She speaks about them not in disgust, but in admiration. She tells me how beautiful these women were, how perfectly their hair was made, how their homes looked like sets on Hindi films, and how they walked—straight with their chins up.
“In my next life, I want to be educated like them.”
TODAY AT SIXTY-FOUR, Aama rests her reading glasses on her nose, and with a pen clutched tightly like chance between her index finger and thumb, she writes down the following sentences from her first English lesson: “I am a woman. I am Nepali. I am a mother.”
I get out of bed. With eyes barely open, I follow the sound of Aama’s voice and find her in the prayer room seated on the floor, her notebook on a small stool in front of her. I curl up on the floor, my head barely touching her lap. It’s 6:00 a.m. Aama is doing her homework.
As I listen to her sound out each English word in the sentences, I wonder if she has ever had these thoughts in Nepali. She surely has never said them out loud. These sentences are protests. They are highly political. Only intellectuals and poets speak this way. But here she was, her first lesson, where she was identifying the “I” in her, and owning the “am.” Softly, she was translating to me in Nepali, saying, “So Muna, listen: I am a woman, I am Nepali, I am a mother.”
It is suddenly clear to me that for the most part of my life, I have failed to see Aama as a woman. I have never tried to see that young woman in the photo who was shy to wrap herself in a maxi, who left her village to go to a country where she didn’t complain about how scary it was to turn on the gas stove, or how she didn’t know what to wear, how to wear it, where she lived in fear of being watched and seen, where she raised three children who have now made homes far away from her.
“Yes, you are a woman, you are Nepali, and you are my mother,” I say back to her.
“You my daughter,” she says in English, giggling. Then in Nepali: “Uffff, I don’t know. I am so old. What am I doing learning a new language at this age?”
AS A CHILD, I remember only wanting to be carried by Aama. Her skin was soft and always cool; she never sweat. But she was always sick and always weak and she’d tell me to go with Baba. “But Baba feels hot,” I would complain. Eventually, Baba would grab me, and I’d protest and squirm and cry, finally placating myself by fiddling with the sharply folded tip of his shirt collar. My birth gave her gastric, she claims. Somedays, the gastric makes her legs boil, sometimes, it sends sharp pains like cold marbles rolling down her spine, and sometimes it causes her to burp fire. A mysterious disease that, to my knowledge, only plagues Gurung women in our family, where their stomachs ache but when they go to the doctor, there is nothing there.
“It’s easy to remember how long I’ve had gastric,” she says. “It’s as old as you are.”
Delicately, I Beg of You
Muhammad Amirul bin Muhamad
When we arrived at the middle of the flower field, I asked my parents if they would help me pluck some flowers, the lavender ones some distance away from where we stopped the car. They were probably actually lavenders, but you wouldn’t know just by looking, and especially not from where I was standing. My parents told me to stay with the car. I had decided to stay anyway. And so I stayed, and sat on top of it.
They looked so delicate, my parents. I told them to be careful and they asked me why I wanted those particular flowers.
“No one else is going to see them if they stay there. I’d like for at least one other person to see them. Beautiful things, those flowers.”
It was a lie, most definitely. It wasn’t even about the flowers. I don’t care for flowers—even in death, I don’t think I’d care for people bringing me flowers. Heck, I didn’t actually say that I wanted the flowers. I had just asked if they would help me pluck them. But they looked so delicate and as they stepped out of the car, I just wondered how much more delicate they would look plucking flowers. That’s why I asked, I suppose. I wanted to see my parents plucking flowers.
I sat atop the car, listening to the wind breathing. It carried my parents’ whispers, their sighs, their hums, their heart. Delicate. They looked so delicate I could have cried and not stopped and the earth would have made up for all the crying with even more flowers. There were so many flowers, but it didn’t look that way, it looked like it could have had more flowers and still somehow look like there wasn’t enough. I bet there were more lavenders that were more lavender than the lavenders that I had in sight, the ones my parents were plucking.
