by Margot Kahn
Like those immigrants, my parents knew that they didn’t have to own a home to make one. Home is culture, tradition, and memory—not mortar. For my mother, that meant carving out a routine as reliable as an atomic clock, building a universe of belonging around my brother and me. With each move, she furiously stamped her imprimatur upon the cookie-cutter military base housing, making each place unmistakably ours. She adorned the walls with her framed needlework and hung my father’s painting of Jesus—with long, dark hair, brown eyes and tanned skin—to bless our dining room table. She filled the air with the aromas of her Southern cooking, especially on Sundays, when the table was lavishly spread with roasts and potatoes, gravies and collards, pound cake and the sweetest tea on earth.
She was the Kool-Aid mom, and ours was the house where our friends were welcome. She was the Girl Scout leader and den mother; my father coached my brother’s baseball teams. Long after we should have outgrown them, my brother and I are still partial to taking Sunday drives.
We were a team when we were traveling, like astronauts cocooned in a capsule, as we crisscrossed the country three times before I was ten. My dad always seemed to sit a bit taller when he was behind the wheel of his Buick (the only brand he’d ever drive), taking us sightseeing around the base or venturing off-base to the markets, or Shinto temples, or White Sands or ancient desert caverns or the Rocky Mountains or the Atlantic. He was always on the lookout for the mighty forces of man and nature, pointing to a suspension bridge or a fighter jet or water tumbling over shorn cliffs, and saying to us, “That’s a dangerous thing!”
My brother delighted at the hint of threat. At an Okinawan festival, he’d watch a habu (a deadly Asian serpent) attack a weasely mongoose or gargantuan Sumo wrestlers face off on television and ask my dad, “Is that a dangerous thing?” My dad would laugh and nod. For us, dangerous things were strangely reassuring, as long as they loomed outside of the fortress of our family—the way listening to thunder as you snuggle beneath the covers can make you feel both lucky and safe.
Not counting Christmas, moving day was the most exciting day of the year. When the van would pull up into the driveway, my brother and I would be as giddy as ferrets. After school, we couldn’t run home fast enough to push open the door and squeal through a completely empty house. The size of the rooms doubled in their emptiness, and the stripped walls threw back our voices.
As we got older, moving meant a time for reinvention, a chance to reset our lives. When we move to Florida, I’m going to ask mom if I can do my own hair. I’m going to start a babysitting business in Virginia. When I get to the States, I’m going to learn how to dance.
Of course, there was the grief of leaving behind all that had become familiar. My last day at school would be full of hugs and tears and signatures in slam books like “Stay sweet and crazy. Friends forever.” But the sadness was always tempered by the extraordinary realization that I had best friends all over the world. I just hadn’t met them yet.
Wherever we went, I knew it would be home in no time at all.
Now, I have resided in Michigan for thirty years. It’s where I became a writer, a wife, a mother, and a grandmother. My children have lived their entire lives in the same town with their aunts, uncles, and grandparents just one house away. They are still in touch with their kindergarten best friends. They have roots. I guess that means that after all of my girlhood travels, I am finally rooted, too.
Yet, I still have a moment of hesitation when people ask me where I’m from. Am I from Japan, the country of my birth and the place I spent the bulk of my childhood? Am I from Detroit, which has been home to me for three decades? Or is it Virginia, where my lineage seeps down into the soil, and where my heart keeps migrating in my dreams?
Over the past six years I’ve moved four times, each time with fewer belongings in tow. At fifty-six, the moves have not been filled with the excitement that I felt when I was a little girl. They have been stressful and anxiety-ridden, precipitated by divorce, unemployment, foreclosure, and family demands. Each unmooring has felt more like amputation than opportunity. Now I think, I’m too old for this.
My parents, however, have stopped moving. For all of their desire to escape Virginia, they returned in 1974 when my dad retired from the air force. For the past forty years, they have lived just an hour from Waverly. They are salmon who, after battling upstream most of their lives, have returned to the river of their birth.
Now in their eighties, they are clinging to their independence. My father is making a go of it, but his short-term memory has trapped him in a constant loop of remembering and forgetting.
