“You are lucky girl, yes.” Jin-Hong said to me, nodding. “A very lucky girl.”
Ba was readying himself to leave for Taitung, but Min-Wei, the one who as a teen had been so angry and certainly not an ally of Ba’s, played peacemaker.
“We are never together anymore,” she reasoned with our father. “We are all here now. Why don’t you just stay? One night. Mei-Ling does not come home much. We can be a family.”
He said no at first. Then he realized she was right. He decided to stay. One night away from Taitung and his son would not hurt.
That evening the whole family—my parents and most of my sisters, their husbands, their kids, and my husband and me—wrapped ourselves in raincoats. Armed with colorful umbrellas, we crammed into several cars and sped off into the soggy night. We went to a restaurant that specialized in giant prawns and sat inside a gazebo, an engorged stream pounding like a great river beneath us. It was pouring rain and the sound of the weather and the water made it hard to hear each other. Our voices slowly began to rise above the din, and then suddenly we were loud, almost joyous, almost like we were eight years ago, when we were new to each other and all the secrets were still locked in a tidy box. The children, oblivious, laughed and squealed. We toasted with juice and tea.
I smiled an enthusiastic smile and took pictures of each sister’s family, overexaggerating my enthusiasm, trying to lift the mood. I felt responsible for the tension. One of the sisters snapped a photo of Ba, Ma, my husband, and me with my camera. Ba, as usual, was handsome, stern, and unsmiling. Ma wrapped her arm around Monte and hammed it up for the camera. She looked twenty years younger in that picture, more radiant and more stunning than I had ever seen. Her smile was wide and her eyes sparkled. To this day, that photo is one of my favorite shots of my birth mother.
This is how people live on. Life forces you forward. You can hate your family, you can try to forget, hide, ignore them. Or you can try to understand the impossible people that you are doomed to love. Maybe you count your blessings and forgive.
You can’t change your past, but you can choose where to go with what you are given. You make your career and raise your kids with your own belief system. You create your own dreams, your novelties, specialties, obsessions, cruelties, and expressions of kindness. You grow your own brand of love. And then you shower it—a spring downpour, a fall sprinkle, a hurricane—on the generations you propagate. Such is the cycle of life.
We called a brief truce and enjoyed each other again that evening. We gorged ourselves on cold prawns, boiled prawns, grilled prawns, blackened prawns, garlic prawns. We drank prawn soup. We dirtied our nails with spices and prawn shells. We used lemon juice and wet wipes to clean our fingers. The rain pounded and our bellies were stuffed, but the night seemed to levitate a little. Enough.
15
MOTHER-DAUGHTER BANQUET
Buenos Aires, 2006
Almost ten years had passed since I’d first met my family in Taiwan. I adored my sisters, and I was both fascinated with and horrified by my birth father, yet Ma still remained a mystery. I knew that I liked her—at least I wanted to—but I had very little sense of who she was. During my five visits to Taiwan over the years, she had been a kind of shadow figure, almost unknowable. She and I could be standing together, even touching, but I always felt as if a piece of soundproof glass divided us. We could talk and talk, but our words disintegrated upon touching the other’s ear, our voices merely a blur of earnest noise. We never really connected. While our biological bond certainly had created a bridge, crossing had been much harder.
I saw my sisters’ relationships with her—the fussy, loving, natural back-and-forth of mother and daughter—and I was envious. At the very least, I longed to see a bit of her personality unchecked or hear from her mouth why she felt obliged to stay in a bad marriage. I also wanted her to know me a bit better. Thus far, I had failed utterly in this task. We communicated mostly through small gestures, tender and disjointed—a smile, a joke, a pat on the hand—that were usually drowned out by the rest of our family.
Ma and I were profoundly different. She had grown up in war and poverty; I had had a comfy childhood in a midwestern American suburb. Ma was an illiterate mother of nine who felt powerless as her husband and mother-in-law controlled her life and who pieced together a life from the dregs that fate had handed her; I took for granted things like money, education, and unconditional love. The barriers that divided my birth mother and me were immense, greater than the oceans, Great Walls, and Grand Canyons that separated us.
