Life lessons from Elaine "Lainey Gossip" Lui's mother, the Chinese Squawking Chicken, as Elaine lovingly calls her. A wonderful mother-daughter memoir full of seemingly radical parenting advice that got results!

When Elaine Lui was growing up, her mother told her, "Why do you need to prepare for the good things that happen? They're good. They won't hurt you. My job is to prepare you for the hard times, and teach you how to avoid them, whenever possible." Using Chinese fortune telling, feng shui blackmail, good old-fashioned ghost stories, and shame and embarrassment in equal measure, Elaine's fiercely loving mother (the Chinese Squawking Chicken, as Elaine calls her) raised her to be an intelligent, high-achieving, devoted and grateful daughter.

In Listen to the Squawking Chicken, Elaine's mother's lessons are recounted in 9 chapters in which the Squawking Chicken teaches Elaine about hard work ("Miss Hong Kong is a whore"), humility ("I should have given birth to a piece of barbecue pork"), love and friendship, family loyalty ("Where's my money?"), style and deportment ("Don't be low classy"), finding one's own voice ("Walk like an elephant, squawk like a chicken") among other essentials. Along the way, Elaine poignantly reveals how her mother earned the nickname "Tsiahng Gai" or "squawking chicken" growing up in Hong Kong, enduring and rising from the ashes of her own hard times.

For anyone who's ever had a mother, or been raised by a parent, Listen to the Squawking Chicken is a loving mother-daughter memoir that will have readers laughing out loud, gasping in shock, and re-considering modern parenting tactics.