My parents sleep in the fold-out sofa bed in the living room, and my aunty and uncle are in the room across the hall from us. In the middle of the night Uncle Richard has coughing fits. Over and over, like he’s going to die. Aunty Mabel never makes a sound. I picture her lying there in the dark listening, the same as me, until it’s over.
We go to the beach. “Just the girls,” Aunty Mabel says. Daddy wants to sit at home on the patio and read and Uncle Richard doesn’t come with us because he has to work. Aunty Mabel has a dark blue bathing suit made of thick material like a winter coat. Ma’s is green with flowers. They are wearing their matching sunglasses. I watch Marty walk over the sand to where the waves are and just stand there.
“Sally, you remember California?” my aunt asks me.
“No, no, too long ago,” Ma says.
Aunty Mabel says something in Chinese.
My mother translates: “Your aunt says you girls both look very healthy. Must be that American food.”
Marty is stooping down now, looking at something around her ankles. She puts her hand into the water, then snatches it back.
Back at the blanket she tells us, “I saw a crab.” She has her fingers in her mouth.
“Baby,” I say.
“He bit me.” Marty’s face crinkles up and she starts to cry.
I collect lots of shells, tiny oval white ones with pink insides, like ears. Ma gives me a Kleenex so I can wrap them up and put them in the pocket of my shorts.
When it’s time for lunch we pack up the beach things and drive to the mall for hamburgers deluxe—with lettuce and tomato. Ma lets us have orange soda but she calls it orange juice so the waitress gets confused. After lunch we get ice cream cones. Marty picks pistachio because she likes the color, but it tastes so awful she spits it out in the parking lot. Ma lets her have the rest of hers, raspberry sherbet. I have chocolate, as I always do, licking it slowly into a point like a Hershey’s kiss.
I sit at the kitchen table gluing my shells to a piece of shirt cardboard. When I am done I want to draw on it, so I go looking for crayons or a pen. In the living room Aunty Mabel is sitting on the sofa with the shades pulled down, a washcloth over her face. At first I think she’s asleep, but all of a sudden she says in a creaky voice: “Who’s there?”
“Sally.”
“Oh.” She lifts up the towel and looks at me. “You having a good time?”
“Yes, Aunty Mabel.”
“You so much like your father,” she says in a soft voice, and then lays the towel over her face again.
My sister is sitting on the front steps, scratching the back of her legs. She can’t find Lili, she says.
Uncle Richard saw Lili when he was driving home from work. That’s all he says, but Marty and I know she was run over, like the animals on the side of the highway when we drove down.
“Too bad,” says Ma. Aunty Mabel just looks tired, like her headache came back.
Daddy wants to know why I’m not eating anything. When Ma says it’s because of Lili he laughs.
“She so upset about an animal?”
“This cat was like family,” Uncle Richard reminds him.
“I hope she’s half as sad when I die,” says Daddy.
Everyone laughs except me. I am picturing Lili at the edge of the road, waiting to cross, but the cars won’t stop coming, so she finally runs out anyway. It’s the only way she knows to get home.
In the morning I go out to the patio to give my father the shell picture.
“What’s this? For me? So beautiful! Thank you, Sealy.”
I don’t say anything.
“What’s the matter? You miss home?”
I shake my head. He opens his arms so I can climb onto his lap like I used to do in California. “Ai-yah!” he says like I’m too heavy for him and it’s true that I’m the biggest girl in kindergarten. He holds me stiff, too tight, and I want to get back down again.
The sliding door opens and there is my sister. “I got bit by a crab,” she announces.
“Ai-yah,” my father says again. He lets me go. “You girls be good now. Go eat your breakfast.”
The next day, when we are getting ready to go, I see the shell picture out on the patio. It’s caught under a chair leg, already ruined by rain.
Back in Connecticut all I can think about is Florida. The ocean, the little palm tree in the backyard, every meal we ate at the yellow kitchen table. The way the air smelled, heavy and sweet. Uncle Richard saying to Daddy, “Clever, she’s clever, eh?” about me. Daddy nodding.