I knew that if I wanted to get to know my birth mother, I would have to make a concerted effort. Ma had not done so and would not—I didn’t think she would even have known how. I would have to be the one to reach out. How to do that, I wasn’t sure, until one of my sisters gave me an idea.
It was early 2006, and my husband and I had moved to Argentina. We had lived there about a year and a half, and I had fallen in love with Buenos Aires. So many things about the place charmed me: the passionate and abrasive Argentines and their rhythmic Spanish, heavily peppered with Italian inflection; the marble buildings with French balconies; the sweeping avenues with several lanes of cars weaving, honking, and barely missing each other; the cheek kisses; the dog walkers who could maneuver fifteen dogs at a time; the cortados (strong coffee cut with a touch of milk) and warm medialunas in the morning. Even though many Argentines called me Japonesa, or Japanese girl—the kind of comment that would have driven me nuts in the States—I loved the people. The friendliness of many made up for any ignorance. I traveled with and without my husband, writing about dinosaurs and Welsh colonies in Argentina, Indian land reform in Brazil, and cooking schools in Venezuela. I ate ceviche in Peru and climbed Inca trails near Machu Picchu. I felt like I belonged in South America. The warm culture fit with my personality. I couldn’t have been or felt farther away from Taiwan. The motivation I once had to try to be “more Chinese” seemed to all but fade away.
Still, living in Buenos Aires and working as a freelance writer allowed me more time to catch up with my sisters than I’d had while working in D.C., and we began to e-mail and chat over the Internet more often. The Web was a blessing for our relationships. The confines of technology fit well with the real limitations of our natural ability to communicate. Chat talk—short, fragmented sentences and phrases—worked well for us. Plus, we could touch base quickly and at whatever hour.
One morning, my sister Ya-Ling started a chat with me after putting her boys to bed. (Taiwan is twelve hours ahead of Buenos Aires.) From her computer on the second floor of our parents’ home in Taitung, she filled me in on the bits and pieces of her teaching job and the latest antics of her two insanely active boys. I asked her how Ma was doing.
Ya-Ling: Ma is feeling better now, she has her life.
Mei-Ling: She was great when I saw her last. Despite everything.
Mei-Ling: She was beautiful.
Ya-Ling: She always goes to the temple.
Ya-Ling: She want travel now.
Mei-Ling: Travel?
Ya-Ling: She want go to China.
This could be it, I thought immediately. This is something I could do.
I decided, with Monte’s encouragement, that I would dip into our savings and invite Ma and one of my birth sisters who spoke English on a trip to China. For a week or two, I would have Ma nearly to myself. I asked Min-Wei, and she said she was sure that Ma would love a trip. Min-Wei, who was now taking care of the kids full time and had never been to Mainland China, volunteered to tag along.
It was a risk, this adventure. Just as I told myself before that first reunion almost ten years earlier, expecting miracles was unrealistic, but at least Ma and I could spend some time together. Maybe we would make some sort of connection. My other sisters had rallied around Ma all their lives. Now she would see that I could be a supportive daughter as well. I knew I might never again have the kind of career flexibility and freedom to travel like this. I needed to act now,
before something unexpected interfered. I had learned from my dad’s sudden heart attack that you mustn’t take for granted that your family will always be there. I wanted to go back while I could to ask some questions. At least I had to try.
Min-Wei took charge of the China plans, which moved forward in the erratic fashion that characterized anything involving my family. Where were we going? How long? With whom? With what company? How much? It all changed a number of times. After considerable back and forth, we settled on a six-day trip to the southern city of Guilin in the region most overrun by tourists in all of China. I had been there before so I knew what to expect.
I did worry about what Ba might say when he found out I had invited Ma and not him. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful or disrespectful, but I knew having Ba along would change the entire complexion of the trip and I wanted to get to know my mother.
“It’s best if Ba doesn’t know that I’m paying for the trip,” I told Min-Wei.
