15. Chapter Fourteen London
Chapter Fourteen: London
D espite the fact that most of the Young family only speaks enough Chinese to order off a takeout menu, our parents insist on gathering us for Chinese holidays every year.
This September, it’s the mid-autumn festival.
Our annual Chinese version of Thanksgiving, where we gather to enjoy spherical foods that represent the moon, pretend we can actually see Chang’er living up on the lunar surface, and embrace the importance of familial togetherness. At least, in theory.
Everyone’s here, from Savannah and her fiancé to Brooklyn and his wife and kids.
Mooncakes—a lotus paste- and salted egg yolk-filled dessert—line the granite counter, next to pomelos in vibrant hues of red and pink and orange.
They’re a popular Chinese fruit, similar to grapefruits but sweeter and juicier.
Too bad the conversation I’m having with my dad leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
“How’s work going?” he asks me. Our only topic.
“Fine,” I say, nibbling at a slice of mooncake. “There’s a promotion for senior associate coming up.”
“You’re in the running, then,” he says. A statement, not a question. Perhaps I should be glad he doesn’t doubt my abilities, but the pressure feels more like he thinks I have no choice but to be in the running. No choice but to live up to his legacy .
“Yep.” I leave out the fact that I don’t want it as I separate the salted egg yolk—meant to represent the fullest, brightest moon of the year—from the lotus seed paste, and pop it into my mouth. “Are your colleagues throwing you a retirement party soon?”
He stiffens slightly, and I wait for his verbal blow, to seize on something I misspoke carelessly and use it as a dagger. He doesn’t. Not this time, but that just means I have to wait for the next one. “I don’t want any fuss. Life goes on. People retire. What’s the big deal?”
“I guess so.” He’s been working as an attorney at his firm for thirty years now. Longer than I’ve been alive.
Dad continues. “Your mother doesn’t want to attend the retirement dinner that your grandparents are throwing. All because she doesn’t want to see your aunts and uncles.”
There’s always been tension between my mom and her in-laws.
I think most of it stems from the fact that they think she’s too stuck-up for them, since she comes from a wealthier, upper middle-class family in Hong Kong and went to an exclusive Catholic girls’ school, while they were barely toeing the poverty line in Kowloon.
“You just said you didn’t want a retirement dinner,” I say with a frown.
“It’s not about celebrating me,” he says flippantly. “It’s about my family. Our family.”
I wish he’d stop making such a big show about his family when most weeknights growing up, he didn’t get home until ten. On the weekends, he was too tired to do much of anything, so we were all put in different extracurriculars and shuttled around by Mom.
But of course, I can’t tell him that. Not when it would irritate him even more .
“Right.” I stuff the rest of the piece of mooncake in my mouth, its chewy, slightly tacky texture sticking to my teeth. At least I don’t have to speak with my mouth full, lest I say something I’ll regret later.
Brooklyn comes up to our dad and starts talking about his own job, so I let the two of them converse.
Still in the kitchen, I spy my mom pulling things out of the freezer for the tang yuan —the sweet sesame-filled dumplings that go into the sesame pudding—and I go over to help her.
Her heavy sigh in place of a ‘thank you’ tells me that she’s had the same conversation with Dad that I just did.
After pulling out a pot and pouring the sesame pudding mixture into it, and adding some bars of cane sugar, I stir the dessert. Mom rubs her temples. “Your father’s retirement dinner is next weekend.”
“I heard.” Well, I didn’t hear the date, but I already know I don’t want to be there.
“It’s not that I don’t want to go.” She rolls her eyes as Dad laughs too loudly at something Brooklyn says.
“But you know those family dinners always take forever . He just loves to talk and talk and talk. And he always accuses me of not liking his family. There’s nothing wrong with his family; the only thing I can’t stand is how they all like to leave me out of their conversations. ”
She huffs a dramatic sigh. I stir the sesame pudding to get it free of lumps.
“Have you tried telling him that?” It’s a tired tactic for disaster, I know, but I find myself asking her that all the same.
She’ll never take my suggestion to actually tell him her concerns to his face.
If she did, he’d just find a way to twist her words into something else and get even more upset.
“I can’t tell him anything,” she mutters, taking out eleven small bowls from a cupboard and setting them on the island. I don’t argue with her, just ladling each bowl full of dessert .
Everyone files into the kitchen a moment later, as if we don’t have enough food around the table already. We all take our dessert and add our preferred number of sesame dumplings. For me, that’s two. For Hattie and Queenie, that’s seventeen (between the two of them).
After dinner, Troy and I wash the dishes side by side.
