Grace speeds up to pass a guy in a Beemer. “Look,” she says, “there just aren’t that many guys who are comfortable with a woman who’s independently wealthy, smart, and attractive.”
“Well, no offense, but you can be kind of intimidating.”
“Who wants to be a wimp? Or worse, be
with
a wimp for life?” Grace shudders and presses on the gas pedal as if she could accelerate past all the climbers who’ve used her as a rung to their success.
“True.”
Grace is on such a roll, I’m not sure how much attention she’s paying to the road. Obviously, not much. She’s tailing a guy in another lane who flips her off. “Jerk,” she says, outraged. “Did you see that?”
“Ummm…”
“Case in point, guys can’t be trusted. Do the money test: name one guy, any guy, you know who wouldn’t freak out that you’ve got more money than your children’s children will be able to spend in their lifetimes. Or who would sign a prenup without blinking.”
I can and do. “My best friend, Age.”
“Uh-huh, and why isn’t he boyfriend material?” Grace waits a scant beat before continuing, “I’ll tell you why. He’s probably a nice guy. Right?”
Grace’s “nice” sounds petrified with boredom. I laugh. “He’s actually pretty adventurous, one of the best snowboarders I’ve seen. There’s just one small problem. He’s got a girlfriend who happens to hate my guts.”
“Ah, the insecure girlfriend.” Grace nods knowingly. “Girls can be even worse than guys when it comes to rich girls. On the one hand, they want to collect us as trophies or coast on our credit cards, but hang around them long enough, and they start tearing us down.”
“That’s so true!” I shriek, reminded of The Six-Pack, the ultimate clique of female collectors and destroyers. Then there’s Lillian. “But not all girls are like that.”
“Maybe not all,” Grace grudgingly concedes. Her cell phone rings from the depths of her leather green tote bag, but instead of answering it, she doesn’t even look in its direction. “But I’m absolutely right about my rich girls are a no-man’s-land theory.”
“Come on, don’t you believe in soul mates?” Frankly, I need the possibility of romance, even if my trust fund attracts the wrong guys. Don’t poor little rich girls deserve for richer or poorer, too? I grip my car seat as though I’m hanging onto a shred of hope. “I mean, you’ve got to believe that somewhere out there, there’s one guy who’s your perfect match?”
My sudden nausea has nothing to do with being carsick and everything to do with how I’ve pushed my perfect match into Natalia’s eager arms.
“Are you kidding?” scoffs Grace, easing up on the gas pedal because a cop is lurking in the median. “The girl you are now is different from the girl you were two years ago is different from the woman you’re going to be in five years and fifteen years and twenty-five years from now. There is no way that one guy anywhere on earth is perfect forever.”
But my Mr. Perfect fit the girl I was seven years ago on the playground as well as he did the one five years ago when we Chengs jumped from wealthy to obscenely wealthy and the girl I am today.
“So, what, people get married because they settle for good enough?” I ask, thinking about Mama and Baba. No matter how hard I try not to hear the gossip, it’s impossible to ignore how the women snicker about Mama marrying for money, and Baba for her body. Would they still think that if they saw how tenderly Baba had held Mama a few nights ago after she learned about her mother’s death?
“Trust me.” Her voice hardens. “The guys who feel comfortable with us are the ones who want us for one thing. And it’s not our bodies.”
I dig my fingernails into my knees. The hallelujah chorus plays in my head, for she speaketh the truth about one boy in my life. But not about Age. The car is going so fast now, the trees lining the highway blur into a swath of green, the way my time with Jared has blurred into a single feeling: shame.
Far, far away, I hear Grace ask, “Hey, you okay?”
I swallow hard, blink away my tears. My robotic “you bet” is confident, clear-cutting any trace that all is not well in Syrah-land.
The weird thing is, Grace’s eyes narrow, like she sees right through my vanishing act. “I know we haven’t been close—”
“Not close?” I repeat slowly, my voice dull in my ears. A harsh, ironic laugh escapes out of me, surprising me as much as it does Grace.
Grace flushes. “Wayne and I were…”
“Mean. Hateful. Choose a synonym, any synonym.” God, where is this anger coming from? The same anger that spurted at Age yesterday. It’s like both Grace and Age have stepped on a fracture line in my heart, one I didn’t know existed, and all those layers of emotions that I’ve packed down, season after season, year after year, release at once. “You guys are old enough to be my parents. God, Wayne himself is a
father,
and he treats me worse than anyone would treat a dog.”
