At the door, nurses in quaint pink uniforms zapped our foreheads with infrared thermometers. When the thermometers beeped at 37 degrees Celsius, the nurses thanked us and waved us through. The plastic chairs in the lobby area, punctuated by unattractive but hardy plants, were filled with people in surgical masks. Rows of dull black eyes without joy or fear.
In the room, Baba napped in a vinyl armchair, a faded peach hospital sheet draped over him. Mama slept too. Amid all the machinery, I could see very little of her—just her thin white hair clumped to her forehead and her gaunt arms. A thick plastic ventilator that clouded and cleared with each breath dug into her cheeks. Her hands were wrapped in mitts and strapped to the bed. Various lines disappeared into her veins, and a urine bag hung off the bed rail.
“My god. Why didn’t you tell me all this?” I whispered to Ah Zhay. I felt sick. I sat on the empty bed that lay on the other side of the curtain. Was this how my mother was to die—half machine? I covered my eyes. Even the last time I’d seen her, she had moved with the exquisite posture that I had admired as a child. She had still gone to have her hair washed and set every week. Now, she seemed so exposed—she would have despised her own vulnerability—unbathed, unveiled. I wanted to weep for the shame that I imagined she would have felt.
“The nurses weigh her diapers to see how much food she’s absorbed. Did you really want me to call you about this?”
“And Baba just waits with her?” I whispered.
“He watches TV when she sleeps,” Ah Zhay said. She was inured to it; she had no more energy for horror. “I’m here every day.”
“Why is she tied down?” The sight of my mother strapped to the bed like a Victorian-era lunatic frightened me the most.
“She tries to pull out the IV every chance she gets.”
“Mama?” I could not imagine my mother doing anything but acquiescing to the doctor’s orders.
“She wants to come home. She doesn’t want to be here.”
“Oh god, so let her.”
We heard someone stirring on the other side of the curtain, then Baba croaked, “Daughter?”
We both came forward.
“Ah, you’ve come,” Baba said. Still groggy, he gripped my arm in greeting. I covered his clammy hand with mine, no word except “Baba” coming to me.
I helped him sit up and handed him a cup of water from the tray next to my mother’s bed. He held it with both hands, like a child might, and cleared his throat. “Your mother is very sick.”
“Baba, don’t talk like that,” Ah Zhay said in the loud, over-enunciated voice people reserved for the elderly and foreigners.
“Don’t talk to me like I’m a child,” he growled. I was relieved; he had not changed.
“Okay, okay.” She backed off. “Let’s just try to be optimistic, Baba.”
“Everyone dies,” he said.
“Ba, please.” Ah Zhay and I exchanged a glance. What else could he do? Cry all day? He was as scared as the rest of us. Anger hid his hurt, as it always had.
—
The PRC government called the virus on Taiwan an “internal matter” and wouldn’t allow the World Health Organization to come to the island. The talking heads went on for hours dissecting the decision and the implications. Like a snake eating its tail, they talked in circles, working up to a fever pitch. All complaints and no solution. The answer was not in our hands, but in Beijing’s. Some claimed this was Beijing’s warning against Taiwan’s president, the first elected from an opposition party and a congenial loose cannon with a big mouth who edged closer and closer to an official declaration of independence. Slap on a surgical mask, hunker down, and shut up, Beijing seemed to be saying in response.
Weary of the relentless noise, I clicked off the TV. Baba had gone home with Ah Zhay to clean up and have dinner with Jie-fu, and I had stayed behind with Mama. She was sleeping, but a faint greenish bedside light—a thin fluorescent bulb that emitted a tiny insect buzz—illuminated her face. The respirator clouded, cleared. The machines rose and fell and clicked and beeped.
In the downstairs lobby convenience store, which sold crutches and bedpans and syringes and pills cups, I bought a sports drink and a Styrofoam bowl of dried ramen, then perused the fashion magazines that had already been torn from their cellophane wrappers.
Reading one article, I caught my breath.
It was a profile of a pop singer who went by the stage name Melody. Your parents, the article said, may recognize her as the daughter of murdered opposition party activist Tang Jia Bao.
