“Buyao! Xiexie! Buyao! I don’t want. Thank you,” I weakly protested.
My sisters came to the rescue, chastising him. He finally retreated, disappointed.
“Tell Ba you want the car,” Jin-Xia said, laughing.
“He isn’t upset, is he?” I asked.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “He just want to give you everything.”
EVERYWHERE I LOOKED, everywhere I went, everything I did, there were sisters. They hovered, doted, teased, bossed, laughed, and cried. They were my translators and tour guides, my keepers, protectors, and friends.
In the United States I had two younger brothers, but in Taiwan I was a meimei, a little sister, and I behaved like a meimei. At times, I would tickle my sisters or pull on their hair. We would walk down the street, and they would hold my hand, as many Chinese women do. During meals, they sat on both sides of me putting things that I did and did not want into my tiny bowl. Jin-Xia tried to correct the way I held chopsticks and my rice bowl. She cupped the bowl in one hand, delicately, with the pinkie pointing outward. “Beautiful,” she said. She also scolded me for blowing my nose too loudly or spitting in the street (when I had caught a cold and could not help it). They all taught me words, phrases, games, and songs. One of our favorites was “Ni shi wode jiemei, Ni shi wode beibei.” You are my sister. You are my baby.
They took me to sing karaoke. We crammed into the small, private room and ordered rounds and rounds of food. I watched, amazed, as they sang one song after another in Chinese and in English. They played “Unbreak My Heart” and made Patrick, Min-Wei’s then boyfriend, now husband, and me sing together. We sang “One Fine Day” and “Careless Whispers.” I sang “Like a Virgin,” glancing warily at Sister Maureen, and noticed with relief and amusement that she was singing, too. On my second night in Taipei, four sisters took me to the famous Shihlin Night Market. We took the light rail train to downtown after drinking a couple cans of Taiwan Beer. On the way, I taught Jin-Hong, whose face was flushed with alcohol, the word buzzed. I remember she was wearing a flattering summer dress, heels, and her husband’s oversized warm-up jacket, and she tended to prolong the “zzzz” part of the word and raise her voice, pronouncing the word like a coy question.
“Buzzzzzed?”
After huddling together on the busy train, we burst through the Shihlin station turnstiles to join the fray that is the night market. Thousands of people milled in and out of the brightly lit open storefronts, where loud speakers blared rap music, and empty, recorded voices promised the best quality and the best discounts. Bright blue, orange, red, yellow, and white signs with neat, sweeping Chinese characters lit up the sky. Street vendors sold drinks with what looked like hunks of jelly floating on their surfaces, fruit piled on ice, and cherry tomatoes and boiled quail eggs alternately perched on sticks. Cooks poured dough and other more gooey and mysterious products into oily woks. The steam shot past the makeshift lights swinging above their stands and into the air in a greasy poof!
The black-market vendors, the ones who did not have licenses or shops, sold their contraband from rolling racks and ratty blankets that could be swept up and whisked away at the first sniff of police. The crowd swarmed around what I like to call hoochie clothing: tight tops, low-rise jeans, and the teeniest miniskirts. Giddy girls eagerly bought English T-shirts that often did not make sense; the shirts always seemed to feature spelling and phrasing that ranged from slightly off to flat-out nonsensical like “Destiny Girl Love Diamond” and “Bubble Star.”
As foreign as all of this seemed—the food, the smells, the places, the faces, the language—I felt at home. We linked arms and swung into the crowd, almost skipping, and paused only to glance at a cute pair of high-heeled shoes, to shake our hips to the bass of a hip-hop song. We squeezed through the bustle like a snake, each of us holding tight to the next sister’s hand. I could hardly breathe.
We were intrigued with each other’s body parts. My sisters were perplexed by my “big eyes.” I always thought I had average-looking, slanted Asian eyes. But they thought mine were abnormally large and round.
“Did you cut?” they asked, referring to the operations that some Asians get to make their eyes look larger. A doctor basically slices the eyelid to give it a crease, thus making the eye look rounder and more European. Ba piped in that I had the prettiest eyes of any of the sisters because they were so big. My sisters protested to his prejudiced standard of beauty and then theorized that my more American look must come from the food in the States.
