Four Directions
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Waverly JongI had taken my mother out to lunch at my favorite ese restaurant in hopes of putting her in a good mood, but it was a disaster.
Whe at the Four Dires Restaurant, she eyed me with immediate disapproval. "Ai-ya! Whats the matter with your hair?" she said in ese.
"What do you mean, Whats the matter, " I said. "I had it cut." Mr. Rory had styled my hair differently this time, an asymmetrical blunt-line frihat was shorter on the left side. It was fashionable, yet not radically so.
"Looks chopped off," she said. "You must ask for your money back."
I sighed. "Lets just have a nice lunch together, okay?"
She wore her tight-lipped, pinched-nose look as she sed the menu, muttering, "Not too many good things, this menu." Theapped the waiters arm, wiped the length of her chopsticks with her finger, and sniffed: "This greasy thing, do you expect me to eat with it?" She made a show of washing out her rice bowl with hot tea, and then warher restaurant patroed near us to do the same. She told the waiter to make sure the soup was very hot, and of course, it was by her tongues expert estimate "not even lukewarm."
"You should so upset," I said to my mother after she disputed a charge of two extra dollars because she had specified chrysanthemum tea, instead of the regular green tea. "Besides, unnecessary stress isnt good for your heart."
"Nothing is wrong with my heart," she huffed as she kept a disparaging eye on the waiter.
And she was right. Despite all the tension she places on herself—and others—the doctors have proclaimed that my mother, at age sixty-nine, has the blood pressure of a sixteen-year-old and the strength of a horse. And thats what she is. A Horse, born in 1918, destio be obstinate and frank to the point of tactlessness. She and I make a bad bination, because Im a Rabbit, born in 1951, supposedly sensitive, with tendeoward being thin-skinned and skittery at the first sign of criticism.
After our miserable lunch, I gave up the idea that there would ever be a good time to tell her the news: that Rich Schields and I were getting married.
"Why are you so nervous?" my friend Marlene Ferber had asked over the phohe ht. "Its not as if Rich is the scum of the earth. Hes a tax attorney like you, for Chrissake. How she criticize that?"
"You dont know my mother," I said. "She hinks anybody is good enough for anything."
"So elope with the guy," said Marlene.
"Thats what I did with Marvin." Marvin was my first husband, my high school sweetheart.
"So there you go," said Marlene.
"So when my mother found out, she threw her shoe at us," I said. "And that was just for openers."
My mother had never met Rich. In fact, every time I brought up his name—when I said, for instahat Rid I had goo the symphony, that Rich had taken my four-year-old daughter, Shoshana, to the zoo—my mother found a way to ge the subject.
"Did I tell you," I said as we waited for the lunch bill at Four Dires, "what a great time Shoshana had with Rich at the Exploratorium? He—"
"Oh," interrupted my mother, "I didnt tell you. Your father, doctors say maybe need exploratory surgery. But no, now they say everything normal, just too much stipated." I gave up. And then we did the usual routine.
I paid for the bill, with a ten and three ones. My mother pulled back the dollar bills and ted out exact ge, thirtees, and put that oray instead, explaining firmly: "No tip!" She tossed her head back with a triumphant smile. And while my mother used the restroom, I slipped the waiter a five-dollar bill. He o me with deep uanding. While she was gone, I devised another plan.
"Choszle!"—Stinks to death in there!—muttered my mother wheurned. She nudged me with a little travel package of Kleenex. She did not trust other peoples toilet paper. "Do you o use?"
I shook my head. "But before I drop you off, lets stop at my place real quick. Theres something I want to show you."
My mother had not been to my apartment in months. When I was first married, she used to drop by unannounced, until one day I suggested she should call ahead of time. Ever sihen, she has refused to e unless I issue an official invitation.
And so I watched her, seeing her rea to the ges in my apartment—from the pristine habitat I maintained after the divorce, when all of a sudden I had too much time to keep my life in order—to this present chaos, a home full of life and love. The hallway floor was littered with Shoshanas toys, all bright plastic things with scattered parts. There was a set of Richs barbells in the living room, two dirty snifters on the coffee table, the disemboweled remains of a phohat Shoshana and Rich took apart the other day to see where the voices came from.
"Its back here," I said. We kept walking, all the way to the back bedroom. The bed was unmade, dresser drawers were hanging out with socks and ties spilling over. My mother stepped over running shoes, more of Shoshanas toys, Richs black loafers, my scarves, a stack of white shirts just back from the ers.
