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Dept. of English
Humanities Building
SUNY at Stony Brook
Stony Brook, NY 11794-5350
Site Designed by Melissa Bishop/DoIT Last Modified 03/10/2003 09:31:13 AM EST
© Amy Yee
Amy Yee
After all the dishes have been washed, my mother will push the kitchen window open a little higher, switch off the overhead light and ease herself into a chair by the table. Passing through the kitchen to go the bathroom, I will ask her repeatedly, why she doesn't turn the light on and what she is doing, only to be met with silence. Of course I know what she is doing because I've seen it many times before. Sometimes she puts her feet up, pulls at her bottom lip, or more often, her eyes will look into the dark corners of the kitchen, mind far away. She sits in the dark and contemplates...what? I can only imagine.
*****
It was another fight at dinner time. It all started off fine, normal, which leads to even more puzzlement when one tries to figure out what led to the whole mess in the first place. Ha ha, this is a funny thing, because in order to understand what led to this, one would have to go back thirty years when my parents immigrated from Hong Kong, or thirty five years when my mother was a teenager, or sixty years to understand my grandfather, who shaped who my mother is who in turn has shaped who I am and probably what happened forty minutes ago.
It is Friday night and Victor was watching Star Trek as he does every Friday night. He has to be called two, three, usually four times before he will grudgingly turn off the set to come eat dinner, leaving the recording mechanism of the VCR to whisper to itself. I scoop out the thick white rice into bowls and Victor and I start helping ourselves to salmon and scallions and vegetables which are still steaming. My mother has already started to scrub out the familiar wok, which is older than my brother, and to wash the other extra dishes. Through mouthfuls of fish and rice, my brother and I tell her to come to the table to eat -- we will wash the dishes later -- but to no avail. She eventually sets the last dish upside down in the rack to dry, turns the stream of water off and exits the kitchen grumbling to herself that she is now going to use the bathroom which she hasn't had time to use all day.
The dinner is delicious but Victor and I take it for granted; he is eating quickly so he can go back to watching his beloved Star Trek; I'm busy thinking about going out with Tally and Karen later on to catch a movie. My mother sits down at last and promptly begins to channel rice from her bowl in a steady stream with a speed that is almost alarming. Through her inhalations of food she lets out a few grunts and murmurs of approval.
"Ah, the rice is very good!" she says in Chinese. "Don't you think so?" She slurps loudly from her mug of tea. "Aahh!" she says contentedly. We usually don't like to give in so easily to her probes for compliments, but the food is good so I agree, but for some reason I have to do it in a curt way. I immediately regret my short answer but it seems like I cannot respond in any other way. Victor observes that the rice is too sticky and that the salmon is too salty. He doesn't realize that mom prepared the dinner at 6:30 this morning, raked some leaves, rushed to work, was almost late opening the vault, bought some groceries during her lunch hour, rode the train for forty minutes to get home and cook dinner early because she knew I was going out that night. I know that she raked leaves this morning because I heard the grating sound of metal against pavement and the crackle of dead leaves from the warmth of my bed.
As the food begins to fill her belly, her tired shoulders start to relax. Last night when she was in a good mood, she told us the latest installment about a customer at the bank named Eunice. The woman is large, probably a size 30, has graying hair, wears disheveled skirts with large moon boots year round and carries several plastic bags upon one plump wrist. The woman would be fairly unremarkable on the streets of Boston were it not for her particularly full salt-and-pepper beard.
Eunice frequents the bank several times a week, just to lounge in the chairs by the bank's window and scowl at the other customers, or occasionally to ask about her saving account and the status of her $69,532 dollars and 24 cents. Yesterday afternoon Eunice came in and marched directly to my mother's desk (my mother says that Eunice has claimed her as her favorite bank personnel) to show her a bank statement that she had gotten in the mail. She reached an arm into one of the bags wrapped around her wrist looking for the elusive piece of paper. During her rummaging, several items escaped from the bag. Spare change, rolls of half-unwrapped Lifesavers, crumpled soiled Kleenex, and to the extreme discomfort of the other customers who watched her warily, several tampons and Maxi-pads wrapped in gentile pink pouches fell to the floor. "Oops," said Eunice scooping the contents back into her bag. Without a thought, she began to gesture at the bank statement that she finally located.
Around the dinner table, Victor and I hooted with laughter and gasped for breath. Punctuated with her own chuckles, my mother finished her story and poised her chopsticks to shovel more rice into her mouth.
