Back at boarding school I keep working on my portfolio, and on April 15, senior year, I get in line for the dorm phone to tell my parents I didn’t get into Yale. Ma is the one who answers.
“That’s a shame,” she says. “I don’t know what you’re going to do now.”
“Half our class applied, you know, and they took only seven people.”
“Your father will be very disappointed.”
“I’m going to the Rhode Island School of Design, Ma. It’s a very good art school. Maybe the best in the country. They gave me a scholarship and everything.”
“I just talk to Xiao Lu’s mother. He got into Harvard and M.I.T.”
For graduation I give Fran a hammered silver bangle and she gives me a pair of silver earrings shaped like teardrops.
10
Some memory you keep underneath, so you can get on with your life.
It doesn’t work. What happens is that you end up moving from dream to dream.
But you, you have your father’s blood.
He walks away into the night, his white shirt a flag. As in life, his shoulders are bowed and he travels hunched forward, not looking back.
I want to call out to him but realize that I don’t know his language.
It’s my ninth birthday. Ma doesn’t get a cake or presents because we’re busy getting ready to go to visit our Nai-nai in San Diego. That is, Marty and I are going while Ma and Daddy spend the summer in Taiwan, where my father has a teaching job. “We celebrate when we come back,” my mother promises me. In the front of the tunnel to the plane she hands us over to the stewardess, who wears white gloves like Minnie Mouse. Marty cries but I don’t. Daddy stands behind Ma, mixed in with the crowd. We don’t say anything to him and he says nothing to us. When he raises his hand to wave good-bye I look away, and that’s the last I see of him.
During the flight the stewardess keeps coming over with Jack and Jill magazine, coloring books, magnetic tic-tac-toe. Not that we need distractions; we sit quietly, buckling our seat belts when the sign says to. Most of the way I read Eight Cousins, feeling my sister’s hot skull pressed against my shoulder as she sleeps.
My Nai-nai is so glad to see us, she has tears in her eyes. “Ni kan!” she says to her cousin Su-yi, who has come to the airport too because our grandmother doesn’t drive. Nai-nai used to live with Su-yi, but now she has a separate house on the same street. Su-yi has a dough face and smokes cigarettes. Her hair is curly and black-dyed, I can tell.
Ma has warned us: “Nai-nai old lady, don’t tire her out.” But my grandmother is inexhaustible. Mornings, when she comes to wake us, she’s already dressed, hair up, face powdered, lipstick on. The first night when she tucks us in Marty asks, “When do you go to bed?” and Nai-nai answers: “Very, very late. Old lady doesn’t need much sleep.”
Over my grandmother’s shoulder I am watching the curtains, patterned with cobalt and fuchsia primroses, dancing over the open window. I have brought Piggy, although I am way too old. Marty left her Raggedy Ann on her pillow at home. Nai-nai doesn’t make fun of me. “Poor old man,” she says, when she notices Piggy’s tattered chest. She looks in her drawers and finds a baby T-shirt I can dress him in.
Every morning the three of us go marketing, Nai-nai handing Marty or me the netting bag when it begins to fill up. We walk the ten blocks to the supermarket, where Nai-nai leans over the mountain of oranges to haggle with the produce man, who is fat and wears a white apron. Her voice is so loud that the other customers stare. “In China, I have maid to do this,” she explains as we leave the store, Marty stomping hard on the rubber mat to make sure the electric door opens.
At the fish store I drag my sister over to watch the lobsters bumbling over each other in their tank. Although I would never admit it, it makes me a little sick to see my grandmother glaring into the eye of each fish as if it were a lifelong enemy and then pointing—“This one, and this”—and the fish lady slaps each carcass onto the sheet of butcher wrap she has laid across the scales. At home Nai-nai chops the heads off and puts them in a pot to make stew. “Good food for old lady,” she says, and that’s her lunch, while Marty and I get the bodies, steamed in a brown sauce so sweet that, when Nai-nai isn’t looking, we stick our faces into our bowls to lick up the last drops.
Our grandmother has lots of opinions.
“Sal-lee going to be tall. Tall girl not so beautiful, but stands out.” She looks me up and down. “You press your clothes, you’re fine.”
To Marty: “You like your mother. Sloppy.”
“WHAT?” Nai-nai is the only one who can make my sister squirm.
“Mar-tee, you walk like water buffalo.”
“Crabby old lady,” my sister mutters under her breath.
“You don’t talk back to elders,” Nai-nai says serenely. “Now please wash rice for lunch.”
I ask my grandmother about Chinese ghosts.
“Two kinds,” she tells me. “Men ghosts and women ghosts.”
“Which are worse?” We are in the kitchen making jiao zi, pork dumplings. Marty and I call them boiled ears, but we can eat two dozen apiece, dunked in a sauce of soy and vinegar, in one sitting. Nai-nai examines each one I make, frowns at some, smiles at others. Not in a million years could I pleat them shut as quick as she does—pinch, pinch, pinch—without even looking.
“Men ghosts are very strong. Make a lot of noise, like child. Women ghosts charming and often beautiful. Some say women ghosts worse.”
When I first get to California I sometimes bolt awake in the middle of the night. I pad down the hallway to my grandmother’s room and slip through the door, which is always ajar. “Ai-yah, awake again!” Nai-nai whispers, lifting the covers so that I can climb in.
“I heard a scary noise.”
“Nothing, nothing, just the wind, so many big bush around this house.”
“It didn’t sound like wind.”
“So what if ghost? They’re dead, you’re alive. They can’t hurt you. You should feel sorry for them. They’re like your sister, tease because they’re jealous.”
But it’s not ghosts I’m afraid of. I can’t tell her, but it helps to lie there in the sweet musty-smelling bed, listening to my grandmother breathe. She’s the same height as me but sharp-boned. Tough. I imagine being old like her, so that nothing can hurt me.
The kids on our street are easygoing, unlike those in Connecticut. No jumping out of the hedges and making Chinese eyes or yelling, We beat you Japs in World War II. There is even a family on the block with an American father and a Japanese mother. Their two daughters are teenagers, beautiful, long-legged, with red-brown hair parted down the middle. They always call out to us: “Hey, you two!” About Marty they say: “Isn’t she precious?” After dinner we lurk on Nai-nai’s front porch to watch their dates come pick them up. The boys are indistinguishable from each other, with booming American voices and faded polo shirts to match their faded blond hair.
We play softball and kickball. One girl takes me into her house and lets me borrow from her Nancy Drew collection, which is the largest I’ve ever seen. Sometimes we go to the beach, along with a lot of other kids in bathing suits, crowded into the back of a station wagon that smells of hot rubber and coconut suntan lotion. When we get there the mother sets up the umbrella and lays down the beach towels and says, “Shoo!” and we all run screaming like crazy people to the ocean, waving our arms. It is the most beautiful ocean I have ever seen, with all different kinds of blue in it, rolling like fluted glass toward us.
I tell the other kids about the Gulf of Mexico, where Aunty Mabel and Uncle Richard live. There were things waiting there in that warm flat water, crabs who’d clamp your toes no matter how carefully you stepped. Then I tell them about the beach in Monterey, where I was born, with all the wildflowers in the spring, and of course the seals. I say that when we went swimming they’d slide off their rocks to join us. Actually we never went swimming in Monterey—the water was much too cold.