Jia Bao’s daughter. To many of her fans, this detail must have been an abstract piece of history, secondary to the fizz of her pop songs about love, motorcycles, and candy.
To me, they had always remained as they had been that afternoon we last saw them in 1982. His wife—the kindly doctor—and the son and daughter on the cusp of adulthood. I had imagined them forever inhabiting, as Jia Bao did, that bygone world.
In the photos of the collage accompanying the article, she wore outrageous costumes—fuzzy pink gloves, platform boots with oversized socks, a skirt made of feathers—but I could still see the ghost of Jia Bao’s face in hers. She was on the older side of pop stardom; however, after four midmarket albums, her latest had been her breakout. I eagerly scanned the article.
The magazine asked her about her father’s death and she said, “For a long time, I was angry—at my mother for letting my father go, and at my father for leaving. I was angry at his murderers, of course. But I hated America the most.
“After years of bitterness, a good friend said to me that anger is an ember, and the one who holds it is the only one who is burned. This advice woke me up. I realized we all have a chance to remake the world. We don’t have to hold on to the world as it came to us. We can have a vision and make the world anew. Every day, we have a second chance. This is what I hope to pass on with my music.”
I closed the magazine. Were these her own words, or focus-group tested and churned out by her management? Her optimism devastated me. The wrenching pain of that awful winter when Jia Bao died—and everything that followed—grew vivid again under the cold convenience-store lights.
—
Upstairs, I filled the ramen bowl at the hot water dispenser near the nurses’ station and sat at Mama’s bedside table to eat. It was nine in the morning in California. I dug out my calling card and called home.
No answer. I tried again, dialing the international calling card center, then the calling card number, then finally entering my home phone number. One wrong button and I’d have to start again. It was like a recurring nightmare I had of misdialing, over and over again, long-distance on a rotary phone. Still no answer. I wasn’t ready to tell Wei about Jia Bao’s daughter, but I wanted to anchor myself with his voice.
I tried to settle into the vinyl chair that Baba had napped on, but it was like sleeping on a table. I stood at the window and looked toward the faintly lit park below. It had once been a meeting spot for gay men; now Filipino and Indonesian workers gathered there on Sundays to spend their single day off among countrymen. On other days, families strolled the paths, old men and women sunned on the benches, downtown workers cut through from corner to corner, and tourists wandered. Maybe one day I’d go down for fresh air. Maybe I could bring Mama. Once she was better. I leaned my head on the glass and closed my eyes. As if.
The 2-28 Memorial Museum was down there too. Depending on one’s politics, the event was known as the “2-28 Incident,” the “2-28 Massacre,” or the “2-28 Uprising.” It had a logo. There was a movie, a CD, books. There were T-shirts and hats. It had gone from a national secret to a branded industry. I had never visited the museum. I wondered if Mama had and if she had thought it strange to see a life she recalled encased and retold as history. Would she even associate herself with the stories inside, or was her life too singular to be linked to the rows of black-and-white pictures and dioramas of disaster?
—
The first night I spent in
the hospital, taking Ah Zhay’s place beside Mama’s bed, I could not sleep. I kept the television on, muted, and the same images cycled through the night: tanks rolling into cities and exhilarated citizens toppling statues of dictators with nooses, then clips of closed schools and stores, and people thronging railroad stations and airports and drifting through the streets with white masks that revealed nothing but their frightened, suspicious eyes. Half-empty subway trains ghosted through the city.
Mama had not woken since I arrived. Her sleep was induced and artificial. I wondered what—if—she dreamed.
For a moment, I had the eerie feeling of seeing my mother through a stranger’s eyes. She was suddenly alien to me. I recalled Jia Bao’s funeral, which I had not thought of in such a long time—how I’d seen him transform through the eulogies: each speaker revealed a new person, one I hadn’t known in my limited view.
