks of the place. And what I
wonder after finding that police record amid 13th birthday photos and travel brochures is if it’s not really my
failures she’s always lugged around in folders and stuck up on fridges, but her own.
I retook that math test with the help of my husband who never got a D on one and scored a lot better the second
time around. I didn’t get every question right, but it turns out that sometimes a negative minus a negative equals
a positive and that the train that Johnny rode to Pittsburgh arrived at the station at 4:00 p.m.
Danielle Davis
