by YZ Chin
I thought about it for much longer than I should have, this blurry place packed to the brim with people just like me.
When Marlin and I were finally seated, I remarked upon the diners around us.
“You hear these accents? Everyone sounds like they’re from mainland China.”
“Food must be good, then,” Marlin said agreeably.
I was buoyant that day, happy that I’d persuaded Marlin to leave the house. In the restaurant, I made a note to myself: I should think about everything I’d said or done that day, figure out what it was that’d made him agree to date night. Don’t forget, I reminded myself.
“I wonder if eating here makes them homesick, or makes them feel less homesick,” I said, surveying the faces at the table next to ours. Under the restaurant’s lights, one woman’s pink puffed cheeks shone brighter than her eyes as she blew on her stew. The man next to her, slack-mouthed, trawled his porcelain soup spoon along the bottom of his bowl repeatedly, trying to fish out whatever remnants were left, wanting to prolong his meal. “I guess I don’t know what homesickness looks like,” I said as I turned back to Marlin. I wasn’t prepared for the look on his face. His forehead looked like it had expanded, pushing down his brows and eyes. His nostrils flared as if something was trying to crawl out from the back of his throat.
“Are you okay?” I was unnerved, to say the least.
“This is what it looks like.”
“What?”
“I’m homesick. Aren’t you?”
“But we were just there.”
“That was for my dad’s funeral. Doesn’t count.”
His retort made me feel like an unreasonable person. I reached for his hand, tried to rub circles into his palm. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a person walking toward us, and I winced, hoping it wasn’t the waiter come to take our order. How like a clichéd TV scene, I thought. I must have made a wry face, or surfaced a slight smirk, before the person passed us on his way to the bathroom. How could I know what my face looked like?
“You think this is funny?” Marlin snatched his hand away, in the process sweeping my menu off the table with a flourish.
“What? No!” When I should have met his eyes and explained, I instead bent over to retrieve that stupid menu from the floor, some drummed-in sense of decorum making me prioritize a list of all the things we wouldn’t eat over my own husband’s feelings. By the time I straightened up again, I could see the evening was lost.
“What’s your plan?” Marlin asked in a challenging tone. “Do you even have one? What if your mom gets sick tomorrow?”
I felt ill, the kind of nausea that makes you torn between the relief of retching and the dignity of holding it down, repressing, conquering what threatens to rise out of control from deep within you.
“My mother is still young. She’s not even sixty,” I said, lowering my voice and hoping he would follow suit.
“So was my dad! He was young too. Your mom, my mom, we need to be there for them.”
“I’m not saying we abandon them. It’s just, we’re so close to getting our green cards. If we leave now, we’ll never know whether we can get them. But if we stay just another year, then at least we’ll know for sure, right? We might not even get the cards—and if that’s the case, the decision will be made for us.”
“Is one little card more important to you than your own mother?”
“I’m not saying I don’t want to do it,” I said, uncertain at that point whether I was being truthful, mostly just eager to stabilize his mood. I could see that the rash, dramatic idea of exchanging our lives in New York for a new start in Malaysia was both exciting and agitating him. “I’m saying let’s think it through. What’s the rush?”
“Every day we’re sucked deeper in.”
“Deeper into what? New York isn’t some, some quicksand of despair or anything!”
“Maybe it is, and you just can’t see it.”
“This isn’t like you, Marlin. You were the one who encouraged me to get a job in tech because it’d be easier to get a green card that way, remember?”
“‘This isn’t like you,’” Marlin mimicked in a mean, singsongy lilt. “So, what? I’m a robot? I can only follow my programming?”
“I didn’t say that. We’re so close to having options. Why don’t we wait a year and see what happens?”
“I don’t want to be a passive observer of my own life. Plus, don’t you remember how they treated me at JFK? Like a suspect, that’s what. A potential source of evil or something. Maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you because you weren’t the target.”
