Chapter 4
Courtesy of the author
Sticky, roiling sleep. I curled up on the couch, since it was Anna’s turn to have the bed and I didn’t want to irritate her further when she got home.
My stomach churned. I wished I had never touched the Kavalan.
Over my freshman year I had learned of the imperative to “hydrate or die-drate,” and so I drank glass after glass of water, and then I kept having to get up to pee.
Anna never came back to the apartment. Around three in the morning I moved to the bed.
She was still gone at sunrise. I had two hours before I needed to be at the department and so I lay still, trying to go back to sleep.
My teeth felt sour, caked in sugar, though I’d brushed them twice.
I felt soiled on some fundamental level.
I chugged more water, hoping it would flush out all this pollution.
I couldn’t keep my eyes shut. The sun was too bright.
Our apartment was positioned so that shortly after sunrise, the sun pierced through a gap between the concrete walls of the buildings next door.
But I could not get up either; I felt too sluggish.
I curled on my side, away from the window.
I couldn’t think of anything better to do, so I began clicking through my flash cards.
By now I had amassed so many vocabulary words that I could no longer tell which lesson each belonged to.
The studying app randomized the order. I could get any word at any time.
紊亂: chaotic. 狠狠地: vigorously, violently. 烤肉串: a meat kebab.
My phone flashed. A text from my mother. Call me. ASAP
I was blinking at the screen, trying to figure out whether I should call her or shower first, when a second text flashed.
I’m sorry to tell you Gonggong has passed away.
I sat up and called my mother.
“Mom?”
“Hi, Lily.”
“I saw your text.”
I wanted her to say that she had mistyped. That she had been joking, or had meant to inform me that someone else’s gonggong had passed away. But instead my mother began to cry.
My mother did not cry. I had witnessed her crying only once—one night when I was in high school, when she thought my sister Jasmine was dead—and even then she left the room when she saw me and Flora watching.
This sound was alien to me. These sobs struck me as fake, the approximation of an emotion—as if I were listening not to my mother but to a recording of some other woman crying in a film, an audiobook, an audition reel.
This sound and my mother had nothing to do with each other.
I wondered if I might be dreaming. I had once dreamed, in terrible detail, that my family members were one by one ripped apart by a giant wolf while I watched helpless and screaming.
I jolted awake, remembered that there was no wolf, and lay there giddy with relief.
The emotional memory of that nightmare was so vivid that when I came downstairs for breakfast, I ran to hug my parents.
Surely this was just a bad hangover dream.
I dreamed nested narratives like this sometimes; I thought I had awoken, but then strange things began to happen, and I grew more and more panicked until I woke up yet again.
“How?” I asked.
“What?”
My head felt light. “How did he die?”
“He fell,” said my mom. “They had just gotten up. Popo—she was getting dressed, she had some trouble with her buttons. He turned to look at her. And then he fell.”
That was all? How could that be all? Surely there was more to this story—a sharp corner, a staircase—but I couldn’t bring myself to ask.
I couldn’t imagine it either. The last time I was in Guangzhou, I was twelve.
I had never visited the apartment they were living in now.
I didn’t know where to place the stairs, the corners in my imagination.
I could only see in the abstract the turn, the tumble.
“Mom.” My ears rang. “Mom, I am so sorry.”
She didn’t respond. A long silence on the other end. Then my father said, “Hi, Lily.”
“Hi, Dad.” I was crying now.
“I’m sorry we had to tell you over the phone.”
“No, that’s okay.”
“Your mom is very upset.”
“Yeah, I can tell.”
“The funeral is the day after tomorrow. She’s flying to China tomorrow with a layover in Taipei. She’ll have six hours between her flights, so you can meet her there, okay? The day after tomorrow, at Taoyuan Airport.”
I made him repeat this several times before I gathered the wits to write it down.
“Make sure you’re there, okay? Be there for your mom.”
“Okay, Dad.”
“So sorry, Lily. I’ll text you the flight number. Take care.”
Then they hung up.
I sat cross-legged on my bed, sniffling and staring at the headboard.