My mother is living, once again, with ghosts. She sees her mother’s face come alive in pictures on the wall. Strange figures enter her room at night to loom over her bed. Children she doesn’t recognize scale the steeples of pines in the backyard. As her life gets emptier, the spirits are crowding. This time, they haven’t come to save her.
Dementia, it turns out, is the one dangerous thing that has finally penetrated the sanctum of their home.
I go to check on them often. During a recent visit, my mother suddenly gasped as we were watching TV. I gazed at her expectantly to see what she was going to say. These days, sudden memories and secrets tumble out as her mind wanders, uninhibited. I braced myself, but she said nothing as she looked around the den wide-eyed.
The room has remained pretty much unchanged since I was in high school. The elm coffee table and matching end tables came with them from Japan, replete with inlaid marble and three-dimensional carvings of feudal life. Over the sofa hangs my mother’s framed needlework, a peacock with a fan of magnificent feathers. The fireplace is adorned with figurines, pottery, and silk flowers. Every other wall in the room is plastered with family pictures that go back as far as my great-grandmother’s generation.
Only a couple of pictures survive from my mother’s childhood. The largest is one of little Bobbie and her father Junious at the county fair the year he died. His eyes are wide and all-seeing, but his spirit is silent. There is no hammering at the back door, no furious warnings in the night.
As we sat there, my mother gazed at her ark of memories, all of her beloved tchotchkes. Then she turned to me, her eyes as scared and lonely as a lost child’s.
“Whose place is this?” she asked. “When are we going home?”
Desiree Cooper is a former attorney, Pulitzer Prize–nominated journalist, and Detroit community activist whose fiction dives unflinchingly into the intersection of racism and sexism. Her first book, Know the Mother, was published in 2016. Cooper was a founding board member of Cave Canem, a national residency for emerging black poets. She is currently a Kimbilio fellow, a national residency for African American fiction writers, and was a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow.
A Family Business
Jane Wong
How to lob an egg into a parking lot: Wait until it’s dark, settled-in dark, not sunset dark, say, 9 p.m. The sound of breaking is better when you can’t see it happen. When your father isn’t looking, go to the fridge and steal two eggs from the bottom of the carton stack and wrap them in a small towel, folding the towel like you would an origami cup. Sneak out through the back of the restaurant, mind the potholes, and circle around front to the parking lot. Unfold the towel and give your little brother one egg. When he says the egg is too cold and smells rotten like unbrushed teeth, tell him to shut up. Ground your heels into the gravel, as you imagine baseball pitchers do to gain traction. Give all your anger up to the egg. Breathe your hot breath on it. Hold it up to the sky like an offering, a sacrifice, this careful thing that could have grown into something else. Tell your brother there is nothing to be afraid of. Tell him to stop shaking. With your arm bent back at 45 degrees, hurl the egg high into the air, into an arch any city would welcome as a bridge. Hurl the egg and do not think about anything—not about how your father disappears for weeks to gamble in Atlantic City, not about how your mother crushes cockroaches with her fist—no, nothing at all.
You must give the egg all of it. You can open your eyes or close them; it won’t matter since you won’t see it land. But, you will hear it. You will hear your brother squeal like a pig at mealtime. You will hear the splat—the crepuscular glob of the yolk spreading across the hood of a car. Poor car, you’ll think, poor, stupid car.
How to lock your brother in the meat freezer: Say the following with love and intention:
“You won’t even last five minutes.”
“It’s 100 degrees outside.”
“Mommy said you have to get the spareribs.”
“Look, I can see my breath in here. Huuuuh-huhhh.”
“I’ll give you five dollars.”
“Let’s go to Alaska.”
“You aren’t afraid, are you?”