Tonight I expect typical tales of the irate customers my mother has had to deal with all day long. More college students who have lost their bank cards and demand cash for the weekend and students from the music school who want to open a checking account with five dollars who insist that a school yearbook is a valid form of ID. This is the usual fare and if we are lucky, we might be treated to a story about a customer who stormed out the glass door, cursing the bank and all its workers to hell because they would not cash his check. I am worried though, because my mother is strangely silent and unresponsive to my attempts to start conversation. Victor starts talking about a computer program that his friend Alan has and the external hard drive that could increase the memory of the hard drive of his computer by so many K...it costs three hundred dollars. There is silence. I don't even look up from my bowl. "What do you need that for? Give me a break," I say bitterly.
I wonder how he can have the nerve to ask for, much less think about asking, this stupid computer gadget which he clearly does not need. The phone rings and Victor pushes his chair back from the table and says hastily, "I'll get it." He closes the kitchen door behind him and talks in low tones behind the door so that we cannot hear what he is saying. My mother and I continue eating in silence until Victor hangs up the phone and returns to the dinner table. Victor mentions the external hard drive again.
My mother says quietly, "Why don't you pay me back the eight hundred dollars first."
Victor looks startled. He asks slowly, "What are you talking about?" I brace myself, like a soldier who hears the whistle of a shell overhead and is waiting for its impact.
"You know what I'm talking about." My mother sounds so tired at that moment that my heart twinges. "When are you going to pay me back the eight hundred dollars," she says again. Victor hasn't moved and sits there staring at my mother blankly. "Don't tell me you don't know what I'm talking about. Yin-Yee told me what happened." I recall the long talk that my mother had last night with our aunt in California which had lasted past midnight.
The story gradually comes out. Four years ago Victor had called my aunt in desperation because she was the only one he could turn to, so he told her. He needed eight hundred dollars to pay for a bad credit card bill which he had used to pay for the pagers that he rented to people in one of his 'quick money' plans. The plan fell through and the pager company demanded their money or else he would be reported to a credit agency. So Victor called Yin-Yee who is the first in our family to graduate from college and make a good professional living as a pharmacist in southern California. Suddenly I remembered the rapport they had seemed to spontaneously develop four years ago: their frequent telephone conversations, and her inquiries about how Victor was doing. Things began to fall into place.
The exchange between Victor and Yin-Yee was supposed to have been kept a secret -- and it was a secret from our family on the East coast. Meanwhile, the information quietly seeped from aunt to uncle to aunt to grandfather and grandmother in Los Angeles in hushed tones, surprised ejaculations of "Aiya!" It was a secret that was tacitly kept on the West coast, referred only in the most subtle, delicate ways between the relatives. For four years a ballistic missile had hovered over our shelter without our knowing it, and finally began its rapid descent when my aunt told my mother last night over the phone about Victor.
My mother speaks to him quietly, her voice filled with resignation. Victor opens his mouth only to brusquely respond to my mother's questions with monosyllabic answers because he has no other choice. He stops eating and just sits there as if he has become part of the wooden chair, and stares back at my mother defiantly. With each minute of Victor's reticence, my mother withdraws from her listlessness and grows increasingly angry. She slips into a slurred mixture of Chinese and English as her voice grows shriller and angrier.
Stupidsonyouaresostupiddoyouwnattokillmewithallthetroubleandheartacethatyoucauseme?
doyouknowhowhumilatediam?everyoneknewexceptmeilooklikesuchafooliamsoashamed&humiliated
whatwereyoudoing?whatwereyouthinking?doyouknowhowharditistomakeeighthundreddollars?
yourfatherandiworksohardyoudontevenrealizewhydon'twejustdieiknowyouwanttokillmeiworkso
hardandyoudothistometenyearsagoineverwouldhavethoughtthatyouwouldbethiswayalltheteachers
saytosaveupmoneyforyoutogotoagoodcollegebecauseyouweresuchasmartboybehavedsowelland
wonallthoseawardsandnowlookatyouwasteofmoneysohardearnedgoodfornothingyoudon'teven
haveajobwhenareyougoingtogetajob?whatdididotodeservethis?iworksohardeverydayanddontask
foranythingbutyoubehavesostupidlydoyouevenrealizeareyouevensorrytheymustthinki'materrible
motherohohohohiamsoahsamed
I have heard it all before many times but this doesn't make it less painful. My brother doesn't even look sorry, doesn't attempt to apologize or explain; he is no longer my ally, but the object of my hate. He only stares at my mother with blank defiance. My mother continues speaking and words stream from her mouth. Her face has become quite red and distressed. Her voice has gotten thick and I pray to god that she doesn't begin crying. Anything but that. I get up and close the window and the door in front of the screen door to spare the neighbors the heated words floating out into the night like the smell of blackened toast.
