by YZ Chin
“Yeah, a little, but I mean. Come on.” She was fighting not to laugh again, I could tell. “Anyway, I came over as soon as I realized you were upset. Dropped my baby and everything.”
“Yeah, hide behind your baby. Do that.”
She grinned at my smile. “Is that my cue to show you pictures?”
I leaned across the table while she swiped through more and more photos of Su-Ann, the toes and arches of my feet pressing into the uneven ground. We’d been so excited, Marlin and I, the first time we wandered down to Stone Street. Lanes that lived outside the grid system! Cobblestones! European-sounding restaurant names! Marlin took his loafers off and tried to prance across the paved stones like a horse, but he wasn’t very good at it.
“Aww, you like her, huh,” Katie said. “You have such a sweet smile on your face. She is a cutie, isn’t she? Here, I’ll send you a few.” She fiddled with her phone.
I thought about what her cousin had said when she’d met Marlin for the first time: “Oh, your kids are going to be so beautiful!” She’d failed to hide her double take well enough. What she said made me uncomfortable, like she was twisting her surprise at Marlin’s skin tone into a weird compliment. I didn’t take it that way, though. I felt slighted by her assumption that not only did we want kids, we’d married for some secret agenda to produce America’s next top model. “They’re going to look like the future of this country,” she added.
“Did you get them?” Katie asked now. She tapped my phone on the table. I unlocked the screen to indulge her, opening up the text messages she’d just sent, Su-Ann now on my phone.
“Give me that.” She grabbed it out of my hands and started typing on it, her body angled steeply away from me.
“What are you doing?” I asked, confused.
“I think it’s time you move on.” Still typing.
“Move on from what? There’s nothing to move on from.”
“You can’t make someone love you when they don’t anymore. What are you waiting for, anyway? Do you need him to really spell it out for you?”
“I wrote him a letter. I’m waiting to hear back.”
Katie frowned. “You’re making it sound like a job application.”
“What if Bradley left you? What would you do?”
“I’d kill his ass, that’s what. There.” She handed the phone back. “Don’t worry. I had the perfect picture for you. And I’m setting your profile to ‘Seeking friends’ only. You can change it later.” She raised an eyebrow at me.
“You installed a dating app on my phone?”
“You don’t have to do anything with it now! It’s just there, if you want it.”
I wanted to ask which picture of mine she’d chosen, and how she’d described me in my profile. Then I thought, What was the point? It wasn’t like I could put my current self into words better than she could.
ON MY WALK BACK TO THE APARTMENT, I WONDERED WHAT MARLIN WAS doing at that exact moment. I pictured him cross-legged, that chunky purple pendulum twirling under his fingers, a single, narrow-beamed lamp shining beside him.
“What do you think happened to him?” Katie had asked, just before we hugged goodbye.
I didn’t have an answer, but I felt compelled to say something so that Katie would understand that this situation, whatever it was, was temporary.
“I think his father’s death really affected him. It’s only been seven or eight months.”
“That’s sad, but a lot of people go through that, right?”
“I guess everyone’s different,” I said stiffly, not really knowing what I meant. Katie pulled me into a long hug, squeezing until tears threatened to leak out of me.
I walked on, trying to decipher what I’d said. Everyone’s different. Unlike me, Marlin had grown up with both parents. This part I excelled at imagining; I’d spent many childhood hours wondering what it was like to grow into an adult with a father alongside a mother. Teenage Marlin would have been rambunctious, his burning curiosity about the world mistaken as naughtiness. His father would have fueled and fanned Marlin’s energy even as his mother protested, painfully aware that her mixed-race child would have to prove himself again and again in order to be accepted.
Marlin’s father was the one who indulged and spoiled. He, too, was the one who brought home Lego kits and radio-controlled cars that turned Marlin on to engineering. His father let him do anything in the name of learning: take apart a brand-new watch; pound on the family typewriter until the keys stuck; throw assorted objects onto the roof of their single-story home to see which would roll back down, and which would remain wedged between shingles.
