by Jessica Pan
“Lily Allen has been here. Amy Winehouse. Elton John.”
THINK OF ALL THE DRUGS THAT HAVE BEEN DONE HERE. No, brain, FOCUS.
I get back to my breathing. I lean forward in the way Alice taught me. Yes. That feels better.
Someone comes into the bathroom. I feel my heart beating extra fast. I stare at the wall, and I recite my story to myself very quietly. Just me and the urine trails of Damien Rice and Elton.
I close my eyes and think about what Alice had said—that there had to be a desire to tell this story. I think about how I want to share my story with the audience. How this is my chance to perform on a large stage for the first time in my life and how far I had to have come to even get here.
I exit the stall and look at myself. Red lipstick. Ironed shirt. I stare at my reflection in the mirror and lean forward.
There is only one thing that comes to my brain at this moment in time.
“My mummy’s marvelous,” I say to myself.
✽ ✽ ✽
“Please welcome to the stage Jessica Pan!”
I can’t feel my legs. Or my face.
I step through the black curtain and up the stairs. The host hugs me, and I walk across the stage and adjust the mic, trying to ignore the fact that hundreds of people are watching me. Meg is sitting right below me, but I don’t look at her, because it’ll throw me off.
All I see is the spotlight, surrounded by vast darkness. The light is blinding.
It’s time.
And I begin, no preamble, just straight into the story, as is custom for these nights.
“I went to get a cup of coffee, and I found these buttons . . .”
I knew the story so well. I knew every beat. And then, in the right place, I hear laughter. But I cannot enjoy it because I need to concentrate on the story and a part of my brain is still going, “AHH YOU ARE DOING THIS DON’T MESS UP ISN’T IT CRAZY THAT WE’RE DOING THIS THAT’S SO CRAZY DON’T FUCK UP THOUGH DON’T STUTTER KEEP GOING.”
In a cathedral with bright lights and vast darkness, it feels like I am telling a funny story to God and God is giving occasional feedback through celestial applause.
Am I dying? Is this death? In a church? Just telling a funny story?
And finally, finally I feel the end coming. I say the final line: no stutter, no blanks.
Before I step offstage, I giggle into the mic, once, out of sheer, colossal relief.
There’s applause and whooping. I run offstage and throw my body into the first row of pews.
Ingrid puts an arm on mine and beams at me. I am floating, grinning in the darkness.
Nikesh takes the stage. I forget about myself completely as he tells a story about his mother and how when she died, he felt so lost that he decided to learn how to cook some of her specialties. I’m transported back to his kitchen. The sorrow in his story hits me hard, and I feel tears spring to my eyes. I sense that Ingrid is crying next to me.
I love them both. I don’t know them, but I love them. They were total strangers two days ago, but now it feels like we’ve shared such intimate moments—straight into Deep Talk territory from day one.
Then before I know it, the show is over.
And I survived.
✽ ✽ ✽
I stay out late that night with the other storytellers. We have been into battle, and we are celebrating victory. Sam congratulates me, equally stunned and thrilled that I have pulled this off. He heads home to bed, but I stay out until the bar closes. Meg has a flight back to Sweden in the morning. David is flying to Washington, DC. Nikesh has already taken a train back to Bristol. Ingrid buses back to her London flat. We hug and kiss cheeks goodbye. I can’t believe we’ve only just met, given how close I feel to them right now.
I walk home in the dark, warm night.
When you believe something about yourself for so long but then finally challenge it, everything feels different. I want to dance. I want to run. I feel like knocking on all the doors and shouting, “I am a REAL rabbit! I AM REAL!” because I’m delusional with relief and happiness. I have done something that I have never, ever thought possible.
When I get home, I can’t sleep. My body is buzzing from the exhilaration of taking a big risk and from the joy of it paying off. At the beginning of my story onstage, I had started off quick and scared, but as I went on, I had grown in confidence. I’d cracked open the shell of that fear.
My fear was performing in front of others, and by performing in front of Alice, I had slowly chipped away at it. If I’d hopped onstage without performing it for anyone else, I’m positive my mind would have blanked again and I would have cried.
But by practicing in front of others (Alice and also Meg and the other storytellers), feeling their eyes on me, my fear, while still there, had greatly subsided, and in its place, I’d started to believe I could do it.
My solemn vow to keep off the public stage had been smashed, and I was elated. Fear and anxiety had dominated my life for weeks, and a less potent strain had dominated my life for the preceding thirty-two years, all the way to China and back again. But that night, blinking into the lights, feeling my heart pound, I’d stood onstage and performed for an audience. I had shaken off the constraints of the fear and crossed over to the other side.
I didn’t know how long it would last, but for approximately twelve minutes, I was free.
four
Heart Problems,
A Real-Life Interlude
With phase two over, I feel ready for more. Except I’d forgotten the painful truth of that old Yiddish proverb: make plans and God laughs.
I’d committed to a year of pushing myself well outside my comfort zone, but because I’d set my own parameters, there was still some semblance of safety in it. But, of course, real life does not care about any of this. Real life does not have any regard for your lists, or your plans, or your lofty dreams.
