–Take your time, we’ve got five more minutes in this session, Shona said, and handed her another tissue.
WHEN CHLOE EMERGED into the reception area her eyes hurt and she was totally drained. She stumbled toward the double doors like a drunk. Her head pulsed. She cried so hard in Shona’s room that now she saw stars. She glanced toward the waiting room to the left of the reception, and was alarmed to see a woman kneeling, hunched down on the musty carpet. The woman had her hair in a bun and wore a long green coat. She had her hands over her face. She almost resembled a dancer in repose.
–Are you okay? Chloe asked.
The woman turned and looked up at her with raw red eyes. Chloe experienced a moment of is-that-who-I-think-it-is before her vision affirmed that yes, it was, there was no mistake about it. Here was the woman from the yoga studio who always held perfect poses, the star student.
The woman shook her head at Chloe at the same time that she recognized her back. She did a half-wave with her hands that seemed like a dismissal and apology at the same time, and then she wiped her eyes and looked away decisively.
–Chloe backed away, flummoxed, and left the building.
IN THREE DAYS’ time she was flying home. Her exile had stretched and stretched and it was hard and good to believe that it was finally coming to an end. As Chloe packed she looked around the sparsely decorated flat with its amnesiac beige carpet and terrible paintings of fruit. The afternoon before, Shona said that she had shown great growth and progress over the course of their work together and that she should be proud of herself. They shook hands and this last time Shona escorted her all the way out of reception. Chloe didn’t feel proud or changed so much as newly afraid. Like there were little pinpricks in her awareness of herself and the world and things might rupture anytime. She had gotten used to solitude, as well as the bus stop by her flat and the rowdiness and bustle of the shops and the roaring street outside, but she felt no fondness for London, she didn’t agree with its often-feted charms. Her mother called to see how she was doing with the packing.
–And how’s Mr. Goh and his wife?
–Barely seen him. And he seems to have a number of female companions, Chloe said.
–Aiyoh, don’t gossip, her mother replied. Anyway, we’ll see you soon. I’ll come pick you from the airport and we can go for ban mian.
–Sounds really great, Chloe said.
She missed the food from home, had even started to miss Choon See and Iris again. It was bitingly cold here. She couldn’t wait for the familiar, comforting humidity of the night air around her neighborhood, her bedroom at home, the glass and gleam of Orchard Road that she still found superior to Oxford Circus. She even missed her parents, although now that was gnarled up in grudge. But maybe they had done the right thing for her and in time she would come to appreciate that, although that thought felt like their words in her mouth.
Chloe was five minutes late for her final yoga class. She hurriedly unrolled her mat in the nearest space in the room. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the woman in the front left glance over. She looked immaculate as ever in her yoga capris and fitted top. It was as if nothing had ever passed between them. The helmet-haired teacher gave Chloe a quick nod.
–Stand in Tadasana. Sweep your arms up toward the sky and press your palms facing together, join your fingers, the teacher said. Tip your head back and soften your gaze. Don’t let your ribs stick out. Feel your tailbone lengthen toward the floor. Then lift your rib cage. Hold for a few breaths.
Chloe stared at her thumbs and the watery winter sun coming in through the glass-paned ceiling and held her breath.
Magritte
Wo Chan
my mother’s face eclipsed by a spray of fortune
cookies my mother’s face eclipsed by the expiration
of passports and my mother’s face in window
fans. in front of my mother’s face
a brown paper bag seeped in the dark
dream of grease, car door of the ’97 Camry blown off
my mother’s face. stranger’s
lipstick, sunglasses lost and found my mother’s face
behind acrylic beach balls, behind whitewood popsicles,
every
dollar bill obscures my mother’s face.
canopy and birdseeds, my mother’s face a shadow
recessed in shadow, the hot globe before
ringing at my mother’s face
a television, the whole vault of it—stars, and still
that shaft of water. my mother’s face reflects
in the well it thrashes under
wet, immutable lid
What do i make of my face / except
Wo Chan
that it is on me
and its physicality )though not me( is how i’ve been addressed
m y w h o l e b o r i n g l i f e
when i was 9
i watched aladdin and thought, after money
i wish for whiteness
*i didn’t even have all my teeth—or vocabulary,
just two yellow hands trying to catch the basketball
my brother hurled at the my face
when
i was 19 my ( )
erupted / in nodular cysts
the bleeding jupiter kind
of sulfuric condensates
and an alien registration.
i had it all
a family, some secondhand sweatpants,
a gender
whose every sentence began
wheniwasaboy
i looked like my mother
now, more like Father, Baba, Dad
am a full yard of irony
waiting for lightning to lick me back ~
once
i was on a gay date (just once)
and a hunched-over-woman slipped me a white note
i thought it said “JESUS”
but instead
“mario badescu”
the skincare brand i would sell months later
when i learned to sm(other) the errata
of hormonal bludgeonings
to the surface—other children saw derm—
otologists at the sight of a curly pube
while my own mother
wheniwasaboy waited until her gallbladder exploded
to get her gallstones removed.