Her look was one of painful denial, reminding me of a time long ago wheook my brothers and me down to a ic to get our polio booster shots. As the needle went into my brothers arm and he screamed, my mother looked at me with agony written all over her fad assured me, " one doesnt hurt."
But now, how could my mother not notice that we were living together, that this was serious and would not go away even if she didnt talk about it? She had to say something.
I went to the closet and then came back with a mink jacket that Rich had given me for Christmas. It was the most extravagant gift I had ever received.
I put the jacket on. "Its sort of a silly present," I said nervously. "Its hardly ever cold enough in San Francisco to wear mink. But it seems to be a fad, eople are buying their wives and girlfriends these days."
My mother was quiet. She was looking toward my open closet, bulging with racks of shoes, ties, my dresses, and Richs suits. She ran her fingers over the mink.
"This is not so good," she said at last. "It is just leftover strips. And the fur is too short, no long hairs."
"How you criticize a gift!" I protested. I was deeply wounded. "He gave me this from his heart."
"That is why I worry," she said.
And looking at the coat in the mirror, I couldnt fend off the strength of her will anymore, her ability to make me see black where there was once white, white where there was once black. The coat looked shabby, an imitation of romance.
"Arent you going to say anything else?" I asked softly.
"What I should say?"
"About the apartment? About this?" I gestured to all the signs of Rich lying about.
She looked around the room, toward the hall, and finally she said, "You have career. You are busy. You want to live like mess what I say?"
My mother knows how to hit a nerve. And the pain I feel is worse than any other kind of misery. Because what she does always es as a shock, exactly like aric jolt, that grounds itself permaly in my memory. I still remember the first time I felt it.
I was ten years old. Even though I was young, I knew my ability to play chess was a gift. It was effortless, so easy. I could see things on the chessboard that other people could not. I could create barriers to protect myself that were invisible to my oppos. And this gift gave me supreme fidence. I knew what my oppos would do, move for move. I k exactly oint their faces would fall when my seemingly simple and childlike strategy would reveal itself as a devastating and irrevocable course. I loved to win.
And my mother loved to show me off, like one of my many trophies she polished. She used to discuss my games as if she had devised the strategies.
"I told my daughter, Use your horses to ruhe enemy," she informed one shopkeeper. "She won very quickly this way." And of course, she had said this before the game—that and a huher useless things that had nothing to do with my winning.
To our family friends who visited she would fide, "You dont have to be so smart to win chess. It is just tricks. You blow from the North, South, East, a. The other person bees fused. They dont know which way to run."
I hated the way she tried to take all the credit. And one day I told her so, shouting at her on Sto Street, in the middle of a crowd of people. I told her she didnt know anything, so she shouldnt show off. She should shut up. Words to that effect.
That evening and the day she wouldnt speak to me. She would say stiff words to my father and brothers, as if I had bee invisible and she was talking about a rotten fish she had thrown away but which had left behind its bad smell.
I khis strategy, the sneaky way to get someoo pounce ba anger and fall into a trap. So I ignored her. I refused to speak and waited for her to e to me.
After many days had gone by in silence, I sat in my room, staring at the sixty-four squares of my chessboard, trying to think of another way. And thats when I decided to quit playing chess.
Of course I dido quit forever. At most, just for a few days. And I made a show of it. Instead of practig in my room every night, as I always did, I marched into the living room and sat down in front of the televisio with my brothers, who stared at me, an unwele intruder. I used my brothers to further my plan; I cracked my knuckles to annoy them.
"Ma!" they shouted. "Make her stop. Make her go away."
But my mother did not say anything.
Still I was not worried. But I could see I would have to make a stronger move. I decided to sacrifice a tourhat was ing up in one week. I would refuse to play in it. And my mother would certainly have to speak to me about this. Because the sponsors and the benevolent associations would start calling her, asking, shouting, pleading to make me play again.
And theour came a. And she did not e to me, g, "Why are you not playing chess?" But I was g inside, because I learhat a boy whom I had easily defeated on two other occasions had won.
I realized my mother knew more tricks than I had thought. But now I was tired of her game. I wao start practig for the our. So I decided to pretend to let her win. I would be the oo speak first.