I was overjoyed to see that a couple sisters had breasts like mine, that I was not some freak of nature.
“It is from mother,” they teased, each claiming the other was bigger, poking and grabbing. We discussed and analyzed our faces, hands, calves, and butt sizes. We even compared feet. Each of us has a split toenail on our smallest toe. I always thought mine was ugly and strange. I hated to show my feet in sandals. Min-Wei showed me hers proudly.
“We all have. Little one!” she exclaimed, grinning, pointing.
I would never be ashamed again.
7
A PERFECT REUNION
We wanted to be perfect for each other. And for the moment, we were.
We knew each other enough to like each other and too little to annoy each other. We were funny and loud. We were happy faces, hugging father, mother, sisters and daughters, curious interviewers and interviewees. They asked invasive questions and I answered with a smile. I pried and they responded as best they could. We reached out and touched each other without hesitation. We wanted to accept and be accepted.
We were the lost and found, and the joy of recovery and discovery trumped regret, loss, or any other sad or shameful secrets that just weren’t worth bringing up yet. They seemed to believe I was too good to be true, and they were right. Because of my poor Chinese, my politeness, and my desire to keep an open mind and make a good impression, my birth parents thought I was obedient and soft-spoken (an idea that made my American parents guffaw). They thought I was beautiful, but I believed I was no more appealing than any of my other sisters. My mother even told Maureen that I must be good because I accepted her, and she didn’t think her other daughters would have tried to find her. I refrained from telling her that for much of my life I had barely thought about her.
Perfection, of course, is never a permanent state. Humans are too complicated, our faults and failures bubbling in our blood, haunting us during our best as well as our worst times. This family had a dark side that crippled the hearts of its women, brought them to furious tears, and made them bull-headed and strong. But this reunion was not the time to air grievances. This was a time for celebration.
For now, we were just ecstatic to be together.
For now, we were a perfectly reunited family.
TAIPEI SPRANG UP in a basin that used to be a lake, and today it is an ultramodern sprawl of high-rises. Random English phrases hover among the Chinese characters above the packed sidewalks. Delicious Restaurant. KTV. Barbershop. Streets buzz with the latest cool cars and bikes to come out of Japan. Two and a half million people, most of them Han Chinese, live on top of each other in gray apartment buildings. What was simply everyday life to my family felt new and exhilarating to me. I loved when Min-Wei would put me on the back of her moped and we would fly down the streets, the smell of exhaust blasting our noses, our hair mussing and mingling in the hot wind. I liked being small and anonymous, the same as everyone else. Most people were short, and I was of average height. Everyone had dark hair and dark eyes, so they tried to make themselves different. They dyed their hair blonde, red, or orange, and they wore loud colors and mismatched patterns. The Chinese did not seem demure, as the stereotypes might imply. They were boisterous, whether bargaining over prices, ordering food, joking with friends, or arguing over a car accident. It all sounded the same to me.
Getting around Taiwan with my birth family was an elaborate production. Maureen and I would get into the car. One or two sisters would put their children in with
us. We would sit for a second, waiting for who knows what. Then, for no particular reason, those sisters would get out, rearrange, and a different niece would be thrust into our laps and a different sister would squeeze into the car. This would happen a few times before we started moving. And an hour later the caravan stopped and the changes started again. At first the disorder made me nervous. Driving with my American family to places such as Florida had been incredibly straightforward: little brother on the hump in the middle and ranking sister and brother on both sides. Play car games, sing a song, push each other around a little, get scolded, stop briefly and start again.
After a few days of touring the temples, parks, and landmarks of Taiwan, we traveled to Taitung. Maureen and I flew with Ma and Ba and a couple sisters, while the other members of the family drove. I almost did not make it onto the plane because Ba, instead of putting my actual, legal name on my airplane ticket, wrote Wang Mei-Ling, as if I still belonged to them.
