Releasing the Fear of St. Vincent’s “Year of the Tiger”

I fear it and I dream of it: total honesty with my family, opening the door of my personhood and letting them see all of me.

My maternal grandmother was a Tiger, born either in 1938 or 1939. I spent part of my childhood living with her, my maternal grandfather (Year of the Rat), my mother (Year of the Horse), my father (Year of the Pig), and my little sister (Year of the Dog) in a two-story house that seems cramped in my memory. But it was a palace compared to the home my grandmother grew up in. I (Year of the Monkey) know this because once, while visiting Shanghai, my great-uncle showed me the place where he and his many siblings grew up, which I hazily remember as a dark doorway carved into a monolith of plaster. I don’t remember when he took me there, only that my grandmother, his beloved big sister, had already passed away some years before.

From elementary into middle school, the six of us coexisted under the same roof. My grandparents had both been professors of physics at an esteemed university in Beijing, not that this ever came up in our daily life. They arrived in the US when I entered grade school and got their green cards to live with us at length. My grandfather doted on me and my sister and was an endless fount of jokes and, only once, as I got over a fever, spoke at length about his long, strange, and often sad journey from fleeing Japanese soldiers during World War II to being by my bedside.

And my grandmother—in my recollections, my grandmother is a small, soft figure. She was shorter than her only daughter and much shorter than my grandfather, who is six foot something and looked like a giant in my child’s eyes. In the bower of home, she shed her professional life and slipped firmly into the house slippers of domesticity. She cooked almost every night and made us clothes and furnishings: wild knit sweaters and giant crocheted blankets and dresses that I always picture either line-drying or on my mother’s body. When I shirked chores or piano practice, my grandmother was the one who’d scold me, I think, but I also sought comfort from and deeply respected her, I think. Partly because I have no evidence otherwise and partly because, looking back, my clearest memory about her is how I wept uncontrollably when I learned of her death.

It’s funny in the saddest possible way that we lived together for years, had countless conversations over meals and on walks and in rooms bound together by hallways but also blood—and I don’t remember how she laughed, or what her favorite story was, or how it felt when her small hand covered my smaller one. But I have two of her sweaters hanging in my closet. One of them is clearly meant for a child, and the other is large and loose on me, perhaps a sweaterdress for herself or originally made for my grandfather’s frame. Neither sweater quite fits my adult body because my grandmother only saw me reach the cusp of adolescence.

It saddens me that I can only remember my grandmother as a caretaker, someone whose many other lives lay on the other side of a door that, as a kid, I’d assumed was locked. Now I understand that for most people, all it takes to be invited into their interior world is a polite knock. But it took me too many years to muster up the courage to try, and her door has disappeared.

It took me too many years to muster up the courage to try, and her door has disappeared.

*

All of this mangled, poignant history is in the back of my mind the first time that I listen to “Year of the Tiger,” the closing track of the 2011 album Strange Mercy (Year of the Rabbit) by the experimental rock musician St. Vincent, née Annie Clark (Year of the Dog). In the years since Strange Mercy, Clark has reached big-league levels of fame (both for her music and for her dating history). But back in the early aughts, she was a critical darling who, after releasing two albums of often brittlely delicate experimental pop, dug into a harder and leaner aesthetic for her third one.

As a record, Strange Mercy feels like a bouncing spring; the songs stretch and then retract violently back together. It’s sliced through with guitar melodies and interludes that remind me of those electric serrated knives, precision tools that buzz as they saw for a quicker, cleaner cut. That said, the songs aren’t pristine, lyrically or musically. But listening to Strange Mercy is, by and large, like walking through a museum where all the walls are on fire, and none of the patrons move with purpose. Instead they peer closely at the flames and wonder, “But what does it mean?”

Clark is content and perhaps pleased to let listeners wander her artful labyrinth (a visual underlined by the video for her song “Cheerleader”) with no clear connection to a personal narrative. Album-opener “Chloe in the Afternoon” is named after a French ’70s art film; another song weaves in excerpts from Marilyn Monroe’s diary. The exception to this penchant for measured lyrical distance is “Year of the Tiger.” In interviews from the time, Clark has a ready answer for the song’s inspiration:

“I talked to a lot of people who said that 2010 [the Year of the Tiger] was the worst year of their lives. I remember talking to a friend who was telling me in early 2010 that it was supposed to be really turbulent and traumatic. ‘The highs are supposed to be really high and the lows are supposed to be really low.’ I thought, Okay, yeah, yeah, whatever—and it turned out to be possibly the worst year in [sic] life.”

In 2010, Clark’s father was convicted of a slew of financial crimes; he was not released from prison until 2019. (This, in turn, inspired her 2021 album Daddy’s Home.) It’s an easy leap to believe his imprisonment was a contributing factor to her worst year ever. And “Year of the Tiger” is, unlike every other song on the album, cowritten—with her mother, Sharon Clark.