“Let’s talk about this at home,” I said, one eye tracking the waitress coming for us. I could tell from her expression that we had become that couple, the one so tactless they let their private unhappiness ruin everyone’s nights out. I avoided Marlin’s insistent gaze and turned the pages of the menu, back and forth. Sour cabbage with pork. Grilled pollock. Sea cucumber.
Did you know? A river can be diverted such that it never reaches its intended end. Some rivers are forced underground, where, instead of nourishing the soil as they formerly did, they begin to erode the earth’s foundation. When you look at a skein of water, can you tell if it’s traveling where it’s meant to go?
After
Day Seven (Tuesday)
Back at the apartment, I slid my Important Documents folder out from a desk drawer, my hands still shaking from the encounter with police. I pinched my passport gingerly and flipped it open to the page with my visa affixed. Near the bottom, close to one corner of my unsmiling face, was the name AInstein Inc. My benefactor, for all intents and purposes.
I examined the Expiration Date again. It read datemonthyear all squeezed together without spaces separating them. The date sat superimposed over a washed-out pastel drawing of the US capitol building, and I blinked and blinked at it.
If I didn’t ask Lucas for a green card soon, it would be too late to beat the Expiration Date. But if I did ask now, he’d say no, what with how things were going at work. Even if Lucas miraculously said yes, I’d have to convince Marlin to come back, so he could fill out forms for a spouse visa attached to my green card. It seemed there were many ways to fail, but only one unlikely path to success.
I ordered delivery from an Italian restaurant, picking the most unfamiliar name I could find. When the osso buco arrived, I was intimidated at first by the shot-glass-shaped bone jutting out of the meat. But the silkiness of the veal made my eyes close by themselves, shutting out sight so that my brain could focus more on the tongue’s pleasures. I’d never had anything of this texture before. I prodded at the marrow teeming out of the shot-glass bone, intrigued. When I took the bone whole into my pursed mouth, I thought of my mother, who sucked snot out of my nostrils when I was a baby. I’d caught the flu and couldn’t blow my own nose, she said. I was suffocating.
I drew marrow like breaths down my throat.
Later that night, my phone rang with a call from her. I dwelled on the mechanics of it. If I were to answer, a temporary connection would be forged between us via cables at the bottom of oceans, and every time the paths that these signals took might be distinct—different cables involved, different data centers in different areas of the earth. So many ways to go from point A to point B. Every connection a new one. When I picked up, I had to decide all over again whether I knew this person, whether I loved her, whether my resentment outweighed my gratitude. She’d sucked my snot, yes, and with one hand she’d fed me, while the other pinched my waist as she told me no one would want to marry me if I didn’t lose weight. She’d carried on alone for my sake after my father died, asking for her old clerk job back at the driving school. All her creativity, all her wit, channeled into raising me and weaving those past life stories of hers. It struck me then, forcefully, that I had never heard her tell a past life story about herself. I wondered about this until my phone stopped ringing, my mother having given up, halfway across the world and twelve hours in the future.
>
After
Day Eight (Wednesday)
“Okay.” Ben cleared his throat. “I think we have quorum. Let’s get started and discuss the latest beta test.”
We were in the Bike Shed, a literal bike shed that had been given its capitalized name because it was also supposed to be an inside joke. To tech people, bikeshedding is a verb. To bikeshed is to belabor one’s point with trivial, borderline inconsequential things, such as whether void functions must always return nothing.
The meeting had started reasonably enough, with Ben declaring that AInstein had failed the beta test, given that the acceptance criteria was laughter at 25 percent of delivered jokes. In the case of my session, “the user” had not laughed at any jokes, and had moreover declared the content “disagreeable.” It was a solid, if understated, start. Then several engineers started speaking at once, and now, as far as I could follow, they were debating whether AInstein’s failure was in fact a true failure.
“It’s clear-cut, isn’t it? There’s acceptance criteria, and we did not meet that criteria,” Ben said.
