I was ready to jettison our escape pod. Of course, the financials for a home loan took longer to come through than we expected. Rolf couldn’t give notice at his San Francisco job because we wouldn’t be able to get a loan if he was unemployed or even just newly employed. And we were in a pickle because we really didn’t have any money to buy a new house until we sold the old house, and that hadn’t happened yet. Our Bay Area, Asian American mortgage broker was working overtime for us, and in his good-natured exasperation he said to me, “Why are you moving to the middle of nowhere? Aren’t there, like, no Asians up there? What are you going to do, open up a Panda Express?”
Oh, you’re hilarious, Ted.
“For your information, they already have a Panda Express, thank you very much.”
The only way to break out of the locked Chinese box was to leave San Francisco. I truly believed that there wasn’t any room for a “new” kind of me to grow in my hometown. My world had shrunk, or I had painted myself into a corner. Any way you wanted to say it, I was stuck in the mud, and whichever way I tried to maneuver, I just sank deeper.
Sometimes you have to break down a door with all your might. What remains of the crash is a splintered, bloody mess. But at least you’re still alive and kickin’. And that’s how I felt then. Like I had to leave to stay alive.
So screw me and the Subaru I rode out on. Life in San Francisco ended with a creaking sound. An aching, wet, wooden pier down at the wharf, or maybe China Basin, was groaning. A ship was moored beside it, and the planks pulled against the weight of the vessel as it tried to accelerate away. SNAP! SNAP! SNAP! The ropes were giving way, breaking, whipping up as they did. The wooden pier felt its xylophone skeleton being pulled apart, then fell back into a slump, causing a small but significant tidal wave.
The boat that got away was being paddled by human hands. Ours. Mine. We were away. The skyline receded, and the familiar red neon letters faded away, the ones that spelled out PORT OF SAN FRANCISCO. We floated away on the Bay, and then under the Golden Gate Bridge to the open waters of the Pacific. The gentle lapping of the ocean and our breathing, our panting from exhaustion, were the only noises, and seagulls.
We risked everything to leave.
And oh, the creaking. I still hear it in my dreams, and in my waking life, too. I detect the faint sounds of the moaning wooden pier as the tide rushes in and out. The moorings did not hold. I loosened the bonds myself and threw my body against the feeling of something constricting me. Before I knew it, restraints that I imagined were made of silk finally snapped. The braided strands had never been even a little bit frayed, but the next moment I found myself on the floor, broken free. Free to go.
As the song goes, “San Francisco, here is your wanderin’ one / Saying I’ll wander no more.” But I had never wandered, never strayed even once. I got up and left the only place I ever knew. My city. A lot of people belong to her and she to them, and they came from near and far. Sayonara.
And yet. And yet. Still I hear those plaintive cries, the moans and whispers. They say, “Come back. Come back. Please, daughter. Please, friend. Come back, honey.”
And all night, in the brightest moonlight, it still keeps me awake, night after night in Nevada City.
As I write this right now, I’ve just had to stop and pause because Lucy is showing me her latest book, The Mice Go On, Volume 26. She has been working on these books that she has stapled together for about a year now, and this is the latest adventure. The series is about a mouse named Squeak and all the calamities from which he escapes. For instance, once a water bottle floods his mouse hole; another time a cat attacks him and his friends; and another time a mousetrap almost captures him in its clutches. The pages are filled with mishaps, foiled plans, and harebrained schemes that always end up working out just fine. No matter what chaos takes place, every volume of The Mice Go On concludes in the very same, satisfying way. It’s very simple. The last page of every book is blank except for one sentence, “And everything was OK.”
And so it was for us. We left San Francisco and moved to Nevada City. We found a new job for Rolf and a new school for Lucy. We lasted long enough in the city to not get flattened in the crosswalk or disfigured by a deranged bull mastiff. We were pretty wobbly at first, but like a mother mouse in one of my daughter’s homemade books, I just kept telling myself that everything would be okay.
