Seeing Ghosts

by Kat Chow

  It’s your husband’s job to take care of you, he said to his daughter. His family should provide for you. And so, my mother turned to her credit cards. She used splurges like the piano to prove she could make it, had made it, by herself. She was so certain she had time to pay off her debts later.

  Yes, you have heard this before, that she wanted to live in a condo near Yi Ma? I say to my father. His face is ruddy against the blush wall of the living room, his expression unmoving.

  Of course, she always told me stuff like that. She says, when I die, she’s going to go live with her sister.

  Huh, I say.

  Mm-hmm, he says. He is not wearing his hearing aid, which we had helped him buy a few years earlier. Caroline found an inexpensive one, since cochlear implants cost thousands. But he rarely wears it, seems embarrassed by it, says that it amplifies all sounds, and that when he speaks on the phone it produces a high-pitched noise that makes others complain. I can see my father, a practical man, assessing a situation and concluding there is no point in speaking, since he cannot hear.

  His expression puckers.

  He holds his mouth funny, jaw tight, invisible marbles stuffed in his cheeks. He also needs tooth implants, but his dental insurance, part of the Medicare Advantage program, won’t cover the full cost of the procedure. As a result, he has spent the past two years seeking quotes from dentists in Flushing and Sunset Park who might be able to perform the surgery at a price he can afford on his own. Steph and I have spent weekends driving him around those Chinatowns, sitting in the car or in various waiting rooms while he goes to appointment after appointment. All of these dentists, as well as their patients, are Chinese, so my father hopes that maybe they can cut him a deal. But there’s no such luck. When Steph brings him to a meeting one afternoon, our father is so flustered by everything—the potentially steep bills, the restless energy of the city, his aching mouth—that he opens his driver’s door into oncoming traffic, the new dent on his car another costly fee.

  These days, it is hard to imagine my father growing old with my mother. He is a man entrenched in his ways. As I sit before him, I see two alternate realities. In one, my mother is alive, and my parents have divorced. In the other, my mother is alive, and my parents are still together. In the latter, which is easier to summon, my mother would have taken care of my father at her own expense. He might have had better dental insurance, at least.

  6.

  Years after my mother’s death, I find an old cache of birthday and holiday cards. They sit on top of a basket of my old Beanie Babies, which for some reason, have remained in a corner of my parents’ bedroom. I’d forgotten that my parents had nicknames for one another—my mother was the general of the household and my father was the president. Much of their relationship was antagonistic flirtation. There was something between the two of them that of course must have worked.

  In one card, the occasion unclear, my father wrote to my mother:

  To the General:

  Let me sleep in a little while longer.

  Love,

  The President

  It hadn’t occurred to me before seeing this card that English might be the language of their love, that their relationship functioned this way, that it never required any translation.

  7.

  When I was two, my mother started a new job at Travelers Insurance working out of its twenty-four-story tower. Over the past seven years, she’d shifted her career into programming, which began with night classes at the Hartford Graduate Center and learning to code. During the day, she worked at Saint Francis Hospital and analyzed patients’ blood samples.

  When the tower was first built in 1919, it was the seventh-tallest building in the world. My mother worked at different Travelers outposts around Connecticut, and I can imagine this: Her first time at headquarters, she cranes her neck to take in all 527 feet of stone and glass that reflects the city. She heads inside every weekday for the two years she’s employed there as a database administrator, aware of how her path has been so different from her colleagues’, many of them men, nearly all of them white.

  Caroline will eventually have a similar job. I wish I could have asked Mommy more about her work, but I only came to understand what it really was after she was gone, she tells me. She wonders if maybe she’s been trying to emulate our mother all along. Mommy always talked about how she was one of the highest-ranked DBAs at work, she says. I don’t quite understand what that means, but I know that Caroline, who of us sisters speaks the least about our mother, is impressed.

  After my mother left Travelers to work at Aetna, another behemoth insurance company, a pair of peregrine falcons nested on the Travelers Tower and hatched three chicks. Biologists caught the chicklings and snapped bands on their legs and returned them to their parents. A reporter for The Hartford Courant wrote in June 1997 that these were the “first documented births of wild peregrines in Connecticut in about 50 years.” Everybody was so impressed that after half a century, these endangered birds were fighting back.

  There are baby birds up in the tower where I used to work, she told me one morning. Falcons. After breakfast, she and Steph and Caroline led me to an encyclopedia that we had on a shelf in the other room. I was in second grade. I slowly read the paragraphs out loud while Steph and Caroline filled in what I couldn’t understand.

  Peregrine falcons hunt other birds and animals, they summarized.

