Half and Half

by Lensey Namioka

  This year Grandpa MacMurray had been invited to direct some of the Scottish dancing at the Folk Fest. Music and dancing are his two great loves—maybe that's where I got my own love of dancing. Over the years, Grandpa has taken part in many dance programs in Vancouver, but this was the first time he'd be doing one in Seattle.

  Since Grandpa and Grandma live close by—Vancouver is only about 150 miles away—they visit us so often that we've gotten into the habit of thinking of the guest room as their room.

  This wouldn't be the first time my father's and my mother's parents met. They were all there for my parents' wedding, of course, and they met during the holidays a few times. But they never had to stay together in the same house for long. Dad's parents usually stayed at a hotel when they came up from San Francisco to visit.

  But since Dad's father died last year, we always invite Nainai to stay with us when she is in town, since we don't want her to be in a hotel all by herself. Lots of other single women do it, of course. But Nainai looks kind of soft and helpless, and we can't stand the thought of her drifting around, lonely and lost, in a big downtown hotel.

  So that was why Nainai would be sharing my room three days from now. It would also be the first time she and Mom's parents would be spending more than a week together.

  I didn't think there'd be a problem. Grandpa and Grandma MacMurray are happy people who like to laugh a lot and make jokes.

  If I was worried about anything during my grandparents' visit, it was with Dad. Normally, I enjoy being Fiona Cheng, daughter of Frank Cheng, the writer and illustrator of children's books. It always gives me a thrill when one of my friends says to me, “I just loved your father's latest! When is he going to do another Cowardly Dragon book?”

  My brother Ron and I try to think up ideas for Dad, but in the end he always comes up with the best ones himself. So I'm proud of my dad—most of the time. It's just when Nainai comes to visit that I feel embarrassed. For some reason, he starts acting like a child when she's around.

  I began to notice this during Nainai's visit last year. It was her first after our grandfather had died, so it was the first time she came alone. When both my Chinese grandparents were here, the men usually hung out together. Dad, Grandfather, and Ron would sit in the living room while Nainai, Mom, and I prepared food in the kitchen. Actually, it was Nainai who did the cooking, while Mom and I looked on.

  But during this visit, things were different. Dad didn't have his father to talk with, so he came into the kitchen and joined Nainai. Since he normally did the cooking anyway, this seemed perfectly natural. It was the way he talked to her when they were in the kitchen that was so strange.

  I noticed first of all that his voice sounded higher than usual. Even worse, I heard him calling her Ma. He sounded like a doll I used to have that said “Ma” when you pressed its stomach.

  Later that evening, he brought Nainai all his newest drawings and sketches. That surprised me, because he never showed his sketches to us. I don't think even Mom saw them. Dad stood there patiently waiting while Nainai slowly looked over his work.

  Nainai frowned at one of the drawings. She pointed to a corner and said, “Bu dui.”

  Although I know very little Chinese, I did understand this phrase, which means “Not right.”

  Dad just bowed his head meekly and accepted her comment. It reminded me of the times when Ron and I brought home our report cards and stood nervously waiting while our parents looked them over and made comments. It's okay for Ron and me, but it was different when I saw my dad, a grown man, doing it.

  Mom noticed me looking on. I must have made a face, because she called me over and took me to her bedroom. “Why does it bother you, Fiona, when your father is so anxious to please Nainai?” she asked. “What's wrong with a child wanting his parent to be proud of him?”

  “But that's just the point!” I said. “He's a grown-up! He looks so silly, behaving like a child again!”

  Mom sighed and patted the space next to her on the bed. When I sat down, she looked at me for a moment with her hazel eyes, then turned away and played with a curl of her hair. She always does that when she's not quite sure what to say. I love the way her red hair curls naturally.

  Finally Mom broke her silence. “Ever since your father and I met, we kept discovering unexpected things about each other. Most of these had to do with differences between Chinese and Western customs.”

  “Why did you decide to marry a Chinese anyway?” I asked. “You must have had a lot of white boyfriends.”