i watched her dimpled ass
blow in the wind of the hospital hallway
as she learned to walk again
and i slept in her bed and fed
her plain contraband congee
i am still talking about faces
the dented, fraxeled, mole-scarred, and trenched ones
i took a pill many times that induced apoptosis
“cell death”
i could barely afford 4 months of
my lips peeling like WWII wallpaper
the sex i was not supposed to have
did not happen anyways
as a nude-myself i am cratered irreversibly
so why
must i explain the thoughts i’ve had
on the things i never got to decide
they happened to me )(happen all the time
& i changed i learned i could keep changing
I must to keep myself
Aama, 1978
Muna Gurung
I could read my nonexistence in the clothes my mother had worn before I can remember her. There is a kind of stupefaction in seeing a familiar being dressed differently.
—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
“If we didn’t wear a sari, word would reach the main office that ‘so-and-so’s wife was not wearing a sari today,’” Aama says to me between fits of laughter over the phone. “Then they would call our husbands to the office.”
She’s laughing now because she doesn’t have to be afraid anymore. She isn’t in Singapore, living in an all-Nepali camp, one of the hundreds of women taking care of their homes and children while their military husbands serv
ed the country as Gurkhas.
She’s told me this story before, but never with such lightness. Aama and I don’t often laugh together. It’s not like we are serious all the time, but laughing together requires that we let ourselves be a little soft, a little silly.
“Later, the newer chyamas started wearing pants. To think that I used to be so shy in a maxi!”
A maxi is exactly what Aama is wearing in a photo, taken in their kitchen in Block A in 1978. The maxi wraps around the waist and stretches all the way to the ankles, sometimes even kissing the floor. Aama says she was probably making rice in the photo. She imagines it’s 9:00 a.m. and that Baba is waiting for his packed meal for the day. When I ask her who took the photo, she shrugs and says, “I don’t know.” And then after a long pause, “Maybe your father?”
Aama is quick to start every answer with “I don’t know” or “I forget.” It is her way to keep me at a distance, to buy herself time so she can figure out just how much of the story she wants to allow. Of course the photographer is Baba. But the fact that Aama has to pretend to think, or pretend not to know (when she had just said that Baba was waiting for his lunch in the photo), irritates me. As a younger person, an exchange like this would be enough to set me off. I would storm past her while she reasoned with astrology: “Your planet and my planet, Muna, they just don’t align.”
Writer Marianne Hirsch once said, “To look is also, always, to be seen.” And I sometimes wonder if Aama’s pretend uncertainty about who the photographer is comes from a place of vulnerability. Maybe she can’t bear to justify to her grown daughter the way she is looking at the photographer. Her mouth slightly open, starting or ending her protest of not wanting to be captured on film in the kitchen, in the middle of cooking, looking like that. But in this soft protest there is pleasure budding in her right cheek; a dimple is waiting to cave in.
It’s not like Aama is unable to love. She is just careful about her loving—whom to love and how much. She doesn’t show it in the way Baba and I do: with wide smiles, high-pitched voices and touch.
I have only seen Aama and Baba share affection—in the way I understand it—once. I was twelve and we had already moved back to Kathmandu from Singapore. It was late afternoon and I was coming home from school. I walked in through the door calling out “Aama!” as I always did. They groaned from their bedroom to tell me where to find them: Aama and Baba were lying in bed, fully clothed, arms around each other, sleep still lingering in the distance between his nose and her hair. They didn’t get up when I walked in. I don’t know how our conversation led to this, but as I was standing over them in my school uniform and they were talking to me with their eyes still closed, I remember asking them if theirs was an arranged or love marriage. Baba said, “Love, of course.” To which Aama opened her eyes, got up to retie her hair, and said to Baba, “What nonsense!” Then turning to face me, she said to me, more as a reminder than anything, “We will always have arranged marriages. We are not those white people you see in movies who wear shoes to bed and marry whomever they want, only to get divorced.”
Years later, Aama and I will battle over love and whom you choose to be with, why and how.
“IN THE CAMP, the women got together and taught each other how to sew or knit sweaters,” Aama says. When I ask her who in the Singapore heat would wear sweaters, she says, “It wasn’t ever for Singapore, silly. It was for Nepal. We would knit sweaters so that we could take them home as presents.” I don’t push. I don’t tell her that if I were on the receiving end, I would much rather enjoy something made and bought in that foreign magical land than something handmade. Before I can say anything, Aama reminds me, “Singapore was always temporary. Everything we did, we did with Nepal on our minds.”
But by the time Baba retired in 1994, my parents had saved up enough to return home in style. They buy a fridge, rice cookers, fans, foldable beds, mattresses, radio, TV, plates, forks, knives, spoons, pots, and pans. She clicks her tongue in regret when she thinks about it now. “We didn’t have minds. We were like mules,” she says. “We never thought Nepal would ever have any of these things. We should have saved up the money. You can get everything here now!” Aama gently taps her forehead. “But—maybe also, we never thought we would travel back to Singapore or visit any other place after we came back.”