22
Aeon Flux Capacitor
Even after I left my hometown, or maybe because of this drastic change, I remained fascinated with the life trajectories of Asian Americans who don’t want to follow the routes their parents delineate for them. Some have gone ahead and gotten that medical degree or passed the bar exam, but they know in their hearts that they don’t want to practice medicine or law. Others of us have followed the path of our dreams even though our parents have warned us that it only leads to the poorhouse. I suppose we are all struggling to escape what is expected of us.
I think of Yoda saying to Luke Skywalker, “Luminous beings are we,” and that reminds me of the fluidity of ideas and feelings, and of how we don’t have to pigeonhole ourselves, even though we might consider our bodies and personalities as already set in stone.
We can be a lot of things and feel a lot of ways. But who says we can’t change if we want to? One day we can be more generous than usual, or less hidden, or less controlling, and more accepting. I think there are unexplored parts of every person’s heart. Let’s go spelunking.
To want another life other than the one you currently have can be an elusive pursuit. You can’t capture it under glass, this mysterious thing that moves in and around us, hiding and revealing itself to us in its own sweet time. Our ambitions and desires for change are constantly in alternating modes, either stirring us into a frenzy or half hibernating in the dark. Our ambition is alive in a cave, in the sunlight, in the air. While we go about our business, this unknowable thing skips around. We feel weak from it sometimes, to have a sense of it flitting around—from me, to you, to other people we see on the street, or through everybody, within anybody else filled with a desperate desire for “something else.”
Being a Chinese American today is to have your spirit in a stream, with those glimmering, shimmering particles too infinitesimal to scoop out, like gold flecks in river water. An American in a Chinese body is always panning for gold. You become part of the water, or else the gold becomes part of you as you cup your hands together and bring a drink of that rushing water to your lips. No matter if you speak English, Cantonese, or Mandarin, there’s always a sweetness on the tongue, but also a thirst that can’t be quenched.
In life, the not-knowing of never trying is worse than the knowing of doing and failing. As you try different ways of being, and eliminate what doesn’t work for you, your desires are constantly changing shape, like water. Your aspirations can drip maddeningly off the storm drain or wash clean a window so you can see better. Sometimes water floods, or merely moistens, or can carry you back or forward like a tidal wash, or might crash down and bring destruction like a wave at Mavericks. As we swim with or against the currents, we go in and out like specks. Water can wash, or it can drown.
You might have a sensation that there’s somewhere else you’re supposed to be. In New York, Shanghai, San Francisco, Beijing, Hong Kong, or Los Angeles, your body in space, whether you are surrounded by many other Asians or if you are the only one around for miles, you feel a heat that doesn’t burn, like a slow pouring of liquid on your skin. It doesn’t stain, but can penetrate and coat you invisibly, like a protection or salve. There is always a yearning that time cannot wrestle to the ground.
Sometimes what we want or think we want feels like a barren branch, but slowly, like right before a rain, plump little birds come and perch one by one. And then there are those tiny birds that travel in clouds, and they can look like a swarm of bees from a distance.
Speaking of which, three days before we moved from San Francisco, my husband was standing on a ladder. He was pai
nting the outside trim of the windows of our old house, and he turned around when he heard a low, humming noise. He didn’t see anything at first, as it took a moment for his brain to make sense of what his eyes were looking at. A section of the sky was vibrating, moving like a dim, shivering spotlight. A thick, buzzing noise became louder. It was an electric sound.
It was a swarm of bees headed right for him. He was standing on the highest rung of a twelve-foot ladder with nowhere to go. Right before the swarm might have enveloped him, it careened to the left and crashed into the windows of the house next door. He climbed down and stood in the driveway catching his breath.
Later that day we were telling this story to a passerby who casually commented, “That’s what happens when the old hive gets too crowded. The queen leaves to find a new home.”
“What happens to the old hive?”
“Before she goes, the queen leaves behind eggs that will become new queens. She takes half the hive with her to the new home, and the other half stays. The swarm splits in two.”
