Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty
Sabrina
The first time Sabrina realized her mother was a liar was when she was ten.
Kit and Kaitlyn had just returned from their Christmas holidays with tales of starfish on Caribbean white beaches.
Sabrina had boasted in a fit of jealousy that her mother was taking her away to the tropics over the midterm break, and they had teased her that she had probably never been to the airport, probably didn’t have a suitcase, probably didn’t even have a passport.
Sabrina sat at the kitchen table that night sharpening her pencils. She asked Lee Lee, “Mama, where is my passport, I want to take it to school tomorrow.” Since leaving school that day, all she could think of was how she could prove those girls wrong.
“Why do you need your passport at school? You’re not getting on a plane,” Lee Lee asked as she put dry plates and glasses away.
“I just want to prove I have one to some of the girls at school. I do, right?”
“Ai-ya, I don’t know where it is right now. Now finish your homework. You’re going to be so late going to bed.”
Her mother went to the sink. Sabrina thought how Lee Lee always looked tired; her skin was sallow, her eyes dragged down by dark rings around them, and her hair had become peppered with little wiry white strands.
Sabrina doodled along the margins of her notebook after finishing all the math she had been set that afternoon.
She watched Lee Lee wearily climb the stairs to the bathroom.
Time for myself. Do not disturb , she said.
Sabrina crept up behind her; she knew which stairs made the most noise and tiptoed from one quiet step to another, making her body as light as possible.
She went straight to her mother’s bedside table, where all her important things were kept: a jade pendant given to her by her nai nai , a small photograph of her family with somber faces in front of a Buddha on a mountain, their hands raised flat to appear as though they held the sun in their palms, and two pieces of paper with Chinese characters she couldn’t read with a faded red stamp that had the star she recognized from the flag of China.
But it was only Lee Lee’s Chinese passport.
There was nothing there that looked like it could be Sabrina’s passport.
Nothing that bore her name or photograph.
“You shouldn’t be snooping in my things.” Her mother’s tone was terse.
Sabrina looked up and closed the drawer fast.
“I really wanted to show my friends my passport.”
“That doesn’t matter, you should not be in my things.”
“But Mama, I want to show them they’re not the only ones who can do things, I wanted to show them I am just like them.”
“We’ll get you one later, Sabrina.”
“You just said you already had one though.” Sabrina watched her mother carefully. Lee Lee’s eyes stared down at the drawer, not at Sabrina’s face.
She pressed again.
“I either have one or don’t. Which one is it, Mama?”
Sabrina readied herself for her mother’s temper to fly. But Lee Lee didn’t raise her voice.
“I know, I made a mistake. I thought we had one. I thought I applied a few years ago but I must have forgotten. We will do it. Now go to sleep, I’m tired.” Lee Lee turned to go to the other side of the bedroom, toward the chest of drawers, and picked up the tub of Ponds and unscrewed the top.
Sabrina said nothing and walked out of her mother’s bedroom and into her own.
That was the first night she chose to be alone.
She did not want to lie beside Lee Lee and have her hair stroked until she fell asleep.
She didn’t want to tell her about every event that had taken place in her classroom that day.
Or what Kit had said about Casey or what she hoped she might get for her birthday next month.
She lay on her bed, her covers too soft from lack of washing, and she closed her eyes.
That night, Sabrina fell asleep in her clothes, and when she woke the next day, her mother had already left for work.
She rushed to catch the bus, and as she dragged her bag behind her, laden with library books to return, she remembered that she hadn’t brushed her teeth.
On her way to school, she worried someone would say something about her breath.
When she walked into the classroom, she looked down at her uniform skirt and noticed a stain from the previous week’s lunch.
“Hey, Rina! Sit here next to me!” called Kit, and she patted the seat beside her. Kit always found the part of the classroom where everyone gathered, while Sabrina had always been drawn to the periphery.
In that instant, Sabrina became truly part of Kit’s world.
Kit never asked Sabrina about her passport again.
Sabrina would always think it was because her friend saw the sadness in her eyes.
Maybe Kit had felt bad that day when she and Kaitlyn had teased her about her passport.
Maybe Kit hadn’t felt anything at all, and just moved on through the fickle trains of thoughts that ten-year-olds had.
