“I need to open the window!”
“What for?”
“Because I need air.”
“I’ll just turn on the vent.”
“Can you please just press the button that unlocks the back window?”
“Hold on. The vent is on low. Can you feel it?”
“No. Can I please just open the window?”
“I’ll turn the vent on medium.”
“Please just let me open the window.”
“You’ll feel the vent any second.”
Sweltering and breathing recirculated air, I reverted, once again, to pretending I was dead. The sound track to my lifelong passive captivity was the same as it ever was, Mathis and Sinatra. I didn’t care for this music, but to my parents the songs were just so good. Timeless. As our separate energies shifted and settled down to their lowest common denominator, my mom changed the subject of conversation to Dancing with the Stars, while I continued my corpse-in-the-car routine. I embodied the collective soul sickness of adult children in backseats everywhere. There was no escape. And I knew it. We all knew it. The steamy aroma of to-go dim sum packed into Styrofoam containers next to my feet permeated the locked-window interior. My parents bickered over who was the best dancer last night. Rolf stared out the window, and Lucy wailed that she was sooooo bored. She began to kick in her seat. Oh, how peaceful it was to be dead.
After a while I couldn’t take it. Lucy was becoming further agitated, so I dug around in my bag for a stuffed animal. I only had one, and it was a “Honker” from Sesame Street, which is a lesser-known category of Muppet who communicates only by honking his bulbous orange nose or tooting the little horns next to his ears.
“Here, take him,” I said to Lucy.
She stopped kicking and hugged the Honker.
“What’s his name?”
“Honky!”
I stifled a laugh, and said, “Um, maybe we can think of another name.”
She thought for a moment. “Horny?”
“Uh . . .”
“I like both names. Do I have to choose?”
“No, you don’t have to choose. Call him what you like.”
“All right. I’ll just call him Horny Honky.”
When we finally arrived at the house, we were greeted by my aunt and cousin. They led us up through the front yard, and as I walked the path, I remembered an old photo I once saw of my grandma Ruby, posing on the front steps in a squirrel-collared jacket and smart chapeau. Her clothes were fancy, but her eyes were sad. The picture must have been taken in the late 1920s. This stucco dwelling had been the only two-story house on the block back then, built with money from a gambling business. Men had come from all around to play card games and dice, and they would sometimes stay to take their meals or buy tickets for the Chinese lottery.
This was the house where my dad grew up with only one pair of shoes until he was six years old, where they played out back in the garden and sometimes walked to the end of the block and waded in the Pajaro River. There were relatives and nonrelatives around, all called “Uncle,” or “Auntie.” There were adopted girls like Ah Foon, a seventeen-year-old who died of scarlet fever. I knew these details just from word-of-mouth stories. From the outside, the house looked like an ordinary building. I tried to hold all these details in my head as I walked from the porch through the front door.
Once inside, I remembered the old piano that had once stood against the back wall, and the yellow-painted kitchen with tongue-and-groove wainscoting. The kitchen was now remodeled, with a center island and pretty window boxes for orchids. As I stood there taking notice of the modern appliances, all I could think of was the old kitchen where I’d sat on the linoleum floor as a kid and played with the gigantic Siamese cat whose name was Big, which was short for Big City Kitty. In fact, there had been several cats in succession called Big, all named after the first one. After all the Bigs, there were other cats, all named Boy. How pathetic it was that I apparently knew more about the lineage of the pets than that of my family. I washed my hands and helped set out the dim sum we’d brought.
As everyone talked and mingled, I made sure Lucy had something to drink and then wandered down the hall and peeked into my cousin Craig’s room. In the 1970s, I had been so intimidated by my older cousin. On the walls he’d had Bruce Lee and Farrah Fawcett posters, and a hook rug emblazoned with the image of Fonzie from Happy Days. He used to listen to “Cat Scratch Fever” and would be holed up in his room with his friend Morgan, who was a dead ringer for Luke Skywalker. It had all seemed so glamorous and grown up to me then, and now here I was, staring into the same room, newly decorated and missing all traces of my dad’s 1940s childhood as well as my 1970s memories.
Out on the landing of the back stairs, where once was just a concrete slab, there now was an extended deck with a fancy Jacuzzi. Craig was showing Lucy how to play Angry Birds on his phone. They were laughing hysterically as the bombs exploded on the piggies. Lucy had never seen anything like this game because we’ve deprived her of electronic media, and Craig was obviously delighted that she was so easily entertained.
My aunt led us out to the back garden and gave us a tour of the different flowers and vegetables she was growing.
“I remember my mom grew everything here,” she said. As I walked through the rows of different kinds of squash and cabbage, the tomato plants, and the peach trees, I could easily imagine a stooped-over, old Chinese woman tending to her winter melons. My aunt’s mother had passed away long before I started spending summers here, but her spirit seemed to linger still in this garden. In the hot sunlight, I inhaled the dusty smell of heated concrete, jasmine, and the faint decay of the giant sunflowers so tall with their bowed heads that they flopped over at the weakest point of their thin, shriveled necks. The dying blossoms, which must have been glorious blooms just a few weeks ago, were now like mournful showerheads slumped in shame, with pain, or in deference. A Chinese deference, it seemed to me.