  Then I was worried that Mom would be offended by my question. Maybe it was one that Grandpa and Grandma MacMurray had asked, too. Had they been shocked and unhappy when Mom told them she was planning to marry a Chinese man?

  Mom didn't look offended. “By the time we decided to get married, I no longer thought of your father as Chinese, particularly. After you get to know people, you don't think about their race anymore. You'll find this out for yourself someday.”

  I'd already found this out. Most of the time I don't think of Amanda as Japanese American. She's just my friend. But making friends with a person isn't the same thing as actually marrying him.

  “How did you and Dad meet?” I asked Mom. “How long did it take you to get to know each other and fall in love?” I had heard this story many times, but I loved hearing it over and over again.

  “Your father and I first met in college, when a bunch of us went to a city hall meeting. We were protesting because the city wanted to close a park near the campus.”

  “So then what happened?”

  “The speeches got boring after a while, and I started looking around,” Mom continued. “I saw that the student next to me was busily scribbling in his notebook. I thought at first that he was taking notes. Then I saw that he was drawing funny sketches of the speakers. He was making them all into animals—cats, dogs, pigs, goats … I burst out laughing. He laughed, too, and we made so much noise that an usher escorted us out. That was how your dad and I got acquainted.”

  “So you decided to start dating?”

  “Not right away, even though we liked each other. It was two years before we finally decided to get married. By then I thought I really knew your father pretty well, and that there'd be no surprises left.”

  I saw her lips give a little twist. When she does that, I never know whether she's amused or mad. “So what were some of the surprises?” I asked.

  This time I saw a real smile. “One of them was seeing your father behaving like a child with his parents,” she said. “At the wedding reception, he kept running up to them and asking if the food was all right. And all the time he was the groom!”

  “That must have made you mad,” I said. Poor Mom! I was surprised she could laugh about it now.

  And she was laughing, too. “Fortunately I had other things to think about,” she continued. “Later, much later, I did ask your father why he went into the little boy act whenever he saw his parents, especially his mother. He was astounded, because he never realized that he did it. Finally he said that it was probably just filial duty.” She looked at me. “Do you know what that is?”

  I shook my head.

  “Filial duty means children paying a debt to their parents for bringing them up.”

  “So filial duty is important to the Chinese?” I asked.

  Mom nodded. “It's considered one of the most important virtues, if not the most important. Your dad told me a famous Chinese story about a man whose parents were growing old and feeble. To make them feel better, he began to drool and crawl on the ground and babble like a baby. He wanted them to feel that they were young parents of a newborn baby.”

  I couldn't believe my ears. “Gosh! Is that really a true story?”

  “Whether it's true or not, this man is always held up in China as an example of an outstanding son,” said Mom.

  If this was how the Chinese thought a good son should behave, maybe they were a lot different from me.

  I didn't look
forward to seeing Dad being a good son when Nainai came for this visit. It would be especially embarrassing this time, because Grandpa and Grandma MacMurray were visiting, and they might see the way Dad behaved toward Nainai. They loved a good laugh, and I usually loved laughing with them.

  But not if they were laughing at Dad.

  On Tuesday, three days before the start of the Folk Fest, Grandpa and Grandma MacMurray arrived.

  Ron and I heard a car pull up outside soon after we got home from school. We heard Grandpa's booming laugh, and by the time we got to the front door, Grandpa and Grandma were coming up the steps with their suitcases. They were not people who stood around wasting time.

  Grandpa gave Ron a crushing hug and pounded him on the back. “Well, look here!” he cried. “If it isn't Fu Manchu himself!”

  Fu Manchu was a Chinese villain in some old books popular in the 1930s, and even now he is still held up as an example of the sinister Oriental. But Ron only laughed. It was an old joke between him and Grandpa. Since Ron has reddish hair and Mom's freckles, he doesn't look anything like Fu Manchu, with his long mustache, sallow skin, and slanted eyes.

  Grandma ran up to give me a hug. “Hello, Fiona, lass. My, you've grown another three inches since we last sawyou.”

