“You don’t have to go to all this fuss,” Nai-nai would say every night when they sat down to eat.
“No trouble, no trouble. You’re used to much better in Shanghai, I’m sure.”
Su-yi’s husband was as quiet as a tomb. In China he had been a pediatrician. He worked very long hours at his American job, which was managing an Italian bakery, and when he was home he’d park himself in the La-Z-Boy and read Chinese magazines. When TV came the husband would watch whatever was on until he fell asleep in the recliner. After dinner my mother and Grace would sit together on the sofa behind him while Nai-nai and Su-yi argued in the kitchen about who would do the dishes.
“You girls finish homework?” the husband would ask, without turning around.
“Yes, Ba-ba,” Grace would answer, for both of them. My mother’s favorite was Jack Benny. The glasses and laconic delivery gave him the demeanor of a Chinese scholar, like her father. Jack Benny made her laugh, even when she didn’t get the jokes.
By the time my mother joined her sister at Smith, she too had an American name—Bonnie. In her high school graduation photo Ma is wearing a blue-collared sailor’s dress and she brandishes her diploma, all her teeth showing in a broad American grin, hair ribbons flapping behind her. She’d worn a cap and gown like everyone else in her class, but Nai-nai thought they were ugly and made her take them off for the camera.
Meanwhile, my Aunty Mabel had met a nice Chinese man. He’d been impossible not to notice, since he was the only other Asian in town besides old Mr. Lee, who ran the Chinese laundry. Pau-yu Wang was teaching introductory Chinese to rich white girls who still had missionary fantasies, despite the fact that China was now Communist. Being a well-brought-up Shanghai girl, my aunt hadn’t dared speak to Professor Wang her entire freshman year, and he had shown no signs of wanting to make her acquaintance. She found him uncommonly handsome—many of his students had crushes on him—although his height was disconcerting to her. The two were officially introduced at a party for foreign students, and by the time my aunt was a junior, they had progressed to meeting for tea now and then. But once my mother swept into the campus coffee shop in her powder blue cashmere sweater set, newly permed curls bouncing off her shoulders, my Aunty Mabel didn’t stand a chance.
In China my parents would have been considered no match at all. Daddy was from the north, a poor farming village in Shandong province, and because he had no relatives in the States, my grandmother couldn’t check up on him. My mother teased my father about his nasal Beijing accent, and he, the intellectual, would merely smile. “Although your mother never admit,” Nai-nai told me once, “Beijing Mandarin is most exclusive, like Parisian French.”
Nai-nai approved of my father, despite his dearth of credentials. Perhaps she was impressed by his refined air, unusual in a man of his background. Or perhaps, after marrying off three daughters, she had relaxed her standards and decided it was all right for my mother to be adventurous—they were in a new country after all.
My parents were married in San Diego, a week after my mother’s college graduation. In the official wedding portrait, my father is standing, his boxy dark jacket a little too loose, hair slicked off his brow in a side part, not smiling exactly, but his eyes are shiny with excitement. My mother is seated in front of him. She is wonderfully pale—rice powder, Nai-nai told Marty and me—dressed in a white tailored suit to which is pinned a corsage of tiny light flowers. Her expression is haughty, even severe, gloved hands folded in her lap, white pumps pressed together. She looks decades older than the girl in the high school photograph.
My parents got jobs teaching at the Army Languages School in Monterey, where they rented a bungalow half a mile from the Pacific Ocean. One day, smack in the middle of her morning class, while she was standing at the blackboard writing the characters for sun and moon, my mother felt deathly ill. Somehow she made it to the bell and hurried to the ladies’ room, where she was crouched over the toilet for an hour. “Every day like that for six months,” she told me. “I think I rather die than be pregnant.”
My father was certain that their first child would be a son. It was 1958, the year of the dog, which means strong and reliable. He was so sure that when my mother went into labor he dropped her off at the hospital and then went out to buy four dozen eggs to hard-boil and dye red, as is the Chinese custom for a new baby boy. When they told him it was a girl he walked out of the hospital and got into the sky blue Pontiac my parents had just bought and made the rounds to distribute the eggs anyway. “Maybe next time,” their friends consoled him. Because my parents had not been prepared for a girl, I had no name for the first two months of my life.
Ma is an inconsistent storyteller. Once she claimed that she and my father first set eyes on each other in San Diego, while she was still in high school, sweet sixteen, never-been-kissed. He was there for a conference and had stopped by the house to visit Aunty Mabel. When I challenged her later, she replied: “You dream this, Sally. Of course I meet your Daddy at Smith. Ask your Nai-nai.”
But my grandmother claimed she couldn’t remember. Nai-nai wasn’t the type to sit down and relate tales, although now and then she would toss out a gem for Marty and me to ponder: “Did you know your mother buy her wedding outfit off the rack?”
In contrast, my father’s frequent stories of childhood were ruthlessly unvarying. Each one was designed as a lesson to Marty and me—study hard, respect your elders, clean your rice bowl.
The house where Daddy was born had dirt floors and the family drank hot water because they couldn’t afford tea leaves. My father was the middle child, sandwiched between two sisters. His parents both died shortly after their third child was born and the orphans were shuffled from relative to relative, a miserable existence. Especially for my father, who was always ailing; there wasn’t a disease you could name that he hadn’t suffered: malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia, rheumatic fever.
In all those strange poor beds he read voraciously, everything from the classics teachers would lend him to the big-city newspapers visitors would bring to the village. And Western science textbooks so beat-up their covers were gone. At sixteen, in the hospital recovering from influenza, he composed a five-page essay on the new role of technology in China. It won him first prize in a provincewide contest and brought him to the attention of an American missionary couple stationed in Beijing. They arranged for him to study in the United States after he had gotten his undergraduate degree.
What seduced my father above all else was the elegant metaphor of physics, which had a language of its own so that no matter where in the world he went he’d find someone else who could speak it. He’d be respected, even if his English wasn’t perfect. So there he was at Berkeley, fresh off the boat, knowing no one, with only a single change of clothing and ten dollars spending money a week. For the first time in his life Daddy felt at home, not in the shabby off-campus apartment he shared with two other male grad students, a Czech and a Russian, but in the chalk- and dust-smelling physics lab, surrounded by giant blackboards dancing with equations he could not only understand but elaborate on. Out of the lab, his life felt more precarious than ever, but if it were possible for my father to be happy, he was happy then.
Happiness precedes loss. This is the main lesson I have learned from my father. When the telegram arrived, Daddy knew at once that it meant the end of his dream. His sponsors had been killed in a car accident. Good-hearted as they were, they’d never changed their will and everything went to a son who lived in Minneapolis. The son did not return my father’s phone calls or letters. As a stranded student my father could stay in America, but he had to support himself. The lawyer who was handling his sponsors’ estate wangled an interview for a teaching post, beginning Chinese, no experience needed, at a prestigious women’s college on the East Coast. My father accepted the job as soon as it was offered. He had nowhere else to go.