Tiger Girl

by May-lee Chai

  “No, you were right.” I opened my mouth, but I didn’t know if the words I was thinking actually came out. I didn’t know if I could actually say what I was feeling.

  Uncle rubbed his face with his hand, and I thought he would cry again, but he remained calm. “Your mother was very proud of you.”

  “It’s Ma she didn’t like,” I said. Even I heard the words come flying out this time.

  Uncle looked at me, startled.

  “That’s what Ma said.”

  “Sometimes it’s hard between sisters. Your mother was used to being the best, the most successful, the most beautiful. It was hard for her.”

  I didn’t tell him I knew about his feelings for Ma, that they had fallen in love, or thought they had, at least. They had broken Auntie’s heart, what was left of it. It didn’t matter anymore. Somehow facing him, hearing his confession, I no longer felt burdened by the old worries, the old rivalries and dramas in the family. I had feared this moment, confronting Uncle, and now here it was passing by, already becoming a story I might tell to someone else someday. Maybe Sourdi, maybe a friend, maybe my own daughter one day. The moment my father admitted I was his daughter. The moment I realized I didn’t need anything more from him.

  “It’s the war,” I said. “It’s Pol Pot’s fault.”

  “Yes,” said Uncle. “It is.”

  Then we both fell into our own silences.

  I told Uncle on the drive back that I was going to return to Nebraska. I wanted to try to make it for the New Year. I said I’d been very happy to see him again, but I missed everybody at home. He said he understood, and then insisted upon taking me out to eat at a fancy Chinese restaurant he liked closer to L.A., off the 5 in the San Gabriel Valley. It was huge, two stories, with several banquet rooms. I’d never seen a Chinese restaurant like this, not even in Dallas. Each floor was packed with families celebrating the holidays, the noise level deafening. As we crowded into the waiting room, I thought we might stand out, I worried people might stare, the way people used to stare at us when we first moved to Nebraska. At least we were a big group, strong enough to assert ourselves: Uncle, Anita, Sitan (wearing his daughter in the Snugli around his neck), Paul and Arun, who had her hair down, looking very glamorous, and me. But no one even gave us a second glance. Every family was its own island, busy with its own concerns. There were elderly grandparents in wheelchairs or pushing walkers, their grown kids helping them navigate through the maze of tables while hyper children raced around the edges. There were families whose members put their heads down and ate in silence, barely looking at each other as they shoveled food methodically into their mouths, and families that talked and laughed and waved their chopsticks over their rice bowls, barely touching their food. There were happy parents and harried parents, bored teenagers, angry infants, sleeping babies, squawling babies, laughing grandparents, grandparents slumped asleep in their chairs. There was every iteration of family, including our table.

  Uncle tried to order a lot of expensive dishes, the kind with shellfish and high cholesterol, but Anita took over the menu and insisted upon “heart healthy” dishes. The kind with lots of vegetables and no flavors, Uncle said dismissively.

  “You don’t want to end up back in the hospital,” Anita said, taking charge.

  Uncle shook his head.

  “It’s funny. I thought only fat people had heart attacks,” Sitan said.

  When the dishes came out, Uncle seemed disappointed, no matter how much the rest of us oohed and ahhed and exclaimed over the delicate flavors, the clay pot stew of mushrooms and fungus, the chow fun with black bean sauce, sticky rice, fish dumplings, the glistening baby bok choy, the platters of spinach and squash, the winter melon soup. I couldn’t tell if Uncle was genuinely missing meat or if he was being polite, apologizing for bounty, playing the good host.

  Eating like this felt decadent, but it also felt like a true celebration. Paul and Arun and I could all remember days when we’d eaten insects, vermin, leaves, stones, maggots, dead things we found, and strange, small things we captured and killed, just to stay alive. Eating a true banquet together felt like a dream, like a miracle. Once upon a time, I would have felt afraid, wondering when our luck would turn, when the next bad thing would happen to balance out the good. I would have clenched my stomach and hunched my shoulders instead of eating my fill, as if I could ward off the pain of life’s next blow. But this evening, seeing Uncle smile, watching my brother and his partner, alive and in love, seeing Sitan tempt his daughter with delicious foods on the end of a glass spoon, noticing Anita sneak a loving glance Uncle’s way, I didn’t feel afraid, I felt warm and happy. I knew this feeling wouldn’t last forever; it might not even last a full day. Sometimes a moment of happiness here and there was all any of us got, but I also knew that any unhappiness wouldn’t have to be permanent either. For the first time, I felt as though I could handle what life threw at me. I felt confident I’d find a way.

