寶石沒有磨光，沒有磨損，也沒有人完成沒有試驗。
Bǎoshí méiyǒu mó guāng, méiyǒu mósǔn, yě méiyǒu rén wánchéng méiyǒu shìyàn.
A gem is not polished without rubbing, nor a man perfected without trials.
Long ago in a land that still exists today, a young girl was born amidst 3 older siblings and two younger ones to come. She had two hard working parents who didn’t really care about having another daughter but instead showered their sons with love and adoration. After a few years, this young girl and her rather large family escaped to a province in the same country, but this province had a higher tolerance and better opportunities for the sons that this family adored. A decade later the parents and their children began a journey to further improve the sons’ future. The young girl journeyed alongside, not really expecting nor dreading this new future in this new country, yet, unbeknown to her and her family, this young girl would rise above expectation and create a life and future for her and her family in this strange land.
Her name was Mei Yuk Or, my mother.
Before the Beginning
When studying Chinese society, cultural aspects are often grouped together without regard to the unique provinces of China itself. While some provinces share some features many actually have large differences. 
These differences can be as small as different nuances in basic rituals and legends, while some differences can be in the languages or dialects of Chinese. Fuzhou, a town in the Fujian province, is mostly characterized by the Cantonese dialect. Many traditions of this region are also deeply rooted in ancient legends and storytelling. Hence why the narrative of my mother is written in the generalized structure of the ancient stories I grew up listening to.
While these provinces are unique in their own right, there are some social generalities that can be outlined for Chinese culture as a whole. One of the main concepts that greatly affected my mother’s life is the Chinese social belief that men had superiority over women in society. What does this mean exactly?
Well, for starts the education of women in China was always second to the education of the male counterparts. Most girls at this time cease attending school by the age 8, this means that they stop after second grade. This was especially the case for poorer families who relied on the young girls to work instead of attending school. 
Additionally, the wife that provided more male children to their husbands compared to the wife who gave birth to female children was more highly regarded. To Chinese society, male children were the future, the opportunity to rise in society. This is why they received a better education and overall better treatment.
During the mid-1800s, Hong Kong, specifically, became a British colony and remained under British rule until the late 
1900s. While the general cultural view of sons being superior to the daughters persisted even under this British province, life and opportunities were greater as a whole. Thus, struggling families and individuals flocked to Hong Kong seeking opportunities and fairer standards. Additionally, it was a widespread introduction of “British English” to Chinese society. The schools taught all the way to high school and beyond, all the while, implementing English into the curriculum. For many families, including my mother’s family, Hong Kong was a safe haven from the brutal and rigid legal, economic, and social structure of mainland China.
The Beginning
She was born to a poor and indifferent mother and father. She had eight siblings, two were boys the rest were girls. The week before she was born, it was said that the land was filling with chaos from torrential rains and havoc winds. When she was born, the rain stopped, and the world watched in silence. She was born Mei Yuk Or.
Mei Yuk spent the first few years of her life as a loud and excited child growing up in the Fuzhou providence. However, over time and with her strict parents’ instructions, Mei Yuk learned to be quiet and how to blend into the background. To her parents and adults in her life, Mei Yuk was only ever meant to be the plain background to her prized brothers’ futures. Her brothers’ futures had been decided a long time ago. One was to study business and the other medicine. They would go on to continue their studies in China all the way up to college. On the other hand, Mei Yuk and her sisters stopped after the second grade. Mei Yuk would spend the rest of her childhood helping around the house and help maintain an income for her family.
After fifteen years of being continuously certain of her duty to her family, Mei Yuk’s life and perspective would drastically change. Her brothers had finished their schooling and were ready for college, Mei’s oldest sister had already moved to New York a few years ago and had shared stories of a better life. Mei’s parents had decided by then that perhaps college in this foreign land, this land of opportunities, would be the best option for their beloved sons’ higher education. At fifteen years old, Mei Yuk would embark on a journey to discover who she really is.
The Arriving
“I remember thinking that America was a place where you could pick money up from the floor.”
