Synopsis
A daughter of a Chinese-American mother and a Norwegian father reveals her personal issues and experiences of race, identity, and culture through a collection of essays and memoirs that explore a variety of global destinations and struggles.
Extrait
Age sixteen, my mother loads up red tubs of noodles, teacups chipped and white-gray as teeth, rice clumps that glue themselves to the plastic tub sides or dissolve and turn papery in the weak tea sloshing around the bottom. She's at Diamond Chan's restaurant, where most of her cousins work after school and during summer vacations, some of her friends, too. There's Suzy at the cash register, totaling up bills and giving back change, a little dish of toothpicks beside her and a basket of mints that taste like powdered cream. A couple of my mother's cousins are washing dishes be-hind the swinging kitchen door, and some woman called Auntie #2 (at her age, everyone is Auntie and each must take a number) takes orders at a table of women that look like Po Po's mah-jongg club. They don't play anymore. They go to the racetrack.
The interior of Diamond Chan's restaurant is red: red napkins, red walls, red carp in the tank and in signature seals on the cheap wall hangings. Luck or no luck, it's like the inside of an esophagus. My mother's nails are cracked, kept short by clipping or gnawing, glisten only when varnished with the grease of someone else's leftovers. Still, she enjoys working here, its repetitive actions, the chores that keep her from thinking. The money my mother earns will soon get sucked into the price of a pink cashmere sweater for Po Po's birthday, along with a graduation photo of herself, also in a pink sweater, pearls, her face airbrushed fog-rose at the cheeks and mouth.
Graduation? Unlike her brothers, she knows she's going to college. Smith, to be exact, though without the approval of the school counselor. "Smith is . . . expensive," the school counselor told my mother only yesterday, which is why my mother is slightly irritated now, clomping around under the weight of full tubs of used dishes. "Smith is not for girls like you." What does she plan to be when she grows up? "A doctor?" my mother suggests. Um, no. "Nursing. Or teaching, perhaps, which is even more practical. Don't you think?"
My mother, who is practical above all things, agreed.
So it's the University of Washington in two years with a degree in education. Fine. She slams down full vials of soy sauce onto each table, makes sure the nozzle heads are screwed on exactly. Someone the other week stuck chewing gum up under the lid of one, and my mother had to dig it out with an old chopstick and then forgot to fully tighten the lid. Black, sweet-smelling pool on the white tablecloth. Seeing it, she could feel the back of her throat fill up with salt. Smith is not for girls like her.
"Cindy!" someone shouts. The kitchen door swings open. A momentary view: white chef shirts stained with red and brown grease. A woman wiping her brow with the back of her hand.
It is not, my mother would argue, the fact she could be denied the dream of Smith so much that someone should tell her she could be denied it. My mother knows the counselor was hinting at some limitation my mother would prefer to ignore. Still, she is whiter than white, should intelligence be considered a pale attribute. Deep down she understands she has a special capacity for work; she likes it, she's good at it, she excels at school and its predictable problems. Hers is a discipline entirely lacking in the spirits of whatever loh fan may sneer or wonder at her in study hall; to be told by a fat, dyed-blond guidance counselor she may be inferior? The monkey calling the man animal.
Now out of the kitchen erupts the newcomer, a smatter of duck fat and ash. Like everyone here, he's someone's cousin's cousin, though he talks like he's got marbles piled in his mouth.
"I come from Hong Kong," he told my mother on break in the alley. "From real Chinese." Is there a substitute? He leers at Suzy, waves his hand dismissively over the carved dragon beams, the waitresses gossiping in English. He's two years older than my mother, lean, high-cheekboned, shaggy-headed. He has big plans for himself. He likes to whip his arms and legs around in the kitchen, threaten the other busboy. Already he's dropped a dish, insulted the cook, cut his thumb on a knife blade. He smells funny.
"Mr. B. O. Jangles," Suzy calls him. "Kung Fooey."