"I am ready to play chess again," I annouo her. I had imagined she would smile and then ask me ecial thing I wao eat.
But instead, she gathered her fato a frown and stared into my eyes, as if she could fore kind of truth out of me.
"Why do you tell me this?" she finally said in sharp tones. "You think it is so easy. One day quit, day play. Everything for you is this way. So smart, so easy, so fast."
"I said Ill play," I whined.
"No!" she shouted, and I almost jumped out of my scalp. "It is not so easy anymore."
I was quivering, stunned by what she said, in not knowing what she meant. And then I went bay room. I stared at my chessboard, its sixty-four squares, to figure out how to undo this terrible mess. And after staring like this for many hours, I actually believed that I had made the white squares blad the black squares white, and everything would be all right.
And sure enough, I won her back. That night I developed a high fever, and she sat o my bed, scolding me foing to school without my sweater. In the m she was there as well, feeding me rice pe flavored with chi broth she had strained herself. She said she was feedihis because I had the chi pox and one chi knew how to fight another. And iernoon, she sat in a chair in my room, knitting me a pink sweater while telling me about a sweater that Auntie Suyuan had knit for her daughter June, and how it was most unattractive and of the worst yarn. I was so happy that she had bee her usual self.
But after I got well, I discovered that, really, my mother had ged. She no longer hovered over me as I practiced different chess games. She did not polish my trophies every day. She did not cut out the small neer item that mentioned my was as if she had erected an invisible wall and I was secretly groping each day to see how high and how wide it was.
At my our, while I had done well overall, in the end the points were not enough. I lost. And what was worse, my mother said nothing. She seemed to walk around with this satisfied look, as if it had happened because she had devised this strategy.
I was horrified. I spent many hours every day going over in my mind what I had lost. I k was not just the last tour. I examined every move, every piece, every square. And I could no longer see the secret ons of each piece, the magic withierse of each square. I could see only my mistakes, my weaknesses. It was as though I had lost my magic armor. And everybody could see this, where it was easy to attack me.
Over the few weeks and later months and years, I tio play, but never with that same feeling of supreme fidence. I fought hard, with fear and desperation. When I won, I was grateful, relieved. And when I lost, I was filled with growing dread, and then terror that I was no longer a prodigy, that I had lost the gift and had turned into someone quite ordinary.
When I lost twice to the boy whom I had defeated so easily a few years before, I stopped playing chess altogether. And nobody protested. I was fourteen.
"You know, I really dont uand you," said Marlene when I called her the night after I had shown my mother the mink jacket. "You tell the IRS to piss up a rope, but you t stand up to your own mother."
"I always io and then she says these little sneaky things, smoke bombs and little barbs, and…"
"Why dont you tell her to stop t you," said Marlene. "Tell her to stop ruining your life. Tell her to shut up."
"Thats hilarious," I said with a half-laugh. "You wao tell my mother to shut up?"
"Sure, why not?"
"Well, I dont know if its explicitly stated in the law, but you t ever tell a ese mother to shut up. You could be charged as an accessory to your own murder."
I wasnt so much afraid of my mother as I was afraid for Rich. I already knew what she would do, how she would attack him, how she would criticize him. She would be quiet at first. Then she would say a word about something small, something she had noticed, and then another word, and another, eae flung out like a little piece of sand, one from this dire, another from behind, more and more, until his looks, his character, his soul would have eroded away. And even if I reized her strategy, her sneak attack, I was afraid that some unseen speck of truth would fly into my eye, blur what I was seeing and transform him from the divine man I thought he was into someone quite mundane, mortally wounded with tiresome habits and irritating imperfes.
This happeo my first marriage, to Marvin , with whom I had eloped when I was eighteen and he was een. When I was in love with Marvin, he was nearly perfect. He graduated third in his class at Lowell and got a full scholarship to Stanford. He played tennis. He had bulging calf muscles and one hundred forty-six straight black hairs on his chest. He made everyone laugh and his own laugh was deep, sonorous, masely sexy. He prided himself on having favorite love positions for different days and hours of the week; all he had to whisper was "Wednesday afternoon" and Id shiver.
But by the time my mother had had her say about him, I saw his brain had shrunk from laziness, so that now it was good only for thinking up excuses. He chased golf and tennis balls to run away from family responsibilities. His eye wandered up and down irls legs, so he didnt know how to drive straight home anymore. He liked to tell big jokes to make other people feel little. He made a loud show of leaving ten-dollar tips ters but was stingy with presents to family. He thought waxing his red sports car all afternoon was more important t<dfn></dfn>han taking his wife somewhere in it.
