Chapter 5 #6
It had happened several years ago, during what our family now referred to as Jasmine’s “difficult phase.” We used the word “difficult” because neither of my parents had the words or even the conceptual framework for “clinical depression.” It all began when my parents realized that it was past midnight, that the family car was missing, and that no one had heard from Jasmine for hours.
My mother and father spoke to some of Jasmine’s friends, and the story emerged in bits and pieces.
Jasmine had been threatening to kill herself.
Jasmine had left a note with someone, somewhere, though this person was now unreachable, and no one remembered what the note said.
Allegedly there were screenshots of incriminating conversations, but we couldn’t see them.
Jasmine had asked a friend to procure sleeping pills for her, and though no one did so, they hadn’t thought to warn my parents that Jasmine had made this request. I had always hated Jasmine’s friends: surly, greasy-haired teenagers in dark and baggy clothes, whose lips curled when they saw me, who laughed when I asked if they were in Jasmine’s homeroom class.
They were not helpful—if anything, they seemed resentful that we were harshing Jasmine’s vibe, that the least we could give her was the freedom to die.
We searched Jasmine’s room, but she had been careful.
Her browser history was wiped clean. Nothing in her drawers.
A few empty plastic baggies, wads of cash, but what did that mean?
We found only one incriminating item: an empty handle of vodka, tucked indifferently behind the trash can.
I remembered that bottle vividly, because it was the first time I understood an object to be vodka, which until then was a concept I had encountered only in Dostoevsky novels.
Jasmine had finished a handle of Burnett’s Hot Cinnamon vodka.
I understood this was a symbol of vice, and the first time I saw that cheap red-and-white label at a college party, vomit crept up in my throat.
I remembered huddling with Flora around the kitchen table, knees drawn up, arms wrapped over our shins while our father shouted at Jasmine’s friends over the phone.
Where did you see her? When was this? Why didn’t you tell us?
When he wasn’t on the phone, he was ranting, slamming his palms against the walls.
The police came to our door. At first they thought our mother had called in a domestic violence complaint against our father because she was crying and he was shouting, and they tried to arrest my father, but Flora and I ran in shouting our protests in English, and even when everyone had calmed down, they were unsympathetic.
Was Jasmine a minor? No, eighteen? Then they couldn’t do anything.
Adults who lived at home were still adults; they had the right not to be found.
What about the car? Had Jasmine stolen the car?
Yes, they could report the vehicle as stolen, but that was not so urgent as to warrant a house call.
They agreed to help only after our father told them that Jasmine was suicidal.
I guessed premeditated murder was still a crime even if the victim was the perpetrator.
Gonggong and Popo were in the house. They had come for our winter break, because we hadn’t been to China that summer and my mother missed her parents.
It was a tense visit. Flora and I were entering middle school and high school respectively, and we were grappling with the life-or-death stakes of those milieus.
We did not have time to babysit our grandparents.
Jasmine had decided against college; she was still living at home, but she was never around.
I only ever saw her sneaking in late at night and then leaving first thing in the morning.
Our language was rusty, and we didn’t know what to do with these grandparents, who seemed so much older and slower than we remembered them.
My mother urged us to spend time with them, but we didn’t know how.
We didn’t need them to take care of us anymore, but we didn’t know what to do with them otherwise.
Every exchange was tinged with guilt: We had to pretend we wouldn’t prefer they weren’t there.
We settled on walking the dog together. Flora and I spoke the best Chinese we had.
Look, a duck! Look, a squirrel! Look, another duck!
I was always startled to hear Flora speak Chinese, because by then she had spent so much time with her gaggle of Bratz doll white friends that I was shocked she understood any Chinese at all.
She refused to speak it at home; she always answered our parents back in English.
But with our grandparents, Flora intoned Chinese with all the saccharine sweetness of a C-drama heroine.
Gonggong, Popo, would you do me the honor of holding Jack-Jack’s leash?