Just days later, still delighted after my performance, I get the text at midnight, as I’m climbing into bed.
It’s my dad: “Can we talk?”
Something is wrong. He calls and tells me he’s been having heart palpitations. He’s had a scan, and they’ve discovered that he has a tumor. On his heart. Which is a very bad place to have a tumor.
I knew that he’d been having heart palpitations, but there hadn’t seemed to be a real reason to be concerned.
He’s going to have open-heart surgery in Los Angeles, because it’s an experimental surgery they don’t perform in our town in Texas. A last-minute spot has just opened up: they’re operating on his heart in three days.
My dad. Is having open-heart surgery. In three days.
All thoughts of talking to strangers, of extroverting, of changing my small and lonely life, fly out of my head.
I am not ready to deal with this. No one is.
I book a flight to Los Angeles for the next day. I don’t know when I’ll be back. I don’t know whether or how my father will recover. I don’t know anything—I can’t think about what might happen. I just know that I have to get halfway across the world as soon as possible.
✽ ✽ ✽
I love my parents. I do. But we’re all a little fucked up by our parents, no matter who they are. Sometimes I wonder whether part of my shintroversion is a direct result of how enthusiastically my parents will extrovert on a daily basis. First of all, they’ll talk to anyone: flight seatmates, waiters, people standing in lines with them, passing mail carriers, people eating at the table next to them. I’m still haunted by their most recent visit to London, during which my father had the following conversation with our Uber driver:
Dad: Where are you from? Eastern Europe? Russia?
Uber driver: I’m Georgian.
Long pause
Dad: Stalin was from Georgia . . .
My father is the most unpredictable: I’
ve seen him hit the ground in hotel lobbies to show doormen how to improve their push-up form, ask a Polish waitress whether she missed her family deeply and regretted moving to London, and discuss circumcision rates in the US versus the UK at my own wedding. With my new British in-laws. Whom he’d met the night before.
“Your dad can talk to anyone,” my mom likes to say.
Yes, OK, but should he?
Before my dad’s surgery, we have one “normal” day to spend together. Whenever I visit LA, I always stay with my grandparents, who are now both ninety years old. The night before my dad’s surgery, my parents and my grandparents and I go out for Chinese food at Hop Li, our regular Chinese restaurant haunt. As we eat crunchy Hong Kong–style noodles, garlic eggplant, and egg foo-young, my grandparents try to get my parents to eat egg drop soup and my parents refuse, just like they always do. It all feels so normal—too normal. But there’s a pall over the evening.
When the fortune cookies hit the table, my mother doesn’t take one. She visibly turns her head away from them. I know that she is afraid she will get a bad fortune, and she can’t take any risks when it comes to what tomorrow will bring. I don’t take one either. We eat the sliced oranges on the table instead.
Before bed that night, before my dad and I say good night to each other again and again, he does twenty push-ups on the floor to prove to me that he’s strong. Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think about whether this is the last time he will ever do this. He’s in high spirits; he’s been dreading the surgery, but now he’s actually excited to just get it over with.
In my grandparents’ kitchen, he uses a pair of kitchen tongs to demonstrate the surgery. He repeatedly refers to the tumor on his heart as a “truffle.” In an echo video scan of his heart, the tumor flutters back and forth as blood flows through his heart. It looks so innocuous, as if it’s just a small mushroom blowing in the breeze of his bloodstream. “We go in, we take out the truffle, and we’re done,” he says, with a little too much relish. “Simple.”
Except he leaves out the part where the surgeons put him under, put his body on a pump, and cut straight through his heart to reach the truffle, stitch his heart back up, and restart it. He leaves out the part where they put his body back together again.
✽ ✽ ✽
I haven’t spent much time in hospitals. Most of what I expect comes from a few episodes of Gilmore Girls, the one TV show my parents and I could bear to watch together. It’s the right amount of funny and the right amount of sex scenes (nearly zero) to make for ideal parent-child viewing.
In the show, Richard, the grandfather, has a heart scare and, later, a heart attack. During these scenes, Lorelai and her daughter, Rory, are constantly pacing the white hospital hallways in search of coffee and junk food in between comforting each other. There are always vending machines and stressed-out nurses, kind doctors, and endless cups of bad coffee in paper cups. Was the world really like that?
Once, while we were watching an episode of the show, my dad said to my mother and me, “Don’t you two wish you were like Lorelai and Rory? Best friends?”
It was an uncomfortable moment because our relationship wasn’t like theirs at all. Rory was sixteen, and Lorelai was thirty-two. When I was sixteen, my mom was fifty-one. We argued a lot when I was growing up. We did not meet every day at the diner for coffee after school. I certainly did not tell her about my first kiss or the night I lost my virginity. We just didn’t have that kind of relationship.
We are very different from each other. As a kid, I would sit beside her in silence while she would chat with strangers multiple times a day. We loved each other but were so different that we were never best friends.
✽ ✽ ✽
On the day of my dad’s heart surgery, my parents and I wake up at 5 a.m. to head to the hospital. We’re told that, despite arriving early, we could be waiting for hours before the procedure due to delays.