My feelings for Marvin never reached the level of hate. No, it was worse in a way. It went from disappoio pt to apathetic boredom. It wasnt until after we separated, on nights when Shoshana was asleep and I was lonely, that I wondered if perhaps my mother had poisoned my marriage.
Thank God, her poison didnt affect my daughter, Shoshana. I almost aborted her, though. When I found out I regnant, I was furious. I secretly referred to my pregnancy as my "growiment," and I dragged Marvin down to the ic so he would have to suffer through this too. It turned out we went to the wrong kind of ic. They made us watch a film, a terrible bit of puritanical brainwash. I saw those little things, babies they called them even at s<var>藏书网</var>even weeks, and they had tiny, tiny fingers. And the film said that the babys translut fingers could move, that we should imagihem ging for life, grasping for a ce, this miracle of life. If they had shown anything else except tiny fingers—so thank God they did. Because Shoshana really was a miracle. She erfect. I found every detail about her to be remarkable, especially the way she flexed and curled her fingers. From the very moment she flung her fist away from her mouth to cry, I knew my feelings for her were inviolable.
But I worried for Rich. Because I knew my feelings for him were vulnerable to being felled by my mothers suspis, passing remarks, and innuendos. And I was afraid of what I would then lose, because Rich Schields adored me in the same way I adored Shoshana. His love was unequivocal. Nothing could ge it. He expected nothing from me; my mere existence was enough. And at the same time, he said that he had ged—for the better—because of me. He was embarrassingly romantic; he insisted he never was until he met me. And this fession made his romantic gestures all the more ennobling. At work, for example, when he would staple "FYI—For Your Information" o legal briefs and corporate returns that I had to review, he sighem at the bottom: "FYI—Forever You & I." The firm didnt know about our relationship, and so that kind of reckless behavior on his part thrilled me.
The sexual chemistry was what really surprised me, though. I thought hed be one of those quiet types who was awkwardly gentle and clumsy, the kind of mild-mannered guy who says, "Am I hurting you?" when I t feel a thing. But he was so attuo my every movement I was sure he was reading my mind. He had no inhibitions, and whatever ones he discovered I had hed pry away from me like little treasures. He saw all those private aspee—and I mean not just sexual private parts, but my darker side, my meanness, my pettiness, my self-loathing—all the things I kept hidden. So that with him I was pletely naked, and when I was, when I was feeling the most vulnerable—when the wrong word would have sent me flying out the door forever—he always said exactly the right thing at the right moment. He didnt allow me to cover myself up. He would grab my hands, look me straight in the eye and tell me something new about why he loved me.
Id never known love so pure, and I was afraid that it would bee sullied by my mother. So I tried to store every one of these endearments about Ri my memory, and I plao call upon them agaihe time was necessary.
After much thought, I came up with a brilliant plan. I cocted a way for Rieet my mother and win her over. In fact, I arra so my mother would want to cook a meal especially for him. I had some help from Auntie Suyuan. Auntie Su was my mothers friend from way back. They were very close, which meant they were ceaselessly tormenting each other with boasts as. And I gave Auntie Su a secret to boast about.
After walking through North Beae Sunday, I suggested to Rich that we stop by for a surprise visit to my Auntie Su and Uncle ing. They lived on Leavenworth, just a few blocks west of my mothers apartment. It was late afternoon, just in time to ca<dfn>.９9lｉｂ?</dfn>tch Auntie Su preparing Sunday dinner.
"Stay! Stay!" she had insisted.
"No, no. Its just that we were walking by," I said.
"Already cooked enough for you. See? One soup, four dishes. You do it, only have to throw it away. Wasted!"
How could we refuse? Three days later, Auntie Suyuan had a thank-you letter from Rid me. "Rich said it was the best ese food he has ever tasted," I wrote.
And the day, my mother called me, to invite me to a belated birthday dinner for my father. My brother Vi was bringing his girlfriend, Lisa Lum. I could bring a friend, too.
I knew she would do this, because cooking was how my mother expressed her love, her pride, her power, her proof that she knew more than Auntie Su. "Just be sure to tell her later that her cooking was the best you ever tasted, that it was far better than Auntie Sus," I told Rich. "Believe me."
