by Kat Chow
Whenever you appeared in my life in your taxidermic state, I frantically reached for conversation. What doing? Lei sik jor fan mei ah? I spat out, borrowing from the way you greeted Caroline or Steph as they sat in their college dorm rooms and you stood in our kitchen, leaning against the counter and wondering over the phone if they were eating enough. But I knew each time I saw you that I hadn’t brought you here just to catch up. I summoned you to remind me of the unfulfilled promises our family had made over the years to appease your spirit and send you to the afterlife. Between you and me, I kind of liked having you around, even if memories of you appeared so vividly that I felt haunted. But then I’d shake my head and blink, and you’d have vanished.
2.
Today marks thirteen years since your death. All these years later, I still struggle to acknowledge this day. After leaving my office near Bryant Park, I find myself on Chrystie Street and locked into an autopilot that I cannot pinpoint, someone or something puppeteering my limbs through Chinatown. My legs have moved my body from my desk to the subway, and to here.
I’d spent the day sifting through audio to cobble together a radio script, and now, Steph’s voice is calming on the phone—when you walk into the temple’s big room, there’ll be these displays on each side of the entrance. Sort of like altars—and I break into a run, worried that I only have fifteen minutes until the temple closes. You’ll see Mommy’s picture up there near Gung Gung and her mother. My legs weave around shoppers who have paused at the outdoor vegetable stands to inspect the daikon and bok choy. The Mahayana Temple is near the base of the Manhattan Bridge, and when I get there, the hum of traffic washes Steph’s voice away.
I gotta go, I say to my oldest sister.
OK, she says. I love you. I wish I was there. Maybe we can have a call later with Caroline?
Yeah, I say. And then: Love you too.
In the intersection, drivers lay on their horns. The long honks bounce off the temple’s brick façade, which is crowned with red Chinese lettering; off the Orientalist marquee made to look like a roofline in China; off the tourists who wander inside to gawk at the giant Buddha. I’d read earlier that until the mid-1990s, the building housed a movie theater that showed old kung fu flicks and pornos. I wonder if these tourists have any clue that the temple isn’t so old.
In the lobby, across from what used to be the theater’s ticket counter, a young couple gestures at a vessel stuffed with fistfuls of burning incense. They lift their children one by one to show them the ash. They take a photo.
I follow an elderly woman past a sign that says NO PHOTOS and into the cavernous hall. A towering Shakyamuni Buddha takes up nearly the entire back wall, seated where a movie screen once hung, surrounded by vases of mums and lilies and platters of pomelos. Behind the Buddha’s head is a pale blue ring of neon light backed by illuminated flames.
Like a Vegas Buddha, I want to say out loud, immediately feeling guilty.
Across the room are the two memorials that Steph mentioned: walls lined with canary yellow prayer strips slotted into neat rows. On each paper is a thumbnail-sized photo of the deceased—now an ancestor—along with their name. In front of these images are carefully arranged offerings of oranges, paper cups of coffee with their lids bent back, and takeout containers filled with cheung fun and yau char kwai.
Studying the hundreds of faces, I realize that I might not remember what my gung gung and po po looked like. And what if I couldn’t recognize my own mother? I might mistake their faces, reduced to tiny, pixelated images, for someone else. It is tight-lipped smile after tight-lipped smile, pallid expression after pallid expression.
I move to the other memorial, wondering which photo of my mother’s I might find here. I recall one that I have of her in my apartment. It was taken on my parents’ wedding day, and they stand in a rose garden in Elizabeth Park in Hartford. My mother wears a long-sleeved satin cream dress with lace sewn along its bodice. She holds a bouquet of Damask roses. She and my father have matching boutonnieres pinned to their chests, their foreheads shiny, smiles plastered onto their faces like wax figures.
* * *
The last time anybody from my immediate family visited this temple was in 2004, shortly after my mother’s death. My father, Stephanie, Caroline, and I drove from our home in Connecticut, and I sat in the back seat, dazed. We left our house at dawn and arrived two hours later in Chinatown as storekeepers rolled up their metal doors. My memory inside the temple is hazy, but I recall that we were joined by our mother’s siblings and our cousins.
The lights were off in the main room. My sisters and I huddled together and clutched one another’s hands. My father must have been sitting on his own. I could not see; there was too much smoke from the incense. The monks sang incantations, and their voices echoed in ways that made the space feel impossibly large. Lids heavy and overwhelmed, I let myself be lulled to sleep.
After the ceremony, my kau fu and yi ma handed the temple employees a photo of my mother to be included in one of the altars. That way, their thinking went, someone would always pray for her.
* * *
As I inspect a row, my worry spikes. I can see a scenario where the monks had removed my family’s photos because we hadn’t visited, and another where I couldn’t recognize my own family’s faces.
And then, there my mother is: toward the upper-left corner, not far from the top. Her photo is grainy. She looks directly at the camera, surprised, like she had been caught stirring up trouble. Her hair is short, her glasses reflecting with a sliver of light. Her photo is below her parents’. I recognize my po po and gung gung from the identical pictures that sat on top of the television in our kitchen, their expressions stern all throughout my childhood when I watched hours of The Simpsons instead of finishing homework. My mother had been here all along. From her spot on the wall, she had observed the temple’s guests for nearly a decade and a half.
