Runaway: Diary of a Streetkid essay

The Relationship Between Upbringing and Rebellion:
As Discussed In Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid While developing a personal set of beliefs, morals, and defining attributes, juveniles commonly experience a phase of rebellion, coinciding with self-discovery and social experimentation. Upon entering this phase, the adolescents will most notably diversify their style, demand more freedom, and experiment with their sexuality. In Evelyn Lau’s Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, Lau illustrates her colourful and unconventional teenage years as a street kid and prostitute, a defiant response to her parents’ lifestyle of conformity. Through various literary elements, such as characterization, voice, and figurative language, Lau argues that the combination of her parents’ oppressive upbringing and her consequent insecurities are what ultimately led to her decision to run away. The theory that the will of parents to uphold a distinct image in comparison to their child is directly related to the will of the child to disassociate themself from said image.  Lau begins her journal by explaining the exhausting emotional turmoil she suffered as a child. In most cases, children experience a time where they are very indifferent towards their parents’ demands and requests. Lau portrays the idea that her parents confined her to extremely limited freedom and high expectations growing up:
My parents did not approve of my writing or of my involvement in the peace movement. They forbade me to write unless I brought home straight A's from school, and right up until I left home at fourteen I was not allowed out of my house except to attend school and take piano lessons - not on weekends, not after school. (xiii)
As pointed out by Marie Lo in her essay, “The Currency of Visibility and the Paratext of ‘Evelyn Lau’,” this excerpt exemplifies Lau’s parents’ “middle-class ‘model minority’ aspirations juxtaposed against her political beliefs and artistic dreams” (Lo, 7). Alluding to the racial stereotype that Asian parents have extremely high academic and extracurricular expectations of their children, Lo explains that Lau’s description of her parents as “‘Chinese immigrants’ implies and attributes their Chineseness as an explanation for their refusal to let Lau pursue artistic expression” (7).
Creating the characterization of her parents as dictators, she emphasizes their overly controlling behavior, which led to her lack of social skills, and consequently causes her to “still react to everyone [she meets] as if they are [her] parents” (259). Although Lau frequently blames her lack of childhood on both of her parents, she makes a point of differentiating her father’s behavior from her mother’s, describing her father to also be a victim of her mother’s frequent rages. Due to the close relationship she had with her father as a young girl, Lau explains that she is still emotionally invested in him, and notes, “It hurt; he didn’t deserve a kid like me, after years of unemployment, living with a wife who screamed at him” (83).
Lau portrays her mother in a completely different light, however, and stresses her profound “ability to inflict emotional wounds” (83). While under her mother’s academic oppression, Lau was subject to endless hours of studying and piano practice, and was forced to be sneaky about the time she spent expressing herself freely. Elaine K. Chang, in her essay “Run through the Borders: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Runaway Subjectivity,” rationalizes Lau’s will to run away as “an inaudible speech act, a protest on the part of a subject rendered voiceless by and in the codes that determine and enforce her ‘best interests’” (176). Lau represents her father and mother individually in contrasting lights, yet together she identifies them as an overwhelmingly demanding and unbearably unaffectionate parenting unit, and affirms that she is not willing to live in the shadows of their expectations. Lau repeatedly labels her purpose and identity as a writer, a brand that goes against her parents’ pre-conceived notions and her peers’ opinions of her. Towards the beginning of her rebellion, Lau remarks that “less than three months ago I was an honor roll student and labeled a square” (35), an identity that was forced upon her against her will. Having had her voice stolen from her while growing up, Lau retaliates through her writing, exposing the raw emotions and experiences she faces as a runaway. Lau’s writing voices her angry and elegiac inner battle as she attempts to escape the labels that were thrust upon her, however she finds herself assuming a whole other persona. Chang explains Lau’s inability to escape the labels:
The constraining power of identificatory labels is one of the factors prompting Lau to run and to write in the first place: labels such as ‘the hidden-away Chinese Girl’, ‘hooker’, and ‘street kid’ may vary in their connotations, the conditions of their enforcement, and the identity crises they precipitate, but they are equally anathematic to her, serve equally to name hierarchical relations between labeler and labeled, and are equally impossible to shake.” (173)
Under her parents’ authority, Lau reaches for the identity that corresponds with her talents, that of a writer. However, under her own authority, she obsesses over her newly assumed purpose, which is epitomized when she asks, “Who am I if not a writer?” (123).