The night of the dinner, I sat i watg her cook, waiting for the right moment to tell her about our marriage plans, that we had decided to get married July, about seven months away. She was chopping eggplant into wedges, chattering at the same time about Auntie Suyuan: "She only cook looking at a recipe. My instrus are in my fingers. I know what secret ingredients to put in just by using my nose!" And she was slig with such a ferocity, seemingly iive to her sharp cleaver, that I was afraid her fiips would bee one of the ingredients of the red-cooked eggplant and shredded pork dish.
I was hoping she would say something first about Rich. I had seen her expression when she opehe door, her forced smile as she scrutinized him from head to toe, cheg her appraisal of him against that already given to her by Auntie Suyuan. I tried to anticipate what criticisms she would have.
Rich was not only not ese, he was a few years youhan I was. And unfortunately, he looked much younger with his curly red hair, smooth pale skin, and the splash e freckles across his nose. He was a bit on the short side, pactly built. In his dark business suits, he looked easily fettable, like somebodys a funeral. Which was why I didnt notice him the first year we worked together at the firm. But my mother noticed everything.
"So what do you think of Rich?" I finally asked, holding my breath.
She tossed the eggplant i oil and it made a loud, angry hissing sound. "So many spots on his face," she said.
I could feel the pinpriy back. "Theyre freckles. Freckles are good luck, you know," I said a bit too heatedly in trying to raise my voice above the din of the kit.
"Oh?" she said ily.
"Yes, the more spots the better. Everybody knows that."
She sidered this a mo<big></big>ment and then smiled and spoke in ese: "Maybe this is true. When you were young, you got the chi pox. So many spots, you had to stay home for ten days. So lucky, you thought."
I couldnt save Ri the kit. And I couldnt save him later at the diable.
He had brought a bottle of French wine, something he did not know my parents could not appreciate. My parents did not even own wineglasses. And then he also made the mistake of drinking not o two frosted glasses full, while everybody else had a half-inch "just for taste."
When I offered Rich a fork, he insisted on using the slippery ivory chopsticks. He held them splayed like the knoeed legs of an ostrich while pig up a large k of sauce-coated eggplant. Halfway between his plate and his open mouth, the k fell on his crisp white shirt and then slid into his crotch. It took several mio get Shoshana to stop shrieking with laughter.
And then he had helped himself to big portions of the shrimp and snow peas, not realizing he should have taken only a polite spoonful, until everybody had had a morsel.
He had deed the saut閑d new greens, the tender and expensive leaves of bean plants plucked before the sprouts turn into beans. And Shoshana refused to eat them also, pointing to Rich: "He didhem! He didhem!"
He thought he was being polite by refusing seds, when he should have followed my fathers example, who made a big show of taking small portions of seds, thirds, and even fourths, always saying he could not resist another bite of something or other, and then groaning that he was so full he thought he would burst.
But the worst was when Rich criticized my mothers cooking, and he didnt even know what he had done. As is the ese cooks y mother always made disparaging remarks about her own cooking. That night she chose to direct it toward her famous steamed pork and preserved vegetable dish, which she always served with special pride.
"Ai! This dish not salty enough, no flavor," she plained, after tasting a small bite. "It is too bad to eat."
This was our familys cue to eat some and proclaim it the best she had ever made. But before we could do so, Rich said, "You know, all it needs is a little soy sauce." And he proceeded to pour a riverful of the salty black stuff on the platter, right before my mothers horrified eyes.
And even though I was hoping throughout the dihat my mother would somehow see Richs kindness, his sense of humor and boyish charm, I knew he had failed miserably in her eyes.
Rich obviously had had a different opinion on how the evening had gone. Whe home that night, after we put Shoshana to bed, he said modestly, "Well. I thi it off A-o-kay." He had the look of a dalmatian, panting, loyal, waiting to be petted.
"Uh-hmm," I said. I utting on an old nightgown, a hint that I was not feeling amorous. I was still shuddering, remembering how Rich had firmly shaken both my parents hands with that same easy familiarity he used with nervous new ts. "Linda, Tim," he said, "well see you again soon, Im sure." My parents names are Lindo and Tin Jong, and nobody, except a few older family friends, ever calls them by their first names.
"So what did she say when you told her?" And I knew he was referring tetting married. I had told Rich earlier that I would tell my mother first a her break the o my father.
