Bearing false idols
Originally published on Medium in 2012 (back when everyone was publishing on Medium). By Ernie Hsiung.
In high school, my Mom purchased a statue of a frog the size of a toaster.
Hollow and ceramic, it was painted in gold with fake ornate details in red and green, especially around its eyes. Bits of paint were beginning to chip off a little bit. There is a coin in the frog's mouth, the type of coin you see in Chinatown with the square holes and the Chinese characters. But you wouldn't know that at first glance and would assume it was something on par with something my mother would buy, tacky and expensive looking. If you sat me down and asked me to tell you everything I know about feng shui, even now, this is what I could explain to you: it has something to do with the flow of qi.
I don't exactly know what qi is. It has something to do with energy, I think: it's the "chi" in tai chi, and it's what Bruce Lee sprouted about before he kicked the shit out of Kareem Abdul Jabbar. And from there, I know that if you place things in a room a certain way, you get a lot of qi and then suddenly have a ton of good luck and fortune and happiness, as if gold coins were to rain from the sky if you put a plate of oranges or a ceramic statue of a deer in the center of a room.
That's all I got.
My Mom had a casual interest in feng shui - enough for her to understand the basic concepts: She knew, for example, that having a stairway facing the opening of the house produced bad qi. Standing in the entryway to our cookie-cutter tract home, she would look up the stairway into the hallway to all of our bedrooms, back down to the front door next to her, and click her tongue; she realized all her fortune could spill out of the house. Not good, I could see her thinking to herself.
I noticed the frog sitting on the coffee table in the living room, coming home from high school. I picked up the frog and noticed how heavy it was for a hollow ceramic figure. Picking up the statue also revealed a hundred or so quarters and half-dollars underneath the statue, now just lying on the coffee table. That was a good day's worth of arcade games at the local Silverball Arcade.
"Don't you dare," my mother barked at me in Chinese. This is weird because she doesn't usually yell at me about stuff, so I knew this was a big deal. Up to this point, I had just assumed the frog was just a part of the house decor, like the crystalline deer or the replica oriental vases bought at a Chinese discount store for nineteen dollars, or the calligraphy scrolls on the wall that I had assumed were some sayings of an ancient Chinese philosopher, but was actually just John 3:16, the universal bible verse of God so loving the world. The quarters underneath the frog brought some curiosity, but it was something I didn't question.
When my sister Angela noticed the frog statue in the house, she stood there staring at it with suspicion, her face becoming ashen as she crinkled her brow.
"Why do we have this in the house, Mom?"
"It's a frog," my Mom told her in Chinese, pointing out the obvious. She switched to English to emphasize her point. "Is lucky."
"Well, I don't like it." She keeps her distance as if the frog will come to life and jump on her face.
Our entire family was Christian, technically. My paternal grandmother converted to Christianity decades before I was born, and we all grew up Asian Baptist. (The Asian Baptist church, by the way, has all the fire and brimstone of a Southern Baptist church, without any of that fun singing and dancing.)
Nainai has been gone far too long to ask her any questions about our family and religion; my dad and uncles went through the motions. But it was my sister who took Jesus Christ as her personal Lord and Savior at the age of fourteen, whose bookshelves were lined with tapes of Amy Grant, Sandi Patti and bibles and prayer tracts and, later, conservative magazines from James Dobson and Focus on the Family. I am suddenly reminded of the Sunday morning Chinese Church as a kid, where Ina laoshi is sticking paper biblical cut-outs against a felt background of a mountaintop as she tells us the story of Aaron, Moses' brother, who had made the golden statue in the calf and had worshipped it, and the disappointment by both Moses when he came down from the mountain after receiving his commandments, shattering his commandments, telling everyone around him about the upcoming wrath of God.
"Well if you don't like it," my Mom said to her in Chinese, "you don't have to live in this house."
Angela frowned, went back to her room, and closed the door behind her.
It's sort of ironic that here in Miami, where people use me as a go-to resource for "Asian stuff," I have to turn to Google to find an About.com page about feng shui. There, a pleasant-looking blonde stock model named Rodika is telling me about the proper term for what was sitting in the middle of my living room growing up: money frogs. "Traditionally, the money frog is placed somewhere close to the front entrance," Rodika writes. "The important thing to consider is that you do not want the money frog to face the entrance, but rather look inside the house."
I imagine my sister coming down the stairs throughout the day: leaving the house, going to the kitchen to get a class of water, and each time, the frog facing her direction as Angela descends the stairs.
"Come, my child." Says the frog. The frog drops the coin he holds in his mouth as he speaks to her. "Follow me, and we will bring much fortune and prosperity onto this household."
"We will not bear witness to idols in his house," Angela says defiantly.
"Aaaah," the frog says, the corners of its mouth upturned into a sly little smile. "But your family already has."
A week passed, and Angela and I drove around Berkeley, wanting to get out of the house because Mom and Dad were fighting again. We parked at the Berkeley Marina and started walking on the pier, surrounded by the occasional homeless person and the occasional guy with a lawn chair and a fishing pole. That's when she told me.
"I prayed and asked Jesus for His guidance about the frog," she said.
"Okay."
"I threw it away."
"Threw it away? Where?"
She points to the pier nearby. "There."
I turned to look at the pier, with the cold, choppy waters from the bay underneath and looked back at her. For what it's worth, I had never really considered the money frog as an idol, more a bad luck charm, like the cursed tiki the kids from the Brady Brady bunch found in Hawaii.