"What the hell the matter with him?" growls Auntie #2. "I never seen nobody act like that before."
"It's all the rage in China," my mother says. She is repeating what he told her in a tone of voice that is meant to seem sarcastic but comes out another way. All the rage. In China.
She stacks more dishes in her tub. From the kitchen comes a high-pitched human squawk and the sound of something clattering to the floor. He's going to get fired soon and my mother is never going to Smith. A waitress scurries out of the kitchen, bearing more food, a panicked look on her face. My mother stands and watches the kitchen door swing in place behind her. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
Around age thirteen, for summer vacation I come down with laziness heretofore unheard of in a child. I doze in bed till noon at least, stay up every night watching bad movies or reading. Sometimes, if it's a bad enough movie and she is not teaching the next morning, my mother wakes and joins me.
Tonight is Enter the Dragon. I remember it because a year or two ago when it came out, all the boys on the block bought numchucks. We smacked our backs with the sticks on chains, left thumb-thick bruise prints on our rib cages. Jeff down the street still has the movie poster, still tells people he has a black belt in karate.
My mother and I watch Bruce Lee set foot on the island, followed closely by the playboy and the black man who will die after the banquet and all his women. Bruce Lee narrows his eyes, ripples his chest muscles underneath his white turtleneck.
"I knew him," my mother tells me. "I worked with him in a restaurant when I was in high school."
"Really?" This is now officially the only cool thing about her. "What was he like?"
"I don't remember. No one liked him, though. All that kung fu stuff; it looked ridiculous. Like a parody."
We watch in the dark as Bruce Lee confronts himself, over and over. In the hall of mirrors, his bloody chest and face seem outlined in silver. He is handsome and wiry; he caws at his opponents like an ethereal avenger. I peek at my mother beside me on the sofa. In the television light, her broad face twists into an expression I do not recognize. Then the light flickers, changes, makes her ordinary again.
One
We Do Not Live Here,
We Are Only Visitors
In Taipei one of the first things I notice are the white cotton masks strapped to the faces of the women. Men wear them, too, but the number of women wearing these makeshift face-filters exceed the number of men, and give Taipei the look of being run by a skinny, anonymous band of surgeons.
After two days my mother, who notices this as well, wants to buy a mask for herself. I argue against it more vehemently than the situation requires, saying that we will only be in Taipei twelve days; whatever damage meant to be done to our lungs in that time will not magically be eliminated by a piece of cotton with two rubber bands. But my mother insists. Near the markets where they sell the masks, she spends minutes haggling with the merchant for a better price than she believes she is being offered. I lounge and snort, tug her away when the merchant's gesticulations become too frenzied to be understood.
In restaurants we argue halfheartedly about the necessity of the masks until we reach a compromise. Now she walks around clutching an old scarf to her face and breathing shallowly. Soon we notice older Chinese women doing the same. Only the young women seem to have adopted the ear-band model. With my mother's wiry skunk hair and still-unlined almond eyes peeking over the tips of her scarf, she has the perfect outfit for traveling. Her brown scarf allows her to blend in with the crowds of older Chinese women in the markets and on the street while always covering her mouth, muffling the fact that she can't speak Chinese.
At night in Taipei after my mother dozes off in front of the hotel television, I think about Mark in Seattle, how we argue in bed together about whether we should marry. Mark had almost proposed twice but thought better of it, he said, when he recalled how easily I became seasick. Mark is an Englishman from Kent who works as a navigator for certain shipping companies. We met in Ireland, where I lived for a year; he followed me home when I returned to Seattle. Mark had half the year off from work and decided, in his typically spontaneous fashion, to buy a plane ticket to the States the morning he drove me to the airport. Within two weeks of my return he was sharing my room in the house I
rented with friends.