  Since she had seen me only a month ago, I knew this wasn't true. Grandma loves to exaggerate, and if she had said I'd grown only two inches, I would have been insulted.

  Ron and I helped carry our grandparents' luggage up to the guest room. Naturally we stuck around while they unpacked. I'd be a liar if I said I wasn't expecting them to bring gifts. From Grandpa's suitcase came a pleated woolen skirt in the MacMurray tartan, which I had learned to recognize.

  “Wow!” I cried, snatching the skirt and holding it up to my waist. It was just the right length for me.

  “It's not for you, Fiona!” said Grandpa. “Don't you know that kilts are for laddies?”

  He held the kilt out to Ron, who turned pink as he accepted the gift and mumbled his thanks.

  Next, Grandpa took out a leather purse and a cap. Again, I started to reach out, but they turned out to be for Ron, too. “This purse is called a sporran,” Grandpa told him, “and you hang it from your waist so it dangles in front. The cap is called a Balmoral.”

  Ron's embarrassment almost made up for my disappointment.

  “Hey, Ron,” I cried, “let's see you put the whole outfit on so you can show off to your friends!”

  “I told you the poor lad would be embarrassed, Alec,” Grandma said to Grandpa. “This is America! What would he do with a kilt here?”

  “He can wear it and be proud of it!” declared Grandpa. “We MacMurrays have worn the kilt for hundreds of years!”

  “Nonsense,” Grandma said. “The kilt wasn't even invented until the eighteenth century.”

  Ron brightened up. “Really? So Scottish men didn't always wear it?”

  “That doesn't make it any less authentic!” insisted Grandpa. After a moment, he grinned sheepishly and added, “But your grandma's right. Some factory owner or another discovered that the long plaid his workers wore kept getting caught in the machinery. So he made them wear a shorter garment. And that's how the kilt was developed.”

  Grandma turned to me. “And this is your gift, Fiona. Your mother told me what you needed, and I got the biggest one I could find.”

  She held out a big pink clay pig. I was born in the Year of the Pig, according to the Chinese calendar, and I've got lots of stuffed pigs, tiny pig figurines, and of course greeting cards with nothing but pigs. I was delighted to add Grandma's clay pig to my collection. It wore a huge, smug grin, and I found myself grinning back at it. “Thank you, Grandma!” I said.

  “It's a bank,” said Grandma. “Your mother said it's time for you to learn how to save money.”

  Then I noticed that there was a slit on the back of the pig. Suddenly the expression on the pig's face looked a lot less friendly. It became demanding. “Put your allowance in here!” it said. “Stop wasting money!” it said.

  Mom likes to say that she comes from a long line of thr-r-r-ifty people, since the Scots have a reputation for being great savers. But Grandpa and Grandma MacMurray aren't nearly as stingy as Mom. She gets it also from being a mathematician. It's probably just Mom's way of having fun.

  It can be really embarrassing when we go out to a restaurant with other families and the waitress comes with the bill. Mom is always asked to figure out how much each family owes because she's the mathematician. She takes ages to figure everything down to the last penny while the waitress stands there looking patient. At times like that, I want to crawl under the table and die.

  Once, another mother lost her patience and said, “Why don't I just pay for everything? You can do it next time.”

  But Mom wouldn't hear of it. “I don't want to pay a penny less than what I owe. But I don't want to pay a penny more, either.”

  It's almost as embarrassing when it's Mom's turn to drive Amanda and me to the library on weekends. We'd drive around and around and around looking for a parking place.

  “Hey, there's a space!” Amanda yells. But Mom won't take it. She has to find a parking place with time left on the meter.

  “Instead of saving,” I tried to point out to her once, “I bet you spend a lot more money on gas from the extra driving.”

  But Mom just laughed. “It's the principle of the thing.”

  When she goes shopping, Mom brings her old brown paper shopping bags, which she's used and reused until the brown paper becomes soft and almost furry. Once, Amanda went to the store with us, and as she helped us carry the groceries, she looked at her bag with wonder. “Wow, this bag must be really ancient!”