My mother asks Why? Why? in Chinese and brings her hand down hard on the table top so that the porcelain dishes jump and chatter. Victor has had enough. He gets up and snatches his dishes in short, angry movements. He has learned a lot during these kinds of encounters and is an experienced veteran by now. In the past he would have retorted something like 'All you care about is what other people think' or, 'There was no way I could have told you anything that goes on in my life'. To him, my mother is the enemy who didn't want him to have a girlfriend (so he got one) was afraid of him falling in with the wrong crowd (which he did) and pushed him into engineering at Boston University (which he flunked). To Victor, my mother is the cause of his discontents. She inflames the situation even more with her tirades and moralizing lectures which have only the opposite of their intended effects.
On his beloved computer he printed out slips of paper with the letters IHMM twenty, thirty times across in bold print and placed them in strategic spots around the house: on his bathroom mirror, on his computer, in his books. One day I had reached the top of the stairs and spotted one of those signs taped to the banister and in an epiphany, suddenly realized what those letters stood for: I Hate My Mother. I asked him about it later and he had looked at me, raised his eyebrows and said, "Very good." So now instead of arguing back, he says nothing, zones out my mother's words the way you would a boring church sermon and concentrates on those slips of paper to alleviate his anger.
Victor piles the dishes in the sink and washes them quickly. All the while my mother is still sitting in the same spot and still going on, asking what she did to deserve all this. Victor leaves the kitchen, retreats back to the television room where Star Trek has already ended. I remain in the kitchen because I feel too guilty to leave, as though I must be the receptacle for my mother's words. She turns to me and starts addressing me as if I were Victor: youaresostupidiworksohardyourfatherworkssohardwearegoing
todiefromheartachewheredidigowrongiworksohardtomakeapennywhyhaveyounosenseloud enough so my brother in the other room can hear. I say to her "Mom, please," and plead for her to stop but she keeps going anyway. "Mom, please, I didn't do anything wrong," and then louder "MOM, PLEASE!" until I am yelling at her to shut up and I have to leave the kitchen and slam the door of my room to block the sound of her voice that is still droning.
I sit on the corner of my bed for a long time. I hold the stuffed dog I've had since first grade and rub his ear, worn down to faded threads, with my index finger. I stare at the soothing green of the carpet and
it is 1983 and I am in third grade. I have just gotten into another fight with Victor and my arm pulses where he has hit me and I imagine the broken blood vessels which will flower into a beautiful violet bruise. My anger is so great I don't know what to do with myself. I try to figure out how tonight's fight got started and cannot remember anything but a dispute over whether to watch the Love Boat or Fantasy Island and then him shaking me and hitting me. There is nothing I could say or do to express my hatred. This has happened before and I know it is no use to cry or scream or kick. Instead I get up and go to my parents room where my mother is lying in bed reading the newspaper covered with vertical rows of black scratches. I stand hanging my head, waiting for her to say something, to ask me what has happened. For ten minutes, twenty, thirty minutes, a lifetime for an eight year with no attention span, I stand very still.
I concentrate on my foot which sinks into the plush green carpet, and try to push it deeper and deeper into the floor. I wait and I wait. More time passes. It is mind over matter for me to remain completely still. I try not to blink or breathe and will my heartbeat to slow. The only thing I cling to at that moment is the idea that my footprint, a perfect outline of my bare foot, will be permanently emblazoned into the carpet. Finally, I lift my head as my mother rustles the newspaper. What are you doing? she asks me over the top of the newsprint. The throb in the side of my arm has become just a dull ache. I lift my foot and though I hope my concentration has created a footprint of blue flame or some other indication of my extraordinary concentration, I am not that surprised when the green threads only begin to spring upright again, erasing the imprint of my foot. My mother turns back to the newspaper.
The springs in the mattress creak softly as I readjust my perch on the corner of my bed. It is
1981. It is summertime and I am a six year old obsessed with the notion of death. For the past few weeks I have tried to reconcile within me the idea that everything must die, and even worse, that my parents will someday die. I spend my time praying to my six-year-old idea of god that my parents will be reincarnated into nice animals after they have died and they will live long lives before that time comes. Every day when my father leaves for work I watch him walk down the end of the street until his figure grows tiny and turns the corner. When my mother comes home from work and cooks dinner, I stand near her side, my head at her waist, though she warns me away as she chops ginger on the wood block with the big cleaver.
