Safety of Numbers

Lucy Tan is getting ready for the SATs. Her mom embarks en route towards her daughter’s voyage to adulthood, making it impossible for Lucy to cram in an hour or two for herself. As motivational posters gradually find their way around the house, Lucy and her mom begin to get at each other’s throats. While Lucy gets bored of studying and ventures into her finite social life, her mom challenges Lucy’s temper by sending study guides and tutor arrangements piling over and completely toppling their relationship. Her college standards for Lucy start to become irrational, and so does their mutual dependency. Lucy Tan argues that expectations are more than ever a thin bubble teeming with stress that strains relationships when it pops.

We see in the beginning of the story that her mother is incredibly superstitious; refusing to eat out of plastic as per the health hazards, making sure she is completely safe from AIDS. If you were to visualize her disposition to life as a truck — it would have one-way windows, first of all — you’d see it crash directly into what you would envision as Lucy’s. Her mom is impatient with success, to say the least. Her expectations of Lucy loom above their trust for one another. On the second page, we see that routinely at a quarter to five, Lucy “switch[es] the TV back to one of Dad’s channels before turning it off.” This shows two things: That she is expected not to be watching TV, presumably studying instead, and that though her mother’s expectations of her take effort to quench, she isn’t taking part in that battle. Because the pair have totally different rules for themselves, their daily lives contrast and clash with each other greatly.

Lucy makes it clear that she’s been running away from home then back accordingly. Even with her mom nagging her about “a chance at America,” (pg. 3) 24/7, there is still a fault in their power dynamic. As a mother, especially a strict and ambitious one, you would think that they act this way to gain dominance over their children, but Lucy threatens this pattern as a result of feeling overburdened by her mom. She notes that her mom is “uncomfortable around emotional confrontation and underachievement,” (pg. 1) and exploits this fragility by testing her mom’s limits. She mocks her mother’s English by using synonyms to answer questions with a written answer to “see if she knows the difference,” (pg. 4). She goes along with her mother’s suspicions of a robbery when her window screen is knocked over. Worst of all, “seeing Mom panic thrills [her],” (pg. 5). As a means of getting back at the stress her mother is inflicting upon her, she is deliberately making Mom’s life miserable.

Lastly, the tension between them mainly constructed of academic pressure starts to erupt when Lucy’s mom reveals why she is so apprehensive of Lucy’s little rebellion. When she was younger, she, too, would run away to protest with her friends. When her parents found out, they locked her in the house, where the next day, she was told her friends had died in a protest she was locked out of. But despite now knowing this information, Lucy feels no regrets seeing her mom chasing after her as she ran away with her best friend, Cat, for good. This is the single most important factor when arguing stress and expectations ruin bonds because even though she was exposed to her mother’s vulnerability, she felt no sympathy leaving her behind.

In the end, although her mom tried her best to mend what was already broken, the fatalities of the trucks we had illustrated were beyond repair. This is simply because the stress both of them endured because of one another was too much for a healthy mother-daughter relationship, and ultimately, led to its end.