Maybe that moment in the playground had meant nothing to Kit at all.
The second time Sabrina caught her mother lying was during the Chestnut Hill Academy International Day, when she was twelve years old.
The Chinese families had been asked to host the China stand.
Mr. Haines had been a chemistry teacher for almost twelve years before he was promoted to Head of Middle School.
He wore a green Eddie Bauer fleece every day, zipped up over his stomach, which protruded over the waistline of his trousers more each year, and a matching green bow tie that Sabrina suspected was a clip-on.
“We’ll call it the Far East Asia region stall, okay, Ms. Chen?”
He also referred to each student by the prefix of Mr. or Ms.
Lee Lee Chen had one of those faces that expressed every emotion that passed through her, as plain as a traffic light changing color. She arrived late, and her hair had been blown loose by the wind. Her purple coat was frayed, the zipper broken.
“Ah, Mrs. Chen! What a pleasure to finally meet you! Ni hao ma! ” Mr. Haines said, hands together like a Thai statue, bowing deeply. “I’m the famous Mr. Barry Haines. I’m so honored you could make it.”
Lee Lee looked at him, a smile twitching at her mouth.
Sabrina begged her mother with her eyes. Don’t say anything. Leave it.
“Mr. Haines, you are not as tall as you look in your picture,” she said, her lips a flat, rigid line across her face. This was her mother’s way of clenching her fists to prepare for a fight. Insult his stature first.
“Well, yes, photographs can be deceiving, I know…”
“And you look older. In the photo in the yearbook, you look young, but now I see you have very little hair left at the back there.” She pointed to the crown of his head.
Sabrina tried to look away, to spare him one pair of eyes at least.
He took a breath, upright again, his face starting to color as he touched the crown of his head as if to check whether she had done something to his hair.
“Like I said, it’s good to meet you, Mrs. Chen. Sabrina is one of our superstars. Do you have some extended family here in America?”
“Yes, I have some aunties on the West Coast.”
“We do?” Sabrina asked.
Mrs. Chen ignored her daughter and continued instead to talk to Mr. Haines.
Her mother spent the rest of the afternoon explaining to everyone who came to the stall the difference between Tainan, China, Korea, and Japan—the oppressors, imperialists, freedom fighters, and traitor Chiang Kai Shek.
How Hong Kong wasn’t really China at all but an island full of British slave owners, and the island of Tainan was where drinking snake’s blood was believed to give sacred powers—but how this was really a Chinese tradition, not in fact Taiwanese, as they claimed.
Standing at the stall, Sabrina leaned away from her mother, creating as much distance between them as possible. Why had Lee Lee said she had family here when Sabrina was almost certain that it wasn’t true? But now a strange feeling of doubt crept into her.
Sabrina wished that Lee Lee hadn’t come that day.
She usually felt this way when her mother came to school events.
Anything that involved sitting in silence through a performance was fine, as long as there wasn’t any audience participation.
Lee Lee Chen couldn’t reliably judge when to hoot and when to stay quiet.
Lee Lee was too proud of her origins and heritage to miss any opportunity for a monologue about the best country in the world.
We are the inventors of everything. Everything came from China originally.
I tell you, if you like moo-shu from your Chinese takeout, we make the best. The garbage you eat here is not moo-shu.
You should come to my house next time, I will show you.
She stood right in front of people, too close, never breaking eye contact.
Eye contact was essential to Lee Lee Chen.
Then they know your position. You must always look them in the eye. And show them you won’t budge.
As Sabrina got older, she learned to keep things from Lee Lee too. School events she wanted to avoid, the times she stole liquor from Mr. Herzog’s cabinet with Kit, the feelings she had for Dave Harrison, Snapchat and Instagram accounts she set up on her phone, the offer from Princeton.
One especially hot Wednesday afternoon that summer, Eva drew up a chair beside Sabrina, jolting her out of her work.
“Something you need to know about me, kid, I don’t do elephants in the room.”
Sabrina looked up as Eva Kim said this. Eva had moved to her desk, with no noise or fanfare, standing before her in the same black shift dress she wore every day. Sabrina wondered how many of these hung in her closet.
“Let’s just get this conversation out of the way now, shall we?” Eva asked as she sat down.
Sabrina swallowed what felt like a large stone in a single gulp.