MA AND BA’S HOUSE in Taitung was much larger than I imagined. A corrugated metal façade hid the three-story home. We entered a small alcove where we left our outdoor shoes, then passed through the front door into a large living room. On the walls hung a black clock, a hodgepodge of Chinese calendars, scrolls, and pictures of the family. Beyond the living room was a small dining room with a circular table in the center and beyond that a cluttered kitchen. The tub in the first-floor bathroom had no curtains or doors; a plastic hose and shower head was connected to a faucet that spat out a trickle of warm water for bathing.
Upstairs on the second floor were a few bedrooms and another small bathroom. As I wandered the hallways, I tried to imagine what it must have been like to grow up there, to know by heart the sound of our mother’s shuffle down the hallway, the slam of the screen door as one of my siblings came home from school, a hard rain on the metal rooftop. I tried to conjure up some kind of intimacy with this place as I breathed in the smells of overripe vegetables and fruits, of fish and grease, of sweaty children, concrete, puddles and tropical plants. I romanticized the familiarity that my sisters felt when they came to Taitung once or twice a year for Chinese New Year or other special occasions, that wave of nostalgia one feels when one returns home after a long time away.
I peeked in the bedrooms. There was Ma’s room; she and Ba slept separately. Strings of colored beads hung down from the door frame and formed the symbol for double happiness, a symbol of luck. She had a poster of Madonna, circa “Who’s That Girl?” taped on the wall. On her vanity table, I spotted my baby picture from when I had just arrived in the United States. My sisters told me it had been there as long as they could remember.
My birth father called to me. He was on the third floor, in the room where they prayed to our ancestors. He stood before an ornate, hand-carved wood shrine featuring paintings and figurines of Guanyin and other deities. It was lit with small red lamps. Black-and-white photos of Ba’s parents, Ama and Agong, hung on the wall. Ba told me the first thing we must do is baibai, to thank our ancestors and the gods for bringing me home safely. Jin-Xia, sister no. 3, handed me three sticks of incense and taught me to hold them with both hands and wave them three times in the air, pausing at the end. I silently gave thanks for this happy reunion. Then we placed the burning sticks in a tiny urn before the tiny golden goddess, and the smoke carried our thoughts to heaven.
FIRST, I LEARNED I had a Chinese brother that my birth parents had adopted shortly before they gave me up for adoption.
Then I learned he was fat.
Not just fat. All-caps FAT. Or “so fat,” “too fat,” simply “a very BIG boy.” I did not even know the name of my gege (big brother) until I actually visited. All I knew was that my sister claimed he was about 140 kilos or 309 pounds—a scandalous size—and that I was to bring him clothing from America.
The request that I buy my big brother clothing came in the second or third letter I ever received from my Chinese family. My introduction to this family, whom I had not heard from for twenty-three years, could be summarized like this: Hello Mei-Ling. We are your birth family. We missed you. Please come back to Taiwan. And, oh, yes, please buy clothing for your fat brother.
Such a brash request might seem appalling, but my birth family has no filter. In their eyes, there was no shame in calling a brother fat or asking me—the long-lost daughter whom they gave up—to buy something for the boy they adopted and kept instead, just like there was nothing wrong with asking me how much I and my parents make and how much I spend on my apartment. But I knew the Chinese could be shockingly forward. If someone felt you were too fat, too skinny, too ugly, too small, too tall, he or she would have no qualms about telling you. My friend Marsha’s mom used to chant “Tall nose, pretty girl,” to her in Cantonese while pinching gently the bridge of her daughter’s nose.
I went with my six-foot-four boyfriend to the Big and Tall shop and the Target store in St. Louis, and we picked through the extra-large clothing. I remember the amused look on Monte’s face as he held up a pair of size XXL gray sweatpants that could stretch his entire arm span.
“This has to fit him,” he said.
Nian-Zu was the boy that they adopted, hoping that he would marry and have children and continue the family name. My parents and grandmother spoiled him, my sisters said. Early on, he seemed to be everything they wanted him to be.
Then he came down with a high fever. After that, my family claimed, he grew mentally slow, while his sisters were agile and smart. He grew chubby, while the girls were shapely and pretty. Our brother dropped out of school.