These familial connections inform the more personal bent to the song, which opens, “When I was young / Coach called me the tiger,” a direct reference to Clark’s extensive sporting history. Compared to lines like “If you say it is, then I guess it is / What you say it is, but I don’t feel anything” (from the song “Northern Lights”), the lyrics on “Year of the Tiger” unfold largely as tight, direct prose. At points, it “reads” like a sardonic accessibility caption: “Italian shoes / Like these rubes know the difference / Suitcase of cash / In the back of my stick shift.” Musically, it’s a long, creeping crescendo, a wave that breaks before it can froth into whitecaps. Within Clark’s burning museum, “Year of the Tiger” is a portrait bust in the central courtyard, the only art piece that you can observe without having to brave the metaphoric flames.

Which isn’t to say “Year of the Tiger” is a straightforward song. Its two refrains, repeated like mantras throughout, are “Oh America, can I owe you one?” and “Living in fear of the Year of the Tiger,” which she raises an octave on its final chorus. The tension is high and the claws are out, as the woman who was called a tiger as a girl retreats from the stars and stripes of the creature and country she’s grown to fear.

*

The year I turned thirty and achieved a litany of personal firsts, 2022, was the Year of the Tiger. My grandmother would’ve been eighty-four. And most likely, she wouldn’t have known anything about my life, at least not nearly as much as she knew when she watched over me in the house we shared.

The year I taught myself to bifurcate my identity for my family was also a Year of the Tiger: 2010, the same Year of the Tiger that’d left St. Vincent and her friends in shambles. I’d just graduated high school and moved across the country for college. For the first time, I had to tell my parents what I did during my day-to-day life. Our relationship, once a tightly coiled spring, now had to stretch across a continent.

The year I taught myself to bifurcate my identity for my family was also a Year of the Tiger: 2010, the same Year of the Tiger that’d left St. Vincent and her friends in shambles.

A consequence of this long-distance strain was that I constantly lied to them about what I was up to and how I was doing. I justified the lies to my parents, the little ones (“of course I’d never get a tattoo”) and the big ones (“I did not drop classes because of how much I partied”), in part because I knew they were capable of bigger ones. The biggest one was about my grandmother, whose death and preceding illness I only learned about once sympathy bouquets began arriving at our house, a story explored in the 2019 film The Farewell and lived by me and my sister in 2006, the Year of the Dog.

The secret of my grandmother’s cancer was the moment I realized that proximity and honesty aren’t related at all, and that at least part of the tragedy of family is that you have very little recourse from their fallibility. Perhaps this is what I immediately picked up from “Year of the Tiger” when I first listened to it: the ambient sense of childhood’s blindfold coming off and your eyes, so used to muted understanding, flaring with clarity. Your priorities shifting as you stare at the yawning gap between how you were taught to be and how people really act.

In “Year of the Tiger,” Clark laments, “I had to be the best of the bourgeoisie / Now my kingdom for a cup of coffee.” With no more parental pedestal holding up your world, you adjust to life as a pedestrian, like the rest of everybody, creating a more independent self with each determined step away from home. Since 2010, I’ve been on a long, strange, and overwhelmingly affirming odyssey, but always with one ear tuned to the ground. Waiting for the slight shockwave warning me that the other shoe, so to speak, has finally fallen.

The truth is, my sister is the only member of my family who really knows me: that I’m covered in tattoos, that I’m trans, that I’m a working writer who’s taken on other jobs to keep the bills paid, that I’m a new author and plan to keep on writing books as long as the publishing industry will have me, but even if the industry didn’t I probably would keep writing books anyway. I speak to my parents only of my domestic life, the partner who keeps my secrets for me and the home that I tidy, wherein I tuck away the parts of myself they don’t know exist, before I let them enter. The only communication I have with my surviving grandparents is over the phone and WeChat, where my deteriorated Chinese makes communication difficult, period.

It surprises my friends and professional peers that I’m not out and known to my family. Not because they don’t recognize the stakes of full disclosure but because I’m so relatively open about who and what I am to myself and the world in my daily life, especially through the fun house mirror of social media and my writing (hello, reader). But all that openness cloaks a fear that stops me from elaborating when I update my parents on my work, that keeps my limbs covered up when they visit, that pitches my voice just a little higher, just a little brighter, when I speak to them over video chat.

I know what this fear does and is doing to me. I feel its ominous pressure in my dreams, in my panic attacks, in the drop of my stomach when I listen or speak to other writers who talk about how their families are their biggest inspiration and support, and I smile tightly and try not to cry. There are many people in my life who’ve come out to their families, who’ve summoned the courage to face the future as themselves, fully. There are also a few people in my life who are like me, who live in fear of being found out as a fraud even though the “farce” is that they’re living as who they really are.

I don’t want to become a stranger to the people who raised me. Who knew me before I knew what a self could be and how much war the self and the body can wage. And though I’m afraid, and even though the fear makes sense given everything I know about my family, I can’t let go of the dream of total honesty, of opening the door of my personhood completely and letting them see all the verdant, blooming wilderness of my interior world.

I know they’ll see it as chaos, as confusion. That in some ways this kind of disorder is their greatest fear. But no one ever gets younger. I’m so tired of putting up and tearing down the set of a production that grows more elaborate and expensive with every performance. And while this Year of the Tiger has come to a close, I don’t want to reach the next one still living in fear.