I didn’t tell my parents how many flowers I wanted, but I knew they knew. They always knew. Even when their knowing was wrong. They would think they know. They wouldn’t say anything, that’s certain. They weren’t saying anything at that moment either. They just kept plucking and plucking until they thought I’d be happy. Happy with what exactly, I didn’t know, and neither did they. All by myself on top of the car. I sat and I watched them. One of me and two of them. One of each, and one in union, but two separate persons, much like me. One, each, delicate.
I wanted to whisper to them, “Why?” at which point they would look up and ask me to repeat what I had just said. They would look up, this I know. They wouldn’t go about plucking the flowers and ask me without looking at me. They would look at me. I was looking at them. I looked at their faces. Tired, each different, but both delicate. Like something precious unearthed, with a little bit of dirt that needed brushing off, but clean and ancient and fragile underneath. “What did you say?” one of them would ask and I would tilt my head, feign some amount of ignorance, and let them carry on with their labor. Then I’d whisper, “Why?” again, this time, making the seemingly fleeting inquisition a little bit more weighted so that it didn’t latch onto the wind. This time, just for my own ears. “Why?” I didn’t have an answer to this and I loved the possibility that my parents would have the answers to this big question, each different, but somehow they would agree with each other anyway, very delicately, so it would appear like they’re finishing each other’s sentences. People in love did that a lot, surely.
I accepted, ever so delicately, that this was not true. That my parents didn’t have the answers to a lot of things, to “Why?” Too delicate to hold all the world’s knowledge in one lifetime. And that is fine. Being delicate. The flowers, my parents, sitting on top of the car, the wind, plucking the flowers, lavender as a color, as a flower, we’re all so delicate. And I accepted that the wind would eventually sweep everything away anyway, delicately and definitely and “Why?” would not matter too much. At this moment, my parents were plucking flowers and I was watching them.
Then it was time to go and it was time to say goodbye.
But they were still plucking flowers. There were so many of them in their hands now. They looked beautiful. Delicate. I wanted to tell them that it was time to leave. That it was no longer like when I was a kid. I didn’t want to have to ask if I could go, I wanted to tell them that I needed to go.
Plainly, I just wanted to tell them that it was okay, that the flowers were enough, that, finally, I was going.
But my words never could come out delicately enough when it came to speaking my heart. My words, they cry and they crush, and through the tumult, my words get lost and wrecked, and my parents are so delicate, I had no heart to speak. So I kept my heart. I kept my delicate heart from my delicate parents and I didn’t say a delicate word. I didn’t speak at all.
I let the wind carry me away, away from sitting on top of the car, away from the flowers, away from my parents plucking flowers, away delicately.
The Words Honey and Moon
Jennifer Tseng
Woo honked the horn lightly, unconvinced by his wife’s urgings that it was an American custom. He was embarrassed as it was by the eight tin cans she had tied to the fender with string. Camille laughed at his timorous tapping and called it a “Chinese honk.” Finally, when it was clear he would not soon Americanize its duration or intensity, Camille leaned over, put both her hands on the car’s black apple, and pushed with
all her willowy might. She’d never felt so American in her life. The street filled with the music of their German car’s horn and someone nearby honked back. Though by this time, the pair (who had met at a dance and perhaps had nothing but Samba in common) was miles away from the church. The guests, who had stayed on the front steps to wave and to whistle their support, were out of earshot and the newlyweds were on their way west.
They drove, according to Woo’s plan, directly from the church to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and arrived in plenty of time to visit the Kenosha County Zoo, first on their list of dazzling destinations. The Kenosha County Zoo was no petting zoo. It was the largest zoo in the state of Wisconsin and contained an endless array of exotic animals. There were, among other mammalian and ornithological treasures, a pair of giraffes from the African veld, a snow leopard from the mountains of central Asia, a Kivu highlands gorilla, a flock of Palmetto flamingos, an Arabian cheetah cub (though no adult cheetahs), three black Louisianan swans, a few New World monkeys, and a small family of zebras on loan from William Randolph Hearst’s California ranch.