Unsure what to do, I bow three times. I sink to my knees on the stool in front of the memorial, and I face my mother.
For the first time all day, I feel I am in my own body.
This is the thing about grief: Despite how much we want to forget—how much we try to ignore—the dead are still here. Waiting, watching. I try to commit the exact location of my mother’s photo to memory—one, two, three down, one, two, three, four over—when a temple employee flicks the lights on and off.
We’re closed, he tells the tourists standing near the seated Buddha.
We’re closed, he says to me.
I glance at my mother. I want to say Bye, or to wave, but all of that feels trite with the temple employee watching. My limbs tighten themselves again and my marionette legs return.
I shuffle outside, drawn to the sidewalk as I watch cars roll onto the Manhattan Bridge. From my vantage point, they might as well be floating into the sky. A pack of tourists and commuters carries me down the street, pulling me away from my mother as unceremoniously as I’d arrived.
3.
It is not incorrect to say that for years, the way my family grieved my mother was to avoid acknowledging her altogether. It is not incorrect to say that we hardly invoked her name or told stories about her.
Shortly after college, my father, Caroline, and Steph descended upon my cleared-out group house in Washington, D.C., for Thanksgiving. In my childhood home, my father’s stacks of clutter multiplied until they overtook the space that my mother had so carefully cultivated; it crowded my sisters and me out. I reacted efficiently, diligently, which is to say that I pretended that these trips to Steph’s apartment in Rhode Island or Caroline’s in California were a chance to visit another part of the country.
We’d decided to exchange Christmas gifts a month early, since we wouldn’t be together in December.
Caroline, dressed in a key-lime-green onesie, handed Steph and me sets that matched hers.
They’re actually really comfortable, she said. She smiled toothily and pulled up the hood to show us the outfit’s ears, her faded
highlights a spray of lavender around her face.
The onesies were from the kids’ section, which was fine for us since everyone in our family, including our father, was small and roughly the same size. Steph and I donned ours, and I was grateful for anything to distract from how cobbled together holidays had become since my mother’s passing. My sisters and I stood on my front stoop to take a photo of us modeling our new outfits. In the photo, Caroline and I jam our hands into our pockets while Steph is wedged between us, her arms thrust into the air. We look so much like sisters, not just because in this image, we are dressed identically, but because the ways we hold our mouths enthusiastically, wryly, are the same.
Afterward, Steph passed out slender boxes.
I thought this might be good for everybody to open last, Steph said. There was a question in her voice, a preemptive apology that made me tense.
She had gifted us each a framed photo of our family. It showed all five of us, including my mother, in Seattle the summer before she died, and it was one of the last photos we’d taken together. We stand on a pier. The sky is muted and filled with the gray wash of color that comes from dragging paintbrush water across a canvas. It looks windy, and though it’s the end of summer, we must be cold, because we’re wearing long pants and sweatshirts. We huddle around my mother, who has her hands clasped in front of her stomach.
Oh, Caroline said as she pulled the wrapping paper off hers, her eyebrows shooting up her forehead as she examined the photo.
I shivered and said nothing. Our time with our mother was a past life—some version of ourselves from which we’d become estranged. When I replayed memories of her, it was as if hearing someone else recount stories of their own mother.
What’s this? Our father asked, still working his fingers underneath the paper. He looked at my sisters and me, confused by our sudden shift in mood, not understanding this context. Oh. A photo of our family?
We held the wooden frames like they were made of blown glass. I studied my mother’s face and sat in a glum silence, unsure what to say, fighting the urge to turn the photo away.
* * *
When I consider the ways images can wrench our grief to the surface, I think of Diana Khoi Nguyen’s poems, which are wrapped around photos of her family in her collection Ghost Of. The book is dedicated to her siblings, including her brother who committed suicide. He is cut from every photo. Nguyen plays with these silhouettes. She cocoons him with her grief and her memories of him. She inhabits the negative space with her despair.
Why should we mourn?
Isn’t this the history we want
one in which we survive?
The first time I read her poems, I assumed that she sliced her brother out of the photos herself. I thought she didn’t want outsiders to be privy to his body. No. Years ago, Nguyen told an interviewer that her brother, in a fit of anger, carved himself from all of the family photos hanging in a hallway of their childhood home. Afterward, he carefully slid the photos back into their frames.
“They foreshadowed his death, and after his death, the missing shards in the frames wounded me deeply,” she said in an interview. “I avoided walking down that hall, I avoided returning to the house.”
When I learned this, her grief crept into me. I avoided walking down that hall, I avoided returning to the house. Why head down a hall of memories if it leads to a perpetual reminder of death? I felt as though Nguyen, with her poetry, had inhabited the void that her brother had left behind, the way I now inhabit the one created by my mother.
For many years, I could not look at photos of my mother. I wrapped the one from Steph in a scarf and tucked it into my bedroom closet, underneath a box of clothes I no longer wore. The way I endured grief was to think only of the after, and not the before.