I think about it at night while Marty and I wait for Ma to come in and read us to sleep. We lie there stretching our legs down as far as we can.
“I will NEVER fill up this bed,” I say, and my sister laughs, kicking up the covers. I arrange all my stuffed animals with my big golden giraffe, Charlie, at my feet to protect me, and Piggy by the pillow.
Ma is reading to us from a book of Chinese folktales. It’s in Chinese, so she translates as she goes, holding up the book so we can see the pictures before she turns the page. We don’t mind her slowness, it just adds to the suspense. She sits in one of the baby rocking chairs Nai-nai gave us when we were born.
One of the stories is called Monkey King. The Monkey King is a god and he doesn’t look like a monkey at all. His head is painted blue and red and yellow and he has the body of a man and a long curly tail. He has a pole that he can make small to carry, big to hit people with. Even though he has eternal life, he’s not happy, and is always making trouble in heaven. When he’s assigned to guard the Queen Mother’s magic peach garden, he ends up gobbling up all the peaches himself.
“Such a greedy, greedy monkey,” Ma says, looking at us like we’re greedy too.
Marty looks scared. I know she’s remembering the hotel monkey.
“He’s just make-believe,” I say.
“I saw him once,” Ma says. “When I was a little girl, my family went on a cruise down the Yangtze River. My father say, ‘Around this bend you look up at the cliff and see the Monkey King.’ Sure enough, we see him standing on the rock looking out with mischievous face.”
“Did he talk to you?” Marty asks.
Ma shakes her head. “Of course not. I tell you, he’s not interested in humans, in a small boat like that. He just watches us.” After we’re finished with the book of folktales Ma tells us stories we remember from Monterey.
“Tell us about Nai-nai falling off the stage in Vienna.”
“Tell us how the servants used to put your toothpaste on the toothbrush for you.”
Ma sets her lips together before she speaks, and the words come out like a dream from her head:
“When I was a little girl, our whole family love steamed chestnuts, you know, like we have in the stuffing at Thanksgiving. . .”
On those nights she sits later, sometimes turning the lights out and continuing into the dark. Beyond the sound of her sleepy words, piling like snow, I can hear the faint TV from downstairs.
For Christmas we get Great Illustrated Classics: Little Women and Tom Sawyer, which my mother had when she was a little girl in China. “You read by yourselves now,” Daddy says. These books are way too hard for Marty. At bedtime I drag out The Cat in the Hat and Curious George Rides a Bike and pretend I am Ma, reading out loud to my sister.
Where Daddy can see me, though, I read the grown-up books. “Good, good,” he says. “This is the way you get into Yale.”
“Yale only has boys,” I say.
“Well, you be the first girl.”
One day when we get home from school someone has removed all the stuffed animals except for Piggy on Marty’s pillow and Raggedy Ann on mine. The first thing I do is switch them and then I go running down to the kitchen, where Ma is cooking dinner. She takes us up to the attic and shows us where the animals are, piled in an old plastic laundry basket in the corner. I pick up Charlie the giraffe and hug him.
“Your daddy says you are grown up now, you don’t need anymore. You save
for your children. I don’t throw away.”
“Can we get a cat?” my sister asks.
“Mau-mau, you are my little cat,” Ma says, stroking Marty’s hair.
That night I don’t read. In the dark I tell Marty I’m going to run away to Florida.
14
And finally this: Disneyland. It was the last summer we lived in California, my parents had accepted teaching posts at Yale, and Nai-nai had already returned to San Diego.
I’ve never seen so many people in all my life, people in shorts and T-shirts, with sunglasses on. Mothers with fat arms pushing strollers. Fathers carrying kids on shoulders, like a parade. It looks like a town, with streets and signs but there aren’t any cars, people are stepping off the curb, walking right in the middle of the street. Daddy has a map like all the other fathers. He has on a white shirt with black and red swirls and black pants and a maroon baseball hat—what he wears when he takes me to the beach on Sunday afternoons when Ma is cleaning the house and Marty’s having her nap.