  After another round of chrysanthemum tea, I excused myself to go to the ladies room. I wove through the round tables of Chinese families, past the waiters carrying trays laden with tureens and platters and plates on one arm like they weighed nothing, around the women wielding their carts of dim sum through the crowded dining room like war chariots, and all the way to the very back, where the fish tanks weren’t just for show or feng shui but for holding the evening’s special “Catch of the Day.” I saw my reflection in the dark mirror behind the bar, my startled face peering back at me from among the liquor bottles and dusty glasses and jars of colored swizzle sticks. Then I turned and looked over my shoulder at all the tables of families eating, celebrating birthdays and reunions and Little League victories and the other mundane occasions that brought the generations together to eat in public, to display their solidarity in being a family, all the arguments and disagreements and secrets and pain temporarily tucked away from public view. I saw Uncle smiling as Sitan discussed something animatedly with Arun, Anita and Paul leaning their heads close as they conferred, and I realized that they looked like any other family here—whole, despite wars and losses and crossing oceans. They didn’t look mismatched. They looked like they belonged together.

  It was me who didn’t belong, but I didn’t feel bad about that anymore.

  CHAPTER 20

  Return to the Palace

  Before he drove me to the bus station, Uncle handed me a plain envelope stuffed with cash. “Take it, it’s your wages, don’t argue,” he said, pushing the envelope into my backpack. “Don’t let anyone see. Don’t leave it lying where they can take it, especially when you sleep.”

  I didn’t open the envelope because that would have been rude. Instead I threw my arms around Uncle’s neck and hugged him good-bye. “I’ll use this for my books,” I said.

  “I will help you with your college,” he said.

  “It’s okay. I have a scholarship.”

  He squeezed me hard, then turned away so that I couldn’t see his face, couldn’t see that his eyes were tearing. “Maybe we can have a reunion. Tell your mother, bring the kids. For Cambodian New Year. There’s a temple in Long Beach.”

  “They’d love to see you again. And Paul. We could celebrate,” I said. “April’s just around the corner.”

  He nodded, then wiped his face with a handkerchief. We both pretended it was just the cold air that made him blow his nose.

  I’d finally made up my mind to call Ma the night before. But first, I practiced what I would tell her: that I was coming back early, I wasn’t going to stay in California all winter break as I’d planned. I was terrified that the moment I opened my mouth, she’d see through me just as she had when I was growing up so I tried to come up with all the detailed questions she might ask me: where was the interview, what did they ask me, what had I worn, what did my roommate’s house look like, had I remembered to thank her family? My hand was shaking as I dialed her number in the kitchen.

  “Hello?” she answered on the first ring.

 
; “Ma! It’s Nea. I’m coming home early—”

  “Good!” she interrupted. “You should spend the holidays with your family! I didn’t want to say anything, I didn’t want to make you feel bad, but really I thought, I’ve missed you, away in college all these months, now I won’t see you.” Then she shouted to the side, “Marie! Jennifer! Sam—put that down—take off your shoes—listen—Your sister’s coming home!” I figured they must have just come in the door. I could see them shedding their coats, hanging them on the row of hooks we’d nailed on the wall, kicking their muddy shoes onto the mat. Then Ma told me how business was going at the Palace, the new menu she was designing, the special vegetarian entrées (“It’s all they want these days! Tofu, tofu, tofu. Such a fad, you won’t believe it. I remember when they only wanted meat!”), and the weather, the terrible weather, so dry this year, all the farmers were complaining, not even a white Christmas, was this the sign of another drought? The wind was fierce as ever, the clouds gathered every day, but the wind blew the snow away.