This multifarious collection met with Camille’s instant approval and garnered for Woo a generous supply of bonus points in their slit eyes versus green eyes game. Her only grievance was that they did not have even one giant panda, the animal she most closely associated with China and therefore with Woo. He quickly appeased her with an optimistic allusion to an upcoming (petting) zoo in Nebraska. In his eagerness to please her, he too became excited and could almost see the dressy oversized bears in his mind’s eye, munching on crisp branches of young bamboo, next to their horse and cow neighbors.
For dinner they ate in a pleasant lakefront restaurant whose only distinguishing feature seemed to be its inclusion of a separate menu for children twelve and under, no doubt the feature that had captivated his colleague Mac’s darling Isabelle and earned the restaurant its place on their list. To Woo’s delight, Camille confessed she had never tasted shellfish or steak. In the spirit of education, he recklessly ordered one of each for her, along with a prime rib for himself. She was more easily charmed by the shrimp, those C-shaped curls of coral flesh, than she was by the steak, which she greeted with confusion as a bloody, cabbage-less version of her mother’s corned beef. Where were the peppercorns, she wanted to know. Didn’t he agree that peppercorns and beef were perfect complements?
“Ah-ha, you are so gourmet for someone who never try gourmet before,” he teased.
“I am?” she asked, and her eyes went greener and rounder than he had ever seen them.
Woo found dinner on the whole banal. He took solemn note of the frozen vegetables and canned fruits and thought wistfully of the day he would pick fresh corn and carrots from his own backyard, plump oranges from his own Valencia tree. He declined dessert, but watched Camille suck on a series of spoonfuls of “orange” sherbet. The carnival color of those soft sugary moons chilled him. He accepted a spoonful fed to him by her gemmed, ecstatic hand only to surprise her, with the hope that she might widen her eyes in response, which she did. To his palate, the taste was cloyingly sweet and artificial. He patiently kept this knowledge to himself, the way a parent might suppress the falsehood of Santa Claus for the sake of a child. Though he made plans to introduce her to something finer as soon as the opportunity presented itself. Belgian chocolate, he thought, or macaroons. Surely there would be no mung bean pastries or shaved ice with coconut milk en route to the western coast of the United States. And so he called to mind a list of all the superior European and American sweets he had tasted since his arrival in his wife’s country.
“I’m still hungry,” Camille said excitedly.
“That can’t be,” Woo laughed, while simultaneously calculating the bill so far. “Two appetizer, two entrée, one dessert! Holy Toledo!”
“It’s true.” She smiled. “I get really hungry when I’m happy. Does that happen to you?”
“No such a thing. I’m hungry when I don’t have food. Work hard, eat more. Exercise, eat more. Happy, no happy, this is irrelevant.”
“Well, I’m still hungry.”
“Then you must be very happy,” he said, looking at her directly.
“Mmmmhmmm,” she hummed, her fingernail tapping the various dessert options in a jaunty dance on the laminated menu. “What do you think? A slice of apple pie with cheddar cheese or raspberry cheesecake?”
Woo brooded silently for a moment over Americans’ preoccupation with cheese. It was his own pet theory that cheese was the culprit responsible for America’s obesity problem. He entertained the thought of his leggy, slit-eyed child bride turned happy and voluptuous. He could get used to there being more of her, but if it meant eating out more often, whether or not his wallet could adjust was another story. Then he felt a pang of confusion. Had she ordered so much food because she was happy or was she happy because she had ordered so much?
“Tell me which one to get,” she said. “You choose and we’ll share.”
“No, no, no. I don’t want. Your favorite you pick.”
“Are you sure? Is it okay? Am I eating too much?”
“My poor growing girl,” he said. “You eat! You eat!” She ordered the cheesecake with a scoop of sherbet.
“Mother says I don’t eat enough. But at home I’m never that hungry. It’s not that I’m unhappy, just not happy enough to eat. Not like now with you. I’m so happy. Why do you think that is?”
