twenty-five
What was the significance of an orange marble anyway?
After school, I went home and dug out my jewelry box. I knew exactly where it was, in one of my unpacked crates tucked in
the closet. It was there with a bunch of other things that were important but not important enough to be taken out immediately.
Easily relegated to later months, with much less urgency.
The box was carved walnut-colored wood with a painted panel on the lid. I had owned it for so long, I didn’t remember where
I had gotten it from. When I’d packed for the move, I had just wrapped a couple of rubber bands around it and put it in the
crate without looking inside.
I peeled off the rubber bands now and opened the lid.
Inside, there was a xiang bao, a good fortune–embroidered sachet with a strong musky scent; my gold and jade jewelry; a string of pearls Mama had given me; and the marble.
I took it out and rolled it around between my finger and thumb.
It felt cool against my skin. It was still vibrant as ever in the light.
I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. I thought about returning it at school or mailing it to him. But I couldn’t
decide. I didn’t understand why he had left it with me, or why he was bringing it up now.
I thought back to the night before school started and how nervous he was. That long hug at the end. And then I realized. He
had been saying goodbye. All along, he had known what he was going to do.
I couldn’t put off calling my parents any longer. The application deadline had come and gone—the whole reason they’d held
off on buying my plane ticket back to China—and I had to let them in on what I’d decided.
This time, Mama picked up right away. She was in Nai Nai’s apartment, and she was alone.
“Where’s Baba?” I asked.
“At the hospital.” She must’ve seen something tight in my expression. “She is no worse. He and your aunts are taking turns
being there, just in case.”
Just in case , hanging precariously in the air like three glass ornaments on a wire.
“Are you back in school? Are you eating okay?” she asked. “There are frozen bao zi in the freezer. Two containers of beef
stock. You can buy some bok choi and make noodles for yourself.”
I was comforted by this familiar territory.
Mama pushing food, me reassuring her that I was eating enough, that things were going okay.
I was good at placating her anxiety with continual promises of being the child she wanted me to be.
It was almost enough for me to go along with.
Not now, I thought. Tomorrow, maybe. In person, maybe.
But I would have to do it eventually. I might as well do it now.
“I went back to school. I’m caught up.”
“Good, good. Your baba and I, we just wanted to make sure you took care of everything before coming back here.”
“But, Ma, I have something important to tell you.”
She immediately pulled herself taut. “What is it?”
Even as there was no going back from my plan, even as I’d committed to talking to my mother, I found the words catching in
my throat. Sam and I had fully internalized the task of pouring ourselves into premade molds. I had never once in my life
told her anything difficult. Everything hard, it seemed, took practice.
“Remember what I told you and Baba before about not wanting to go to college?” I said.
“Oh,” she said, her face clouding over. “We were all tired then. We had just taken Nai Nai to the hospital. Your baba should’ve
been gentler, I know. He shouldn’t have raised his voice.”
“I didn’t send in my applications.”
There was a moment in which she seemed to be struggling to even process what I had said.
Then her eyes fluttered closed. I could see the tumultuous turning in her mind, the way she was imagining a future destroyed.
The crisp, bright fear reflected outward.
“Why didn’t you talk to us? Why didn’t you tell us beforehand? ”
“I tried. You didn’t listen,” I said. “And I don’t know how to talk to you. I don’t know how to talk about anything real.”
“Mei mei,” she said, so quietly I could barely hear her.
“You never call me that anymore. You stopped calling me that after ge ge died. It made me sad.”
She was crying. My mother never cried openly. I’d heard of it only from Auntie Yang or muffled through the wood of double
doors in their master suite.
“It made me sad too,” she said.
“I miss him. We moved away. We put all his stuff in boxes. It’s like he was never even here. I was never a little sister.”
Mama hesitated, wiping her cheeks hastily. “It hurts too much. Your baba and I... maybe we did it wrong. But we didn’t
know how else to keep going.” The words sounded awkward coming out of her mouth. I could tell she was uncomfortable even mentioning
her grief.
I felt the same. I felt as though I wanted to climb out of my own skin. We were so bad at this.