As a kid, I was certain that the images we had of our dead relatives were taken in caskets: a photographer pried open the deceased’s eyes and held them there with double-sided tape. The cameras clicked, the dead person cartoonishly wide-eyed, mouth gaping. I couldn’t conceive of the idea that these photos were taken in some version of the past, when the subject was alive. Looking at these ancestral photos gave me a whole-body chill, like I had come across a dead animal—one of our parakeets sprawled at the bottom of the cage, a fish floating at the top of its tank at the pet store—uncanny, a small fright pulsing, my body retracting.
Two years after her brother’s passing, Nguyen decided to tackle with words the empty spaces that her brother left behind in those photos. She said that in her work, she was trying to mourn, not exorcise. When I first read this, I was startled by how much this resonated. I have never wanted to exorcise you. I am too attached; my inclination is to preserve you—to taxidermy you—like you wanted.
But, Mommy, grief is a container of contradictions. I want to expel something, though I do not know what. I want to rid myself of this heaviness, just as much as I want to keep your ghosts. Writing about you is a strange act itself. I am perhaps afraid of it, or at least, I dread it. Yet I feel compelled to write you into being. I am hopeful, though: I spin you out of myself and into something else.
4.
Before my mother was my mother, or before she went by Florence, she was Bo Mui. But before she was Bo Mui, she was a growing speck in her mother’s uterus, and her survival was up for debate.
When my po po was months into her pregnancy with my mother, who would be her fourth child, a doctor told her that her uterus was riddled with cancer. She should abort the baby so that they could treat the cancer, the doctor told her. There was too much risk for the baby, and for her. My po po knew she was being given a choice of chance.
This was in 1955 in a village near Guangzhou.
Po Po and her husband’s extended family were recently questioned by Communists. I use that word, questioned, because the family history is vague. As the lore goes, my gung gung’s sister had zealously fallen in line with Mao Zedong’s beliefs. She’d alerted the Red Guard about her family members, who were considered landowners and therefore hoarding their wealth. And so, the family was interrogated, and eventually one of Gung Gung’s brothers was sent to a labor camp for a decade up north. The family was never the same afterward—especially not Po Po. This is how most of what happened to my family was explained to me over the years: in passive voice, these events falling from the sky, actions never committed by anybody, never involving motivations, revealing so many holes that I would need to fill, might not ever be able to fill.
I imagine that when the doctor told Po Po her diagnosis, her body became still, only her lips moving to repeat some resistance: No, no, no, no, no. The doctor told her the same facts again, emphasizing that her health was important and that she should live in order to take care of her other children.
How could I do that, she must have wondered, and survive the guilt?
After a couple of days, she finally agreed: The argument made sense to her. As painful as it was, it would all be for the better, she must have thought. She rubbed her belly, which grew larger with child and disease. She relayed this in tears to her other children, my yi ma, who was eleven, and my kau fu, who was three. They had an older brother, but he would later be disowned for reasons only vaguely mentioned and hurried along in conversation. It involved booze, gambling, abuse.
This baby, Po Po said, has to leave us.
The idea that a baby could be in their mother and then suddenly not perplexed her children, especially Yi Ma. And her mother was usually so tender and gentle, it was nearly impossible for Yi Ma to imagine getting rid of her child.
Don’t do that to my sister, Yi Ma begged. I’ll help take care of her.
Yi Ma pleaded her case for days. They had talked about this girl so much that she was already real. Still, Po Po tried drinking tonics she thought would terminate her pregnancy.
But when the tonics did not work, Po Po understood that she would have the baby. She took on a new resolve: They could try to attack the cancer after the delivery. And besides, chan
ce was capricious. There was no certainty that treating the cancer now—or in a half year or so, after she gave birth—would make a difference.
* * *
Bo Mui was born after the Communists had taken over, as Gung Gung and Po Po quietly plotted their escape to Hong Kong. Spring in Guangzhou had begun, and verdant grass leapt from the ground and hyacinths fanned across fields. That Bo Mui translated to “precious plum flower” was no coincidence, I think, something optimistic woven into her name.
Before Bo Mui’s birth, her life was a feat of survival, a gritty tooth-and-nail fight. It’s nearly impossible for me to think about her birth without conjuring more of the poetry from Diana Khoi Nguyen:
Still, every living body finds a routine
no matter its damage.
Two minutes after I was born
I had already made my first evacuation
An evacuation sounds right. My mother escaped both a womb and a disaster. I once discussed this poem with a good friend who recently had a baby. She told me she thought the line about evacuation referred to shit—since birth is often accompanied by a mess—that with it comes a vulnerability and a physical expulsion. I laughed upon hearing my friend’s interpretation. There was something so grounding about an evacuation being paired with something as powerful as a birth.
My extended family often invokes reincarnation, both when a child is born and when someone has died. I like to imagine that over lifetimes, whenever my mother reenters the world, her body is all new and fresh, like a bloom of spring—just as her name implies. This renders my mother’s comment about taxidermy so contradictory; taxidermy, after all, is about preservation.