I remember their patient smiles, their vigorous strides.
Popo swung her arms up and down in imitation of the army march she’d learned at school.
“Keeps the blood circulating through the muscles,” she told us.
“Circulation is important at my age. Go on, you try.” We obeyed.
We understood perfectly well whenever she spoke to us.
We just couldn’t give an interesting response.
We were polite. We excused ourselves at dinner, and then we fled upstairs.
Flora liked doing her homework at the dining room table, but now she did it shut up in her room.
Otherwise Gonggong would hover over her shoulder, curious about how they taught algebra in America.
What was this new math? Why was she drawing boxes?
“Tell him to stop,” Flora complained to our mother, as if Gonggong weren’t even there.
“I can’t concentrate, he’s so annoying.”
The only group activity we enjoyed was watching movies.
One night we all sat together to watch The Godfather.
Gonggong had picked it out. He recognized the cover; that imported bootleg DVD had made it all over China.
At first Gonggong had sat there watching by himself, but the score and dialogue were impossible to resist, and by the time Connie’s wedding was over, all of us were sitting in rapt attention, waiting to see how Michael might save his father from being assassinated at the hospital.
There were no subtitles; I couldn’t tell how well my grandparents were following the plot.
Sometimes my mother leaned over to explain things such as “The older brother is too hotheaded and that’s why they had to kill him,” or “Now control of the family goes to the younger one.”
“It’s hard to be the head of the family,” Gonggong had observed, while my father nodded in agreement. “So many people depend on you.”
The police called around two in the morning.
Someone had identified a car similar to ours by the lake.
Our parents and the officers at the house all sped out to go investigate.
Flora and I wanted to go too, but my mother refused to let us.
“Watch them,” she said as she was gathering up her things, though it wasn’t clear whom she was speaking to.
We ended up sitting on the stairs right in front of the front door, just sitting and waiting, hugging our knees to our chest. I remembered staring at the bottom of the stairs, tracing lines in the patterns in the wood.
How could this be my reality? How could I be in this moment, right now; how had things culminated in this?
Back then, I already harbored fantasies that I could prove any bad situation was an illusion.
Maybe if I concentrated on the precise grain of the wood I would find a flaw and expose the dream and wake up.
“Why is it always our family?” Flora demanded. “Other families have normal people, why do we get stuck with fucking Jasmine, what’s her problem even, why is she always doing this? What does she have to be sad about?”
We bitched about Jasmine for a while. Jasmine was selfish and narcissistic, Jasmine didn’t care about any of us, she made our parents miserable, her piercings looked awful, the one in her nose made her look like a cow, and if she meant to kill herself then she should have done it a long time ago and saved everyone all this trouble.
“Don’t say that,” said Gonggong. “Don’t talk that way about your sister.”
We were startled to hear him speak. Until that moment we had been acting like he wasn’t even there.
Flora and I were in our own little world, and Gonggong and Popo were in theirs.
I realized, in revisiting this memory, that perhaps my perception of Gonggong had been wrong all along.
Had I imagined that he couldn’t speak a word of English?
How else would he have known what we were saying?
“Your sister is a good girl,” he told us, in Chinese. “She loves you all very much. And she is going to come home.”
“How do you know?” asked Flora, also in Chinese.
“Because I know your sister,” he said. “She’s going through a hard time. It’s hard to grow up in this country.”
He spoke with such quiet authority. Gonggong never spoke with authority to us; he always deferred discipline to our parents.
Gonggong was only ever gentle and accommodating with us; if we put up with him, then he enjoyed our time; if we wanted to run off, he didn’t mind.
He never complained about anything we did.
But he, too, had raised three daughters, in far harsher conditions than these. He knew how to be a rock.
“Don’t worry,” said Gonggong. He put his hands on both of our shoulders. “I know Jasmine. I know she doesn’t want to die.”
Flora began to cry, and so I began to cry too.