“I’m sorry,” says Grace softly.
At that, Mochi lifts his head in the armrest between us and yips quietly, like he’s apologizing for every teeth-baring growl, too.
Once my emotions run free, I can no more check myself than I could have the avalanche I set off in the backcountry. “And then you come prancing out, all nice and ‘let me rescue you’ after fifteen years of being an asshole.”
God, how do I stop this, stop myself? I’m out of control, wandering so far from The Ethan Cheng Way, I’ve lost my way.
Grace must know it, too, because matter-of-factly, she says, “I deserve that.”
That simple admission of guilt and responsibility diffuses my anger, thwarting the tantrum I’m ready to have.
“But it’s not me who you’re mad at. Not even Wayne.”
“Who?” I demand. “Who do you think I’m really mad at?”
“Your mom.”
“What?”
“In the same way that Wayne and I have been mad at our dad. He left our mother and us, Syrah. We lived through years of him never being around. He was always at work so much—”
“As if he’s around now.”
“No!” Her rebuttal is so emphatic that Mochi whimpers. If I hadn’t known better, I would have missed that telltale sign of a second emotional avalanche being released into this car. Soon, if we’re not careful, the weight of our words will suffocate us. Grace’s voice quiets, each syllable angular with articulated sharpness. “This was different. The only memories I have of Baba those few times when he made it home were of him yelling at us. ‘You’re so stupid. You’ll never amount to anything.’ God, anything I ever said would set off a tirade, until I stopped talking when he was around. And then my silence would make him so angry, he’d…”
“He’d what?”
“He’d yell even more. I know it sounds stupid, because it wasn’t like he ever hit us or was a bad drunk. But I was completely scared of him and how he’d totally lose it, like he was crazy when he went into his yelling benders. God, when everyone used to say he was Prince Charming combined with Yoda, it’d make me want to throw up.” She snorts. “How little they knew.”
Prince Charming meets Yoda is exactly how I idealized Baba, thinking of him as suave and wise, until he yelled at me in the closet. I can’t forget how his fists balled up without him realizing it. How I was so scared when his face twisted like he wanted to obliterate me, and even more scared because he lost his famous Ethan Cheng control. I turn my head, stare at the windblown clouds outside my window.
Grace takes a deep breath. “But I don’t get mad at Baba, and you don’t dare get mad at your mother.”
No,
I want to snap.
Keep your PR-pseudo-psychology-spin-doctoring bull to yourself.
But I don’t, because I’ve got a niggling feeling that she’s telling the truth. Grace turns on the blinker and we cross back into the carpool lane. Beyond the windshield I realize I can make out individual trees. But only if I look straight ahead—not behind to check out who’s trying to pass me, not to the side to see who’s catching up to me. But forward to where we’re going.
I ask her softly, “So what’s with this big sister act all of a sudden?”
“You want to know what this is all about?” Grace turns to me, her PR toothpaste commercial smile disappearing to reveal one that’s melancholy and real. “I finally got it at that Evergreen Fund dinner that you aren’t the girl who I wanted you to be. You should be spoiled, feel entitled, be lazy. But you’re not.”
In front of us, a long stretch of cars waits to cross the border. I soak up her words, closing my eyes as if that way, I can better taste the residue of our first true big sister–little sister talk and tiff.
As soft as a grace note, I hear her murmur, “You’re more Cheng than I am.”
My eyes snap open. “How can you say that?”
“Because you’ve got the guts to be a pioneer. I just toe the line.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. So much for being a pioneer. I totally got the yes-but-no rejection from RhamiWare. So it’s not like I’m ever going to be a pro snowboarder.”
Grace swivels in her seat to look me in the eyes. “Why do you really want to be sponsored? Most professional women athletes are hired for their looks, not their skills. The ones who are paid the most aren’t even necessarily the women at the top of their sport.”
I start to deny it but realize she’s not saying anything I don’t already know. How unfair it is that snowboarding guys can look as skanky as they want? If they don’t shower for five days, who cares? So long as they tweak out more amplitude than the next guy, go bigger and cleaner, they could be the scroungiest dirtballs on the slopes and still score sponsorships. But girls? No matter how good their tricks are, how high their jumps go, the pro snowboarding girls have got to work their sex appeal, watch their figures, stay in shape in season and out. Their bodies, not just their skills, make them marketable: boobs on boards. Just like my manga alter ego, Shiraz.
