After it was published last year, I had glanced through Baba’s bestseller, called that half-assed effort good enough, and shelved the book out of sight, out of mind at the top of my bookcase.
Putting it in Chenglish, I was ambushed at the family meeting, and I was ambushed by Natalia. Maybe I couldn’t help her moving in on Age, but it was my fault for not being prepared for the Cheng assault.
Sitting down, I hold Baba’s book in my lap, wondering if the ultimate how-to lesson is somewhere within. What I need is a step-by-step plan to win over my parents, Grace, Wayne. And myself. That’s what I find in the table of contents. To paraphrase the great Ethan Cheng, 99 percent of negotiation is preparation (introduction). Identify your goal (chapter one). Select your partners (chapter two). And then obliterate your obstacles (chapter three).
Looking up from the book, my eyes graze over the ghost-detecting mirror. I think about how everybody else takes what they want. They don’t stop whatever they’re doing. Right away. Why don’t I grab what I want, this once?
Slowly, I get to my feet, thinking about my goal; how after tonight, I’d just love to prove Wayne wrong: I can be a snowboard girl, one who’s so successful, my busy career will be just as all-consuming as everybody else’s in my family. Hong Kong? Hardly. My schedule is going to keep me busy flying around the world for competitions. I’ll be the one that other girls like Natalia wish they were.
At my computer, I open the spreadsheet I started a year ago, the one with the list of companies, their local sales reps, and addresses. I find the one I’m looking for, the man who asked to see my video after I finished it. It’s as if all my ambivalence and insecurities about snowboarding disappear. My fingers strike each key hard as I type:
| From: | Syrah Cheng |
| To: | [email protected] |
| Subject: | Checking In |
Dear Ralph,
You gave me your card after I won three events at Alpental last year and wanted to see my video résumé. I’m sending you a CD tomorrow. I’d love to talk when you have a moment.
Syrah
My hands feel as icy as if I’ve been standing on a mountain in skin-burning cold. When you approach a cliff, you can’t overanalyze, you can’t stall. So before I get scared and talk myself out of it, I hold my breath and hit Send.
C
ome Tuesday morning,
I wake from the same dream I’ve been having since my first day back on the slopes, the one where I’m snowboarding, whole again, only I’m wearing a leash, the kind that kids who are learning to ski sometimes wear. The thing is, I don’t know who’s holding my reins, slowing me down, but I’ve got a good suspicion. She’s bubbly, wears pink snow pants, and rides with her arms poised in second position like a ballerina. And she’s the reason why Age hasn’t called to check in yet again this morning.
With my eyes still closed, I breathe out the sensation of being tethered and inhale deeply, catching the scent of my favorite soy sauce eggs. The last time Bao-mu fixed those eggs was before Mama declared it was time for me to lose my baby fat, and lured a fancy American chef away from the top spa in Scottsdale. Another inhale. As a way of returning to my reality, this isn’t so bad, even if it means that Mama and Baba must have extended their second trip to D.C. in a week. That’s the only explanation for why Bao-mu would dare the wrath of Lena the kitchen warlord and whip up anything with the artery-choking fat content of (the horror! the horror!) eggs.
I open my eyes slowly and remember that it’s Bao-mu’s birthday. We’ll both be eating eggs this morning to wish her long life, and Bao-mu’s probably waiting for me. But I can’t resist checking e-mail—no response from RhamiWare, and definitely no message from Age. Bao-mu’s gift is behind my snowboarding gear, and I wince when I bend down to grab it, because my shoulder is still stiff from falling on it four nights ago.
Before I can head downstairs to the kitchen, where I thought she’d be, Bao-mu surprises me by opening the door to her suite. “I been waiting for you,” she says. Bags under her eyes mar her normally unlined face, her mouth puckered with sour worry.
The birthday wish dies on my lips, and I rush over to Bao-mu, demanding, “What’s wrong?”
“Christine call last night. My granddaughter had baby yesterday. Too early. Baby not ready come out yet.” A frown wrinkles Bao-mu’s smooth forehead. “I need go. Today.”