Then as Marlin got older, his skin tanning to resemble more and more his mother’s dark brown, he began to see how many of her attempts to rein him in were done out of a fear-tinged love. He learned from her the necessity for care and caution. He saw how she adopted different tones and styles when she talked to different people. Because of that, he began to pay attention to social interactions, noticing the power dynamics and hierarchies at play. He picked up from her a barbed humor, deployed often in irony and against the powerful.
It warmed my heart to imagine this, the best-loved qualities of my husband deriving equally from his two parents. I pieced together this fantasy based on the stories Marlin told me, but who knew whether his memory was accurate? Not to mention my memory of my memory, and the parts of his memory that were really his parents’ memory.
But say it was true. Say that for Marlin, his parents represented the two poles of a magnet. Electrons shuffled between these poles to create a magnificent field, one that drew people like me in and held me fast in love and admiration. Then the death of Marlin’s father destabilized the entire makeup of Marlin’s being. Something impossible had happened; the magnet was now missing a pole. Maybe Marlin was sabotaging his life to underscore his great loss.
Or it could be that I am simply projecting.
Marlin and I once talked about stories. He observed that some people liked stories that fed their confirmation bias. What he meant was that people seek justification for the way they live their lives in the narratives that they read or watch. For example, a man who has martyr syndrome and feels the world treats him unfairly will devour stories about courage winning the odds against tyranny. Meanwhile, a different man who undertakes mildly unsavory business practices cannot get enough of plots involving power play and ascendance through intelligence and trickery. This also explained why all summer blockbuster movies seem to have the same plot. Because when someone likes pizza, they won’t just stick to their favorite pizza restaurant. They have to sample all the pizza places in their city to find the best one, and each new bite is a reminder: “I’m a pizza person.”
Marlin, prone to pontificating, said that it made sense to him from a utilitarian standpoint. Life was chaos. Attempting to remain more or less the same person from day to day required a psychic bedrock around which to organize one’s various mental loose threads. And this sort of bedrock, which had to withstand daily battering, of course had to be reinforced from time to time. Enter familiar stories under various disguises.
I smiled, listening to him. He sounded like he was leaving himself the world’s most serious voice memo.
What about “moving” stories, what people call tearjerkers? I asked. People loved those. They watched or read them and got weepy, melancholic. Untimely deaths and star-crossed lovers torn apart! The failure of ambition! Ah, the fleetingness of love and life! There was the twist, too, that people who loved “a good cry” from their stories were overwhelmingly positive and optimistic about their own lives. What was the explanation?
Marlin thought a moment. Then he hazarded that it was practice.
Practice?
Yes, the kinds of people who wanted their emotional heartstrings tugged—well, likelier than not, their lives were like still ponds or sheltered groves, without much turbulence to their days. Yet they knew that loss and death would visit them one day, sure as anything. Thus,
to be moved by stories was in a way rehearsal for how to act when the dreaded events did visit. When the time came, you’d know without hesitation to wail and beat your chest, or turn to drugs and alcohol. It might even be that the pain of loss, when it happened, would feel “natural,” and this would help people better accept the pain—there, utilitarian after all.
So it’s all prep work for our tear glands? I teased. Memento mori with pastel filters?
Nothing wrong with keeping the engine of grief running, he joked.
IF YOU’VE READ THIS FAR—AND IF YOU HAVEN’T, IF YOU DIDN’T EVEN open my email, I understand. I’m sorry I stood you up. Please forgive me. I got as far as putting on my shoes to leave the apartment. Than I thought: What if I happen to laugh unguarded at a joke? Or lick an ice cream cone with abandon? Someone, you for instance, might remark that I seem happy. But I’m not happy. These days that drag and stun and rot me from the inside out, I need to really live them all. I want to be able to say that I suffered as much as I could, in honor of something that I lost.