America, home of the brave and true. America, the beacon of home for millions of immigrants. America, the place where Mei Yuk’s family sought a better life. The Or family’s life in China was marked by poverty and America was the dream. The dream consisted of working in Chinatown, running the family restaurant. The two sons would go off to college and make lot’s of money to support the family in the future. They would marry a respectable woman. The remaining Or daughters would find husbands and become dutiful wives. Mei Yuk had never known a different life plan than this.
Mei distinctly remembered growing up watching movies that took place in America. She remembered watching the commercials for American home appliances. Whiles she did not understand exactly what the commercials said since they were in English, she did distinctly remember the jingles associated with the commercials. She saw catchy commercials for washing machines, toys, and restaurants. Mei grew up with the preconceived notion that in America, the pretty and clean people lived in extravagant homes with machines to do all the work.
However, this preconceived notion would greatly contrast with the reality that Mei’s family would face.
The Surviving
After a grueling sixteen-hour flight from Hong Kong, China to New York City, New York Mei Yuk and her family arrived in the promised land. Mei Yuk shares a story of how her first expectation of a white community was immediately disproved.
Mei Yuk’s family moved to Flushing, Queens where she and her family worked for a Chinese restaurant. She remembers the first apartment her and her family lived in as well as reflecting on how she was treated differently from her brothers.
After a few years, the family was able to open their own restaurant. Throughout her teen years, Mei Yuk was still unable to complete her education even through 12th grade. Instead, she spent her first years in America working for the family business washing dishes day in and day out.
By seventeen, she worked two jobs trying to keep her family afloat while help paying for her brothers’ higher education.
By eighteen was the beginning of her road to transformation. She had married her first husband by her parent’s insistence. At 18, Mei Yuk was pregnant with her first child, my half-brother. Over the course of their short marriage, it was clear that her husband had a serious gambling issue, yet their marriage persisted. At 18, she had her first child and was still working two jobs.
Mei Yuk shared a story of how during the summer of her 19th year she was walking in Kissena Park with my brother Sidney. She passed another young couple who appeared to look at her rather disapprovingly. She heard them muttering about her and how she was a communist. She was labeled “red,” ironic since it was her favorite color. Now her favorite color is green the spectrum opposite of red. At the time, Mei Yuk did not understand what it meant to be labeled “red.” To her, America and its principles were already adopted into her own personal ideals. To her, this small and seemingly minuscule memory became the focal point of her transition into adulthood. As she sought higher paying jobs she was often turned away due to the political atmosphere consuming the foreign nation an ocean away from her home in New York City. To her, it was a
red nightmare.
Her so-called American Dream had been crushed.
At twenty-years-old Mei Yuk had her second child, Stanley. She had two sons and to her parents, had already fulfilled her duty as a mother and housewife. Yet, Mei Yuk still sought more from her life. At 22, she worked multiple jobs, trying to keep her young family afloat. By 24, she divorced her gambling husband. The family was aghast. This was the first decision she made completely on her own. She was now a single mother and this is when she truly became a tiger mother. This is when she became my tiger mother.
The Living
To society today, a tiger mother is one who is controlling in order to dictate her children’s future. For most of my life this is how I perceived my own mother, but after learning her story this began to change.
By 27 my mother stops working at the family restaurant and instead worked as a secretary at a law firm. Here she began picking up skills of her own outside of how to get rid of grease stains. She learned how to write up business contracts and other legal proceedings.
By 29 she worked at a constructing site, learning to put up drywall and install extensive plumbing systems, all the while discovering her unique skill at adaptation. After almost 10 years in America, my mother discovered that she was a polyglot. At this point in her life, she knew how to speak three different forms of Chinese and English. All of which she spoke fluently. Now she can speak over 7 languages including Spanish, French, German and more.