Now he was an adult, unmarried, and living at home, while my sisters were all educated and working. Nian-Zu often stayed in his room, mostly watching television for long periods of time, often action movies. When I met Nian-Zu in 1997, he had just gotten a job at the local fruit and vegetable market, loading and weighing winter melons, pineapples, and eggplant. He still did not know he was adopted. They might openly celebrate my return, but telling Nian-Zu about his history was not an option. Ma later said she would rather kill herself than have Older Brother find out that he was not their biological child.
Nian-Zu had waited in Taitung, while the rest of the family had gone to Taipei for my arrival. No one told me why, but I supposed my brother might have stayed in Taitung because he had to work. Or maybe he was too big to fit comfortably on a Taiwanese plane. Or maybe he didn’t want to travel. But he was waiting in my parents’ living room when all of us came home.
He was big, I thought, but his size wasn’t that unusual to someone who had grown up with American standards of obesity. His body was large and pillowy, the folds of his tummy showing through his thin red T-shirt. He had a square head, hair that was matted down with sweat, and a warm, wide grin. He reached for me and I reluctantly succumbed to his sloppy, heartfelt hug. I noted with some shame my own reticence in returning his welcome with the passion I had embraced my sisters. Nian-Zu tried to hug his other sisters, but they also seemed to pull away, embarrassed.
Nian-Zu tried to speak to me, but I didn’t understand. He spoke no English, and my Chinese was hopeless. He pulled a gift out of his pocket, a jade pendant with a monkey carved on it, a symbol of intelligence and success. It hung from a red string.
I thanked him, “Xiexie,” and gave him the clothing I bought him.
Later, when the family sat down to eat, the sisters translated for Ba.
“The clothes don’t fit; next time you have to bring more,” they said.
I stared at them, amazed, a bit taken aback. Who was this guy? The conversation moved on, this time to the fact that Ba was thinking about arranging a marriage—or even buying a bride for Nian-Zu—provoking a shower of loud protests from his daughters.
“You are so old-fashioned. That’s ridiculous,” they told our father.
He snapped back, “No it isn’t!”
That evening, my third or fourth in Taiwan, was long: endless toasts and constant eating. Nian-Zu wandered in and out of the fray, rather quietly c
ompared with my sisters, who talked, laughed, and carried on. Our brother did not even eat at the table with the rounds of family who pulled up to gorge and then retired before another round began. I later asked Min-Wei why he didn’t eat with us. My younger sister’s answer was simply a long, surprised pause: she had never noted his absence before.
By 10 p.m. I was beat. I was tired of the talking and of not understanding, of being bossed around, of being on display, and of constantly being photographed as if I were a baby learning to walk. I had grown up with only two younger brothers, who were still unmarried, and having several Chinese siblings, brothers-in-law, and nephews and nieces wore me out. Exhaustion and irritation were quickly replacing joy and intrigue. I could not remain open-minded and sweet without rest. I needed to escape the noise so common to my birth family. I excused myself, saying I was tired. I slipped on my pajamas and lay on a hard bed, my stomach stuffed. I breathed deeply, listening to the game of mahjong being played downstairs, the sound carrying up to my room on waves of shrieking laughter.
Write. I need to write. Release. Relax.
I reached over and grabbed my journal, flipped over on my belly, and started to write.
Suddenly, the door flew open.
There was Nian-Zu.
“Get out! Go away!” I yelled, as I tried to cover myself. My sleepwear was not too sexy or revealing, but this “brother” was a stranger.
“Get out!”
He didn’t understand. He was standing there, smiling a big, silly, oblivious grin. He had crammed his body into the clothes I had bought him. The bottom of the polo shirt was riding up over his stomach, which was bulging out of his pants. He rested his hands on his hips and stood very straight with his legs spread wide.
“Sank you vely much!” he said, then closed the door and marched back to his room, as pleased as he could be.
MAUREEN AND I spent three days in Taitung. We had little time alone, and when we did, we were dead tired. We got along well, but the family just sucked up all of our energy. That was okay, though. Maureen understood that this experience was between my birth family and me, and she seemed happy to be a part of it. Meanwhile, they had a hard time understanding that Maureen had not actually been a part of my life until very recently. They kept asking us questions about each other that we could not answer.
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