AFTER I LEFT KATIE, I SPRAWLED ON THE COUCH, HEAD LEADEN FROM the whiskey she’d bought me. The alcohol opened up a portal in my jumbled brain, and I examined the memory it called up, a moment from the night Marlin had accused me of cheating. He’d brought up a name, Li Shen. I remembered it because it was also the name of a Tang dynasty poet. Where had Marlin gotten the name from?
Just then, my mother called.
“Yes, I know my face is red and I look terrible,” I said to my laptop screen.
“And so many pimples! How this happen?” my mother exclaimed.
“I’m stressed.”
“Are you mabuk? Your face is really red!”
“Yes, I’m drunk.”
“I don’t understand you. If you’re so unhappy in America, why don’t you come home? Your job isn’t even what you want to do. And you sound so different now. So atas and proper. How come you don’t talk like us anymore?”
“Didn’t you have something to tell me?” I asked. I couldn’t afford to dissect my life choices with her right now.
“Oh, ya. Hmm.” She pushed her face closer to the screen to peer at me. “I’ll tell you next time. When you’re not mabuk.”
“Just tell me.”
“I cannot tell you when you’re like this.”
“Fine,” I huffed. “I’ll do it for you.”
“What?”
“Did you talk to Marlin about the banana tree spirit story?”
Her face fell. She cast her eyes down, and I looked at the roots of her dyed hair, waiting, wondering how I’d drifted away from her. That thought experiment about teleporting to Mars wasn’t a hypothetical question after all, was it? Maybe anyone who left home to go far away stood the chance of being reassembled, and called it variously immigration or rebirth. The distance traveled was shorter than Mars, and the timeline of transformation longer, but it had happened to me all the same.
“He called me,” my mother said. “I just wanted to help.”
“When?”
“I can’t remember exactly. April.”
“What did he say?”
“He wanted to know more about your past life. At first I told him what I told you. You remember the story?”
“Yes.” I swallowed some saliva. The whiskey made it hard to stay still; I felt like my brain was gently vibrating, and I wanted to move my whole body in rhythm to it, but I couldn’t quite pin the beat down.
“Then he asked, was he in the story too? Did he know you in a past life?”
“And then?” I felt my jaw clenching.
“I asked him, why do you want to know? I was excited, you know, that he showed interest. You never pay any attention.”
“That’s not true.”
“He said he wants to understand your marriage better. I thought: that’s nice.”
“So what did you tell him?”
“I said the two of you, your fates have entwined for many past lives now. It is meant to be. I told him he was your fiancé in that past life with the banana trees.”
“Li Shen?”
“Yes, and I said, Edwina loves you so much in this life because she wronged you in the past, so she owes you this deep kind of love.”
“What? You said that? How can you say something like that?” My hand had flown up to cover my eyes in horror.
“What’s so bad about that? I said you love him very much now, isn’t that good?”
I groaned, fighting an urge to get up and press my face into a wall. My head felt hotter than the rest of my body, my mouth was dry, and the wall, it seemed so cool and refreshing.
“You do love him, right?” my mother asked. From the consternation on her face, I concluded that this must have been exactly what she’d been wanting to tell me for the past week. She’d been planning to confess her conversation with Marlin, all packaged up as some twisted reaffirmation of our marital bond.
“This is a mess,” I muttered. No way I would admit that my marriage was in danger to her, a woman who had remained faithful to her dead husband, who placidly faced down the long rest of her days alone. Who believed that Marlin and I were fated to be together!
“It’s America that’s making you so unhappy,” she said. “Do you even like your job? You work so much, you probably don’t have time to enjoy New York also. Then you might as well just move back home, right?”