Was this really the same plot of land where I had once fled in terror as I was chased by my brothers and cousins who shot at me mercilessly with their tracer guns? The hard plastic discs the size of pennies hit with rapidity and precision. The only thought in my six-year-old head had been, RUN! Back then, if my Chinese ancestors had been ghosts in the garden watching me, I’m sure they would have been amused by my roly-poly body scrambling past the dahlias, running for my life in tube socks and knock-off Adidas. As if. As if that little butterball would grow up to be the teller of their tales. Maybe as they hovered invisibly in the patch of carrots they had pity on me and said to one another, “All right. Let’s trip up these boys chasing her. Let that piglet make it to the back stairs and into the house. There she can hide beneath her mama’s legs under the mah-jongg table.”
That was more than three decades ago, and I did make it unscathed into the house, having been spared by the wannabe Stormtroopers with plastic guns. In contrast to that day of anguish, this afternoon was peaceful and happy. Craig and Lucy continued to enjoy each other’s company with their electronic mediator, my parents and aunt had a good time talking, and Rolf and I hit the Ping-Pong ball back and forth on the table in the back driveway. No one talked about unpleasant topics, and I managed not to say anything that might upset anyone.
I didn’t ask about the Chinese restaurant down the street that allegedly had a machine gun mounted on the roof, and I didn’t say, “Is it really true that a prostitute was Uncle Vincent’s babysitter?”
We all ate dim sum and fruit salad and had hot tea afterward. We made polite conversation. I sifted through my portion of fruit and found all the pitted cherry halves to give to Lucy, who chewed them with gusto.
But I wanted to ask so many things. I wanted to ask about unwanted pregnancies, girls who were given away, babies that died, and twin sisters separated as children. But I couldn’t. The house was pretty and remodeled. The trash heap was now a fancy Jacuzzi. The patchy front yard was now an amazing oasis of lovingly pruned miniature mapl
e trees, manzanita, and exotic flowers. Nor did the electronic blips and bleeps of Angry Birds lend itself to asking invasive family questions. I told myself, Don’t make trouble.
I wanted to know so many things, but I couldn’t conjure any reason why specific details were really any of my business. Did I need to know the exact truth about everything? Maybe I could just accept that the Chinese past was studded with hardships and leave it at that. Was it really necessary to dig up the bodies and extract the gold fillings from dead people’s molars?
Of course not. I wouldn’t rock the boat. I didn’t want to be impolite, but as I sat there sipping my tea it occurred to me that it was moments like these that accounted for why so many Chinese Americans don’t know anything about their own history. I see plenty of us around looking modern and clueless at the shopping mall, and I wonder how many other people’s parents are shielding them from their own family histories. The old folks may hope to keep us from suffering, but as a result, now they’ve got to suffer fools. And we are those fools!
Elders, tell us what you know so that we can understand where we came from, and where you’ve been to get us where we are now. We can’t stand tall on a puffy, cotton candy cloud. No matter how sweet it tastes to be sitting pretty now, we can’t seem to ever get our footing. The ground evaporates beneath us because our families have wanted to save us pain. But really, we need to know.
We Chinese Americans are walking around in our modern lives, but who and what are we carrying around, invisibly, inside us?
I am always thinking about how pursuing the life I want is a privilege. My stairs to climb are the backs of my uncles, aunts, and cousins who didn’t get so far. They didn’t have the time, chutzpah, luck, or stupid optimism to fall in love, have a baby, or pursue their illogical dreams. Is that for better or worse? Maybe worse for them, and better for me? They weren’t cheeky enough to want for themselves. Or were they stomped down?
How did I get to slip by? Was no one watching, or were they playing interference so I could rush by? Did I lunge forward through the closing door—like a selfish jerk—or were they holding the gate open for me? Or did I just miss getting tripped by a relative’s outstretched foot? I’m lucky, I know. Whose stories do I tell first? And how do I tell them if no one will share what they know?
Over the years I have thought about this Watsonville house a lot, and of all the relatives who may have once slept here but then scattered across the country as time went on. I wondered about the day-to-day activities, the sibling dynamics, rivalries, loves, and jealousies that took place in these rooms. As I went about my life, I could only imagine those who came before me. Even as I was shopping for the hundredth time at Anthropologie at the Village of the Damned at Corte Madera, I wondered about the past. My physical body was trawling through the mall, shopping for cutie-cute housewares, but my mind often came back to my fascination with this humble place of beginning. Even as I was noticing the pretty fashion aprons, I just might have been thinking of my grandma Ruby as a young woman, wearing her apron of calico cotton that had been washed so many times the print had faded to near invisible.
I’ve wondered about this Watsonville house at random times. Once, at West Portal Playground in San Francisco, as I watched my daughter, I noticed that none of the moms, myself included, had had time to bother with makeup. Everyone looked so bedraggled. The weariness around the eyes was its own wild, feral eye shadow of sleeplessness, anxiety, and boredom all rolled into one. We in the kid club had washed so many bottles and done so many loads of laundry that our once supple hands now made a different sound when we picked up paper cups. The sound was that of paper against paper. It struck me as a Dust Bowl dryness, even in the fog and the rain. And for some reason that sound of papery hands rubbing together reminded me of my Watsonville forebears. I knew that my lined hands were nothing compared to those of my relatives who had picked vegetables, washed clothes, dried fish, and did everything else under the sun without the benefit of Playtex gloves and emollient lotions.