  She had so much news to tell me, things she’d been bottling up, complaints she couldn’t tell the younger kids, details of all the casual daily frustrations that made up her days, that I didn’t have time to say any of my rehearsed speech.

  “You know how that crazy Mrs. Beasel always tries to get free food—free eggroll, free dessert, wraps food in her napkin and puts it in her purse? She died. Yep, so sad.”

  “She didn’t die in the Palace, did she?”

  “No, of course not. I read it in the paper.”

  Finally there was a crash in the background and the sound of my sisters’ voices rising in fury, a flurry of calls for her intervention, “Mom! Mommy!” And my mother said she had to go, but she was glad I’d called. “It’s good you’re coming home early. Your sisters are going to drive me crazy,” she said, and then she hung up.

  My heart leapt to my throat and stayed there. She had missed me, I realized. She really did care that I’d been gone.

  The bus ride across Nevada seemed endless, especially after the on-bus toilet broke again, but by the time we reached Utah, I was literally pushing against the floor of the bus with my feet, as though I could will it to go faster, as though wishing could make something true.

  I had decided I would admit to Ma what I had done. Very simply. I’d say, I’m sorry I lied, but I went to California to see Uncle. Before she could get angry, I’d tell her the good news, that we’d found Uncle’s oldest son, alive and well. A miracle. Imagine all of us together for the New Year, I’d say. Wouldn’t that be something to celebrate? Such good luck after all these years. I figured her happiness would take the edge off her anger. As far as telling her that I’d found out who I was, I’d save that for later, for my next confession.

  As I watched the flat fields pass by, I thought about the new story I would have to weave, a story that could encompass all of us, the whole family. How once upon a time we were lost, scattered, afraid. We wandered in the jungle, we flew over the sea, we fought in the streets, we worked in hostile villages and unfriendly cities, until, battered and bruised, we lost the power to see. Like the Apsaras who fell from Heaven, we could not recognize our own faces. Then slowly by slowly, we found each other, one by one, the family came together, only to discover we’d forgotten how to speak. We called out like the sisters who’d turned into birds, our words mere sounds, animal cries, nothing we could understand. But then we struggled harder and taught ourselves to speak again, one word at a time in our new American voices, until we could roar with the tigers. We were creating a new story, one about a family with a happy ending.

  The first flakes of snow began to fall as we passed the Wyoming-Nebraska border. Tiny ice chips from the tight-fisted clouds struck the windows like rice at a wedding. Downy clouds covered the sky from one end of the horizon all the way to Iowa, the sky and the road the same shade of steel. I watched jackrabbits hopping across the empty fields, crows circling in patterns like black lace through the sky, searching for stray cobs of corn or soybean pods. The wind swept through the ditches, the bromegrass swaying like the fur of a great beast bracing its back before a storm.

  A big snowstorm was coming. I imagined the world turning white, like a blank slate, erasing all the work of the past year so that we could start over fresh, so that when the first rays of sun emerged after the storm, the whole world would spark with light.

  I changed buses at the intersection to the state highway, and from there it was another three and half hours home. The Greyhound left me off at the Super 8 opposite our restaurant. I recognized Ma’s Honda in the parking lot in front of the Palace.

  I zipped up my coat and shivered in the wind as I waited for the driver to pull my backpack from the luggage bin under the bus, and then I was running across the parking lot, squinting into the wind, the light from the Palace windows shining like beacons.

  I burst through the front door, and the familiar scent of curries and stir-fry and sweet-and-sour pork and the incense that Ma burned on the shrine in the very back of the dining room filled my nostrils. I blinked, trying to see clearly. My face felt frozen. After three weeks in California I’d grown unused to the cold. There were a few families chowing down, an unfamiliar waitress serving.

  Then, over the tinny cheer of the canned carols, I heard my mother’s voice calling, “Nea! Nea! You’re back!” Ma ran out the kitchen doors, through the dining room, and hugged me. “I think you grew taller!”

  “Ma, I stopped growing in high school.”

