Chapter 3 Magnolia
MAGNOLIA
You would think, with two parents who were doctors, and OBGYNs at that, I would’ve grown up smart and confident and beautiful.
(Okay, I don’t know what being beautiful has to do with having parents who were doctors, but when I imagine the daughter of two doctors, I always think of someone who is smart and confident and beautiful.) But I was none of those things.
My older sister, Iris, was. Smart, confident, beautiful.
A lethal combination. What Iris wanted, Iris got.
And what she always wanted was attention.
When we were little, Iris tried getting attention from Mama and Papa, but she quickly learned that she might as well cut stone for water, so she turned elsewhere for attention.
Now that she was fifteen and had boobs, she mostly got attention from boys.
I often watched from the window, marveling at the way she preened—she had a brilliant way of preening.
She’d lower her face so she came across as demure, but at the same time she’d push her shoulders back so her boobs strained against her dress, and somehow, she achieved a look that was both sexual yet innocent.
And boys couldn’t help themselves. Men too.
I tried practicing the pose in front of the mirror one night, but it just didn’t work without boobs.
Iris’s boobs sprouted when she was twelve.
I was now thirteen and there wasn’t even the ghost of a bump yet.
Iris took everything—the height, the looks, and the boobs.
But enough about Iris. Sometimes, I get tired of talking about Iris.
It was all anyone ever talked about—Where’s your sister?
Iris did what? She went out with who? And so on and so forth, a constant chorus of Iris’s adventures.
Despite Iris being smart, she didn’t want to follow in our parents’ footsteps.
Neither did I, for what it’s worth. You might think that this would greatly disappoint our parents, but in actuality, they were both relieved.
And it was no wonder that Iris and I didn’t want to become doctors, because every night, Mama and Papa would come home looking very crumpled and very grumpy.
They each had their own reasons for being cranky.
Papa was cranky because he was overworked, rushing through patient after patient at the clinic they opened up a year ago, and still had yet to break even.
Mama was cranky because she, on the other hand, barely had any patients.
“Why the hell did I break my back in med school?” she’d mutter as she took out a can of Bintang Beer from the fridge. “I should’ve known. No one trusts a female doctor in this country.”
Papa wisely stayed quiet, but I could see his jaw working as his teeth ground together, and even at the age of thirteen, I knew he was angry.
I just didn’t know if he was angry at the fact that people didn’t want to see female doctors here, or if he was angry at Mama for being a woman. Maybe it was a bit of both.
“Not even women,” Mama continued. “You’d think that women would want to support other women, but”—she took a long swig of beer and shook her head—“internalized misogyny is a hard habit to break.”
“To be fair, male doctors do have a higher rate of successful births,” Papa said.
Mama’s head jerked to face him so fast, like a viper.
“And why do you think that is?” It was clear she wasn’t actually going to give him the chance to answer.
“In med school, all the professors only ever directed their lectures, their questions, their feedback to the male students. There was just me and two other women in my year, and the three of us were often told to go to nursing school instead. And never mind med school, secondary school was the same.” She turned to me then, and Papa’s shoulders sagged with obvious relief.
She’d let him off easy. I resisted the urge to cower as Mama advanced toward me.
She and Papa stopped spanking me and Iris a long time ago, but there was something about her that scared me all the same.
It was the way she looked at me and Iris sometimes.
Like we were total strangers and she had no idea what the hell we were doing in her life.
“You listen to me, Magnolia,” she said, crouching so she was staring right into my eye.
“Don’t make the same mistakes I did. I thought I was special.
I thought I could forge my own path, blaze a trail for other women.
I was wrong. When you go to college, sure, go for the big degrees.
Study premed, or prelaw, or engineering, or whatever the hell.
But don’t bother studying too hard. I spent every waking hour in college and med school studying my eyes out.
I never had fun. Didn’t go on a single date.
So stupid. No, you listen to Mama. You use that time and find yourself a man with potential.
Someone with a real future. That’s the only reason college is worth going to in the first place. ”
My insides turned sour. I wanted so badly to turn and run away.