"I never had a ce," I said, which was true. How could I have told my mother I was getting married, when at every possible moment we were alone, she seemed to remark on how much expensive wine Rich liked to drink, or how pale and ill he looked, or how sad Shoshana seemed to be.
Rich was smiling. "How long does it take to say, Mom, Dad, Im getting married?"
"You dont uand. You dont uand my mother<cite></cite>."
Rich shook his head. "Whew! You say that again. Her English was so bad. You know, when she was talking about that dead guy showing up on Dynasty, I thought she was talking about something that happened in a a long time ago."
That night, after the dinner, I lay iense. I was despairing over this latest failure, made worse by the fact that Rich seemed blind to it all. He looked so pathetic. So pathetic, those words! My mother was doing it again, making me see black where I once saw white. In her hands, I always became the pawn. I could only run away. And she was the queen, able to move in all dires, relentless in her pursuit, always able to find my weakest spots.
I woke up late, with teeth ched and every nerve on edge. Rich was already up, showered, and reading the Sunday paper. "M, doll," he said between noisy munches of flakes. I put on my jogging clothes and headed out the dot into the car, and drove to my parents apartment.
Marlene was right. I had to tell my mother—that I knew what she was doing, her scheming ways of making me miserable. By the time I arrived, I had enough ao fend off a thousand flying cleavers.
My father opehe door and looked surprised to see me. "Wheres Ma?" I asked, trying to keep my breath even. He gestured to the living room in back.
I found her sleeping soundly on the sofa. The back of her head was resting on a white embroidered doily. Her mouth was slad all the lines in her face were gone. With her smooth face, she looked like a young girl, frail, guileless, and i. One arm hung limply down the side of the sofa. Her chest was still. All her strength was gone. She had no ons, no demons surrounding her. She looked powerless. Defeated.
And then I was seized with a fear that she looked like this because she was dead. She had died when I was having terrible thoughts about her. I had wished her out of my life, and she had acquiesced, floating out of her body to escape my terrible hatred.
"Ma!" I said sharply. "Ma!" I whined, starting to cry.
And her eyes slowly opened. She blinked. Her hands moved with life. "Shemma? Meimei-ah? Is that you?"
I eechless. She had not called me Meimei, my childhood name, in many years. She sat up and the lines in her face returned, only now they seemed less harsh, soft creases of worry. "Why are you here? Why are y? Something has happened!"
I didnt know what to do or say. In a matter of seds, it seemed, I had gone from being angered by her strength, to being amazed by her innoce, and then frightened by her vulnerability. And now I felt numb, strangely weak, as if someone had unplugged me and the current running through me had stopped.
"Nothings happened. Nothings the matter. I dont know why Im here," I said in a hoarse voice. "I wao talk to you….I wao tell you…Rid I are getting married."
I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting to hear her protests, her laments, the dry voice delivering some sort of painful verdict.
"Jrdaule"—I already know this—she said, as if to ask why I was tellihis again.
"You know?"
"Of course. Even if you didnt tell me," she said simply.
This was worse than I had imagined. She had known all along, when she criticized the mink jacket, when she belittled his freckles and plained about his drinking habits. She disapproved of him. "I know you hate him," I said in a quavering voice. "I know you think hes not good enough, but I…"
"Hate? Why do you think I hate your future husband?"
"You never want to talk about him. The other day, when I started to tell you about him and Shoshana at the Exploratorium, you…you ged the subject…you started talking about Dads exploratory surgery and then…"
"What is more important, explore fun or explore siess?"
I wasnt going to let her escape this time. "And then when you met him, you said he had spots on his face."
She looked at me, puzzled. "Is this not true?"
"Yes, but, you said it just to be mean, to hurt me, to…"
"Ai-ya, why do you think these bad things about me?" Her face looked old and full of sorrow. "So you think your mother is this bad. You think I have a secret meaning. But it is you who has this meaning. Ai-ya! She thinks I am this bad!" She sat straight and proud on the sofa, her mouth clamped tight, her hands clasped together, her eyes sparkling with angry tears.
Oh, her strength! her weakness!—both pulling me apart. My mind was flying one way, my heart another. I sat down on the sofa o her, the two of us stri by the other.
I felt as if I had lost a battle, but ohat I didnt know I had been fighting. I was weary. "Im going home," I finally said. "Im not feeling too ght now."
