15. Sam
Sam
In the early afternoon, Sam sat at the computer in his “office” on the second floor of the lighthouse, a small area separated from the nonfiction bookshelves by a simple folding screen with a painted scene of the nearby Fitzgerald Marine Reserve tide pools.
A video call rang, but he’d been expecting it, of course. His monthly calls with his parents were always scheduled, because the time difference and the fact that Sam didn’t like to carry around his phone would otherwise make it impossible to reach each other predictably.
Jenny and Roger called in the wee hours of the morning in Taiwan, in that sliver of time between the first batch of pineapple cakes coming out of the oven and the bakeries opening.
Even though they had franchisees running the individual shops now, Jenny and Roger still made sure to be physically in one of the bakeries every single day; with fourteen stores across the island, that meant they maintained a two-week circuit of daily travel.
It was tiring, but it was their way to ensure that the quality of their pastries and their stores met the high bar they’d set for Sunshine Cakes.
“Good morning, Sammy!” Jenny’s radiance carried even through a computer screen, her energy so potent that it wasn’t diluted at all by having to traverse through fiber-optic cables across the Pacific Ocean.
While Roger was the quiet financial brains behind the bakery chain, it had been Jenny’s recipe and her personality that inspired the loyalty of the patrons of Sunshine Cakes.
(This was also the origin of their logo—two cartoon pineapples holding hands, one wearing a chef’s hat, the other wearing glasses, both of them smiling.)
“Good morning, Mom. Good morning, Dad,” Sam said self-consciously.
His Taiwanese was stiff and too formal, always reflecting the fact that he only knew how to speak the language from the perspective of an eight-year-old talking to his parents.
He was sure that Jenny and Roger didn’t care, but Sam always felt awkward nonetheless.
It was such an unsettling feeling to be a fully grown, intelligent adult but unable to communicate properly.
When he was younger, he’d wondered how his parents could have sent him away.
If you loved your son, how could you willingly part with him?
Even sending him to boarding school in the same country would have seemed a cruelty, let alone across the ocean to live with a distant relative, rarely to see your child again.
But when Sam went to college and studied East Asian philosophy, he started to understand a little better.
There was a fierce self-sacrificing element in filial relationships in Taiwanese culture; parents would give literally everything to their kids to make better lives for them, even if it meant having to give up their only child to another country to be raised by someone else, to never hold him in their own arms. As Sam met other Taiwanese American students at Stanford, he realized he was far from the only one who’d been sent to foreign shores alone.
“How are you? How is bookstore?” Jenny asked. She liked practicing her English on Sam. He suspected it was also her gentle way of making sure he could understand her; she would never embarrass him by subjecting him to a conversation that exposed his linguistic insufficiencies.
“The bookstore is good,” Sam said, returning the favor in Taiwanese but wishing his vocabulary encompassed more than basic adjectives.
“No big earthquakes?” His parents had been worried when he chose Stanford years ago, having sent him away from Taiwan to Mississippi for fear of earthquakes, only to have him end up back in an earthquake zone.
It had been nearly two decades, however, and their fears had slowly been allayed. She still asked, though.
“No big earthquakes,” Sam said. “How are the bakeries? What city are you in today?”
“We are in south, in Kaohsiung,” Roger said, also in English like Jenny. “Very hot today.”
She laughed. “So hot, inside bakery and outside on street. We think both too hot. We going to retire!”
Sam smiled. “You like to work. You will not retire.”
“No joking,” Roger said. “Mom is serious. We retire. We sell bakeries.” He shrugged, like there was nothing he could do once his wife made a decision, which, to be honest, was probably true.
“No way,” Sam said in English, before catching himself and switching back to Taiwanese. Except he didn’t know how to express that sentiment, so he just said, “You are selling Sunshine Cakes?”
Jenny grinned and patted Roger’s shoulder. “Dad is smart businessman. He find very good deal. We sell to 85°C Bakery.”
“Wow.” Even Sam knew 85°C. They were so popular they’d expanded overseas, including to the Bay Area. “That is very good. I am very happy for you!”
Internally, he sighed at how completely inadequate of a congratulations this was, but they were the best words his brain could find.
He knew there must be other phrases in there somewhere, but they were buried deep, in the way that children didn’t remember much of what happened to them when they were very young, even if the memories were happy.
“Okay,” Roger said. “We sell Sunshine Cakes today. Then we come visit you next week.”
“Wait, what?” Sam blinked at the computer.
“You’re literally signing the papers and selling the bakeries today?
And then you’re coming to the Bay Area next week?
” The surprise made all this come out in English.
“Where are you going to stay?” (Taiwanese parents usually expected to be put up in their kids’ homes, but Sam lived in a tiny studio apartment atop a lighthouse.)
But Jenny smiled, apparently having caught most of it despite their language barrier. “You no worry. We stay very nice hotel near you. I see it on YouTube. And we okay use Uber. Taiwanese very good using phones.”
That was true. The country seemed to run on QR codes and apps. Even senior citizens had no problems doing bank transactions via mobile or organizing dinners with their friends on group chats. Sam’s parents were probably more adept with their phones than he was.
“Okay, um, I… vacation from bookstore,” he fumbled as he switched languages again.
“No, no,” Roger said. “We only stay one week. We want see your normal life.”
“Then we go travel, whole world!” Jenny said, her excitement again beaming through the screen. “We work whole life, no leave Taiwan. Now we sell bakeries, we going to enjoy retire.”
“Your mom have big plans. She watch so many YouTube.”
Sam laughed. “Okay, then. I will see you soon.”
“Okay, bye-bye!” Jenny said, while Roger waved.
This was the longest stretch that Sam would spend with his parents since he visited Taiwan five years ago. Short monthly phone calls were one thing, but an entire week was another. As family, they loved each other by default. But in reality, they didn’t know each other beyond surface-level details.
Sometimes, he wondered what his life would have been like if he had stayed in Taiwan and never moved to the States. Would he be stepping up to take over Sunshine Cakes now? Certainly he would know Jenny and Roger better, be closer. What would it have been like to grow up with an actual family?
But then he took in the lighthouse around him, the nonfiction shelves in view beyond his folding screen, and the jovial sound of Kenneth’s voice echoing up the curved stairwell as he greeted a new customer to the store.
Sam smiled. He really liked the life he had. It wasn’t perfect, but it was one he had carved out for himself.
He just had to figure out how to show his parents—how to really communicate to them—that their decision to send him to the United States had worked out, and that they had done right.
Sam hoped that they would be proud.