My sister wants to go on the teacups, but when we get there the line is way too long.
“Come back later,” Daddy says.
We keep walking until we get to a little house with a green-and-white-striped awning. Ma buys four big glasses of orangeade. While I’m drinking, a bee floats into my cup and buzzes there right in front of my face, trapped.
“Sealy, don’t move,” Daddy’s voice says, quiet. I close my eyes. I feel the cup being pulled away gently, slowly.
He shows me the bee floating dead and then takes the cup to the trash can. Then he walks off, in the other direction.
“Sally almost got stung!” Marty says, like she’s disappointed I didn’t.
I ask Ma where Daddy went.
My mother frowns. “He’ll be back.”
There are cartoon characters everywhere: Pluto, Goofy, and Marty’s favorite, Donald Duck. “Dono,” she calls him. I can tell Donald Duck likes my sister, because he comes over so Ma can take a picture of them together. He has real feathers, a soft little white tail that sticks up. But I am holding out for Mickey and Minnie, especially Minnie. At home I have a Mickey Mouse Club T-shirt and ears, and a pen with Minnie Mouse on it that shows her winking if you move it from side to side. I love Minnie’s white gloves, her polka-dot princess dress, her big red high heels, and most of all that enormous smile that takes up half her face. Along with flowers and snails and houses, that’s what I draw the most, Minnie Mouse, on the backs of the old flash cards my parents bring home from work. Sometimes I draw her dressed in my own clothes: shorts and T-shirts, my favorite aqua overalls, PJs.
Ma is sitting on a bench, humming “It’s a Small World After All.” That’s a ride we’ve already been on, where you get in a boat and go through a dark tunnel and miniature people from different countries pop out at you. Ma and Daddy laughed really hard when they found out we had to go on a boat. When Marty asked what was so funny Ma said: “Your father is not a good sailor.”
“Watch your sister,” Ma says to me. Marty is standing off to the other side of the bench watching this little lake that has a stone bridge over it. It must be a famous bridge—people keep stopping to get their pictures taken on it.
“Dono,” she says.
“No, silly, he isn’t there.”
The next time I look my sister has disappeared. I glance back at Ma, but she has her red pointy sunglasses on and isn’t looking in my direction. The bridge isn’t very far, only about ten people away, so I edge my way over and sure enough, there’s Marty, crouched by the railing, staring into the water.
“He’s not THERE!” I yell at her, and when she sees me she gets up and runs farther away, over the bridge and onto the other side of the lake. Luckily she is wearing red—a red T-shirt with white snowflakes and red shorts and sneaks—so I can follow her easily through the crowd.
“Dummy,” I say when I catch up with her. I take her hand and look back over the bridge to the bench where Ma is sitting, but I can’t see the bench. Marty looks too. I tell her: “We better go back.”
“Where’s Ma?” my sister whines.
“She’s there.”
But when we cross the bridge the bench where Ma was sitting is taken up by another family, a big Negro woman with a newborn baby and two boys who just stare at us.
There is a low concrete wall behind the bench, and I take Marty over and lean her up against it. “Don’t move,” I tell her before climbing up. My sister’s face is scrunched up but she obeys. I know what to look for—Ma’s puffy black hairdo, Daddy’s maroon baseball cap. But all the colors in the crowd—except for the family sitting on the bench below—are pale-pinks and light blues and yellows.
Marty starts to cry.
“We’ll find them,” I tell her. It doesn’t occur to me that they’ll find us. People are noticing us, alone together, and this makes me nervous. There’s big old Goofy in the distance, and I consider asking him what to do, but Ma says none of the cartoon characters can talk. Anyhow he’s kind of scary-looking. Who ever heard of a purple dog? He doesn’t even look like a dog.
My sister has stopped sobbing, although tears are still sliding down her face.
“Don’t worry, Mar-Mar,” I say, hugging her. Though we are only about a year apart I am so much taller, and sometimes we pretend that she is my baby. She’s small enough to still fit in the buggy and I used to wheel her around the backyard until Ma told me to stop. My sister sticks her hand into mine again, and we continue walking, away from the bridge, which seems the right thing to do.