Mark has hired himself out as a sailing instructor now and spends the better part of every weekend teaching his latest student the rudiments of tacking. I can't spend more than a few minutes on a boat without being overcome by nausea. Besides the fact of my seasickness, however, I have found other, more pressing reasons to be hesitant about marriage, such as our inability to agree on anything. Still, marriage seems like the next logical step we need to take in our relationship, and for a while we have pursued the subject relentlessly. But whatever reasons we could invent for ourselves to believe marriage is the right answer, neither of us makes a move to propose. We have stopped referring to marriage at all; my nausea has become a symbol of our stasis. "I'm going sailing," Mark will say, looking meaningfully at me. "Do you want to come?" And I, bilious at the sight of a dock, shake my head.
In the past weeks we have argued so much that we have stopped conversing almost altogether, replacing normal dialogue with sexual banter, teasing each other about our accents. "Zee-bra," I say. "Zeh-bra," Mark answers. Tonight in Taipei, in front of the flickering television, I think about his pink hands. The way his face always appears chapped in the sunset. I won't admit it to him, but I love his accent. The first time my maternal grandmother, Po Po, met him was at her birthday celebration at my parents' house in Seattle. "I can't understand a thing he says," she announced loudly after he'd greeted her.
In bed sometimes he asks me to recite the few Chinese phrases I know. "Kai nooey," I say, stroking his chin. "Gung hay fat choi. Shie shei. Soo jiep." But his favorite is the insult: the epithet Po Po called my father before my parents married.
"Loh fan," I murmur, kissing him. "Old savage. Loh fan."
In Taipei my mother asks about Mark. At first she didn't approve of my sleeping with him out of wedlock and, on their first meetings, had to mask her dislike of him on account of this with excessive politeness. My mother's politeness is terrifying. I've learned about this from ex-boyfriends who insist my mother is the most intimidating woman they have ever met; a single dinner once reduced a man named Tim to sweats and stutters. But when I confront her about this on a tour of the city, she acts playfully bemused.
"They're afraid of me?" She laughs. "I'm so nice."
"It's the niceness that's killing them. They think you're really pointing out their flaws."
"If their flaws are so obvious then I don't have to point them out, do I?" she asks. "It must be cultural. Politeness like that is very Chinese."
My mother has softened toward Mark since she suspects the relationship won't last. She gathers this from the number of times Mark and I fight, the days I've called her up, still yelling my side of the argument because Mark has stormed out of the house and stranded me with my anger. Any time we spend alone together, my mother feels free to question me so intimately that I have begun to suspect her concern really fronts some prurient desire to live through me vicariously. "Oh, you're just in this for the sex," she'll say, and then accuse me of innocence, of becoming steeped in the romantic tripe that has similarly ruined her generation of friends' marriages. To defend myself I try to dismantle my image as naïf as quickly and finally as possible by confessing the most embarrassing, cruel details of our couplehood; things I know I shouldn't tell her even as I reveal them, because if the relationship is going to lead to anything, some amount of privacy and trust has to be preserved. She knows this.
"You don't understand," I say.
"Oh, I do. You're fickle," she replies, and then demands to hear, yet again, how Mark drunkenly begged me to propose to him on New Year's and then, laughing, told me no. She tells me my boy-craziness is only exceeded by my gullibility when I tell her about the time I got so stoned I ended up in a corner and wouldn't leave until Mark, drunk himself, wrestled me out of my clothes and then left me there, naked. I embarrass myself, admitting these details. But I realize how proud my lack of loyalty to Mark makes me, how these secret transgressions increase my sense of independence. The more I tell my mother, the further apart I feel from him. "She wants to know," I tell myself. I feel like I can punish him.
By the seventh month of living with Mark, it was as if my mother had wormed her way into my skin, lodging there like a tick. Even now when Mark touches me after I spend a day alone with my mother, I become distant. I imagine she is there, bobbing above us along the ceiling. The next day the phone rings and I know it is her. I can hear her even before I pick up the receiver, her private ticking, how she is prepared to translate everything.
No one associates my mother and me with each other. To shopkeepers and hotel bellhops in Taipei we are two women traveling together,...
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