In my peripheral vision, I sensed Papa hovering, wrath emanating from him in palpable waves.
Even at my young age, I knew Mama’s words must’ve hurt him, though if anyone had asked me exactly why they did, I wouldn’t have been able to explain it.
I groped desperately for the right response.
Something that would diffuse this inexplicable, unbearable tension in the room.
“I’m scared of blood,” I said. I don’t know why I said that, aside from the fact that it seemed like a good time to let this secret out. I’d hidden it for so long, ashamed that the child of two doctors could possibly go woozy at the sight of blood.
Mama blinked. Then she cackled while Papa shook his head. She was still laughing even after Papa left the room.
I hope you don’t think my parents were cruel. They had a lot to deal with. And if I’d gone to med school only to find that I’d have close to no patients in my career, I probably would’ve been a lot more bitter than Mama.
· · ·
When she was fifteen, Iris was found topless with her boyfriend, so Mama and Papa did the only reasonable thing—they sent her off to California so she wouldn’t have the chance to ruin our family’s reputation back home.
She was to live at a group home for Asian students run by a Taiwanese woman.
I couldn’t decide whether that sounded awesome or terrifying, and I knew Iris felt the same way.
The morning she was set to go, her normally brilliant smile was strained.
“You can’t keep being like this, you know, Meimei,” she said as she applied her thousandth coating of mascara.
“Like what, Ci?” But I knew, without really knowing, what she meant.
In the mirror, I could see Iris rolling her eyes. We used to be close. When we were little, we’d play all sorts of games together—dress-up, house, Lego. The only thing Iris never wanted to play was hide-and-seek. When I asked why, she said, “What if I hid so well nobody could find me?”
I didn’t really know when we stopped being close, but if I had to guess, I’d blame it on the boobs. They changed her, seemingly overnight. She went from an older kid who was happy to play with me to a teenager I didn’t recognize. I still didn’t.
“This helpless act,” Iris said, gesturing at me.
“I’m not helpless,” I said helplessly.
“You’re so pathetic.”
Her tone was so acerbic that tears immediately rushed into my eyes. Iris was the only person who could make me cry with just one sentence.
“Oh my god, are you going to cry? See what I mean? Jesus.” Iris dropped her mascara into her makeup bag and zipped it up. She looked pissed. She always looked pissed, especially when she talked to me.
I didn’t trust myself to speak without my voice cracking, so I didn’t say anything.
“When are you going to toughen the fuck up?” She didn’t wait for an answer.
She stuffed her makeup bag into a backpack and slung it over one shoulder.
In her baggy jeans and tank top, Iris looked so cool.
I admired her and I hated her. For a moment, she frowned at me, hesitating.
I braced myself for whatever barbed thing she was about to lob at me, but all she said was, “Well, see you around.” Then she strode out of her bedroom without another glance.
I sat at the foot of her bed, listening to the sounds of Iris leaving home for a whole other country.
I wasn’t going to the airport; Mama and Papa were dropping Iris off before going to the clinic.
I didn’t know how I felt about that. Part of me wanted to cling to my big sister, spend every last moment with her, wave at her madly at the gates and watch her plane leave the tarmac.
The other part of me knew that if I did that, all she would do was roll her eyes and tell me to grow up and stop embarrassing her.
That was the thing with Iris. Even at fifteen, she knew that the best way to say goodbye was to not say it at all.
· · ·
By the time I graduated high school three years later, Iris and I were as good as strangers.
She’d come back every summer, and each time, I recognized less and less of her.
It wasn’t just that she looked different—so American in the best possible way, her hair, her clothes, even her eyebrows.
It was the way she talked and the way she moved.
Her American accent was flawless, zero traces of Indonesia in the way she spoke.
She spoke like a true ABC—an American-born Chinese.
When I spoke to her, I became painfully aware of my own horrible Indonesian accent, the way the R’s rattled harshly on my tongue while they flowed out rich and smooth from Iris’s mouth.
Eventually, I stopped talking to Iris altogether.