"You have bee ill?" she murmured, putting her hand on my forehead.
"No," I said. I wao leave. "I…I just dont know whats inside me right now."
"Then I will tell you," she said simply. And I stared at her. "Half of everything inside you," she explained in ese, "is from your fathers side. This is natural. They are the Jong , tonese people. Good, ho people. Although sometimes they are bad-tempered and stingy. You know this from your father, how he be unless I remind him."
And I was thinking to myself, Why is she tellihis? What does this have to do with anything? But my mother tio speak, smiling broadly, sweeping her hand. "And half of everything inside you is from me, your mothers side, from the Sun in Taiyuan." She wrote the characters out on the back of an envelope, fetting that I ot read ese.
"We are a smart people, very strong, tricky, and famous for winning wars. You know Sun Yat-sen, hah?"
I nodded.
"He is from the Sun . But his family moved to the south mauries ago, so he is ly the same . My family has always live in Taiyuan, from before the days of even Sun Wei. Do you know Sun Wei?"
I shook my head. And although I still didnt know where this versation was going, I felt soothed. It seemed like the first time we had had an almost normal versation.
"He went to battle with Genghis Khan. And when the Mongol soldiers shot at Sun Weis warriors—heh!—their arrows bounced off the shields like rain on stone. Sun Wei had made a kind of armor s Genghis Khan believed it was magic!"
"Genghis Khan must have ied some magic arrows, then," I said. "After all, he quered a."
My mother acted as if she hadnt heard me right. "This is true, we always know how to win. So now you know what is inside you, almost all good stuff from Taiyuan."
"I guess weve evolved to just winning ioy aronics market," I said.
"How do you know this?" she asked eagerly.
"You see it ohing. Made in Taiwan."
"Ai!" she cried loudly. "Im not from Taiwan!"
And just like that, the fragile e we were starting to build snapped.
"I was born in a, in Taiyuan," she said. "Taiwan is not a."
"Well, I only thought you said Taiwan because it sounds the same," I argued, irritated that she set by su uional mistake.
"Sound is pletely different! try is pletely different!" she said in a huff. "People there only dream that it is a, because if you are ese you ever let go of a in your mind."
We sank into silence, a stalemate. And then her eyes lighted up. "Now listen. You also say the name of Taiyuan is Bing. Everyone from that city calls it that. Easier for you to say. Bing, it is a niame."
She wrote down the character, and I nodded as if this made everything perfectly clear. "The same as here," she added in English. "You call Apple for New York. Frisco for San Francisco."
"Nobody calls San Francisco that!" I said, laughing. "People who call it that dont know aer."
"Now you uand my meaning," said my mother triumphantly.
I smiled.
And really, I did uand finally. Not what she had just said. But what had been true all along.
I saw what I had been fighting for: It was for me, a scared child, who had run away a long time ago to what I had imagined was a safer place. And hiding in this place, behind my invisible barriers, I knew what lay oher side: Her side attacks. Her secret ons. Her uny ability to find my weakest spots. But in the brief instant that I had peered over the barriers I could finally see what was really there: an old woman, a wok for her armor, a knitting needle for her swetting a little crabby as she waited patiently for her daughter to invite her in.
Rid I have decided to postpone our wedding. My mother says July is not a good time to go to a on our honeymoon. She knows this because she and my father have just returned from a trip to Beijing and Taiyuan.
"It is too hot in the summer. You will only grow more spots and then your whole face will bee red!" she tells Rich. And Rich grins, gestures his thumb toward my mother, and says to me, " you believe what es out of her mouth? Now I know where you get your sweet, tactful nature."
"You must go in October. That is the best time. Not too hot, not too cold. I am thinking of going back then too," she says authoritatively. And then she hastily adds: "Of course not with you!"
I laugh nervously, and Rich jokes: "Thatd be great, Lindo. You could translate all the menus for us, make sure were ing snakes s by mistake." I almost kick him.
"No, this is not my meaning," insists my mother. "Really, I am not asking."
And I know what she really means. She would love to go to a with us. And I would hate it. Three weeks worth of her plaining about dirty chopsticks and cold soup, three meals a day—well, it would be a disaster.
Yet part of me also thinks the whole idea makes perfect sehe three of us, leaving our differences behind, stepping on the plaogether, sitting side by side, lifting off, movio reach the East.
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