Min-Wei thought my concern was amusing.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll tell him I paid for it.”
I still wanted Ma to know that I had suggested the trip, though, I told my sister. Frankly, I wanted the credit. So Min-Wei told Ma not to tell Ba that I had fronted the bill.
“Don’t worry,” Ma told Min-Wei. “He won’t even ask.”
AT THE END of May 2006, I flew to the United States to attend my brother Hoon-Yung’s wedding reception before leaving for Taiwan. Hoon, who was now a Michigan state legislator, had married a woman from Korea. Jung-Hoe also had married a Korean woman, a couple years before, and had a baby girl. So in the end, both brothers ended up with women who were born and raised in the country they had left as children. In a sense, they were rediscovering their heritage in the creation of their own families.
A couple days after Hoon’s party, I left Detroit and, after a more than eighteen-hour odyssey, landed in Taiwan at the close of the Dragon Boat Festival.
I’ve never attended the Dragon Boat Festival, though my family tells me it’s a blast. It’s one of the most important national holidays in Taiwan, aside from Chinese New Year and the Mid-Autumn Festival, and is dedicated to Qu Yuan, a statesman who fought corruption during the Zhou dynasty. Legend has it that after he was exiled and heard news that the Qin had defeated the Zhou, he killed himself by jumping into the Milou River. The people are said to have rushed out onto the river in long boats, pounding drums and throwing balls of sweet rice into the river to keep the fish from feeding on Qin’s body. To this day the Taiwanese celebrate by racing elaborately painted dragon boats to the beat of sinus-vibrating drums and feasting on sticky rice dumplings stuffed with pork, salted egg, and peanuts.
By the time I arrived, the races and the festivities were over. Min-Wei and Jin-Hong, who still lived together, came to the airport to meet me, both looking as gorgeous as ever. Min-Wei wore one of her usual hot-mama outfits, a short jean skirt with a tight tank top and heels, and Jin-Hong a slightly more conservative version of the same. I silently noted how stunning these mothers of two looked and I hoped that their postchildren good looks boded well for me.
MIN-WEI AND I met Ma at Taipei’s domestic airport the day before we left for China. Ma looked great, her skin radiant and her hair still jet black, laced with only a few gray strands. She wore a white silky blouse decorated with big blue flowers and black and beige checkered pants. She smiled broadly when she saw us and gave me a loose hug as I took her bag. I thought about how in Argentina we regularly and naturally kissed strangers upon meeting them. I got the feeling Ma only hugged me because that’s what she thought I wanted; I had seen her embrace my nieces and nephews but never my sisters.
Ma said she had not slept for days out of excitement for the trip and announced that she’d brought sticky rice dumplings left over from Dragon Boat Day and a box of autumn melon and other vegetables from the market where our brother worked.
“Cheaper in Taitung,” she told Min-Wei. We lugged her vegetables to the car. Once in the apartment, she made us a lunch of rice dumplings and egg and turnip soup. Then she pulled out the Chinese yuan she had left over from a very recent trip to China and asked Min-Wei to help her count it. As they smoothed the colorful bills imprinted with Mao’s face, Ma told Min-Wei she should put away money for herself. Just in case.
“I never did, and look me now,” she said. “I have nothing.”
Min-Wei told me Ma had visited Suzhou, a city in eastern China, just a month before. As a citizen of Kinmen, she could go directly to the Mainland from her native island without the special permission that Taiwanese citizens needed, and so on a whim she and a friend went. I tried to hide my disappointment that I could not give Ma her first trip to Mainland China. But in the end, I told myself, the fact that it’s the first or the second visit didn’t take away from our bonding potential.
The three of us took a nap before Min-Wei’s children came home from school. Ma and Min-Wei went to her room, and I went alone to Jin-Hong’s room. After a half an hour or so, Min-Wei left to fetch her kids.