“It’s not so black-and-white. What if the tester just has no sense of humor?” Josh said. “I was there, and I thought at least a couple of the jokes were funny.”
“We also have to think about the size of any improvement efforts,” Darren said. He was the data scientist, responsible for trawling the web for free jokes. “What size are we talking about here? L? XL? XXL? The launch is two months away, just as a reminder.”
Handlebars dug into my spine. Spittle flew overhead. I looked at my shoes. No matter how I tried to shrink into myself, something or someone was always pressing against me. Hard elbows, soft thighs, mud-crusted wheels, unyielding plastic seats, they were all around me, crowding in.
“We have data from other beta test users, right? How do those look?”
“Every single one of those passed.”
“Like I said, in this case maybe it’s an issue with the user. No offense.” The exchanges had become rapid-fire; I couldn’t keep track of who was speaking.
“Excuse me,” I said. I tried not to pant, but it was getting hard to breathe. “I’m the first woman to beta-test AInstein, right? Isn’t that a relevant factor?”
“Are you saying female sense of humor is different from male sense of humor?”
“Hey, I didn’t want to be the one to say it because it’s not PC or whatever. But see, she herself is admitting there’s a difference between female brains and male brains.”
“How does that help us here?”
“That’s not what I mean,” I said.
“You know what? Actually, beta users shouldn’t be part of the postmortem. We have what we need in terms of feedback from the user, and now it’s up to us, not the user, to decipher the feedback and map it to action items.” Darren looked pointedly at me.
“Can I just explain what I mean?”
Faces peered at me, impassive. No one said yes, but no one objected either. Now I was thankful that we were all crammed in so close together, because my knees were shaking, and I didn’t want them to see.
“I’m saying some of the jokes in our database might be sexist, racist, or offensive in other ways to subsets of users. I think we should have a human audit of all the jokes and flag those that might be problematic. We don’t want to alienate paying customers.”
“Human audit? That’s so inefficient. The whole point of our tech is that there’s a smarter way to do things.”
“Actually, flagging the jokes might not be a bad idea. So if something is flagged as offensive to women, we’ll limit that joke to cases when AInstein detects the user as male.”
“Did you not hear me? I’m saying having a human flag things at all defeats the whole purpose of our tech!”
“But we already do it for non-adult—” I tried to speak again, but they were all caught up in an opinionated frenzy now. I looked around for Ben. He was half hidden behind the tall DBA whose name I couldn’t remember, gesturing with both hands. Defeated, I pushed past three engineers and two bikes to exit the void function that was our meeting. No one stopped me. I was the cause of the problem, not part of the solution.
AS SOON AS I GOT HOME, I BEGAN STRIPPING. SHOES OFF BY THE FRONT door. One sock in the foyer, one three paces ahead in the kitchen. Jeans in a tangle by the sink, where I stopped for a glass of water. T-shirt on the counter. Bra in the doorway of the bathroom.
I used to spend a lot of time imagining my mother naked. I know that is an odd confession, maybe even off-putting. Or perhaps it’s a gold mine in the context of therapy. Make of it what you will. Back in my youth, dwelling on her nudity seemed natural, given what I saw as my mother’s obsession with my body. She could tell when I had gained or lost the slightest bit of weight, and would always comment accordingly. For a long time I thought it was her right, since she had made every scrap and droplet of me, gestated during the height of her life. That was how she described it to me: she had never been happier than when she carried me around in her womb.
On days that she remarked upon my fatness, I would take off my clothes in front of the full-length mirror she had installed in my room. I’d brush my palms over my stomach the way I had seen pregnant women do, the sharp chill of my hands making them seem alien. And I’d imagine my mother nude, her slender frame eloquent as an ink brush, describing to the world her uncompromised goodness. Then I’d come back to my corrupt flesh and try to measure the distance between her body and mine. I was sure, as a teenager, that she was waiting for me. She would wait as long as it took for me to become like her.
