“Fingas!” Mrs. Liu demands again.

Sheepishly, I slide my hands on top of the keyboard.

Mrs. Liu raps me on the knuckles once. Not a hard rap, but a strict flick of her palm that means only one thing: Bad Girl. Her hands are slender, the hands of a knowing woman who clips her nails each Sunday and sweeps the shavings into a tin trashcan. My hands are eight years old. They are chubby and unwise.

In my 10 years of playing the piano, Mrs. Liu never called me a “Good Girl.”

Instead, my Good Girl status was reduced each Sunday afternoon, when I sat in front of a piano and plunked fingers that weren’t built for grace notes or arpeggios. In the car, after nursing my weary knuckles, I’d whine to my mom: “Can’t you just get me a white teacher? I don’t like Mrs. Liu. I’d actually practice if I understood what she was saying.”

But the truth was I had no trouble deciphering Mrs. Liu’s criticism. In fact, I understood her disapproval quite clearly. Each knuckle-whack carried a slap of condemnation: Bad Girl. I disliked piano lessons, but it wasn’t because Mrs. Liu wasn’t white. It was because she was, like my mother, Chinese, and her furrowed eyebrows meant I was failing to be a Good Chinese Daughter.

---

When I ask my Facebook friends what they think of the term “Good Girl,” my childhood friend David answers within 40 seconds.

“do you consider yourself a good girl o_O,” he writes, tacking on a wild-eyed emoticon to his sentence for sarcasm.

I can tell he doesn’t expect a real answer. In fact, his emoticon implies that he already knows the real answer. I do consider myself a Good Girl. Or at least, I consider myself a Good Daughter. Are the two interchangeable? I’m not sure. Good Girls make to-do lists, then check off each completed task. We don’t earn knuckle-raps from our teachers. We practice the piano, and excel. Our parents beam. Good Girls are successful.

---

I call my mom on the phone over the weekend. When she picks up, she’s grumpy, frying shrimp with one hand, dangling the phone with the other.

“Mom,” I start cautiously, “I need your thoughts on something.”

“Huh?” she squawks.

“What does it mean to be good?”

Silence.

“I mean, how does a girl become ‘good?' ” I prod. “Did your mom teach you how to be good? Or did you just know how?”

My mom remains quiet. I’m curious. I never hear anybody use the term “Good Woman,” yet I know clearly my mother is “Good” in the sense of fulfilling duties, in the sense of giving us love. Does she know this herself? At what point do women leave their good girlhood behind … or can they ever? Is my mom, at age 52, still a Good Girl?

The flip of shrimp skin hisses dirtily on the pan.

“You want to be good?” My mom scoffs, “You cook.”

---

At home, my mom plants an oven mitt into my hands slowly, as if the fabric will crumble at my touch. She grimaces.

“It’s about time you do this,” she growls.

I don’t blame her urgency. I’ll be moving into an apartment with my best friend next year, and our plan so far is to thrive on pre-made salads and peanut butter. I’m no good in the kitchen. The first time I cracked open an egg, the yolk slid from its shell onto the floor like a yellow sun hatched across the dirt. When it comes to food, nobody in my family is a waster. The trashcan is a holy place, reserved only for the scraped clean and utterly broken: melon rinds gnawed, white jars of pickled tofu licked until the glass scratches tongues. I’ve been taught that a part of being good is being resourceful: finding a recipe for every piece of the fruit, including the seeds.

“Help me make the red bean bread,” my mom commands.

I crack the white walls of an egg. Its yellow center flops to the floor. Shit. Bad Girl, I reprimand myself.

I fear my mom will lash out at my yolky mishap. To be a Good Girl and a Good Chinese Daughter requires constant discipline, a reminder to the self that any waste you create — even by accident — will be deemed a failure.

“When I was your age, I was cooking dinner every night for the family,” my mom huffs, strutting around the floors in a plaid apron.

“Of course, it was different back then. Your grandma and grandpa were working all the time. They had no time to cook for the rest of us. It was a matter of helping the rest of the family survive,” she says simply, stirring a bowl of sweet red bean paste.

“You?” She jabs her chopstick in my direction. “What do you know how to make? Nothing. What do you know how to clean? Nothing. But what do you play with when you are small? Dolls. Ai-yah! Dolls! Yellow-haired yang wa-wa.”

She spits, “How will that help you survive? You know what I play with when I am small? Candy wrappers, if I am lucky.