  “All of Mom's bags are at least three years old,” I said, gingerly supporting my bag of groceries against my chest.

  “You're reusing old paper bags because you want to save a tree, don't you, Mrs. Cheng?” said Amanda. “That's great! Our teacher says that using a lot of plastic bags is bad for the environment, too.”

  “Mom's really doing it because the store gives her back a nickel when she brings her own paper bags,” I told Amanda.

  “Thr-r-r-rift!” said Mom, and winked. She looked very young when she said this, making me feel almost like her older sister. Saving money is a game Mom loves to play, and being both a thrifty Scot and a mathematician is just an excuse.

  But sometimes I just wish she'd act like other people's mothers.

  Maybe Mom liked to play saving games, but I didn't. Still, I took the piggybank from Grandma and tried to look grateful.

  Grandma seemed to read my mind. “Put in mostly coins,” she suggested with a wink. “They make a bigger clatter than paper money.”

  Dad came home a little while later and greeted Grandpa and Grandma MacMurray warmly. He's always gotten on well with them, even if he finds them puzzling sometimes. They get along well with him, too, but they find him just as puzzling. I've seen their jaws literally drop.

  Once, Grandpa MacMurray showed off a new cashmere scarf he had bought.

  Dad admired it, then asked, “How much did it cost?”

  “It cost quite enough,” Grandpa said stiffly.

  Afterward, I overheard Mom saying to Grandpa, “Frank didn't mean to be nosy. The Chinese often ask people how much things cost. It's their way of showing appreciation.”

  Grandpa shook his head in bewilderment. “I'll have to get used to it, I suppose.”

  I hate to think how bewildered Grandpa and Grandma MacMurray would be if Dad ever used baby talk with them. Fortunately, he hasn't tried it yet.

  Another thing they can't figure out is why Dad does most of the cooking—not only that, but he seems to enjoy it. Tonight Dad went straight into the kitchen after greeting them. Soon I could hear the sounds of the fridge door opening, the faucet being turned on, and the clatter of pots and pans being taken out.

  Grandma looked at me. “Aren't you going to help your pa, Fiona?” she asked.

 
; “Dad doesn't like people getting in his way,” I explained. “Later, I'll help set the table, and Ron and I will do the dishes, of course.”

  For as long as I can remember, Dad has always done the cooking. It wasn't until Grandpa and Grandma MacMurray mentioned it that I realized this was unusual, and that in most families the mother did the cooking.

  Dad prefers to do the cooking because he gets home earlier from his job, which is working as a translator for a company that does business with China. He has only a part-time job so that he has time to work on his books.

  Since Mom teaches full-time and usually comes home later than Dad, she's glad to have him do the cooking. Ron and I are happy about it, too. Mom is a lousy cook. When Dad has to go away to give talks at schools and libraries, Ron and I usually beg Mom to take us to some fast-food place.

  Mom came home just as I was setting the table. As she greeted her parents her Scottish accent became a lot stronger. In fact I had trouble understanding some of their talk.

  It didn't take long to exchange news, since we see Grandpa and Grandma once every other month, either when they come down here or when we drive up to Vancouver.

  “Do you want to do some shopping or go to the art museum?” Mom asked as we sat down to dinner. “The Folk Fest doesn't start for another three days.”

  “We'll be needing all three days for the dancers to practice,” said Grandpa. “Would it be all right with you if we rehearse right here in this house? Eight youngsters jumping up and down can produce a great deal of noise.”

  Mom smiled. “I'm used to the noise. I grew up with it, remember? There's enough space here in the living room, if we roll the rug back.”

  I was really excited, because this would give me a chance to see the dancers practicing, instead of just watching the actual performance. “I'd love to join the dancing someday,” I said.

  Then I noticed that Grandma was looking at me with a huge smile. “You're about to get your wish, darling,” she said. “One of our dancers had to drop out at the last minute, and she felt terrible about it. But I told her I know of a substitute right here in Seattle.”