Except our tiki just caused our family to fight a lot.
"Mom's going to be pretty mad about that," I said.
"'Thou shalt have no other gods before me.' It's in the Ten Commandments."
"And the quarters?"
"In the water." She looked calm.
It was the first major time I had seen my sister go against my parents while not having her schizophrenic episodes. What about the Chinese commandment of respecting your elders? What about the family commandment of "Don't make your parents angry?" I had absolutely revered my parents up to this point, and to see Angela going against that made my muscles tense up, my heart drop to my stomach, and my breathing become shallow. I continued sitting in her car, in her tiny gray 1986 Colt, and I imagined I was riding in the passenger seat, barreling straight into the eye of a hurricane.
This week, my boyfriend asked me what I was writing about, and I explained the concept of feng shui, furniture rearranging, and tiny statues of animals sitting on mountains of fake gold coins.
He looks at me as if I carefully explained the concept of a stop sign. "Yeah, of course. My dad had that."
"Had what?" I ask.
"Money frogs," he says." Money frogs, fu signs, stuff rearranged in lucky corners."
"Wasn't your family Christian?" I ask.
"Wasn't yours? Besides, we needed all the luck we can get. Fabio's Mom was huge into feng shui too, and they're Brazilian."
"Huh."
"Yeah. She had the frog in their living room, too. We always tried to steal the coins from the frog's mouth."
I'm one of seven Asian Americans in Miami, and my boyfriend knows more about this stuff than I do. Whatever magical powers I felt I had are now completely gone.
"I think more people know about this stuff than you think."
Suddenly, this gaudy painted plastic animal was no longer a mystical object or a cursed talisman that caused my mother and my sister to fight but a common household object that Brazilian families in South Florida had lying around in their living rooms. Not only do I feel stupid for not knowing what a money frog is, but I am strangely unlucky for having a family that would have a complete meltdown over one. No one else dumps the money frogs of their parents into any large bodies of water.
My sister shows up at the evening youth services nearly two to three hours early. A bunch of teenage Christians are singing praise songs in front of two guys with a guitar and an overhead projector, songs about how "bananas and mangoes were sweet, but nothing touches the sweet love of God." My sister shows up at the door and asks one of the kids jumping around to ask for me to come outside and talk to her.
When I meet her outside, she suggests that one of the youth advisors give me a ride home; the later I get home, the better. She tells me that she and Mom got in a fight, and she is just going to drive around for a while before she goes home.
She shows no emotion while she tells me this.
A youth advisor drives me thirty minutes home in the opposite direction. After I tell him what has happened, he takes my hands in his, and we bow our heads. He prays for my mother, my sister, and me for comfort and protection before we exit the car.
When I get home, the house is dark except for one light in the landing area. Unsurprisingly, the money frog is gone, and the house is cleaner than usual. The light under Angela's door is dark.
The next morning, coming down the stairs, Mom served me a scrambled egg breakfast between two pieces of toast. It's when she puts down the jar of mayonnaise and the container of pork floss that I notice her black eye. She talks to me normally as if nothing happened; it's just another Monday, but this time, Mom has a shiner. I kiss her on the cheek, the other cheek that isn't swollen, and I hurry to catch the bus to get to school.
Mom took down all the feng shui symbology in her house, as far as I'm aware. She was relieved when the family moved from El Sobrante to a small house in Fremont after I moved away from college - mostly because the family would move to a suburb with more Taiwanese immigrants, but partly because the house number they were moving to had more 8s - a number meaning "fortune," and less 4s - a Chinese homonym with the character of "death." But gone are the money frogs or any sort of tiny animal figurines that had any additional connotation that they could be anything except for tiny animal figures.
It wasn't until years later that my mother would really understand the concept of my sister's mental illness. "Ernie," she would say to me in Chinese, with my father right behind her. "I finally understand now. Your sister is sick!" And I would nod, silently wondering what on earth Mom thought her daughter was going through when we would all hear the one-way conversations in the silence when she was alone in the bedroom.
But when Angela threw the figure out into the water, I'm not sure how much of it was due to the mental illness that would eventually consume her in a couple of years. Maybe she was cornered and felt trapped when faced with conflict. In this case, the conflict was the golden frog sitting in the house, a direct affront to her love of Jesus Christ. When we are presented with conflict, we are all reduced to our basic primal instincts, where we either run away and avoid the situation or stand our ground.
For me, I run. I instinctively put on headphones to drown out unnecessary interactions and prevent arguments and street confrontations. I dodge conflict and then sit in my bed at night, seething in my anger, unable to fall asleep. I sit in a therapist's chair, listening to him talk about the fine line between aggressiveness and assertiveness.
I stare back, unable to comprehend the notion.
But Angela, even now that she's heavily medicated and her thoughts are muddled - when she feels threatened, whether by well-intentioned family members or faced with three black teenage girls who call her a fat bitch on the bus from Fremont to Berkeley, she stands her ground. Because at the end of the day, it's the one thing I respect the most out of my sister, even though it's something I would never be able to tell her. She's the one that gets in our faces and screams no, over and over again. She's the one that punches the first girl in the face while the other two come at her from the back, pulling her to the ground by her hair and kicking her in the face. She's the one with the bruised face as she gets a police escort home to my horrified mother, a grin from ear to ear.
She's the one who hurls the idols into the bay.
Well, you got me to stop for a moment and consider the stairs in my house that run right to the front door. And then again to look up "pork floss." I didn't know that term. I've learned something new!