I thought about the bee incident and this conversation. Our hive had gotten too crowded with others’ needs and wants that displaced our own. We were overburdened with our families’ expectations and dependencies. Newcomers could and would always build their hives in San Francisco, and I had left to make room for them, and to make room for myself somewhere else, too. I didn’t need to worry about my old town being taken care of. There would always be new artists, new inhabitants, and native sons and daughters born every day. I could go find a new home.
Two days later, I was collecting the last remnants of our belongings in the house and giving the floor a final sweep. I heard a familiar squawking noise, but it was a cacophony that seemed out of place. It was a North Beach sound out in the Sunset District. I shuffled to the window and looked up. Perched there on the electrical wire directly in front of me were the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill. For my whole life I had never once seen them this far west in the city. And there they were, those cheery green conures with the red heads and bright white circles around their eyes. Maybe it wasn’t the whole flock, but thirty or so parrots were balancing on the wire, flipping like trapeze artists, and shouting out a hello, or a good-bye.
I watched them for a long time, their bird antics both charming and saddening me. “What are you doing out here, fellas?” I asked them out loud. They squawked and squeaked as I watched them play and fight, groom and preen. I didn’t know how they found me, or why I felt the need to pretend their flight and visit had anything to do with me personally. When they suddenly and abruptly flew off in a haphazard tussle through the air, they were so clumsy and comical that I laughed out loud.
“Bye, guys,” I said, watching their bright green bodies blend like a group of dots into the blue of the sky until they were gone. Rather, they blended so effortlessly into the background that I thought they were gone, but they were still there, of course, just continuing their adventures elsewhere, less sentimental than this San Franciscan.
I had been living in San Francisco with a husband, home, and new baby. Both sides of my Chinese family had a C-clamp on my soul, and the stress of city living was squeezing an ever-tightening grip around my shoulders. My nerves were frayed like electrical lines that had been blown down in a thunderstorm, live and exposed, ready to ignite at the slightest provocation.
I felt the gathering storm clouds although I could not see them. I was sure that something bad could be just around the corner. Was it just paranoia? Perhaps. But I didn’t want to find out the hard way.
Each day I feared that I might get squished in the street. Even if I was between the two painted lines of the crosswalk, I could very likely become Pedestrian #17 to get annihilated that year in the Cool, Grey City of Love. A truck could flatten me or a cyclist might knock me over as it flew through a red light. Perhaps I would never seen it coming.
Maybe I felt so vulnerable because my C-section had changed me. After all, my body had been taken apart and put back together again, and in the process a new human was born. My hometown suddenly felt menacing to me. I was overwhelmed with an impending sense of doom, as if everything that had once felt assuring and familiar could now potentially kill me.
And like that swarm of bees, I felt split in two.
One morning I woke up in Nevada City and looked out the window to find snow melting in the sunlight. It took a while for my pupils to adjust. After my warm slumber behind dark curtains, I was temporarily blinded by the sun-slicked leaves of the trees outside. Droplets of clear slush dripped from the branches like crystals hanging from a chandelier. The night sky had burned away. I continued to watch the melting snow slide from the trees to the ground in slow-motion free fall, half between snowflakes and rain. Steam was rising everywhere, and the natural world transformed right before my eyes.
Where else was frost melting? Somewhere inside me.
Caught between two worlds, we are all in our own version of the Middle Kingdom. There’s who we’re expected to be, who we’d like to be, and where we live, the in-between. We all inhabit that secret cave where we’ve been spelunking. Beneath the rocks, the cave opens up to a spacious wellspring where fresh water gurgles up, and the sunlight from above reflects and glimmers, casting wavy light into the shadows.
Asian Americans, we hide ourselves too well. No one is going to crawl under a rock to get us. We have to come out into the light.
PART 4
Emerging from the Shadows and into the Light
23
Trying to Calm the Inner Hysteria
What kind of idiot leaves San Francisco? I left my house, my family, my city of riveting, bright ocean light and foggy, romantic skies. I knew all the shortcuts in SF, the one-way alleys, secret parking spots, and clean bathrooms downtown. I knew which magnolia tree bloomed earliest in Golden Gate Park and could identify the sandy stretch of beach where the plentiful, perfect, unbroken sand dollars washed up after a storm.