Tonight my mother sits on the back porch by the screen door of the kitchen. It is twilight, not yet dark, when the top of the sky is a deep plum blended seamlessly with inky black and the stars have not yet emerged for the night. Dinner has been eaten and all the dishes are washed and we wait for my father to come home from work. Victor, in his fourth grade baseball craze, is watching the Red Sox on television. The sound of the crack of a bat and a crowd cheering drift out into the night. The air is redolent of apples ripening on the tree in the corner of the yard. Chinese melons and green beans in the small garden grow almost audibly in the warm night air, their light green tendrils wrap around wooden stakes in the ground. I climb into my mother's lap and we watch the sky, waiting for the stars to come out. My mother hums a song that she learned when she was a teenager, "I don't want to say good-bye for the summer/darling I promise you this/I'll send you all my love/everyday a let-ter/sealed with a kiss..." and for some reason this reminds me once more of death and I begin to cry. I try to watch for the first star to peep out so that I can make a wish on it, but my vision has become so blurred with tears, the bright pinpoints in the sky are no longer distinct. I can't remember which star was the first one to come out because now the sky is filled with small pricks of illumination. I cry even harder. My mother asks me what is wrong and strokes my black hair and holds me tight. I think to myself that if there is a god, death cannot be possible because the love I feel inside of me is too strong and hurts too much to be snuffed out like a tiny candle flame.
*****
The minute hand on my clock has moved ahead thirty minutes in the space of just a few seconds, a phenomenon that seems to happen all too often lately. I have to meet Tally and Karen soon and I wonder how I will be able to sit through some trite movie about hormonal teenagers. No doubt they have come from dinners where parents and children talked together, civilized and normal. No doubt they will ask me why I am so quiet. I wouldn't dream of telling them (no one would understand) so I will tell them that I am tired.
I reassure myself that by tomorrow it will all be better, we'll joke and laugh and the tension in the house that is so thick right now will dissolve -- until the next time. I gaze at the pile of catalogs stacked on the floor from colleges telling me to attend their schools. The pictures of Gothic dormitories, safe and serene, tantalize me. Not too much longer, I tell myself. I can hang on for less than a year. I wonder how Victor could have wasted his chance for freedom.
I open the door and pass the kitchen as I head toward the bathroom. The kitchen window is open again and so is the door in front of the screen door. The only light comes from the porch light outside which has acquired a halo of fluttering moths and a breeze lifts the flowered curtains gently. And of course, my mother sits in the darkness of the kitchen, silent and still.
In the bathroom I stare at myself in the mirror and wait to cry but no tears come. I study the face which everyone says looks like hers. My eyes are large and dark and the corners of my mouth droop downward casting my whole face down making me look much older than sixteen. What is she thinking when she just sits like that for hours? I ask my reflection silently. Does she regret the way her life has turned out? Regret the trouble and hardship that fate has dealt her? Once she was beautiful, I know from the old photo albums. I know she is smart because she continues to surprise and impress me. Once she had hopes and dreams too. And what does she have to show for all that? Victor and I, form her world and she forms ours -- this idea scares me when I think of how little we give back to her in return. My heart lurches when I think about some novel I have read where a mother jumped into an airplane, disappeared into the blue sky and abandoned her two children, a boy and a girl. No, it would not happen, I reassure myself. Without us she would no longer be a wife, a mother, a self-sacrificing Chinese immigrant -- she would be a woman and a human being with her own sense of regret and longing. There is something wrong with this logic though...My mind grapples with the idea, then gives up and releases it. All I know is this: There is no justice in life when a woman squints her Chinese eyes in the dark and tries to imagine what could have been, when what she has done is just taken for granted. No, she won't ever fly away because she was tethered to the ground long ago by a tangled rope. She can only imagine what it would be like to disappear into the peaceful blue sky there in the dark of the kitchen. And here I am, free to take flight with no idea where to go.
Outside I hear the telephone ring and I know it is Karen calling me because I am late as usual. I let it ring because I cannot move. I am leaning against the cool porcelain of the sink, absorbed with the pattern of tiles on the bathroom floor, trying to comprehend the order of the black and white pentagons which fit so neatly together. I hear my mother rouse herself from the security of the dark kitchen and the phone stops ringing.
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