It’s still dark when we drive to the hospital and park the car. My dad takes off his watch and hands it to me. I put it on, clicking the silver clips into place. The weight is heavy on my wrist. We walk through the hospital, and he signs himself in.
My mom and I sit next to him while a hospital employee has him sign a few more forms. Then the man says, “OK, I’m going to take you upstairs now so you can change into your hospital gown and they can put your IV in.”
My mom and I both stand up.
The man says, “Only one visitor is allowed.”
And that’s it. That’s the moment.
I thought we had a few more minutes together, but it hits me that this could be the last time I see my dad alive. I start crying, and I hug my dad hard and say that I love him. I don’t know what else you are supposed to say in these moments, but when I had pneumonia when I was four, I remember what he told me. “I know you’re strong,” I say to him and hug him one more time.
Alone in the waiting room, sitting as far away from everyone else as possible, I start crying quietly. I don’t have tissues to cry into and am using my shirt; and at that moment, I realize that I have also just gotten my period. I am bitterly half laughing, half crying at this when a woman walks up to me.
“They want you to go upstairs,” she says. Only five minutes have passed. I look at her, confused, but the woman gives me directions and a new visitor’s pass; I fly toward the elevators and up into a crowded hospital floor. I sprint down a hallway, searching for the correct room number.
Then I hear it.
My mom’s voice, loud and clear.
“Mom?” I call out tentatively.
She calls back, “We’re in here!” and pulls back a curtain. My dad, now in his gown, IV in, is propped up on the bed, and I run to him to hug him again, because I can, not caring about why I’m suddenly allowed up here or how long I have before I need to buy tampons.
A steady stream of doctors and nurses comes in, quickly—an anesthesiologist, the heart surgeon’s assistant, another anesthesiologist, and then another nurse—talking so quickly with such big words about what happens next. They talk about all the medications they are slowly feeding him, about stopping his heart and cutting through its walls before restarting it. It makes me dizzy with fear.
Twenty minutes later, it’s finally time for him to go into the operating room. I start to panic. I feel like I need a bargaining chip to persuade him that he has to come back, to make sure his heart will definitely start up again. Bribing has always been key in our family.
“A grandchild from me by 2020 if you make it out of this, OK?” I blurt out at him, right before he goes.
His eyes light up. “Can I get that in writing?”
The man has five grandsons already, but he’s intent on having a full baseball team.
But now it really is time. The nurses and doctors come, and they wheel his bed out and down the hallway. He disappears from view.
My mom and I walk toward the elevator and get inside. “Let’s have breakfast,” she says. “I’m hungry.” It’s odd how mundane life carries on in the shadow of the most dramatic moments.
We walk through the lobby to the dining hall.
“How did you get me upstairs?” I ask. “They said only one visitor was allowed.”
“Last time we were here for preliminary tests, we had this really nice Ugandan nurse. We chatted a lot about his family. Just now, he came up to me and said, ‘I’d know that smile anywhere,’ and I told him that I was so scared and that you were all alone in the waiting room and that we really needed to be together right now. He smiled and said, ‘Let me see what I can do.’”
I’m so moved by this and sort of shaken, because my mom just worked a goddamn miracle with her chattiness. By sharing her wish with the nurse that she had befriended a few weeks ago, my mother had managed, in all of this chaos, to teach me a little about extroverting.
We get in line at the cafeteria and then s
it down across from each other at a table in the enormous dining hall. We’ve both opted for a cherry Danish and strong coffee. My dad’s watch still feels heavy on my arm, and I’m trying to ignore it and why it’s there and focus on my pastry instead. The cherry Danish tastes better than it should under these circumstances. My mom takes a sip of her coffee, her hands around the paper cup, elbows on the table, and looks around the cafeteria at all the doctors and nurses.
“Do you think they’ve all had sex in a broom closet upstairs?” she asks.
“What?”
“You know, like in Grey’s Anatomy. There’s not a broom closet in that show that hasn’t had doctors and nurses getting busy. It must be very stressful for the janitors here,” she says.
And I laugh, loudly, for what feels like the first time in years.
Maybe we aren’t Rory and Lorelai, but in that moment it feels like we kind of got there in the end. It’s just that I had to be the one who was thirty-two, not her.
Still, when I mention that I’ve just gotten my period, my mom is up out of her chair, off to find a pharmacy to buy tampons for me. And I am officially sixteen again.
Hours later, we get word from a nurse that my dad is out of surgery. Later, the thoracic surgeon stops by to tell us that he’s successfully removed the mass from my dad’s heart and repaired a hole in it that we hadn’t known was there. We should be able to see him in a few hours.
When we’re finally allowed through to the ward, my dad is still unconscious and on a ventilator. It looks like he’s in a coma. My mother grabs my hand. We have a new ICU nurse, Pete, who comes over to us and tells us that everything went great, not to worry. He has a kind smile, and he’s very gentle and slightly rotund. I immediately love him. He feels like a young Chinese Santa with a California accent, which is exactly the kind of nurse I didn’t know I needed in my life.
Slowly, my dad begins to stir ever so slightly. My mom and I study every miniscule movement he makes with rapt attention.