Veiled from the ability to live without a prescribed image, Lau demands a role to satisfy and a purpose to fulfill upon entering the streets. Her role as a prostitute, she admits, was her way to fulfill someone, “which [she] couldn’t do as a child with [her] parents” (225). Lau shows great wisdom as she analyzes her actions and thoughts, yet once she sinks deeper into heavy drug use, her voice becomes ambiguous and she flips between representing herself as a teen experimenting with rebellion, and a juvenile caught in a web of insecurity.
Reflecting on her need to fit a mold, albeit unlike the one her parents expected her to fit, Lau explains that, “wanting to be someone else, someone perfect, is what drives me” (268). To be considered perfect as a child, Lau was required to “bring home straight-A report cards, do all the housework and smile”, which was rewarded by a small dosage of approval from her parents (77). On the streets, Lau tirelessly searches for approval from men, often performing sexual acts to ensure their satisfaction, yet the satisfaction never makes up for the love she feels deprived of. She dulls her emotional pain with an abundance of drugs, which act as a “protective barrier” (215).
Having stolen Lau’s “childhood and most of [her] adolescence” (229) through the construction of physical and metaphysical barriers around her freedom, her parents created this confounding idea that Lau was not allowed to experience life outside of work. The extent of these metaphorical fences led to Lau building up the courage to escape, and further run far away from them. In many instances throughout her diary, Lau references barricades, whether she is escaping them or trapped by them. Describing her childhood fascination with “small, bare, locked places”, Lau affirms that this was because she would “rather live in a closet” than deal with her parents dominating expectations (85). Running away from these barriers was a natural decision for Lau, since she knew that if she didn’t, she “would kill [herself] or go crazy” (xiv). Marie Lo also rationalizes her running away as being “attributed to the restrictive upbringing defined as Chinese culture” (7). As she immerses herself into the street-kid persona, she finds herself slipping into a deep depression.
Exposing her vulnerability, she admits to wanting to give up when she says, “here I am. I want to go home. I want to have friends. I want to be loved by someone. Is that naked enough for you?” (128). Although she overcomes the idea of going back to her own bed and meals with the idea of once again living with her parents, Lau remains adamant that she is unhappy with her current living situation, and states that “the barriers of suicide were eroding” (141). Similarly, while referencing her newfound pastime of pill popping, she says “The pills were the beginning of something; a barrier somewhere had been broken” (143). In both instances, Lau uses a figurative barrier to represent the morals she was expected to abide by in her childhood. Her mindset to break the barrier fuels her decisions to go against every moral and belief her parents’ Chinese-traditional upbringing imposed on her. Marie Lo explains that Lau’s “running away from her parents is figured as synonymous with running away from the markers of race and ethnicity” (6).
Recalling her childhood, which often happens during phases of emotional confusion and uncertainty, Lau describes feeling “trapped” by the “old memories” of her high-handed mother, passive father, concrete expectations, and her mixed-feelings associated with them (153). Her mother, although perceived as unfairly authoritative, provided her with food; her father, represented as emotionally absent, provided her with a roof over her head; yet she intentionally sided with rebellion, overlooking their willing obligations as parents for the sake of her aspirations as a writer. Mao Zedong is quoted saying, “running away is the chief means of getting out of passivity and regaining the initiative” (quoted in Lee, 1990, 108). While Lau reiterates that she was trapped in her house, with unaccepted aspirations and ignored emotions, she notes that she was still part of a family that provided for her, and exclaims that, “there’s definitely something magical and irreplaceable about a family” (114). Therefore, Lau suggests that her running away was to claim control and prove her own purpose as a writer.
Parents set expectations and rules as a way to guide their children’s development. In the cause of Lau, it was no different; her mother expected her to excel as a student and be a helpful member of their household, teaching her the importance of academics and selflessness, respectively. In Lau’s representation of her parents, she blames her will to run away on their overall lack of understanding, yet her shifting narrative voice, showing both aggression and longing towards her family, suggests otherwise. Lau’s parents, as Chinese immigrants, had a distinct set of traditional Chinese values and beliefs that they expected their daughter to abide by, and Lau rejected the expectations profoundly. By running away from the barriers she had been bound by in her upbringing, Lau intentionally set out to experience a lifestyle directly contrasting her parents’ beliefs. Through her unpredictable narrative voice, as expected from an avid drug user, strong characterization of her parents’ roles, and repetitive use of metaphorical barriers, the reader can infer that Lau’s decision to run away was a form of rebellion, which consequently took over her body and mind. Lau’s self-representation reinforces the notion that children of a certain age crave control over their own lives, and will go to extreme lengths in order to gain it.