By 34 she was hired as a secretary and paper pusher for Citibank. She stayed with Citibank for over 30 years and continues to work there today…
The Thriving
…as the CitiGold manager and branch Vice President. Over time my mother began building up a very successful life. She sent my two older brothers to school and they both completed K-12 by the time I was born. She worked a series of different jobs just to make ends meet. The entire time her family looked on disapprovingly, yet today she has more than succeeded. When I asked her what she thought about the American Dream now, her answer surprised me:
The American Dream is real Mei Bo, not the American Fantasy. I lived in a fantasy world where I thought things would be handed to me on a silver platter in America. I was disappointed and destroyed when I came here. Everything I had ever imagined was crush, but that let me have new dreams… Now, I didn’t just dream those dreams. Now I learned how to plan those dreams. America wasn’t everything I wanted it to be…it was and is everything I needed it to be. America gave me a chance and a choice to be the woman I never knew I could be. It does the same for you love.
When my mother said this I wasn’t entirely sure what she meant. That is until I took a deeper look in what her life would have been like if she continued her adulthood in China. America gave her the opportunity to rise in her social status as a woman. Her life didn’t have to be defined by a housewife (something she most definitely is not). In America, she could be a wife, a contractor, a business woman, a manager, a boss, and a mother. All of this contributed to her defining her identity as an American. If you ask her, she won’t say she is a Chinese immigrant, she won’t even say she is Chinese. She would say that she is American. If you forced her to be more specific (and it wasn’t easy), she would say she is a Chinese American woman.
The Never Ending
Thanks to my tiger mother’s sacrifices, my brothers and I live a very different life. My eldest brother Sidney finished his high school degree and began working towards his college degree however it was interrupted by the events of 9/11. Instead, he dedicated most of his early adult life 
to working with the Red Cross. Today he works in an executive position in OEM in Technology and COmmumications sector. My second eldest brother, Stanley went and got his BBA in Accounting from NYU, but also found his calling in public service. He now works as an EMT for the FDNY but is attending school against to earn a higher position. I was born two years before Stanley finished high school.
I was born Ashley-Mei Bo Lucy Cecelia Evangelina Giovanna Brucella Adellina Iosephina Torrenti (the short version). My Chinese name was Mei Bo (“beautiful treasurer”). Like my mother, I took on the name “Mei,” as do all of my aunts and my baby nieces. When my mother was born, it was said the rain stopped and the world was hushed. When I was born it was said that snowflakes descended onto the earth. When I was born it was said my grandparents wept with sadness. When I was born it was said my mother wept with joy. As the first bi-racial child in my family as well as a girl, my grandparents wanted little to do with me on my mother’s side. However, my mother fought venomously against their reaction. I was named Mei Bo because my skin was as white as the first winter snow that fell on my birth-day and to the eyes of my mother I was her treasure. Later in life, I was told that I was also named “treasure” because the phoenix’s ability to live on endlessly was the Chinese treasure.
As my mother’s daughter I, unlike in her own life, was raised with the belief that I could be anything I wanted to be, I was raised with the belief that my sex had nothing to do with my failure nor my success. I am often told that while I look nothing like my mother, my mother and I share the same phoenix soul. I, like her, am vivacious and stubborn ( I was born the year of the Ox), but most of all we persist.
My mother still carries our unique culture and mystic stories, the stories which influenced my imagination and birth name, with her as she lives out her life in America.
We eat dim sum on Sunday mornings and occasionally go to traditional temples, though we are deeply religious Catholics. We honor our ancestors and cook Chinese food as mother and daughter. She even teaches me all the ways to remove the grease stains, but my hands will never be as wrinkled or as rough as hers. My hands will remain soft and only ever marred by the ink stains.
Today, Mei Yuk Or, Angela Ko, Angela Torrenti, Mom, is my tiger mother. In Chinese culture, the tiger is a symbol of perseverance and persistence. They are protective, courageous, and strong willed. Sometimes, these qualities can be too much, yet for my family, a tiger mother was exactly what we needed.
