CHAPTER THREE
My mom is still fuming when she slams the car door behind her.
I shrivel in my seat, my shoulder pressed to the window for support. “I’m sorry,” I say, even though the words sound too weak, too superficial to my own ears, like trying to fill a gaping hole in a dam with nothing but napkins. “I’m really so extremely sorry. I didn’t mean to curse my cousin or … or ruin the wedding. I just—I forgot the right words—and I feel awful.”
My mom turns on the ignition and grips the steering wheel. “No, I’m sorry,” she tells me.
I blink.
This is new.
“I should have done something ages ago,” she continues. “I knew you were forgetting your Mandarin. They all warned me this would happen. They told me I should encourage you to read more books about Chinese history and culture and converse in Mandarin at home whenever possible.” She heaves out a long, heavy sigh. “It’s my fault my English is so good. If I weren’t perfectly bilingual, things might not have turned out this way.”
“Your English is phenomenal,” my dad offers from the passenger seat.
“Yes, I know,” Mom says. She finally starts easing the car out of the parking lot.
The constant lurching motion doesn’t help the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. It’s not just that I feel guilty for ruining things—it’s also humiliating. I’ve always made it my goal to move through life as gracefully as possible, to only do the things I already excel at, to only participate in games I’m confident I’ll win. This was a major defeat, and Cyrus just had to be around to witness it.
Then again, maybe it isn’t a coincidence that Cyrus is involved in two of the very worst days of my life so far. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if in a past life, I accidentally ran him over with a horse carriage or something, and his whole purpose in this life is to bring me misery. He’s definitely succeeding.
“But what’s the point of speaking great English if our daughter can’t speak her own mother tongue?” my mom says. “She can’t even speak to her own grandparents.”
My aunt’s words ring inside my skull, and I wonder if my mom’s thinking of them too. Ignorant foreigner. “I … I do speak to my grandparents,” I venture through the lump in my throat, desperate to defend myself. “I called my nainai just last week.”
My mom draws in a deep breath and sighs again, as if there’s an excess of oxygen inside the vehicle. “You said love you, dude at the end.”
“What’s wrong with telling her I love her?”
“You called your nainai dude ,” she emphasizes.
“Respectfully.”
“You don’t even know who Tang Bohu is.”
I hesitate, trying to place the name. “Who is that? One of my uncles?”
Dad makes an impassioned motion for me to stop talking.
“Look, this is a serious problem, Leah,” my mom says as she turns onto the main street. “How long has it been since you visited China? Do you not remember anything anymore?”
I’m not sure how to answer that. I gaze out the window, at the smooth, winding roads and the lush lawns and the ocean simmering on the horizon, peppered with little white boats, the clear sky opening up around us. When I think of here , I think of LA. These are my most intimate, immediate surroundings. This is the place where I grew up, where I learned to ride a bike and spell my name and play soccer, where we buried my pet goldfish and planted a cherry tree and set up a tent in our backyard to watch movies at night. But I don’t think of China as there either. It’s not the same as when my friends talk about traveling to France or Bali for the holidays, some hazy, distant destination I know only from photos and travel brochures. Although my memories of China are flimsy, stretched almost translucent over a total of five summer breaks from my childhood, I always have this feeling that my bones will know the place, even when I don’t.
“I’m not sure,” I mumble.
“Well, if you’re actually sorry about what happened today, and if you’d like to prevent anything similar from ever happening again, we’ll need to make some changes around here,” my mom says with a terrifying note of resolve in her voice. When she decides on something, she means it. Last year, she made an abrupt announcement that she felt the house chores weren’t being evenly distributed enough. By the end of the evening, she’d created a very strict roster we’ve been following to this day. Tonight is dish duty for me.
“I am sorry,” I say quickly. “We can go to my aunt and my cousin right now—I can write them an apology letter—”
“In what, English?” my mom says with a scoff. “If you’re apologizing to them, it better be in perfect Chinese. You should start practicing. No more English allowed in our house.”
“What?”
“Starting now,” she repeats. “Xianzai.”
“But—that’s—” I splutter. “I don’t—”
“Yong zhongwen” is all she says. Use Chinese.
Nobody speaks again for the rest of the car ride.
***
All throughout the next week, my mom is in a strange mood.
She stays up in her home office until midnight; when I go to sleep, it’s to the sound of the printer whirring or her computer humming. She disappears at dinner to make important calls, speaking in a hushed voice. She cancels our pizza night on Friday and cooks for the first time in a month to make sweet-and-sour pork ribs and sticky pineapple rice. She keeps her word about only speaking in Chinese; the one time she weakens is when she accidentally locks herself in the garage and I can’t figure out where the key is.
Then, on Saturday, she lowers herself onto the couch next to me and holds up a document.
I hit pause on my laptop. “What is that?” I ask warily, rubbing my eyes.
I’ve spent the past two hours binge-watching a documentary about the career revival of a famous singer-songwriter. The last scene had been of her sobbing into a napkin in the darkness of her studio, while screenshots of absurdly mean comments floated around her like digital phantoms.
Of course, I know how things will go from here. She’ll remember why she got into the industry in the first place: because of her passion for music . Maybe she’ll receive a heartfelt message from a fan, or she’ll find a video of herself playing the piano as a toddler. This is what it’s really about , she’ll say, not success. She’ll then wake up one morning with a melody stuck in her head, and she’ll hurry down to the studio, and the rough, original audio will transition into the final song, which she’ll play at sold-out stadiums, having become successful at last.
“An application,” my mom says.
“An application for what?” I ask. “And are we finally speaking English again?”
She ignores my second question. Just waves the document around with excitement like it’s a winning lottery ticket. “Journey to the East.”
I stare.