To one man, whom I didn’t recognize, Jia Bao had been funny, a real crack up. He said you never would have guessed. To his library supervisor, Jia Bao was humble, someone overqualified for the job he’d been given, but who did it without complaint. Wei called him an uncommon man, someone who “made all of us strive for higher ideals.” I didn’t speak at the service. My ribs girded my pain, constraining all my grief. I could not cry.
The machines around Mama flashed meaningless graphs and beeped like neglected digital pets, begging, Feed me, groom me, love me. In death, who would my mother be revealed as? And Baba?
—
The East Peace Street Hospital was the first in the city quarantined. In desperation and panic, a nurse threw herself from a window, adding coroners and police tape to the barricades. News crews created another buffer between the hospital and the world. Even though it was only a mile away, it felt like another country.
I finally reached Wei.
“How are you? How is your mother?”
“Wei, it doesn’t look good.” Speaking it aloud made it real; I realized the words were true. My mother was dying.
55
DUA HYAN DROVE UP from the south that afternoon and took Baba and me to a graveyard in Liuzhangli. I had missed Tomb-Sweeping Day by three weeks and most of the graves on the hillside were already cleared of weeds. The oranges left as offerings were sunken and wrinkled, flowers had toppled on their dried stalks, and mountain rats had eaten away the other food, leaving empty bowls and torn wrappers.
Wei’s parents’ neglected plots stood out among the tidied graves. I thought of our baby boy’s grave in Oakland: a smaller marker, with no picture embedded in the stone. Just one name and one date. It was almost strange that I loved someone so much who had never been. I had never seen him move, or cry, but I thought I knew who he would have been, and I mourned him for that.
I set out a foldable stool for Baba, and then Dua Hyan and I began pulling weeds. I had brought a bottle of cleaner and rags, and I wiped down the graves. Because of my parents’ disdain for the old superstitions, I had hesitated to bring offerings, but some tiny part of me, the girl who had grown up among clouds of burned dead money in the streets, feared that the baby, and my husband’s parents’ ghosts, would be starving and neglected in the afterworld, so I set out a vase of artificial flowers and a few packages of ramen. Glancing briefly at my cynical brother, I bowed to the graves and gestured with my hands folded in prayer. Dua Hyan scoffed.
“Baba, you don’t mind, right?” I asked.
Baba had not said a word on the drive, or on the climb up the hill. I’m sure he tired of our anxious hovering, as if we expected to fight the Grim Reaper off him at any second. But perhaps he had spied death too, and that was why he had insisted on visiting his oldest friend’s grave.
He waved away my question impatiently, not deigning to speak, and I smirked at my brother.
Dua Hyan jutted his chin at the ramen, which I’d arranged in a pyramid. “Rat poison.”
“Better the rats than us,” I said. “Baba, shall we eat?”
Baba sighed, which I took as a yes, and we spread out a blanket and I offered the bento lunches I had picked up from 7-Eleven. I opened Baba’s, separated his chopsticks and sawed them together to file away the jagged edges, and set it before him. He ate slowly and meticulously. Dua Hyan, despite his military training, or because of it—too many mess hall meals and young men tussling for portioned servings—ate noisily and quickly.
The weather was mild and the empty graveyard felt like the safest place in the city. On the other side of the hill, builders worked on the tallest skyscraper in the world, which was stacked like a tower of take-out boxes. A light wind moved among the graves and a plain white butterfly, almost blinding in the sun, danced past us.
Dua Hyan was a bachelor, a retired major general, and from the few times a year that we spoke and based on what I heard from Ah Zhay, he spent most of his leisure time training his two corgies and tending his garden. He kept his life so private that I did not know if he’d ever had any lovers, or even if those lovers would be male or female. We certainly didn’t talk about the past, as if we shared none beyond the intuitive sense that we had known each other a long time, so we talked of what we loved in common.
“How is Stephanie?” he asked. “What is she studying again?”
“Ethnic studies. She studies global immigration patterns.”
“Is there work in that?” He actually looked interested.
I laughed. “I’m not sure. But that’s what American kids do—study whatever their hearts desire. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake.”
“She’s always been brilliant,” he said. “And Emily?”