I had told Alan that there was nothing to tell about my love life so far. It had been true, but I’d had little crushes here
and there, people I’d wanted to know better. With each of them, whenever someone would get close to me, I’d find some way
to put some distance between us. Emotionally unavailable , I’d read online when looking for an answer for my behavior. That was me. But how could I have learned to be any other way?
“Wait,” she said. She put the phone down.
I stared at the white popcorn ceiling that the camera faced. I heard her blow her nose heavily.
She picked me back up. “Sometimes, I wonder if any of this was worth it,” she confessed.
“What do you mean?”
Her eyes flickered back and forth. She couldn’t quite look at me directly. “When you and your brother were young, still in
China, our house was so quiet. I hated it. You can’t understand what it’s like to give birth to babies and then one day, hear
nothing but silence at home. It’s not natural. I told myself it would be okay in the end. Everyone said it would be. You would
come here when you were older and we had money. We would be so happy together. But when you came, it wasn’t anything like
I thought it would be. I didn’t know you at all. I assumed I would always know you, because I am your mother. I thought the
love and connection would come automatically. And I did love you. Of course I loved you. But the rest of it—it was hard.”
She said all of this almost in one long breath. Rapidly, as if she were trying to get it all out before she lost the words.
I didn’t want to interrupt her. This was the most I could remember her ever saying to me about herself. The conversation between
us seemed like a gossamer web. If I moved too much or spoke too loudly, it would tear.
What she said drew a memory from a hollow, shameful place within me that I had mostly filled in as I grew older.
And her honesty finally made me feel as though I could admit my worst feelings too.
“Sam and I used to think you weren’t our real parents.
You seemed so barely interested in knowing us that we thought you were fakers.
We used to look for evidence around the house.
In the drawers, in old photo albums. Thinking we might find something that gave us a clue to who our real parents were. We even once made plans to run away.”
She looked at me, her eyes deep and glistening—the same eyes I had, with the same shape and placement on our faces. “I wish
I had never let you go. Maybe none of this would have happened.”
I realized that she was talking about Sam’s overdose. That she felt, in some fundamental way, like her lack of mothering had
left him adrift. That if she had raised us, maybe she could’ve saved him.
We were all shouldering that guilt. The undeniable specter haunting us about what we could’ve done. Maybe I was at fault,
for not spilling his secret when it could’ve made a difference. Maybe Mama was at fault, for making him feel as though he
couldn’t tell anybody himself. We had failed him, all of us, in one way or another.
It was strange, but I had never felt as close to Mama as I did now.
She gave me a wistful look. “You know, sometimes I am jealous of Nai Nai. She was doing us a favor, but I couldn’t help but
feel like she was stealing you away. I was always afraid you loved her more than me.”
These were things she could never say to me in front of Baba, since it was his family and not hers.
“That’s not true.” But even as I said it, I wondered if she was right. Those early days in the beginning, I always dreamed
about returning to China. I missed Nai Nai so badly. It would be a lie to say I hadn’t ever fantasized about trading my parents
for her.
Nai Nai, who had held us while we slept as toddlers. Nai Nai, whose gentle wrinkled hands wrapped bandages around our cut
knees and brushed my hair every night with her precious whale-bone comb.
Mama didn’t ask for more. Maybe she sensed that anything I might say would be more to make her feel better than the actual
truth.
I didn’t want to linger on it. “Auntie Yang told me that you had made boxes of mementos for Sam and me when we were still
apart.”
She was startled. “She told you that?”
“You never gave them to us. Why?”
She fiddled around with her hair. “I thought you wouldn’t like them. It seemed like a silly idea once you were here. I realized
I had mostly put them together for myself, to cope with not having my children. They were for me, not for you.”
“I would’ve liked to see it,” I said. “Do you still have them?”
“I’ve always kept them. I’ll find them when I come home. I’ll give them to you.”
I knew the trip back to China would be a short one, since it was in the middle of the school year. I was already dreading having to return. But at least now I had something small to look forward to. “Okay,” I said.
She smiled at me. Then sighed deeply. “Baba will be back soon. I have to tell him about your applications. What will you do
now?”