How to be in Alaska: You live on the other coast, the Jersey side, and the wildest thing you’ve ever seen was a goose eating chips at the beach. But in the velvet cold of winter, in sad February, you can escape anywhere. You can be transported to the other side of the country. To travel, you must wait until closing time, around 11 p.m. when the parking lot empties and your mother begins shaking the ants out of the MSG bin. Pull on your boots and grab two brooms from the supply closet and run outside. Ask your brother where he’d like to go. Alaska, he’ll say, arms high in the air as if a puffin would adopt him any second. Earlier, at lonely 5 a.m., before you woke up, a snowplow’s jaw pushed all the snow from the lot up against the street lamps. Take your brother’s arm and give him a broom, bristle side-up. Don’t ruin the expedition, you’ll say, or I’ll send you back to Jersey. As if Jersey was punishment enough. With the alien light of an Alaskan sun, dig the end of the broom into the hard snow—a mix of ice, gravel, and car oil. Climb up the mound, declaring coordinates along the way. 64.2008°N, 149.4937°W! At the top, sit with your little brother, your back against the street lamp, the bare warmth of electricity running through this conduit, this lifeline. Close your eyes, frost thickening along your lashes. Imagine what it feels like to be so far away from home. To leave this strip mall, this state, this way of life. Imagine traveling to places beyond Alaska—Hong Kong, Seoul, Cairo, St. Petersburg. Vow to leave Jersey the instant you graduate high school; link your two pinky fingers together and promise yourself to leave. As you fall asleep, surrounded by glaciers and your mother’s sharp voice slicing through the ice, your brother declares everything he wants to see right now: sand, yak, mud, ice, caribou, polar bear, volcano, fox, rainbow fish, ants, ants, ants.
How to pretend to fall asleep so your mother picks you up: You’ve seen it on TV before—how children fall asleep in unlikely places and how parents look at them with pure wonder and affection. You’ve seen parents pick them up gently, kiss them, and tuck them in someplace safer. Don’t worry; you have an upper hand in your ability to fall asleep in unlikely places. You have your choices: dining booth, supply closet, under the sink (if it’s not leaking). To pretend to fall asleep, become a fat noodle—a floppy, waterlogged noodle. Leave a book or a can of orange soda on your chest so that, when it inevitably falls in fake-sleep, she will hear it fall and be compelled to come over. Slow down your breathing; become a hibernating bear, a top-notch sloth. Dream of the ways she will find you—not hours later when she is done with her shift and you actually fall into real-sleep, but when she is finished cutting strips of wonton, refilling the water pitcher, and carrying dirty plates stacked tightly like the layers of an onion. Dream of the kiss on the cheek. Dream of the real feeling of her real arms wrapped around your back. Dream of her picking you up like a sack of sugar, a wet bleach rag, a suitcase she packed diligently many years ago, in a country 7,186 miles away. Open up that suitcase and see what you can find.
How to read in the half-dark: Contrary to the advice of any decent optometrist, you won’t need that much light. Your eyes are good at adjusting. You can think of yourself as a cat, if that helps. Head next door to the dry cleaners with your copy of Matilda; look in to see if anyone is there. The owner will be in the very back of the store, steaming a shirt—the smoke trailing like a campfire someone forgot to put out. Head straight for the changing room. Pull back the velvet curtain and settle in. Clean the space as you would clean your apartment—the apartment you imagine having when you are thirty-one and, to the disappointment of your grandparents, unmarried. Push the fallen pins to one corner. If there is lint, roll it up like a dung beetle—with purpose and slow precision. Your eyes should have adjusted by now. You should see light at the bottom of the curtain, intermittent waves of custard yellow. Start reading and when the owner opens the curtain ten minutes later, lower your eyes so that the light doesn’t flood in too strongly and make you hiss. The owner will say hello to you in Korean because that is her language, and you’ll say hello in Cantonese because you haven’t forgotten your language yet. You’ll look past her scoured, pink hands to see a customer behind her—a tall, impatient man who wants his suit measured correctly this time. You’ll meet people like this later in life. The ones who will mark you as laborer, as not worthy of their time, and you will add them to your revenge list.