As a twelve-year-old moving back to Kathmandu, I remember being really excited about one piece of cargo. It was a sky-blue foldable picnic table and bench. We even had a rainbow-colored parasol for it. There was no green space in the first apartment we moved into, so I would ask Baba to take it out and place it in the garage so that I could do my homework. Aama would hear me and scream: “Don’t do it! It’ll get dirty! It’s for when we build our home with a garden!”
WE HAVE A garden in our Kathmandu house now, but they still don’t use that plastic table and bench. “It looks so small and cheap,” Aama says.
“IN THE EARLY days though, I always asked myself: Why Singapore? Why are we here? There was nothing in the rooms they gave us: just a rusty spring bed with a flimsy wooden board. We had to buy everything. It took us years to put things together. Can you believe it, I would wash out the milk cans and use them as flower vases,” Aama remembers. When I tell Aama that new hip restaurants in New York use milk cans as vases, there is a silence on the other end and then a “But why?”
The milk cans along with rice, daal, sugar, salt, pepper, bread, biscuits, tea, milk, veggies, and meat were all a part of our ration bag that appeared once every fifteen days. It was red and chubby. All the kids whose parents could buy them soft Gardenia bread ate that bread instead of ration bread. For the longest time, until Baba got promoted to inspector, we ate ration bread. But Aama would cut off the edges and say, “See, ration or Gardenia? No one will ever know.”
But kids always know.
Aama was a repurposer like that.
The Milo tins and Johnnie Walker bottle on the shelf in another photo are familiar childhood objects. We reuse those square Johnnie Walker bottles to chill drinking water in the fridge. But Aama always made sure to set aside one or two bottles; she would make black tea in the perfect whiskey hue, pour it in these bottles, and with the labels still intact, close the caps and place them in the display case next to the TV. She wanted visitors to see that we had a fine line of drinks.
But Aama is a restless decorator. The sofa in the living room will be facing south one day, and just when we grow comfortable with the way the light from the balcony hits our legs but not our faces, Aama will change it up on us and move the sofa elsewhere. “I get bored,” she reasons.
“I can’t stand that about you,” I tell her.
“I don’t like it either,” Aama says, and her agreement surprises me. With me, Aama has always found a way to disagree; even if we might be saying the same things, her words come from a place of but. “Nowadays, I can’t find anything in this house,” she says, referring to our Kathmandu home where she moves items from one cabinet to another and then forgets where she’s moved them. “I’m getting old.”
Her “boredom” also has made her get into the habit of throwing away things that are old or just sitting around harmless. “She is possessed on some days. She doesn’t listen to me,” Baba says. In his small complaint, you can tell that he’s not trying to change her ways. If there is a photo she doesn’t like, she cuts them into little pieces and throws them away. It’s no secret that the photos in our family album only tell the stories that Aama wants to narrate; she doesn’t think that anyone in the family would or should object.
“Do you have anything that is dear to you that you keep?” I ask her.
She shows me a coral piece strung in a red thread. “This one here’s originally from my sister’s necklace. Our mother gave it to her. There aren’t corals anymore, they say. Is that true?” she asks me, with a look that translates vaguely into you should know, I sent you to school.
“And your blue slippers,” she says, pulling them out from a trunk where s
he has spread two bags full of mothballs. They are fuzzy blue, closed-toe house slippers with a panda on them. “You used to love them so much. The soles are still good. I’ll give this to your child.”
It’s cute, sure, but also arbitrary. Why the coral, the fuzzy slippers, and not that famous necklace Baba bought for her? “Oh, that! I loved that!” she exclaims. “Your Baba would buy a lottery ticket every Saturday and once he won seventy-five dollars! We were so happy we couldn’t feel the ground, but when he won four thousand dollars . . . I don’t think I’ve felt richer.”
I remember this story because my brother said that the day Baba won that ticket, he didn’t sleep the entire night. “So with that money, he bought me the necklace I am wearing here,” she says, pointing to another photograph where she is seated with a friend wearing matching black sleeveless tops, printed maxis, long necklaces, hair parted in the middle with a baby boy each on their side. “I don’t know where it is. Probably sold it and ate it.”
When I ask her why they are wearing identical clothes, she says that when a friend in the camp bought something they liked, they would ask her where she bought it and then all of them would go to that place and buy the same thing.
“Well, that’s annoying,” I tell her.
I am a hypocrite, of course. Because I don’t tell her about the matching tattoos I got with my girlfriends. Or the way we “accidentally” buy the same shoes. Or how we begin to listen to the same bands, like the same songs. Or how we eat the same things, like the same restaurants. Repeat the same expressions in the same manner. And sometimes how we fall in love with the same kinds of people, or long to be each other and have each other’s lives.
“But there were other women in the camp who weren’t like us,” Aama says. “They were educated and gave private tuition lessons to our children if we could afford to send them there.” Most of these women that Aama refers to were Nepalis born and educated in Darjeeling. “They used to call us pahadiyas, mountain people. To them, we were villagers who had no sense of taste and didn’t know how to wear clothes. Maybe they were right.”
Go Home! Page 6
