Bab 57: The Argument
Like her father, Sylvia's go-to coping mechanism was humor. However, Joann was in no mood to laugh as evidenced by the stern expression on her face. Sylvia wilted under her mother's fiery and judgemental gaze.
Sylvia's 'mystery boyfriend' tried to help initially but Joann's presence overwhelmed him. He thought about it and decided this was family business and he was going to stay out of it. He shrunk deeper into his seat and tried to be as inconsequential as he could be.
"Well?" Joann pressed.
"I, I…" Sylvia stammered before lowering her head in a mixture of shame and sadness. There was nothing she could say about it, she was caught red-handed. To be perfectly honest, she was not ashamed of her job but she was ashamed of being found out.
"You do not have the face to even admit openly the despicable thing you are doing?" Joann's voice crackled with fury. It felt like she was going to reach through the open window and use her two hands to strangle her own daughter.
"But there is nothing despicable about what I am doing…" Sylvia retorted weakly.
That made Joann flare up even more. "Not despicable?! You are snooping into other people's dirty laundry and airing them to the public, allowing the public to judge them unfairly.
"You are framing people's lives in such a way that they have a negative reputation with the public. You are writing and publishing inconsistent and oftentimes downright incorrect information on people, breaking up their career and daily life.
"You are…" Joann paused as if to compose herself before spitting out with derision, "You are a paparazzi!"
Joann was so angry at Sylvia because celebrities had always shared a tense relationship with paparazzi. The two parties needed each other for their survival, the celebrity needed the paparazzi for publicity while in return, the paparazzi needed the celebrity for the scoop.
This was a highly volatile relationship with the power tipping more and more towards the celebrity as their fame increased. This was understandable because after the celebrity reached a certain level of fame, they would no longer need the paparazzi to promote them anymore. In contrast, the paparazzi's desire for such celebrity increased because they had on themselves great newsworthiness. The public was interested in the lives of the rich and popular, and the paparazzi was the instrument which would deliver to them their daily need for celebrity gossip.
For celebrity with Joann's caliber and fame, the paparazzi was more of a hindrance than an aid to her life and career. The paparazzi was also called Little Doggie in the Chinese vernacular because they hounded you like feral beasts with no regards to your privacy when they had their eyes set on you… and to think her very own daughter was one such Little Doggie…
Joann was reminded of the horrible brush-ins she had had with paparazzi throughout her long career and her anger continued to grow. The closest example was the fake scandal with Lee Mu which had sent a shockwave through her life. That was a 'present' by the paparazzi as well. Knowing her daughter of one of 'them' made the bile in Joann's stomach boil.
With Joann staring daggers at her, Sylvia thought about changing the subject because she too was feeling the fire rise up within her, she was afraid she might start firing back to her mother. After all, from her perspective, she could see nothing objectively wrong with her profession of choice.
Her mother's aversion to paparazzi came from the prejudices and bias that originated from her career as an actor. However, it was unfair to limit the daughter's life simply because the mother wanted it a certain way, right?
Sylvia felt like her mother had no right to deny her the opportunity to choose the profession she liked simply because Joann was an actor. In other words, if Joann was not an actor, then she would have been more permissible to Sylvia being a reporter with an entertainment beat. So Sylvia felt like why should she yield to her mother's demands, couldn't her mother make the compromise for her instead?
However, Xu Jing's blood did run in her veins so she wanted to avoid the unnecessary confrontation. The philosophy she followed was to reduce major issues to minor ones and then minor issues to naught.
Nevertheless, this did not mean that Sylvia was a pushover, push her far enough and she would snap and one would understand why she was her mother's daughter.
Sylvia tried to shift the conversation to a safer ground in the hopes of distracting her mother, "By the way, how did you manage to find me?"
"We followed the bug planted on your phone."
"What?!" Sylvia brushed over the 'we' and assumed it was Joann who was responsible for this. The sparks within her grew to become embers. "Mom, that is a gross violation of my privacy!!"
"You have the audacity and face to talk to me about privacy?! People like you snoop into people's lives without their permission and you want to talk to me about privacy? What about the privacy of those people whose lives you have ruined? What about the privacy of my friends? How do you expect me to face them after they find out I have a Little Doggie as my daughter? What about you, you asked, but what about me?!"
One could say Joann had taken this a little bit too personally but how could she not? Her life of a celebrity was a constant tug of war with the media and to have her daughter choose to fight for the opposite camp was the ultimate betrayal.
'What about me?!' The question reverberated in Sylvia's mind and the ember finally burst into flames. "Yes, it is always about you, isn't it, mother? Everything has to be about you!"
Sylvia screamed back at her mother. The shouting went back and forth, both parties feeding off the other's anger.
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