Camille chattered away while Woo listened and interjected the occasional peppercorn of wisdom, to please her conversational palate.
“In China we have a saying, the best appetizer is hunger. Eating is like getting married. When you wait, when you are patient, it tastes good. When you are hungry, everything tastes like the best.”
Later, when the waiter came to bring their dessert, he found the table so cluttered by the many dishes Camille had sampled that there was no place to slip the bill except next to her right elbow. Woo reached awkwardly over the dirty plates to take the ticket.
It dawned on him that she did not have any money, probably not even a few coins in her small beaded purse. What sort of girlish things did she store in there? Lipsticks and tissues, perfumes and picture postcards of places she had never been? Now and in the future he must pay for her. He pulled two blue twenty-dollar traveler’s checks from his wallet and signed them carefully. A Chicago bank had issued them to him; he knew they were valid, but the blue, almost purple color of the notes was so different than the green of American currency. It looked to him more like play money, extracted from a children’s game.
THE MILKY WAY Motel was situated like a mole on Kenosha’s high eastern cheekbone. Contrary to its illuminated sign, which promised a buxom, braided blond girl pouring a pitcher of glowing, milk-colored stars into the night sky, its small lobby contained a gaunt, spidery man with bruised eyes seated at a metal desk. Woo surmised that the girl from the billboard sign must have been born of this man’s imagination, a girl from the world that existed behind the lids of his bruised eyes while he slept. It was dusk and the man looked as if he might doze off momentarily. He was wearing square, plastic reading glasses that magnified the shadows on his face as he scanned the classified section of a newspaper and sipped from a small tumbler of milk. There was a poster of the solar system on the wall behind him and a Swiss-cheese-block paperweight on the desk. The green glass lamp by which he read was the only light in the room other than the moon. Had either newlywed known of such a thing, they might have thought the office looked like that of a California fortune-teller’s.
When Woo stepped into the dim, milk-scented lobby, the man held up a room key and continued scanning the classifieds.
“Good evening,” Woo said, stepping up to the desk. “Pardon me please. I am Joseph Woo. I have tonight reservations. Two people. Husband and wife.”
The man continued reading and took a sip of milk. Woo wondered if he was to reach out and take the key from the man’s hand. He didn’t think it a wise idea.
“You�
��re supposed to take the key,” Camille whispered in his ear. “He’s busy.”
Something was wrong, Woo thought. He was sure this was not the custom. The man was supposed to take their names, signatures, identity verification. What kind of establishment was this?
He pulled out his wallet and found the three-by-three card that he had cut from a three-by-five to fit. There in his own Royal typescript were the words:
The Milky Way Motel
725 Lake Dr.
Kenosha, WI 53141
THERE WERE NO Motel 6s in Wisconsin. Woo had hesitated each time he had booked a non-6 reservation. It was likely that independent motel keepers were not regulated to the extent that chain motel keepers were. There was no systematic quality control, no centralized power to enforce high standards. The man at the Milky Way Motel was precisely the type Woo had feared: a lazy, unregulated clerk with no consideration for the customer.
He longed to be in Iowa—their next destination—where a Motel 6 clerk named Candy had not only given him clear directions to the motel but to the state fair as well. She’d recommended the apple fritters and told him to have a safe trip.
He thought that if they stood in front of the reading man long enough, he would have to look up, that shame or self-consciousness or both would force him, but the man continued reading and sipping like a machine. In fact, he seemed so undisturbed that had he not been holding out the key, Woo would have thought he hadn’t noticed them. Had he not been reading, Woo might have thought he was blind. Finally the man finished his milk. As he tilted his head back toward the solar system to allow the last drops to fall on his tongue, Woo snatched the key angrily out of his hand. Woo was defeated. His fantasy of driving through the night to Iowa had been brief. Their day had seemed as long as his stay in America, a small lifetime. His new wife was tired and he noted with affection that her green eyes were sleepy, verging on accidental slits. Such pale skin, such thin arms, such a long and fragile neck. So tired. They could not go back and they could not proceed. They must stay.
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