I sat on the lip of my bathtub, taking off my underwear. The only thing I still had on was the necklace my mother gave me when she sent me off at the airport for the first time.
“This will protect you in America,” she’d said, reaching around to fasten the clasp of the necklace. Her face was close enough to kiss.
A sob escaped me in the apartment, pathetic and unbearable. I turned the shower dials to drown it out, savagely twisting the hot water knob. The medicine cabinet’s double mirrors slowly filmed over like dead fish eyes. My mother had once promised me that if I ate fish eyes, I would be able to whistle. I did, and I couldn’t. My butt felt cold against the bathtub. I grabbed fistfuls of fat from my midsection and tugged on them, kneading, then yanking. I imagined a civil surgeon examining this very body for my green card examination. What would he find that I didn’t already know? I felt sure there was something.
With the mirrors blinded and unable to judge me, I could be honest: I missed my mother. I could hear her now, saying things I didn’t want to hear, stressing words like diet and positive thinking. How had I grown up so different from her, our beliefs and outlook on life diametrical opposites? She had raised me almost single-handed, her influence on me total. I should have inherited her prejudices.
For our last meal before I left for America, we went to her favorite restaurant, a place that made home-style Teochew dishes that were difficult to find elsewhere. She was such a regular that the owner recognized her on sight. A dish was set in front of us practically as soon as we sat down.
“What’s this?” I eyed it, suspicious. The food resembled cut-up sausage, though the shape and size of the slices were off. The cross-sections were more parallelograms than the usual round or oval, and their edges were golden crisp, like they’d been fried. The texture of the filling, too, was unusually uniform, its color too pale to be meat. Studded throughout were orbs and halves of peanuts.
“Don’t worry, I’m not tricking you this time,” my mother said. “This is really vegetarian. It’s called kwong qiang. You know what that means?”
When she identified the two characters that made up “kwong qiang,” I frowned. “Flushed intestines? Like an enema? Why would they name a vegetarian dish something so . . . gross?”
My mother laughed. “It’s only gross if you think of it that way, isn’t it? It’s like this: how you choose to see the world is the most important thing.
”
There she went again, always turning every conversation into a teaching moment. She talked like there was forever a disciple near at hand, ready to jot down every pearl of wisdom that emerged from her mouth.
The owner returned, all smiles, bearing even more dishes.
“Thanks, thanks,” my mother said, then gestured at me. “This is my daughter.”
“Your daughter?” The owner’s eyes bugged out. “Cannot be!”
“Why, we don’t look alike?” my mother needlessly asked, already knowing the answer.
“Oh, but you’re so skinny, and she’s so fat! I thought she must be your coworker.”
My mother tittered with pleasure, flattered.
Perched on the bathtub ledge, I finally understood why I’d turned out so unlike her. My fatness had punted me off course, marking me as “other.” The shape of me transgressed, the width and bulge of me failing to conform. So it was only natural that I shaped my mind to match that outsider status.
The water in the bathtub lapped at my butt. I turned the faucet off and watched as the water jiggled, weakly at first, as if nothing had changed. Then, gradually, sleepily, it started swirling in the direction of the drain. It made a greedy, sucking sound, hoarse and insistent. I swiveled my legs around and lowered myself into the tub.
The water was still warm enough to surprise my skin. Submerged from chest down, I shivered as a chill spread across my shoulders and neck. I felt a sudden oozing sensation, originating from deep under the ridge of flesh that Cosmo magazine called my pooch. The oozing traveled downward, applying pressure against my urethra. I looked down to see a period clot slither out of me into the cooling water.
I picked the blood clot up by reflex, not wanting my bath to be tainted. Maybe I even thought I was saving a piece of myself. Balancing the menstrual clot on my palm, I smoothed it open where it had started to curl over. I marveled at how much of an entity it seemed, its edges solid, not bleeding away, bright as any fruit. I took a neat bite out of it.
