Bury What We Cannot Take: A novel
Page 25
San San sucked in a breath.
“All right, Ma, that’s enough,” her mother said.
Her grandmother tightened her grip around San San’s hand. “Please, Little Sister, can you forgive me?”
The air in the room seemed to thin. Her grandmother’s form grew hazy before her. She felt herself list forward, and she clung to the edge of the headboard with her free hand to steady herself.
“Grandma needs to rest,” said Ma.
Tears shone in her grandmother’s eyes. “Can you?”
San San loosened her grandmother’s fingers, placed her hand atop of her stomach and stroked the knotted blue-green veins. Grandma lay back, and San San edged toward the door.
Her mother said, “I’ll have the maid bring a cold compress, and if the fever doesn’t break soon, we’ll call the doctor.”
“No doctor,” said her grandmother.
San San let her mother steer her into the hallway. When the door had shut behind them she whispered, “She’s dying.”
Her mother crouched down so they were eye to eye. “Nonsense, it’s just a fever, that’s all.”
But San San knew that wasn’t all. She’d held Grandma’s icy hand and seen her waxen complexion and heard her ragged breaths. She chewed on her bottom lip and said nothing. She knew her mother knew that she didn’t believe her.
Ma said, “Sometimes, a person can suffer so much stress that it’s hard for her to recover fully. Sometimes her body can’t take anymore.”
San San blurted, “I gave my friend my bangle so he could buy his mother’s medicine.”
At first Ma said nothing, and then she urged, “Go on.”
She tried again. “A barber cut my hair for free.”
“Yes,” Ma said, cupping San San’s face in her palms.
She slipped out of her grasp. “I bribed some sailors with my watch.”
“Yes, go on.”
But her mother’s gaze was so probing, so invasive, that San San couldn’t go on. She shrank back until her shoulder blades hit the wall, her throat throbbing with all the things she had no words for, all the things she couldn’t speak aloud.
Ma enveloped her with startling ferocity, smothering her face. San San tried to push her off, she didn’t think she could breathe.
“All that matters is that you’re here now,” Ma said. “We’ll never let you suffer again.”
Each stroke and kiss sent a bolt of pain through San San’s center, but she was powerless to stop her. Arms pinned to her sides, she couldn’t even stuff her fingers in her ears to block out those inane phrases her mother spoke over and over, as though afraid of what the silence would bring.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my family, Michelle Brower, Carmen Johnson, Al Woodworth, Scott Calamar, Little A, Kim Liao, Beth Nguyen, Vanessa Hua, Reese Kwon, Aimee Phan, Claire Vaye Watkins, Pamela Painter, Paul Douglass, Nick Taylor, the Steinbeck Fellows Program, and Hedgebrook. To Matt Salesses, for his wisdom. To Eunice Chen, for sharing her reminiscences. And to Jon Ma, for telling me an unforgettable story many years ago.
So many books helped me complete this novel, especially Escape from Red China, by Robert Loh and Humphrey Evans, Discover Gulangyu by William Brown, The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Dr. Li Zhisui, The Secret Piano by Zhu Xiao-Mei, The Bitter Sea by Charles N. Li, The Tragedy of Liberation by Frank Dikötter, and, last but not least, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, which, in its author’s note, contains a line that became my guiding star, pulling me through those times when doubt and insecurity threatened to derail my work. In writing his novel, Chabon states, “I have tried to respect history and geography wherever doing so served my purposes as a novelist, but wherever it did not I have, cheerfully or with regret, ignored them.” I wholeheartedly concur.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2017 Sarah Deragon
Kirstin Chen is the author of the novel Soy Sauce for Beginners. Born and raised in Singapore, she currently lives in San Francisco.