We never used the dishwasher growing up—each of us would rotate dish duty and we had too many dishes to fit in the dishwasher anyways—so we don't use it now.
It's what my dad's always complained about, saying sarcastically that he's sorry he doesn't make enough money for us to have a large enough dishwasher.
As Troy rinses a plate and hands it to me to dry and put away, I wonder if I should tell him. Troy feels like my only ally in this house against the indifference of our other siblings and the blind wrath of our father. But even he doesn't notice what our mom goes through.
"What's new with you?" Troy asks me as he finishes rinsing a pot. "No offence, but you look like crap, man."
I chuckle dryly. "Thanks, bro."
"No, I say that with all seriousness." He drops the nonchalant brother act and puts on his concerned older brother hat. "You look like you haven't eaten or slept properly in weeks."
"It's Gloria," I say before I can stop myself. At least that's a truth I can tell.
Troy raises an eyebrow. "Your coworker?"
"We've been friends for eight years, but yes, we're coworkers." There's so much more that I could tell him, but I can't. He’d just tell me to get over my fears and ask her out.
"What's up with her?"
"She's… dating."
Troy chuckles. "That's what people do. They go on dates and get married and have kids. "
The thought of Gloria doing that with someone else immobilizes me. Yet the thought of having children with her paralyzes me as well. "Yeah. Of course."
"So why do you look like Perry just stole your chocolate orange at Christmas?" Troy eyes me.
"I'm in love with her," I blurt out. "Or at least, I like her. A lot."
"Does she have a boyfriend?" Troy scrubs a grease stain on a baking sheet.
"No…"
"Then what's the problem? Ask her out."
"I can't just ask her out!" I say with a groan.
"She's not your subordinate. I'm sure there's no rule against a tax lawyer dating a corporate lawyer. It's not like you two work in different firms. What's the issue here?" Troy looks at me like he did when I was five and couldn't recite the multiplication tables. He's a math whiz.
"She wants children," I say.
"Like, right now?" Troy is insufferable, I swear.
"No, but I don't want kids," I say. It's something I've only ever told Gloria. Telling my brother makes me question whether it’s the right decision, something I've been doing more and more lately.
But hearing my parents complain about each other constantly—that just cements it for me.
I can't just get married and move on with my own family.
Someone has to be there for my mom, to pick up the pieces of our broken home, and it'll have to be me.
Savvy is getting married, Brooklyn has his own family, and Troy will probably propose to his longterm girlfriend any day now. Perry is never around.
It'll have to be my job to hold my parents’ marriage together.
Troy doesn't argue with me, which I appreciate. "I think you're a great uncle."
"Thanks. "
"But you'd be an even better dad." Never mind. There goes his acceptance and non-judgment.
"Well, I'm not going to be one, so you'd better have eighteen kids to make up for it."
"Come on, London. Why don't you want to have kids? You can't tell me that practicing tax law satisfies your every need in life."
"Marriage and children wouldn't satisfy my every need in life, either."
"Do you have, like, a health issue?” His voice drops at the last three words.
"I'm not impotent or infertile," I say. At least, I'm pretty sure. The doctor would have mentioned it at my last physical. Not that I want to discuss my reproductive health with my brother.
"Okay, geez, no need to be so testy." A grin lights up his face. "Get it, testy ? Because—"
"Troy," I say in a warning tone.
He holds up his rubber-gloved hands in a posture of surrender. "Why don't you want to have kids? You're not terrible-looking, you know, if you're worried they'd be bullied for their looks."
I sigh. "Why would I be scared of my children looking like me?"
"You're not giving me any other reasons."
Staring into the damp dishtowel in my hands like it will give me answers, I look up again. "Because the last thing I want is for my kids to grow up watching their parents fight like ours did."
Troy shrugs. "I really don’t think their marriage is that bad. You have to remember, they had their happy moments.”
“Not that I remember,” I mutter.
“They used to go on dates and stuff. Life just gets busy with five kids. But now that Dad’s retired, I’m sure things will be different. They’ll have more time for each other,” Troy says reassuringly. “We already talked about this last time, remember? ”
“Right.” But it didn’t assuage my worries last time, and somehow I don’t think any more conversations will.
Troy sighs. “Every marriage goes through a rough patch.”
If that’s the case, my parents’ ‘rough patch’ has lasted twenty-seven years. But I don’t say that. Maybe he’s right, and I was just too young to remember when our parents were happy.
Maybe it's true that they were happy once. But it still scares me to think that means even happy marriages can disintegrate the way theirs has.