  “No, you are definitely taller.” Ma smiled to the family seated at a center table. “This is my daughter. She’s been away at college.” She squeezed my shoulders. “She’s growing so tall!”

  She took my arm. “Come on, I’ll show you something. A surprise. Hurry now.”

  She pulled me toward the kitchen, and I thought, It’s some new menu disaster, some fusion thing she’s created, like her fried mashed potatoes with hot mustard dipping sauce or the twins’ hamburger chow fun.

  I stepped into the kitchen and the lights went out. I heard giggling.

  Ma said, “Close your eyes.”

  “It’s already dark,” I said, but I closed my eyes.

  Then the twins came out carrying a cake with sparkler candles sizzling on top.

  “Surprise!” everyone shouted, and I recognized my brother Sam, the twins, the cook, Ma, and some white kid I assumed she’d hired to work in the Palace, until I realized he was holding Marie’s hand and that he was probably my sister’s new boyfriend, now that Ma let the girls date white guys.

  “But it’s not my birthday.”

  “It’s not for your birthday,” Sam said.

  “It’s for you,” Ma said. “Dean’s list. We saw your report card.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, it came in the mail a couple days ago,” Marie said.

  “You opened my report card?”

  “Make a wish,” Sam said. “Hurry up and blow out your candles.”

  “I don’t think I can make a wish if it’s not my birthday.”

  “Of course you can,” Ma said.

  So I closed my eyes and blew out the candles while everyone clapped, but when I opened my eyes, I realized I’d forgotten to make a wish. But that was okay, I didn’t believe in wishes. Anyway, the candles sparked back to life right away, and Marie and Jennifer giggled hysterically, like the fifteen-year-olds they were. “They’re trick candles!” they announced. “Got you!”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I already got my wish.”

  Ma turned the lights back on, and suddenly someone’s hands covered my eyes. “Ha ha,” I said, playing along. “You got me.”

  “I sure did!” said a familiar voice. And I realized it was my sister Sourdi. “Surprise!” she cried.

  I pulled her hands away. “Sourdi! Sourdi! You’re here!” I threw my arms around her shoulders. I hadn’t expected to see her. Trips were so hard, what with all her kids. I hadn’t seen her since I graduated from high sch
ool and visited her in Iowa. I held her tight. “You won’t believe who I saw in California,” I whispered.

  But before she could reply, I felt little hands, like so many eager monkeys, pulling at my jeans and my sweatshirt, enlacing my legs. “We’re here, too!” Sourdi’s kids, my nieces and nephew, screeched happily.

  “You look good,” I told Sourdi, and I wasn’t lying. She’d gotten her hair streaked in long blond tendrils, she was wearing a lot of makeup, but tastefully done, and she smelled like a perfume you couldn’t buy in a drugstore. She looked like a grown-up, like a mother, like a woman who’d grown into herself, no longer like the girl who’d left home too soon.

  “Ma called me last night. Asked if I could drive up with the kids to welcome you home. You’re full of surprises, Nea.”

  “I would have told you I was going,” I started, but then I stopped, because that was a lie, and I didn’t want to lie again.

  Sourdi squeezed my hand. “So Ma told me you went to find an internship?” She lifted an eyebrow, but she smiled too, and I knew she’d guessed my secret, and she’d already forgiven me. Sourdi had always been my best friend, my protector, and I was still her favorite. I could tell.

  Ma brought out our special dessert plates and I helped cut up the cake—a special ice cream one from the Piggly Wiggly, mint chocolate chip; Ma had remembered my favorite.

  “So how was California?” Sam asked. “You see any movie stars?”

  “Even better,” I said. “You’re not going to believe what happened.”

  “It’s no fun if you don’t see movie stars,” he said, and grabbed his plate. “I’m taking this upstairs, Ma. Game’s on.” And he rushed out.

  The twins took their cake and started giggling with Marie’s boyfriend, who thanked me politely when I handed him his slice. “Can we go finish watching the game, too, Ma?” the girls begged, and Ma let them go. Sourdi gathered up her children and followed the others. She paused at the door and winked at me, quickly, so only I would see.