I trotted out the knee-jerk, expected answers, about how in America there were more merit-based opportunities, less constitutionalized differences in how people across races were treated, less ostentatious corruption, and so on. What I didn’t tell her: I already knew how to be a minority in America, having been one in my home country. All that was required of me was to learn my new names, like kook or dirty commie or terrorist, and to understand what I was expected to do, such as eat dogs and cats alive. Some of the names I’d already acquired in Malaysia even translated abroad like a universal plug—an engineer might appreciate the portability of an insult like “Sepet,” which means “Slant-eyed,” applicable to me in various countries around the globe. Although I will admit that I did not foresee the twist in America, which split the insult off into branches, as an undergraduate dining hall experience showed me. I was offered a choice. I could choose from a dial with three settings: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, each click of the dial corresponding to the position of index fingers stretching eyes into narrow strips. Slightly above the eyes, curving the slits upward—Chinese. Parallel—Japanese. Yanking downward into droopiness—Korean.
One other thing remained constant—the exhortation for me to Go back! Except the destination had changed. In Malaysia I was supposed to go back to China. In America I was supposed to return to Malaysia. Was this progress? If I moved to China, would they tell me to piss off to America, thus resulting in some sort of infinite loop? I wondered if it would be like the completion of a ritualistic summoning diagram I’d seen witches and demonologists draw in movies. What would emerge? Perhaps a space that existed between real places, where I could go and be left in peace. The most well-educated Americans said to me: It must be hard to live in diaspora for the first time as an adult; it’s easier on children. They didn’t get that I was born into diaspora, that I had merely moved from a place that wasn’t mine to another place that also wasn’t mine. To them, diaspora meant the arrival of the non-West into the West, that was all.
After nine years in America I’d finally gotten a reasonably whole picture of what I looked like in the eyes of the dominant culture, partly thanks to Katie. She was the one who shed light on a myriad of things, from “me love you long time” to why, when I carried a guitar on campus, three men stopped me to ask whether I was on my way to serenade Korean Jesus, then burst out laughing. Once, depressed, I turned to her: “I know I don’t look Malaysian because that’s not a thing here, but do I really look like all these other categories? Korean? Vietnamese?”
Katie rolled her eyes. “Edwina, please. Don’t ask me things like that. I had those
same questions all the way back in third grade, when I was being bullied, and I am not ready to relive that.”
“So you’re saying that as far as being American goes, I’m just a child.”
“Yeah, you have a long way to go,” she said, smiling. “Ten more years, maybe.”
A decade more of coded insults, of learning to navigate my perceived place and exploring my cordoned-off swim lanes. But even if I were to return to Malaysia, it wasn’t like I could slip back into my previous identity like it was a pair of comfortably worn shoes. I had changed, and so had the country. I’d have to discover anew just who I was, though a few traits of this ghost person could already be divined: a loser who couldn’t cut it overseas; a banana who uncritically idolized the West, yellow only on the outside; a pretender who adopted a fake American accent. If I were an expat, then there wouldn’t be a problem. My time away would have been for the perfectly justifiable mission of “finding” myself. But I am not an expat. I am an immigrant.
There was also the raw and shameful reason for staying away that I could never share with my mother. In Malaysia, I shop for clothes in size XL, whereas in America I am a medium. The “all clear” given by American doctors during annual health checkups translates to “not yet have kids already so fat” in Malaysia and “better don’t eat so much” during mealtimes with my own relatives.
It is ridiculous, and I know it, which is why I can’t confess it to anyone but you. “Fewer people body-shame me” is not a legitimate reason to emigrate.
And yet I feel it all over, on my shoulders and midsection and thighs—the weight of all those taunts and admonishments, whenever I think about moving back home. It would be a burden to be endured daily, just as living in America comes with an atmosphere of different poisons.
It is so hard to be proud of my own thoughts.
After
Day Seven (Tuesday)
I’m so relieved that you want to keep talking. I knew I could trust you to understand. I’m sorry again for not showing up, and I hope you didn’t wait too long. And I’ll try not to take up too much more of your time with my story.