Ma and I did not get up. We stayed in separate rooms. The noise from the street filtered in through the windows: the horns and motors of cars and motorcycles, ringing bells and shouting children, water splashing from laundry buckets onto the street. I stared at Jin-Hong’s cream wall, beyond which Ma lay in bed. It had been two years since we had seen each other. Yet we weren’t comfortable being alone together in the same room when Min-Wei was gone. We didn’t know how to fill the silence between us. I realized a breakthrough was even farther off than I had imagined.
EVERY SPRING FOR ten years during my childhood in Taylor, my American mom and I attended a springtime mother-daughter banquets in the basement of Granny’s church.
The dinners were simple affairs, but we had to dress up. That was the fun part. I even wore white gloves, which made me feel elegant. We usually picked up Granny from her small one-bedroom apartment little more than a mile away from our home. The men of the church cooked the meals—baked chicken, meat loaf, or some other American classic. The tables were wrapped in Easter-egg-colored paper, and there was often a cupcake holder filled with chalky, pastel mints at each place setting. I was allowed to drink whole milk at these dinners; my mom only gave us skim at home. The pastor spoke, and children sang. My mom secretly hated the stuffy room, the forced conversation, the smell of the musty basement, but for me it was one of those classic rituals of youth, reserved for just my mom and me.
Although everyone knew me as a daddy’s girl, Mom and I were close, too. She drove me to all my after-school meetings and classes. She picked out cute clothes. She bought me pads and tampons when I had my first period. She gave me journals and inscribed a short, sweet message in every one. I’ve often thought our relationship seemed more grown up than other mom-daughter relationships. As long as I can remember, Mom has talked to me as if I were an adult or as a teacher would speak to a student. She is loving but never the mushy, doting type—that was more my father’s thing. Discipline was a direct and swift scolding and perhaps banishment to my room.
My mom once told me that when I was about seven, she realized I could probably run our house almost as well as she could. I was boss, like my dad. I went to the grocery store with my dad. I knew how to cut the coupons and balance the checkbook. When I was about eight, I entered a Mother’s Day essay contest through the PM Magazine television show in Detroit and placed third. I wrote something about being an adopted child and having the best mom in the world. Upon returning home from work one day, my mom was greeted with a bouquet of flowers and a letter saying she would get a Wok with Yan cookbook. (It was a hilarious prize because my mom hated cooking. She told me later that she was silently thankful that I didn’t win first prize, which would have meant a trip to New York to attend cooking school.) When I was a kid, I always thought of us as opposites in many of the same ways that she was different from my dad. I was outspoken, independent, driven, and tumultuous. She was orderly and structured. I
was constantly on the go and tended to be ultrasocial, always planning. She liked to be with friends but she always needed her downtime. I loved food; she ate only because she had to. We used to fume at each other when I was a moody teen, and at times we competed for my father’s attention.
But as an adult, I started to see that I was more like her than I thought. We were both exercise addicts; we talked all the time about the gym and have cheered each other on during marathons. I, too, could be a neat freak. Like my mom, I had a heightened sense of smell, and as she used to do to us, I have been known to noisily sniff my husband. I had come to appreciate more my mom’s sense of humor, her subtle sarcasm, and her quiet generosity. After my dad died, I began to see her outside of his shadow, as a more independent woman. While we would always have our quibbles, we were enjoying an ever-evolving friendship. We even took a few vacations together—to Hawaii and to Miami—and she visited me in Buenos Aires.
Mom thought it was great that I wanted to take Ma to China, and I’m sure had I asked, she would have given me money to help pay for the trip. Mom listened with amusement when I filled her in on the soap opera-like developments in the Wang family. She knew my relationship with my birth mother had little to do with us. We will always have our trips, our visits, our mother-daughter banquets.
MIN-WEI, MA, AND I left for China early on a Saturday morning. My younger sister took charge with her usual spirited aplomb, locating the correct tour group and our flag-waving guide, listening to directions, organizing our documents. She directed Ma and me to sit in the waiting area while she talked to the guide. I hadn’t seen this side of her when she was in the United States because I had done much of the organizing. In Taiwan, I felt useless.
Ma and I sat next to each other, quiet for several minutes. Then I gave it a try.
Lucky Girl Page 18