Suddenly we’re at the teacups again—I recognize the little pink house where you get your tickets. There’s still a line of people in front, but I just keep walking and no one stops us. At the window there’s a lady with curly blond hair and a diagonal band across her body, like Girl Scouts. She leans down.
“What? I can’t hear you, little girl.”
I repeat: “We’re looking for our parents.”
This causes a commotion. The lady in the booth speaks to someone behind her and then tells us to stay put. Now the people in the front of the line are paying attention to us. One of the mothers with fat arms is saying she’s surprised this doesn’t happen more often here, kids getting lost. A man in a flowered shirt squats down in front of Marty to offer her a Tootsie Pop. She shakes her head, which I am glad of. The man tells his wife: “Looks just like one of them Japanese dolls, doncha think?”
The lady in the booth comes out and says we should come inside to wait. She puts her fingers, with their long purple nails, on our shoulders, to pull us in.
The booth is dark, with lots of shelves and a table with a big roll of green tickets and some paper napkins and empty paper cups. The other person in the booth, a man with a brown face and a black mustache, points to a couple of stools in the corner and says, “Take a load off!” As we sit down, Marty is still clutching my hand. I shake my own hand until she lets go.
“Don’t be a baby,” I whisper.
“Okay,” says the lady. “Tell me your last name again.”
“Wang,” I say.
She wrinkles her forehead. “Won? Your name is Won?”
“WANG. Sarah and Martha Wang.”
“Okay, Denny, you hear that?”
“Yeah. Don’t worry, hons, we’ll find who you belong to.” The man adjusts his microphone, which I notice for the first time, and leans into it. “ATTENTION ALL PARENTS. WE HAVE TWO LITTLE LOST ORIENTAL GIRLS AT THE TEACUP RIDE. I REPEAT, TWO LITTLE LOST ORIENTAL GIRLS AT THE TEACUP RIDE.”
He doesn’t say our names. How are Ma and Daddy going to know, unless they hear our names? I look over at my sister. Although she has finally stopped crying, I can tell from the expression on her face that something bad is about to happen.
“That should do it,” the man says.
Marry is peeing in her pants, right on the stool, and it’s spilling onto the floor.
It’s my fault. I forgot to ask her if she needed to go.
The man a
nd the lady both turn around. The man says a bad word.
“You poor little thing,” the lady says to Marty. “Don’t worry, your mama and papa will come to get you soon.” She scrunches up some napkins and walks over to my sister. Marty leans away from her, almost falling off the stool.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” the lady says. She looks at the man, who shrugs his shoulders. Then she just tosses the napkins on the floor around my sister’s stool, to soak up the pee.
The man leans into the microphone again. “ATTENTION PARENTS. TWO LITTLE LOST ORIENTAL GIRLS AT THE TEACUP RIDE.”
The lady goes over to stand at the window and the man ignores us. I think he’s just hoping neither of us is going to do anything disgusting again.
Then I hear the lady say: “Hallelujah, I think it’s them.”
Our parents look very hot. I am surprised to see them. Right away Ma reaches for Marty, who’s crying her head off again.
“She wet herself?” Ma asks me, like anyone couldn’t tell.
“Sealy,” Daddy says. He has a funny expression on his face.
“Okay, okay,” says Ma. She says to the lady and man: “Thank you for taking care of them.”
“No big deal, I got nieces and nephews,” says the lady.
The man makes a grunting noise.
Ma points at me. “I told you watch your sister. Can’t you hear? Something wrong with your brain, Sal-lee?”
She takes Marty to the ladies’ room to wash her off, and Daddy and I sit down to wait for them on the concrete wall. I’m so thirsty I think I am going to die. I remember I didn’t get to finish my orangeade.
Daddy touches the top of my hair and says: “Ouch! What a hothead!” He takes off his baseball cap and puts it on my head. It’s sweaty and smelly and way too big but immediately I feel better.
Monkey King Page 15