  They can go as fast as two hundred miles per hour when they dive.

  I pictured the falcons circling the Travelers Tower far above Hartford and hurtling themselves toward the ground as if in a self-sacrifice. Wings tucked so tight into their body like splinters while they picked up velocity, the embodiment of headfirst. The speed was heavy and shattering and powerful, and the image of a bird shooting through the sky this way left me breathless.

  Not long after, my family explored a nearby town’s fair, and we came across a couple giving a demonstration with their birds of prey. My mother prodded me and my sisters toward the birds. Go look at them. Go learn something. My family huddled around the falconers and listened to them explain what the birds ate (bats, pigeons, ducks, songbirds) and their wingspans (a large adult peregrine can have a wingspan of around forty-three inches). After, the falconers pulled heavy gloves over our fists that stretched up our arms. They coaxed the peregrine onto Caroline’s, and a smaller bird—perhaps a prairie falcon—onto mine. Caroline is ecstatic, her eyes enormous and meeting the gaze of whoever’s taken the picture. In my photo, I look so small, much younger than six. I am delighted, though I look shyly into the camera, as though I've been instructed—maybe by my mother—to stay still to keep the bird calm.

  For months afterward, I talked about falcons as if they were made of magic. In my kid eyes, they could reach speeds of infinity; so strong and seemingly unbreakable, those feathered bullets in the sky.

  I recently read that female peregrine falcons are larger than the males. This is not unusual for birds of prey. One theory posits that female peregrines evolved to be larger to fight off aggressive male falcons; they also often chose mates that were smaller and, therefore, safer. My first reaction was that they were settling; my second was that this was a matter of self-preservation.

  As a child, I couldn’t understand what an enormous feat the reappearance of peregrines at the Travelers Tower signified for environmentalists. As an adult, it’s birds like that swooping between glass and steel that stays with me. It was humans and the use of pesticides that poisoned and nearly eradicated peregrines from the East Coast. It was humans who helped bring them back, building roosts on the skyscrapers. The falcons nesting among the tall buildings strikes me at first as unnatural, though perhaps this is a matter of adaptation and survival. The word I’m looking for is assimilation.

  I wonder now if my mother’s career change was in response to my father’s—a realization that she would need to provide for our family. Was this the path that my mother had originally wanted to pursue years earlier wh
en she had first arrived in the U.S., but felt she couldn’t because of her father’s wishes? Was it that she hadn’t realized she’d wanted to study programming until then? Was she satisfied with this change? I suppose I am wondering what it means to be satisfied.

  My father often talks of survival—do whatever is necessary to succeed—but where in this idea does satisfaction factor?

  Mommy, I am asking about your happiness—and yet, I am only able to reach as far as “satisfied.”

  * * *

  The first time my father tried to reinvent his career, it was to work at his restaurant.

  I can picture my father before this, seated at a cubicle that would never have his name on it. He wore a pair of khakis from the juniors section and a button-up shirt that my mother ironed.

  He cycled through different industries every handful of years, often taking short-term contracts that didn’t come with health insurance. He was an engineer, restauranteur, programmer, financial consultant, and property manager.

  Until my sisters reached elementary school, my father worked at companies that manufactured energy. At one of the firms, which produced steam power, he and some co-workers who were also from China were assigned a project that they found a more efficient way to complete. The manager learned that they had developed their own method.

  Don’t do this the Chinese way, the manager told them, though nobody had brought up China or that they were Chinese. We’re in America.

  My father ignored him. He continued on with the project how he saw fit.

  What did you think of that, though? I ask him one evening on the phone. I had wondered, broadly, about the types of discrimination he had faced over the years. At the time, did you find this to be racist?

  He speaks quickly, but evades the question.

  Oh, there was just always little things like that, he says. People always say things like that. You know.

  He launches into a story about you. At work—he forgets which job—your co-workers told raucous jokes. You were one of the few women on the team, and one of fewer immigrants. My father couldn’t remember what those jokes were about, specifically, but it’s easy to imagine. Your co-workers, most of them white, assumed you were laughing with them.

  You better be careful, you know, you said. Your lips crimped. I’m a double minority. A woman and a Chinese.

  Then, you added, your smile broadening: Watch out, I could go to HR.

  They froze, uncertain if now they were the ones who had missed the joke.

  When Daddy relays this story, he pronounces mi-nor-i-ty carefully, and laughs. Never mind that women aren’t technically minorities in the U.S. But that you identified as such, tells me you likely dealt with many similar situations over the years. You defused your discomfort by swiveling it around.

