IncompleteMy mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You could open a restaurant. You could work for the government and get a good pension. You could buy a house with almost no money down. You could become rich. You could become instantly famous. “Of course, you can be a prodigy too,” my mother told me when I was nine. "You can be better than anything. What does Aunt Lindo know? Her daughter, she's just the smartest." America was where all my mother's hopes were placed. She had arrived in San Francisco in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her home, her first husband and two daughters, twins. But he never looked back with regret. Things could improve in so many ways. We didn't immediately choose the right kind of prodigy. At first my mother thought I might be a Chinese Shirley Temple. We watched old Shirley movies on TV like they were workout movies. My mother took me by the arm and said: "Ni kan. You look." And I would see Shirley tapping her foot, or singing a sailor's song, or pursing her lips into a very round O as she said, "Oh, my God." Ni kan," my mother said, as Shirley's eyes filled with tears. "You already know how. You don't need talent to cry!" Shortly after my mother had the idea of ​​Shirley Temple, she took me to beautician training school in the Mission District and placed me in the hands of a student who could barely hold her hands. scissors without shaking. Instead of having big curls, I emerged with a patchy mass of black, frizzy fuzz. My mother dragged me into the bathroom and tried to wet my hair. “You look like a Chinese nigger,” she complained, as if I did it on purpose. The beauty school instructor had to cut off these limp locks to fix my hair again. "Peter Pan is very popular these days," she assured my mother that I now had the ugly, boyish-length hair, with curly bangs that fell slanting two inches above my eyebrows. I liked the haircut, and it really made me look forward to my future fame. In fact, I was excited at first as much as my mother, perhaps even. even more. I imagined this prodigy part of me as many different images, and I tried them on for size.