How to pass the time: Brush your hair fifty times; untangle hair from a wool blanket; shake up a can of orange soda; defrost shrimp; defrost your hands; chase the curly white dog who lives along the train tracks behind the restaurant; brew honey water; water the jade plant, covered in dust; scrub graffiti off the restaurant; hiss at boys; draw on the backs of menus; stick gum under the table and see how long it takes to fall; sweep up piles of your father’s cigarettes on the back stoop; breathe in deeply; peel grapes over a red plastic bucket; scrape grease from the griddle; drop wonton wrappers into the fryer; roll grapes under the fryer and imagine them melting, days from now; punch a bag of flour; recite your revenge list; listen to the sound of gravel under tires; clean the muck out of the curly white dog’s eyes; teach your grandpa to say “apple” in English (no, he says, teach me how to say “poverty”).
How to carry dishes: Carry a pile of dirty dishes with both your hands first; you don’t learn to shoot a basketball with one hand first, do you? Then, after a few weeks, carry the dishes in the crook of one arm like you carry your textbooks. When you feel bold, stack crushed soda cans on top of the dishes. Put one foot in front of the other—this rule of thumb can be applied to dancing with boys, which unfortunately won’t be relevant to you during middle school or high school for that matter. Don’t forget that you quit ballet after one day. When you naturally bump into the prep table and drop a dish, its porcelain center splintering in all directions like the sun’s rays, do not listen when your mother laughs and says: “And who would marry you?” Instead, keep putting one foot in front of the other until you reach the kitchen sink, a wide, deep crater. Lay down the dishes, the refuse of others, the barely chewed pieces of beef fat and hard stems of broccoli. Raise your outrage—who is rich enough to leave food behind? Wash the oyster sauce trickling down your arm like squid ink. Add these customers to your revenge list, too, for making your family cook Chinese American food—sticky, sweet food your family had to learn to make. Food that is not your mother’s, father’s, grandfather’s, or grandmother’s. Never eat this fake, plastic food, the photos of which are oversaturated and laminated above the ordering counter; wait for the real Cantonese food that your mother makes during 20-minute lunch and dinner breaks. During dinner, help your mother carry your favorite Cantonese dish—whole tomatoes, ginger, soy sauce, egg, and rice. When your mother was pregnant with you, she grew tomatoes all around the small duplex your four uncles and grandparents lived in. Think of your mother at twenty-one, arranged to a complete stranger, your father, and sitting on a mattress in the duplex’s attic, squirrels running across the beams. Imagine her eating a tomato like an apple, the juice trickling down to her knees. Think of the bright green vines wrapped around you as you eat your favorite dish, the tomatoes as sweet and tart and large as your heart. Forgive your mother for being so tough on you; you don’t know what she will have to carry over the years—the bi
lls, the food on the table, the disappearance of your father, the work. Yes, the work. Lest you forget and you mustn’t forget: look at her hands, rough as canvas and trembling, wanting to be held.
How to write your revenge list: Start with the cruel ones. The neighborhood boys who threw rocks at you, who picked up smooth, flat rocks from their landscaped yard and threw rocks at your backpack as you walked home. Add the ones who ignore you, the ones who look at clouds more than they look at you. The ones who have low expectations. The guidance counselor who placed you in lower-level English, despite your test scores, despite your abilities, despite the stack of novels you read a week. Add the untrustworthy ones, the ones who smile too wide and compliment your hair while pointing out your too-large ears. Add the creepy white guys who always sit next to you on the bus, in the park, anywhere really, and ask if you are Chinese and if you can speak English. Imagine stabbing them like stabbing the foggy eye of a steamed fish. Add the popular girls, the rich kids, the customers who get frustrated and yell at your mother because they can’t understand what she’s saying, the kid who punched your little brother, the politicians, the racists. Add them, add them. Think about adding your father who will leave very soon and will always, somehow, be leaving. Think about how he gambled away your family’s money and drank and smoked and lied and never spoke to you. How, when you were little, he didn’t pick you up from band practice and you had to sit with the teacher for four hours until your mother came. How he decided to go to Atlantic City that day and kept going there like a moth drawn toward light—casino light, brash and blinding. Think about it, yes, give it a thorough evaluation, but please, do not add him. When he decides to leave your family and comes back after four months for your birthday and tries to give you a carton full of rice and chicken thighs, take the gift. Do not let him past the door, for forgiveness is difficult, but take the gift and allow the weight to leave his hands.