“You know, like Journey to the West ? It’s a play on words. Because this is a journey to—well, the East,” she explains.
“Yeah, um, I got that part,” I say, still trying to decipher what this means.
“It’s a two-week trip around China’s cities to really immerse you in the culture,” she goes on. “The local Chinese school, Jiu Yin He, is hosting it. It’s perfect for kids like you, who’ve forgotten their Mandarin and barely know anything about China. Studies show the most effective way to relearn a language is by being in the environment. And,” she adds, like it’s an afterthought, “the program is run in collaboration with the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford, so your aunt is the one who designed the itinerary for this year. She’ll be receiving regular updates about the trip and will meet the participating students at the end.”
There it is. The real reason. I can almost see the gears in my mom’s head working. This is her big plan for redemption—both hers and mine. Prove to her sister that she didn’t raise a completely uncultured daughter, that she hasn’t failed as a parent.
“Are you sure my aunt will want me to join her program?” I ask tentatively.
“Yes, because you’re going to commit fully to her itinerary and amaze her with your dramatic improvement in Chinese when you come back afterward,” my mom says, sounding far more confident than I deserve. There’s a distant look in her eyes, like she’s already fast-forwarded into the future, one where I’m probably reciting ancient poetry and pouring tea for my aunt while she smiles at me in glowing approval, the disastrous wedding forgotten behind us. “Plus, a program like this will look amazing on your college applications, which I know are currently a little … underdeveloped.”
“Underdeveloped,” I repeat under my breath. That’s a nice way of putting it. I’m willing to bet that I’m our career counselor’s worst headache. At our last meeting, she stressed that my grades are abysmal , my attendance record even worse, and that the last time I signed up for an extracurricular, it was to serve lemonade at a charity event for iguanas.
“… even though it’s last minute, one of the original participating students canceled, so there’s a spot open for you, and I snagged it just in time,” my mom is saying. She smiles. “Can you believe how perfectly everything’s worked out?”
No. I truly can’t believe this.
“Don’t worry,” she says, misinterpreting my silence. “You won’t have to miss the start of school. You’ll be leaving in a week, and you’ll be back just before your break ends.”
“Wait. But—” I drag a hand through my hair, my mind struggling to keep up. “But you can’t just send me halfway across the world on some trip. I—I had plans for this summer—”
Her smile vanishes at once. “You haven’t moved an inch from that couch all day. Not even to drink water.”
“I had plans to rest,” I elaborate.
“And that’s okay.” She tucks a strand of her long, always-straight hair behind her ear. “Your dad and I have been saying that you need a good, long break. But you don’t seem well rested. Do you feel like you’ve been resting?”
The problem is, I don’t.
After I officially parted ways with my modeling agency last month, I imagined sleeping for fifteen hours straight, without having to worry about going to the gym or rushing in for hair and makeup or stressing over how my photos will turn out, and then waking up refreshed. Feeling like a proper person again. Dedicating time to my hobbies.
Instead, when I woke up, I felt an exhaustion so heavy and bone-deep I feared it would crush me. And as it turns out, I don’t have any hobbies. I never had a chance or reason to discover other interests, because modeling was an all-consuming force, coloring in every single aspect of my life, and now that it’s gone, there’s only blank white space.
Maybe my mom’s right.
Maybe a change of scenery will help. It’d be preferable to slowly losing my mind inside the house.
Besides, after the wedding, I owe it to my mom—and my cousin and aunt—to at least try to make amends. Make myself better. Show them that I do genuinely care about my culture, that I’m not an ignorant foreigner who goes around dooming my family members’ marriages. Learn how to hold a conversation long enough to apologize properly, in Mandarin.
“Okay, fine,” I say, holding out a hand. “Let me see that.”
My mom’s face breaks into a wide beam as she passes me the application, and I feel a pang in my chest. It’s been a while since she last looked so happy. So hopeful. Even if the Journey to the East can’t solve all of my problems, at least it’ll be worth this.
***
Later that evening, my phone buzzes with a text from Cate.
we’re heading down to sarah’s beach house next sat. u coming? xxx
This is how most of our conversations go. Short, to the point. Often, it’ll just be a question: Should I wear this dress or this? Is the jacket too much? Are you free tomorrow? I understand that the vast majority of the student body would consider it a great privilege to be trusted by Cate Addison for fashion advice, and I guess I do. I just wish we really talked , that I could feel comfortable confiding in her about anything without worrying I’d seem too weird. The closest we’ve ever come to having a heart-to-heart talk was when she got drunk on a martini and told me that she sometimes feels insecure about her music taste.
But I’m not sure if she’ll even want to talk to me at all once we return to school. I still haven’t told her that I’ve quit modeling. Partly because my gut churns at the thought of her reaction—it’ll no doubt be some vocal mixture of disappointment and confusion—and partly because I haven’t figured out a way to do so without bringing up the photo shoot. She wouldn’t understand why it was such a big deal to me, why I had to leave after that, for the sake of my own sanity and dignity.
At least I now have a legitimate excuse to put off telling her for just a little longer.
I’d love to, but I can’t , I text back. My mom’s signed me up for this trip to China and I’ll be gone two weeks. You guys have fun though!!!
Her reply is immediate. oh my god, you poor thing. why on earth would they send you to that place?
I stare at the screen, my muscles tensing. I can easily imagine her petite nose scrunched up in pity, her bleached brows knitted together—just like I can imagine that if I were to tell her I was going on a trip to Paris, or London, or Italy, she’d be expressing a very different sentiment.
Why not? I respond. It’s going to be fun.
And it will be. I’m determined to make it so, to prove her assumptions wrong. Even if it’s purely out of spite, I’m going to have the time of my life.