“She’s working for a union. Organizing. She has the perfect personality for it.”
Dua Hyan smiled. “I see it. She really can talk. What kind of union?”
“Food service workers.” Emily had majored in anthropology, so I was surprised by this job, which she had fallen into after a summer stint, but her extroversion and energy suited the work well.
Baba’s cough interrupted us, and I leaned over and pounded him on the back while Dua Hyan snapped the seal of a water bottle.
“Drink, Baba.” I grabbed the bottle from Dua Hyan and urged it to Baba’s mouth. He struggled for a few moments—we all could hear the phlegm rattling and dislodging in his chest—and finally, he cleared it. He was red and shaken.
“Ah Zhay didn’t say anything about your cough,” I said.
“It’s nothing.”
“You don’t want to pass anything on to Mama.”
“Just went down the wrong pipe.”
“You sure?” Dua Hyan asked. Authority entered his voice and Baba responded as he usually did.
“Quiet down. It’s nothing. Stupid rice.” He nudged away his empty tray and the dirty chopsticks rolled across the grave.
“Dua Hyan is just worried.” I gathered up our garbage.
Dua Hyan helped our father to his feet. Baba was weaker than I had realized. His hands shook as they clasped my brother’s arms. I walked beside the two of them. I would lose both Mama and him soon, I suddenly understood.
We returned to the car and drove back into the heart of the city, to the hospital, where, for the first time since I’d arrived, Mama was awake. With her eyes open, she looked more robust, to my relief, even though her black irises had faded to milky blue. I went to her.
“Look who’s here,” Baba said. I touched her hand. From inside the mitt, her fingers tried to grip mine.
“You look good, Mama.” I hoped she did not detect the sadness beneath my smile.
She wanted us to unstrap her hands. “Of course,” I said, but Dua Hyan said no.
“She’s stubborn. She’ll rip everything out.” He tapped his fingers over the machines next to the bed, as if inspecting them. “It’ll be a bloody mess.” He settled into a chair. “Right, Ma?” His voice rose and his words slowed when he spoke to her. She closed her eyes, offended or defeated. I glared at him.
I slipped the breathing apparatus off my mother’s face and gave her a m
oistened large cotton swab to suck the water from. After she’d wet her mouth, she said, “No filial piety.”
“Who? Dua Hyan?” I looked back at my brother, who now stood at the window with his arms crossed.
“It’s for your own good,” Dua Hyan said.
Meanwhile, Baba had retrieved a bottle of vitamin E oil and began massaging Mama’s swollen feet. He stroked Mama’s waxy skin, his thumbs pressing into her soles, his fingers pinching her toes. His hands trembled on her flesh—this act was an effort. They still love each other, I noted with awe. After everything.
For a while, we basked in our own meditations while Baba rubbed Mama’s legs. Dua Hyan found the remote and flipped through the channels, moving through the entire listing three times before shutting it off.
“When’s Zhee Hyan coming?” he asked. “He should be here. You came all the way from California. What’s his excuse?” Zhee Hyan was a long-distance bus driver for the Aloha bus company with a schedule that we had trouble tracking. Of course, even when he was unemployed, he was hard to pin down.
“Ah Zhay says this weekend,” I answered.
Dua Hyan snorted. “We’ll see.” He settled into a chair and crossed his arms.
“Ma,” I said, “can we get you anything?”
She blinked wearily and shook her head. I suddenly realized why she looked so much older than the last time I’d seen her—her dentures had been taken out. Her mouth had collapsed on itself, destroying her grace.
She had come in for her lungs, developed and recovered from septicemia, only to have the doctors discover a previously undiagnosed heart condition. Baba, Ah Zhay said, had maintained himself with the same stoic bearing that had carried him through my youth, but I saw his worry reveal itself in his tenderness with Mama and in his impatience with us. For the past few days, every answer from his mouth had been a bark, but as soon as he turned to Mama, his voice would soften. He was more attentive than the nurses: he checked her pills, scanned her chart, applied balm to keep her lips from cracking.
Touched, I said, “Baba, let me take over.”
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