How could I leave that complicated nest, my place of knowledge, my beating heart where the blood rushed through my veins, thumping loudly like the Pacific Ocean crashing against Seal Rock?
I immediately missed walking by the Flood Building that used to be Woolworth’s that used to be the Baldwin Hotel. I longed to eat a cheeseburger in a dark-paneled room with Maxfield Parrish’s Pied Piper glowing golden on the wall behind glass and crystal decanters. I wanted to touch my fingertips to the red velvet and silver wallpaper at C. Bobby’s Owl Tree.
The memories and ghosts I thought I was fleeing instead just took up residence in a kaleidoscopic corner of my brain, and I still could see the faraway images like from a coin-slotted pay telescope at Playland-at-the-Beach. I could place a dime in the slot on the side of my head and here’s what would unfurl:
My brother’s wedding at the Empress of China, afterward sitting in the Palace Hotel’s Garden Court in an inky-black gown, my husband in a tuxedo and my baby daughter still just a twinkle in her daddy’s eye. And Café Europa on Columbus Avenue, El Tapatio on Francisco Street, the old U.S. Restaurant, Pronto Pup, Uncle’s Café, Joe Jung’s, and everywhere snacks, pastries, chow fun, ice cream, and those fancy Parisian macaroons that, for two, cost more than I was paid per hour at my first job at Pier 39.
San Francisco was where my mom worked in a curio shop as a kid in Chinatown, where my grandparents raised seven kids and ran a travel agency. It’s where my dad’s father died at Kaiser in 1962 the day he was supposed to go home after a routine operation. My dad worked in the Transamerica Pyramid, that pointed dunce cap on the paper cutout skyline, and we all went to school, worked, had piano lessons, Chinese school, and basketball practice while joyous and tragic things happened all around us, like one moment going to the Ice Follies at Winterland, and then getting a phone call and finding out that a friend’s dad was stabbed to death on Van Ness Avenue by a guy who’d just robbed the Crocker Bank.
That was my city, or just a twenty-second silent film of it. A snapshot, really. But, hey, I
’m not the only one to feel longing and love and pride in San Francisco. I’m the one who left, after all. But all those images are what roll around in your head, everyone’s head, I suppose, all in a jumble when you’re from a place.
Now that I’d left my hometown, had it left me? I refrained from buying a SAN FRANCISCO sweatshirt and wearing it around my new town. That would’ve drawn exactly the kind of attention I didn’t want. My heartbroken mopiness was already a big scab on my face. Wearing a hoodie with an SF logo would have been advertising the ache that still woke me in the night.
What had I done? In the following months, I opened many bottles of champagne and assured myself it would be okay. I baked dozens of chocolate chip cookies, cheesecakes, and blueberry pies to keep my hands from shaking. I told myself that a lot of formidable people had loved both my old town and my new town: Lotta Crabtree, Lola Montez, and all those old-timey writers we all claim to love but have never actually read. Nevada City is as old as San Francisco, with similar sights and sounds of bygone rowdiness. In my head I saw the gold bullion, the veins of silver in the mines, the gilt wallpaper, and murdered Chinamen.
I left so I could find out something new about myself, to see what lay beyond my childhood playground.
However. There was nowhere to hide now. There was no ocean air to soothe me, no fog to enshroud me. I looked for the old familiar sights—snowy plovers, bottlebrush trees, eucalyptus, and miles of concrete sidewalk. But now there would be no grid to follow, no straight shot up Market Street, no waterfront or end of the earth scattered with broken bits of shells and nineteenth-century brick. I touched my hand to the ground and searched unsuccessfully. Now all I felt was new dirt beneath my flip-flops, with not even one jewel of green sea glass to remind me of what came before. Unmoored and unprotected, I might’ve stayed safe if I had remained in San Francisco. She would’ve watched over me, my city. She would’ve made sure I didn’t do anything stupid.
Tiger Babies Strike Back Page 11