In addition to this oral history narrative, I recently entered into Miss Asia and for my talent section, I wrote an original spoken word poetry piece detailing a timeline of my mother’s life and sacrifices while studying her hands. Unfortunately, I was unable to attain my own copy of the live stream feed but I have attached a hyperlink. My poetry begins at 53:00. Additionally, I have included a copy of my original transcript. When I write poetry, I never actually sit down with a notebook and write, usually I begin by just talking about anything that’s important to me. This particular poem was hard for me since it was so personal. it was about my mother’s story, but also my own journey of understanding who this woman really is.
I want to talk to you about hands.
If a picture is worth a thousand words
Then your hands are worth a million.
My father is a large and hearty man
My mother… I never understood her
That is until I looked at her hands
Growing up I remember my father and I walking along the beach
He held my hand so gently
as though my hands were made of butterfly wings
His hands were huge, and warm
They were calloused, yet soft
When my father held my hand it felt
like a warm blanket was wrapped around me
My father always felt like the earth,
steady and strong and always there to hold me up
If my father was the earth, then my mother was the sea
I never knew what was boiling underneath
The only time I remember my mom holding my hand
was when we walked through large crowds
She didn’t hold my hand, she gripped it
It felt like ropes wrapped around my fingers
She held me like I was safety line in a sea of strangers
But to me it felt like I was her anchor, and I was drowning
I do remember putting her hand against mine.
Her hands were so much larger than mine.
Where my dad’s hands were supple, my mother’s were sandpaper.
My mother is 63 (don’t tell her I told you that)
but she looks 40,
but her hands, her hands look like they’re 80
I never understood my mother, until I looked at her hands
Her hands are wrinkled, and cracking,
they are covered in sun spots and they look so frail.
But in the folds of her wrinkles and in the cracks of her palms
I have found my mother… I found her story.
Age 1
her hands were soft, softer than mine now
I had the same hands
Age 8
She stopped going to school
I continued to the 2nd grade, the 3rd,
the 4th 5, 6,7,8th grade and graduated
15
She found out she was going to have to uproot her whole like in China
I was a freshman in high school
16 she came to America
16 I was annoyed b/c they wouldn’t let me have a sweet sixteen
17 Lived in a single room studio,
she slept on the floor with her 3 sisters
while her 2 brothers and parents slept on the only bed
17 I was stressing about SATs
18 SHE married her gambling husband
18 She was pregnant with her first son
18 I graduated high school with honors
19 She was working 2 jobs and raising a son
19 I am attending college, one of the best business schools in the country
20 she was pregnant with her second son
20 I’ll probably be taking an accounting class
21 she was working 3 jobs and raising two sons
21 I am probably going to bar to see what they hype is about
22 she divorced her gambling husband
22 I graduate from college
23 she enrolled her sons in school
23 I begin medical school
24 she worked 10 hours a day washing dishes in boiling hot water
Her family said she wasn’t a working woman, but that she was a slave
That she had brought dishonor to her family
27
She was the secretary for a law firm,
learning to write up business contracts
Her hands covered in paper cuts
29
She worked at a construction,
learning to put up dry walls and install plumbing
Her hands dried out from the plaster
34
She began working at Citibank as a secretary
Her hands were already wrinkled by now
40
She met my father
44
She had me
F to the present – age 63
She’s vice president of her Citibank branch
Age 63?
Me? I can’t even begin to image the possibilities.
But that’s the point. I have possibilities
I can be what I want to be,
not what my family needs me to be
Flash back to my present
I watch her, she is standing at the sink.
She still washes dishes with burning hot water.
She says she barely even feels it anymore.
She refuses to wear gloves.
I watch her hunched over the sink.
I put my book down and walk up behind her.
I wrap my arms around her. She feels so small.
I have out grown her in height now.
I put my hand into the hot water also.
Her hands are still larger than mine, but now they’re warm.
In folds of her wrinkles and the cracks of her palms
I have found my mother… I found her story.
Her hands are wrinkled and marred so that mine would stay soft.
My mother taught me that if a picture is worth a thousand words,
then hands are worth a lifetime.
Her family said she brought dishonor.
But they were wrong. She brought us, me, a future.
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