Grace says, “You could still snowboard just for the love of it—”
“But I want to be more!”
“Let me finish,” she snaps—a big sister to her pesky little sister. “Why be sponsored and get paid a tiny piece of the pie when you could own the entire thing, crust, filling and whipped cream? Ride for Our Lives could be your launching pad to a whole different career, something that melds snowboarding with business with philanthropy.” She pauses. “I’ll be honest here. Even if you went pro, you’d never be known for your riding. Not really. You’d always be
that
girl, the one with Ethan Cheng for a dad.”
As much as I hate to admit it, Grace is right.
Ahead of us, the Peace Arch links America to Canada in a great rainbow-shaped embrace. The line between us and the border is still long and interminably slow moving, but that gives me time to think about Grace’s suggestion. The whole snowboarding pie. Funny, that was Jared’s reach dream, but it could be my reality.
“This is another reason why having a private jet is a good thing,” mutters Grace, sighing impatiently when we don’t budge for another five minutes.
“I’m glad we drove.”
“Me, too.”
In silence, we wait until it’s our turn to face the border patrol’s interrogation. The young, unsmiling man leans slightly forward from within his private gatehouse and demands, “State the purpose for your visit.”
“Personal,” says Grace.
This morning I would have said,
Finding my family.
That’s what I thought I was doing when I set out this morning with Grace. But as we cross into Canada, Po-Po’s adopted country, I realize I’ve already found the sister I’ve been looking for right inside this car.
R
ichmond may be a
suburb of Vancouver, but it’s really little Hong Kong. I’m not just referring to all the restaurants serving up every variety of Chinese food from spicy Hunan to Cantonese seafood, and dim sum to donuts—the long, hot, and savory Chinese ones that you dip into soy milk. Almost all the storefronts we drive past are bilingual. Even the church we pull into welcomes its congregants with a sign in both English and Chinese.
The church parking lot is the one place that doesn’t feel congested with people, people, and more people. There’s only one other car in the lot, and Grace pulls next to it. With an hour to go before the service, why do I feel like I’m a lifetime too late?
“Do you want to drive around for a bit?” asks Grace, hand poised on the stick shift, looking ready to drive me anywhere I want to go.
All morning long, I couldn’t wait to get here, but now that I’m this close to meeting a hidden branch on my family tree, I just want to hop into the backseat and watch the scenery pass me by. But watching life roll on without me isn’t what I’m here to do.
“No, thanks. I might sit inside before the service starts.” What I really plan on doing is scoping out a seat in the back of the church where I can leave fast if I need to and remain incognito if I want to be. “Could you come back at two thirty?”
“The service will last longer than half an hour, you know?” When I nod, Grace says, “Okay” like she understands her role as big sister: to be my safety net-slash-getaway car in case something goes terribly wrong. “I could just go in with you.”
“I’ll be okay.”
Uneasily, Grace watches me as I get out of the car. The air is cool and moist, the sky gray but not raining. The gloomy clouds look on the verge of tears.
“I’m going to be fine,” I assure her, but nod to convince myself.
That’s when Grace smiles. “I know you are.”
Even so, I notice she stays in the parking lot until I’m inside the church, and only then, as though she’s reluctant to leave, does she drive slowly away.
From the outside, St.
Joseph’s Church looks more big-box warehouse than place of worship. It’s bland and white with zero personality, the kind of building you’d drive past a million times without noticing.
Inside the church’s narthex, the high ceiling should feel imposing, but doesn’t. Somehow, between the benches and planters, the church is warm and inviting, even though no one mans the welcome desk near the entrance, which is a relief, since it saves me from explaining who I am and why I’m here.
Beyond the bulletin boards with notices about bible studies and women’s teas I spot a placard on an easel, a collage of Evie Leong’s world as beloved mother, grandmother, and wife. Pictures of her with all the important people in her life adorn the poster board. I tear my eyes away, knowing that I’ve never been part of even her most insignificant experiences. What I find myself looking at are my thick, heavy black shoes, not the dainty heels Mama would have me wear to school, nor the tattered sneakers I do instead. Just like my imposter shoes, I don’t belong to this world. But then I hear a car honking outside, and remember Grace.