  I am surprised when he so easily supplies these anecdotes. Surprised again when he launches into another, about a neighbor who complained about my sisters swimming at a private pool club as guests instead of paying members. Surprised again that all these years later, he remembers the name of this neighbor and the name of the pool club. I cannot recall any times from my childhood where my family spoke openly about the little moments of denigration and racism that we gathered. Distance provides safety, and allows us to call these decades-old moments what they were. Now, the speed in which he recalls this makes me want to know what other stories he chooses not to share.

  As my father worked his office jobs, he found himself thinking more about his own father.

  I had always wondered, he tells me, what it would be like to own a restaurant.

  My grandfather worked in seven restaurants in Havana, goes the story. He eventually became a partner at some of them. He was successful, and not only had he survived, but until his sudden death, he thrived.

  I thought it would help me to better understand my father, my father explains to me. I had not expected him to so readily tell me about this quiet yearning he had for any knowledge about my grandfather. There was also the promise that if the restaurant did well, my father thought, he might be able to make a better living that surpassed whatever he could make as an engineer, a position which he slowly suspected had a limited trajectory for him. Money meant freedom, he always said. It meant working for himself and doing whatever he wanted.

  As my father tells it, my mother had not wanted him to enter the restaurant business. He claims my gung gung seemed to think that people who worked in restaurants, or anything he considered blue collar, didn’t have much of a career or, therefore, life.

  In retrospect, my father moralizes, citing Yi Ma’s late husband as an example. My yi jeung had worked at his family’s restaurant, and as a custodian at a local school: I always thought that was wrong, how [your yi ma’s husband] helped bring the family over, and then your gung gung was looking down on him. He keeps repeating the phrase looking down. His voice curdles the longer we sit in this memory. It makes me think that maybe they’d felt like outsiders together.

  My father persisted and followed his curiosity; he continued ahead with plans to open his restaurant. He kept his day job—a way to capitulate to his father-in-law.

  * * *

  My mother, as my father tells it, befriended another couple also from Hong Kong. She had listened to my father’s ruminations about opening a restaurant, and had struck up conversation with a woman who ran a takeout spot in town with her husband. The four of them bought a failing Chinese restaurant and renamed it Lotus Garden. The husband was a cook, but not a very good one, according to my father. The wife—my father couldn’t remember what she did. He had a lot to say about the husband though: He did not seem to take much pride in his cooking and was not knowledgeable about Cantonese cuisine, which was what my father had hoped to serve. This partner was a cook, not a chef, my father kept saying, trying to emphasize his distinction between a tradesperson and an artist.

  My father wanted to serve dishes like fried taro bird’s nest with sliced ginger, bamboo shoots, straw mushrooms, scallops, shrimp, and squid inside, or stewed beef brisket with daikon. He wanted dim sum carts to roll through the dining room on weekends with har gau, siu mai, lo bak go, and cheung fun wrapped around yau char kwai. And for a short time, he found a chef from New York who could make dishes like that.

  But, according to my father, very few chefs wanted to live so far from New York, where there was a large Cantonese population. As he put it: Talented chefs had options, which meant they wouldn’t want to live in the middle of nowhere in Connecticut, where they’d be isolated in both community and familiar pleasures. It was hard to keep this chef, who was protective of his recipes and refused to share how he made various sauces with my father and the other owners.

  And so, my parents did what they could, trying to hold their restaurant together.

  I don’t have any memories of Lotus Garden. I was a toddler when it shuttered. But for Steph and Caroline, it was their childhood playground.

  In a photo from the late 1980s, perhaps a year or so before I am born, they pose for a camera at a table. My father is the only one sitting. My mother stands behind him, a hand on his shoulder. Steph leans in front of them, Caroline to the side.

  My parents look tense, as though the photo itself has interrupted an argument.

  She never wanted to help, our father says about my mother now. I can already feel him sliding into that place he goes when he remembers her. Face hard, agitation building.

  No, I say. She was busy. She already had a full-time job.

  She never wanted to come to the restaurant, he says again, like he doesn’t hear me. I always ask her and she says, Oh, I’m busy, I’m busy.

  Perhaps in the photo, my parents are discussing whether to file for bankruptcy. My mother looks irritated and as though she has begrudgingly called Steph and Caroline to the table, ordering them to smile. Nobody does except Steph, though her eyes are closed and her expression seems more like a grimace.

  The photo is undated, but Caroline and Steph look around five a
nd seven years old. Based on this timing, my mother might have recently given birth to her only son. Under the glare of the camera, the pale blue of her shirt blends into my father’s button-up, turning them into a human Hydra.