Chapter 1 #2
and through the sitting room to shoo the pups into the backyard. Outside, shielded from any upper-level snooping by the dense
foliage of a passionfruit vine, she took the opportunity to sneak a quick joint, her breakfast of choice.
The third puppy, the one who was still biting, glared up at her with big wet eyes. Unlike the rest of his litter with their
unblemished white fur, this runt had a dark black patch on his forehead, serving as a merciful marker for anyone who wanted
to avoid his razor-sharp jaws. April exhaled a big cloud of smoke, looking back down at him as he snarled at her. She understood
why he bit everyone.
April too was marked, in her own way.
“Ain’t that a bitch?” she muttered to herself.
When April returned, her stepfather, Teddy, was seated at the breakfast nook with Meadow, as he and the little girl conspiratorially
poured cascades of Canadian maple syrup onto their steaming bowls of oatmeal. Cristiano was washing a pot at the sink on the
kitchen island, but he wrinkled his nose at her to indicate that her morning toke was not so sneaky after all. April quickly
moved next to him to rinse out her mouth with water from the tap.
Not a moment too soon, Roses entered the kitchen, followed by her loyal old pit bull Houyi. Roses’s luscious hair was in a high pony and her Pilates-sculpted body draped in a silk peignoir. Everyone grew quiet as April looked down at her own stained sweatshirt from Bible camp two decades ago.
It was a crucial moment that this household endured every morning: What mood would Roses be in today? It set the daily tone
for the rest of her housemates, whether they liked it or not. To be fair, most of the time Roses was pleasant, or at least
civil. She would usually begin the day by smiling at Meadow and everyone would let out a collective sigh of relief. But sometimes
she would snap immediately at April over something arbitrary but cutting, and the other four knew to buckle up, that it was
going to be a bumpy day.
But this morning, Roses neither smiled nor snapped. She seemed a bit dazed and distracted actually, which was not her typical
baseline disposition. She nodded a bit in everyone’s general direction, then walked over to the fruit bowl to choose a freshly
plucked guava. Wordlessly, she sliced it into eighths, arranging the pieces on a plate, then placed it on the breakfast table
as she sat down.
Cristiano served his mother-in-law a bowl of oatmeal, along with a glass bowl of strawberries and slivered almonds. Thanking
him, Roses stirred the contents with a spoon, but did not eat.
Finally she leaned over to her husband and said to him, “Teddy, would you take Meadow to Chinese school today?”
A master of his wife’s hints, Teddy sprung up and prodded at his step-granddaughter playfully. “Looks like it’s me and you
today, kiddo!” Every good husband has a mantra to keep his spouse happy, and Teddy’s was Ignorance Is Bliss. Cristiano handed
Meadow’s lunch box to Teddy as April helped her into her backpack.
A feeling of doom was creeping its way to the back of April’s throat.
“What’s up, Mom?” April finally asked when she heard the front door slam shut on the other end of the house.
She sat down across from Roses, and Cristiano joined her with a pot of hot coffee.
Whenever Roses excluded Teddy from the conversation, the younger couple knew she meant business.
Specifically, she meant April and Cristiano’s business.
Roses tapped at the plate of guava slices. “Have some.”
April shook her head. Despite living next to the largest private guava orchard on the West Coast, she had always hated her
mother’s signature fruit. “The seeds get stuck in my teeth, Mom.”
As Cristiano poured coffee for the women, the mother and daughter avoided looking at each other. By nature of their relationship,
Cristiano knew that whenever Roses and April were together, there was a herd of elephants in the room with them. Cristiano
wondered to himself, Which elephant is Roses going to tase today?
Finally Roses spoke. “So I was talking to Master Chu . . .” she began slowly.
With great effort, April restrained her eyes from rolling. She knew that her mother spoke to that old quack all the time,
though usually Roses kept his snake oil to herself. But April also knew that for nearly a decade, Master Chu had puppeteered
nearly every action and decision of her mother’s life. In turn, the ramifications—some silly and yet others profound—mercilessly
spilled onto the rest of them like nuclear waste.
It was this same unseen Master Chu who, despite being far away in Hong Kong, had once convinced Roses to replace every toilet
in their house with custom-made toilets made of real granite . . . because, feng shui. Ever since, all of their midnight bathroom
visits during the winter were marked with yelps of surprise as bare butts touched freezing stone.
Cold bottoms aside, what really infuriated April were Master Chu’s more disruptive divinations, such as his warnings to Roses that had forced April and Cristiano to change Meadow’s school multiple times because their daughter “had too much metal to be that far inland,” whatever the hell that meant.
If her mother hadn’t been the one paying for Meadow’s pricey education, nothing would have given April more pleasure than to practice some choice Cantonese phrases on that damn fortune teller.
Cristiano could feel his wife’s heat rising and placed a discreet but comforting hand on her thigh underneath the table. “Oh?”
he asked casually. “What were you guys talking about, Ma?”
Roses was now staring pointedly at her daughter. We were talking about the hungry ghosts, she finally said.
Like lit gunpowder, April leaped up with an indignant anger.
“Mom, I can put up with that con man when it comes to many things, but when he feeds you those fucking sexist lies . . .”
April thundered.
Cristiano braced himself as Houyi the pit bull whined at their feet.
“Sit down, April,” Roses ordered, and there was something about the tone of her voice that silenced her daughter immediately.
April sat down. But inside her head there was an uncontrollable screaming.
“This is not about sexism,” Roses continued, calm but intense. “It is about tradition.”
“I’ve never seen what the difference is,” April scoffed, taking a spiteful sip of her coffee.
Cristiano interjected, hoping to play peacemaker. “Ape, let’s hear what Ma has to say. Maybe it’s . . .” But his voice trailed
off as April shot him a loaded look.
Roses let out an irritated sigh. “That is the problem with your generation. You take everything so personally. This is not
about Cristiano, it is not about you, it’s not about me. This is about all of the Suns, past, present and future. It is about
our lineage.”
April’s eyes were quickly moistening with exasperated tears. “And you think Cris and I didn’t try? We’ve done our best, Mom!
And we have Meadow!”
Her mother shook her head. “It isn’t just any child, April. After Lewis—”
Lewis’s name landed like a hex that silenced them as a streak of shared pain flashed across their faces. Even Roses could not bring herself to finish the sentence.
Inside her head, April was still screaming, but she kept her voice steady. “I am done trying and failing to give you what
you so desperately want, Mom. You are on your own now. You and your fucking hungry ghosts!”
With that, April stormed out of the kitchen, her footsteps running up the stairs to her bedroom. With an awkward look of regret
at his mother-in-law, Cristiano rose to follow his wife.
Stroking old Houyi’s head, Roses sat at the table as her coffee curdled and cooled, staring at the untouched plate of guava
slices. She had been hoping to have a calm conversation with her daughter and son-in-law to explain what would be happening
next, what was already in motion, but April’s hysterical reaction did not surprise her. Her daughter crumbled whenever fortitude
and selflessness was needed.
The way Roses saw it, April never thought about anyone but herself, let alone the eternal fates of everyone in their clan.
Roses knew that her actions, however extreme or divisive, were necessary for the Suns. Without them, everyone who bore their
last name faced existential damnation, a fate worse than death in which their souls were cursed to forever starve in the afterlife.
Hence, Roses had not been asking for April’s participation, or even her permission. In fact, what the matriarch had planned
did not involve her daughter at all. Master Chu had long since assured Roses that April was not the answer to their family’s
metaphysical dilemma.
No, Roses Sun had an audacious plan for someone else entirely.