Shock was the concept. We had learned the Chinese last week, 震驚.
震 was the same character used in the word for “earthquake.” 地震.
Everything turns upside down. The world is in disarray.
But nothing about the concept told you how to feel about this, how it sat in your body.
The phrase took you out of your body completely. A great shock, and the soul flees.
I did a tally of my vitals. My fingers were still, my heart pulsing steadily. No trembling. I got out of bed and stood up. My legs worked. I raised my hands above my head. My vision didn’t fade.
So the shock had not reached me yet. This scared me.
I didn’t know when it would hit or how it would feel.
Was I sad? How sad was I going to be; how much would that hurt?
What if I didn’t feel anything at all? I had fainted only once in my life, last October, after I’d donated blood for the first time.
I had been so sure I was not afraid of blood or needles, and yet the moment the needle left my arm and I saw the bag I had filled, a dark wave rushed up at me, and the next thing I knew I was lying on a cot, root beer lollipop in hand.
That was what I was afraid of. Emotional vertigo.
If I began to walk, I didn’t know whether or when I would fall.
NOW WHAT WAS I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH MYSELF?
It was the strangest thing. Time did not come to a halt just because I had received bad news. The seconds kept ticking by and I was still here, and my shock did not keep me from perceiving its passing. I was getting bored.
I thought about going to class, but when I reached for my textbooks, I felt a tremendous inertia, like I’d be pressing against the weight of the world if I tried to put my backpack on and head out to the department. I couldn’t. It simply wasn’t happening.
But still, I had to get through this day.
I had no one to talk to. Now that Anna and JC both were not speaking to me, I did not have a single close friend in this city.
Earlier in the week, that had seemed like a fixable problem.
Words would be exchanged, relationships ironed out.
Now Anna and JC and everyone else in my program seemed planets away.
I decided to act as if it were a Saturday.
I moved through my morning ablutions. I brushed my teeth.
I washed my hair. That suspicious black grime seeped out from under the door, as always.
I wiped it up. The toilet paper bin was full, so I tied off the trash bag and carried it downstairs.
I ran back up and washed my hands. I sprayed my legs with Off!
I locked the door. I took out my umbrella and walked across the intersection to the Xiaonanmen tofu pudding shop.
“Number one, thanks.” By now I had perfected this exchange. “With ice, for here. And a spoon.”
Three deft scoops, and she passed me my tray.
I found a stool by the window and ate, scrolling through my vocabulary cards.
各有千秋 meant “each has its merits.” 麻痹 meant “paralysis.” 俱樂部 meant “entertainment club.” 養老 meant “to support oneself in one’s old age.
” I marked all the cards as “easy.” I had forgotten the context in which I encountered these words, but I saw them often enough that I knew what they meant.
The flash card app used an interval learning system: It showed you the cards you struggled with at a higher frequency.
I wouldn’t see these cards again for two weeks.
I clicked through with blinding speed; sometimes my thumb moved even before I registered the characters.
I finished the set in minutes. I clicked the option to “study more,” and fifty more cards loaded in front of me.
I ate mechanically, without looking at my bowl.
Sometimes all I got was a mouthful of ice.
That was okay. I couldn’t glance away from my phone.
I couldn’t let my mind wander, not even for an instant.
I missed my mouth, and a glob of tofu plopped into my lap.
Sugar water dribbled down my chin. To fix this I had to do several things at once, and I failed at them all.
I wiped my chin and got sugar water all over my hand.
I dragged my sticky fingers across my phone, and the touchscreen stopped working.
The tofu stain spread across my shirt. I tried to pick the glob up, but it crumbled in my fingers.
Outside the window stood a woman and her child. They were staring at me, I knew, because when I glanced up the woman grasped her child’s hand and hurried on.
I could just imagine what she thought of me.
Useless girl. Can’t speak Chinese. Can’t bring a spoon to her mouth.
I dragged my spoon a few times around the bowl.
I wasn’t hungry anymore. I placed my bowl and tray on the counter and stepped into the hot sun, wishing it would melt me into the concrete.