“Today?” I repeat faintly. Wait, I want to say, I just found out that you were leaving. But she is leaving. Bao-mu’s suite, which is typically a study of neatness with every book, frame, and plant in its place, looks like the aftermath of an earthquake or the mess made by an overwhelmed person who doesn’t know where to begin, abandoning one project to start another and another. Random piles of books and papers dot the bamboo floor, creating a sporadic tree line. Only the middle shelf of her bookcase has been cleared off. A few paintings, including the best of my elementary school art projects, lean against the far wall.
“You didn’t sleep,” I accuse her. “Why did you cook those eggs?”
I know why she cooked them instead of sleeping: because she loves me and knows how much I savor every bite of those forbidden salty eggs.
Bao-mu maneuvers slowly around her coffee table, stacked with clean teacups, looking around helplessly, lost and unsure.
Seeing Bao-mu like this, as if her age has caught up to her over the course of a phone call, makes me want to cry. According to the chapter in
The Ethan Cheng Way
I read last night when I couldn’t shake the fear that I’d never regain my feeling for snow, sometimes it’s better to act than to do nothing.
I figure, this is one of those times. Besides, I’ve traveled so much, packing I can do with my eyes closed.
Huskily, I tell Bao-mu, “Let’s pack your clothes first.”
Bao-mu nods and follows me into her bedroom.
A large suitcase lies open on her low platform bed.
“Okay,” I say decisively, “you need enough clothes for a week. Three pants, four shirts, a sweater, a jacket, and underwear.” Out of her drawers, I pull out the elasticized pants Bao-mu’s so fond of wearing, no matter how many custom-made slacks Mama brings back for her from Hong Kong.
“And this,” says Bao-mu, handing me the cashmere sweater I bought for her two Christmases ago, the one she’s never worn even though it’s her favorite color, tangerine. She strokes it lovingly the way Grace does Mochi or a mother might a beloved daughter’s hair. “I been waiting for special occasion wear this. When Christine see me in this, she say, Mama, you look so successful.”
I want to ask her why it matters what her daughter thinks, her daughter who has never taken the time to call on Bao-mu’s birthday or remember Mother’s Day. Her daughter who Bao-mu sees only when she visits California, and never the other way around. Bao-mu always demurs with a “Christine medical doctor. She so busy.”
As I place Bao-mu’s underwear inside the suitcase, I notice her precious treasures on the bed: the black-and-white photograph of a much younger Bao-mu and her husband, a stern, unsmiling man. Her daughter, surly, wearing graduation robes. But when I pick up Bao-mu’s cell phone, the one Baba gave to her that she rarely uses because she says the sudden ringing, ringing makes her think a ghost is calling, I know she’s truly going for good.
“You call me anytime,” Bao-mu says before turning abruptly to the closet. She walks slower than usual, like she’s the one who was used, bruised, and abused.
As she stands on tiptoes to grab her shirts, I nudge her gently aside. Since I have studied with the master and commander herself—Bao-mu the Great—for the last fifteen years, I order rather than ask, “Just tell me what you want.”
“I be okay,” Bao-mu replies, but to my relief retreats to her bed, her weight a bare suggestion, hardly indenting the mattress.
“Which shirts do you want?”
“It not matter.”
So I reach up to select a few, holding my breath when my stiff shoulder protests. On her bed, I fold the sleeves one over the other so they hug themselves.
“There so much work,” says Bao-mu, glancing wearily around her bedroom.
“I’ll take care of packing the rest of your stuff after you’re gone. Just let me know where to ship it, okay?”
“You just like your daddy.”
“What? Bossy?”
“You always know what to do,” says Bao-mu stubbornly.
That unwavering confidence in me makes me tear up, and to distract myself, I hand Bao-mu her present. “Happy birthday, Bao-mu.” Where Mama is stressful to shop for, what with her ever-changing brand hierarchy with each new season—Prada is good, Chanel better—Bao-mu is a challenge, because she says at this time in her life, the best present is having someone listen to her talk. Out of habit, Bao-mu unwraps her present so carefully, she doesn’t tear the paper, good enough to reuse.
“Wah!”
says Bao-mu. Her fingers run gently across the cover of the baby book inside the box. “This so beautiful. You make?”
I nod and tell her, “It’s a brag book. You can put pictures of your great-grandchild in it and bore everyone with them.”
“Brag book,” she repeats. She opens it to the first page, where I’ve drawn a manga version of her chasing a crawling baby. “In China, we say bad luck brag about children. It tempt fate to take them away, bring lots bad luck.”