Later, as I was driving home from the playground with my kid strapped into her car seat, I was still thinking of the hardships endured by my grandma Ruby, and how she made do during tough times in Watsonville. My reverie, though, was interrupted by the urgent knowledge that I really had to get back home in time to bid on something on eBay.
Actually, first I had to call the bank and confirm that I had enough money in my personal checking account so that my next purchase wouldn’t hurl us head over heels into bankruptcy. We raced home, and once I got through the phone prompts, I was embarrassed to hear the recorded Bank of America fembot impassively recount my debits on the telephone:
“Press two for more history transactions . . . $62.40 PayPal . . . $146.50 PayPal . . . $89.68 PayPal . . . $298.08 PayPal . . .”
The perky cyborg’s voice was like a stuck recording. Obviously, PayPal was my morphine clicker. It was so easy to spend the money when I couldn’t see or feel the cash being sucked out of my grimy little fist. But I knew my eBay life was getting out of hand. Even as I experienced the fleeting, triumphant shudder of outbidding someone for a famille rose chafing dish, I was fairly certain there was more to living than tapping that computer mouse like it was a giant plastic clitoris.
But back to Watsonville. As I sat in the old house for real on that day, everything was clean and pretty as I looked around. It looked as though a designer apron from Anthropologie wouldn’t seem out of place there now. The advertising slogan popped into my head, “We’ve come a long way, baby!”
And yet. My relatives and I sat together, not saying anything. I felt a calm in the space between us, even while I imagined sadness seeping up from the floorboards. Some dead and gone memories were not mine to exhume.
Afterward, we all piled back in the car. Once more, I pretended I was a corpse in the backseat. This time, though, my dad blasted the air conditioner, either because he just happened to figure out how the dials worked, or he was trying to show consideration for my temperature preference. The car’s interior quickly became too cold, but I didn’t want to lobby for further adjustment for my own sake. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. A few minutes later, I could feel Lucy’s hands inside my clothes.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“My honker is cold,” she said. “Horny Honky needs to sleep in your underpants!”
She lifted the hem of my skirt and crammed her toy into the elastic of my underwear. Fine. We sped home in our sedan, away from the hot, dusty town of my dad’s humble beginnings. What had earlier felt like a cramped backseat filled with bickering and stifled freedom now struck me as a seat of relative comfort. There was a chill in the air and a Horny Honky in my underpants, but all was pretty good in my world at that moment.
34
Place Your Hand in the Beast’s Mouth
Tiger Babies, let’s talk about you.
I started writing this to feel closer to you. I imagine your shallow breathing as you decide whether to go to bed or to get some work done. I wonder what you are thinking now, or on any Thursday night at ten thirty. What do your eyes look like as they read, or as they rest, asleep in your head? Are you talking to someone, or thinking about your weekend errands?
When I see other Asian Americans, sometimes I feel like we are in an impossible situation. Even if we say hello or have a brief transaction in a store or business, we will never really get to know each other, and yet I feel a kinship that I want to acknowledge.
Maybe there are too many people around, watching and listening, for me to feel comfortable. I try not to look directly at you, but I’m sure my eyes show everything. And you. Your eyes give you away, too. I know I shouldn’t say that, but look at us. Probably no one else can tell. But you know it. And I know it. Our Asianness is a common thing between us, maybe the only thing, but it’s really obvious. We don’t know if we should acknowledge it, or if that would be embarrassing.
After I go home, I wonder what you think when you’re alone. Are other
Asian Americans consciously thinking about their place in the world as I am? To some extent, everyone must be constantly thinking and scheming, right? We are each Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys singing “In My Room.” I wonder what it would be like to be with you and listen to your tattered, long-playing record, your Pet Sounds.
But we talk about the weather, don’t we? Current events are a-okay, but really, who the hell cares when everything alive between us goes unsaid?
We were raised by Tiger Parents, but maybe we are a different type of tiger. Biding our time on the atoll of the swampy mangrove forest, we remain motionless. We are not exactly cavorting with cobras, but we see them swimming in the muddy river water and feel them slithering beneath our forepaws. We live in the wild but conserve energy and stay alive. We hold our heads high as we navigate the water, even as the leeches try to penetrate our fur.
We, the Asian Americans who still have feelings in our veins, who dare to be vulnerable, we are somehow invisible to the world. We are tigers, too, and just as endangered.
People like us, we wind up dead because we feel too much, and hurt too much. We’re not tough. That’s why we often just wander deeper into the forest, never to be counted again.
But our numbers do exist. This weary species of tiger is everywhere, just hiding. If you were to stand in the moonlight, after your eyes adjusted to the dimness, you might see that we are here. Our eyes are glittering in the darkness, if you would only see us.
Tiger Babies Strike Back Page 17