“Oh.” I grimace, wondering if I’ve made a colossal mistake, given Bao-mu a
bad
present when all I’ve wanted to do is make her happy, remember me.
But Bao-mu sighs. “Maybe I not brag enough about my daughter. Ah, Syrah, life sometime so hard.” She looks at me intently, willing me to understand. “Just because someone leave you, not mean they not love you.”
“I know.”
But she makes a tsking sound as if she doubts that I know, and then she says in Mandarin, the way she always does when she has something Important to Communicate,
“Wo jiang ni ting.” I talk so you listen.
Bao-mu scoots over and pats the empty spot beside her. “When Christine little, just ten, the Red Guard come to our house in Shanghai. You know Red Guard? Cultural Revolution in 1966?”
I shake my head because, according to my school’s history program, nothing much has happened in America past 1945. With the brief exception of a weeklong sojourn into the Far East, Chinese history is a vast, uncharted territory, as far as I’m concerned.
“Communists took control over China about time when your mommy born. They start Red Guard group. Kids like little soldiers. Some your age, only fourteen, fifteen.” Bao-mu shakes her head, still unable to comprehend it. Her voice hardens. “One day, they came and burn all my books, smash pots, vases, everything beautiful. They take all my jewelry. I so stupid. I hid diamond in my shoe, one my husband gave me for engagement ring. The Red Guard separate us in different rooms. They tell him, they know I hide something. They tell him, they kill me if they find unless he tell them. So he tell them about diamond. They beat me, my husband in front of Christine. Then they take him away to labor camp.”
Bao-mu smoothes the bedspread between us, one pucker refusing to lay flat, its edge trapped under the suitcase. “Christine denounce me.”
“What do you mean, denounce?”
“All time in my village, we have meetings. Everyone have to come. Some make confessions about themselves, that they capitalist, they landowner. Christine say I bad, a landowner.” Bao-mu shakes her head, her fingers pressing down futilely on the bulge of fabric, but like her memory, it won’t be smoothed away. “In front everybody, they give me
ying yang tou.
Shave half my head, other half cut short like man’s hair. Very ugly.” Her eyes narrow in remembrance.
“And you’re still going to help Christine and her daughter.”
“They my family.” And like Baba’s favorite explain-all word,
business,
the way Bao-mu says “family” explains why she’s leaving me. To Bao-mu, family, not money or honor or face, is everything. And I’m not family. Her hand sweeps brusquely through the air to clear the ugly wisps of memory and history away. “Old story. We all have old story.”
Bao-mu looks at me expectantly, waiting for me to divulge my secret that I’ve punched down, tried to bury for the last seven months. The reason why I took off at Whistler, not because I’m an idiot but because I was so upset I became idiotic. There’s a big difference even if the results are the same. But that’s an old story I still can’t draw in my manga-journal, much less confess. Not even to Bao-mu. Or Age.
“You never told me any of this,” I say, realizing I only know the bare facts of Bao-mu’s life where it intersects with mine. How many journals could I fill with what we don’t know about each other?
“Sometime, better if we just forget about,” she says finally as if she knows everything about my broken heart. “No, no, that wrong. Learn from first,” she corrects herself. “And then forget about.”
What I want to know is, where’s the step-by-step plan for forgetting all the things that disfigure you inside, in places where only you can feel the scars? My hands are folded, a good girl at church, but good girls don’t knowingly let a boy like Jared do what he did to me.
“Seee-raaaah,” Bao-mu says, hanging on to the vowels in my name like she doesn’t want to let them go. “Look.”
When I do, I see that she’s holding a picture of me and her, the day I won the school spelling bee in fifth grade. I don’t remember where my parents were that time, only that they weren’t there. Bao-mu shakes her head in disbelief that so much time could separate that girl in the photograph from the one she’s sitting by now.
“You such smart girl.” Slowly, Bao-mu works the photograph out of its frame and places it in the brag book, the one I made for her great-granddaughter. She nods once, satisfied, and only then does she say, “You need make own brag book. You need say, I the best. I deserve the best.”
I throw my arms around Bao-mu, the one person who has always believed in me, no matter what. Under my hands, her frail shoulders are as delicate as bird wings. Only then does it strike me hard just how much I’m going to miss her when she flies this coop.