Tall lights around the half-pipe stick out like gangly giraffes past the Nokia yurt where Baba and Mama want to visit to check out which phones appeal to the kids here.
“I’m going to walk around,” I tell them.
“Remember, you can watch from the VIP stands or in the tent,” Mama reminds me, her teeth chattering in the cold. Reason number 542 why a little body fat is a good thing: free insulation in winter.
“Maybe,” I tell her, then wave them off and trudge through the snow to the base of the mountain, where I can join the crowd gathering around a large, fenced-off area.
Even with my parka and my natural layer of body fat, I’m cold in this wind, and I cross my arms around myself, not that that does much good. Inside the enclosure, a bunch of guys wearing thick black jackets walk around, headsets on, looking official and important. Off to the side are the ramp and rails for the jam session later this evening, where a thousand bucks will be given out every half hour to the rider with the best moves. On the other side is a large stage capped with an enormous screen. Above it all, loud music thumps, pumped in from the speakers set atop towers.
Personally, my favorite event is the slopestyle, where the riders take a course that’s a little bit of everything: some jumps, some rails, and a whole lot of palm-sweating fun. That event’s not until the afternoon, and anyway, I’m here to look for Jared, who competes in boarder cross, which pits four riders at a time as they race down a course of turns, jumps, and mogul fields. Let’s just say this isn’t exactly the cleanest of events, not when snowboarders get rewarded for cutting each other off as they race to qualify first for the semis and then the finals.
One of the men in black motions to a cameraman with a shaky cam on his shoulder. A couple of snowboarding hotshots have arrived, including Jared. I can identify every single one in his group: Hideo, who starred in the last Mack Dawg snowboarding movie; Jorja, who’s been dominating the snowboard scene in Europe; and Erik Johanson, Mr. Fame and Glory, one of the giants in snowboarding and Jared’s older brother.
The girls in front of me are jostling to get an even better position at the fence, hoping to attract the attention of both the snowboarders and the cameraman. I stay in my spot. The reporter first talks to Erik, then moves on to Hideo and Jorja, before returning to Jared’s brother.
Finally, the reporter turns to Jared, a footnote in this news piece, the first thing that’ll be cut if the segment ends up too long. “So, are you going to follow in your brother’s footsteps and win your first world championship the way Erik did when he was eighteen?”
Erik sidles off as though he doesn’t think his brother’s answer warrants his time. I can see the irritated sweep of Jared’s gaze over to his brother before resting on me. His fifteen seconds of fame are over, drowned in the “Erik! Erik!” of the girls who’ve jockeyed their way to an open spot on the fence down the way, and the cameraman pans their apple-cheeked good looks.
“Hey,” says Jared, approaching me. It’s one thing to prepare my talking points and another to have Jared on the other side of the fence, so close that I have to look up, up, up at him. How can his eyes be greener than I remember? “So, stranger.”
“Yeah, it’s been a while,” I tell him, wondering how on Earth my hands could possibly be sweaty (sweaty!) when it’s about twenty degrees out here.
He grins like he knows that I’m nervous.
I grin like I’m not, even though I feel like I’m losing my footing on an uneven, gravelly path, one that leads directly to old fantasies. Looking at the freckle by his mouth makes me forget everything—everything that I wrote last night and practiced this morning—everything except how just one of his kisses made me forget that I am Syrah, Ethan Cheng’s daughter, and believe that I was Shiraz, the snowboarding chick. It was such a heady transformation that, I swear, I feel the ghost of a tingle on my lips. And I remember how he nudged me back against the wall, pressed into me, and how I smelled evergreen on him, as if he were part of the mountain.
“You caught me at a good time,” says Jared, his gaze flickering to the cameraman who’s walking away. And just like that, I wonder why I’d want to be with someone who’s constantly posturing to make himself look more important than he is. No matter how being with Jared made me feel, when it comes down to it, I’d be just another data point to prove his greatness.
The wind stops blowing, but I don’t need to brush my hair out of my eyes to see Jared clearly for the first time since he bedazzled me on these very slopes. I’m no more girl on the fast track to a pro snowboarding career than he is the man of my dreams.
Sure, I could leave now. But I’ve got a few things to say. And according to The Ethan Cheng Way, confrontations are best in your place of power. If you can’t have that, opt for neutral grounds. Since I’m at a disadvantage on snow (I mean, who am I kidding? I’m not the one competing today), I ask him, “You want to grab something?”
For a moment Jared looks surprised, but then his natural self-assurance asserts itself. Either that or the prospect of a free lunch.
“For sure,” he says easily.
I meet him at the gate and we approach the enormous VIP tent. Jared looks at me expectantly, but when I continue past it, he has to ask more directly, “Are your parents in there?”
I know that’s Jared-code for: Take me to your patriarch.
“Yup,” I say. When the choices are 1) parents potentially barging in on us in the VIP tent or 2) paying for food in public, I know exactly what scenario I want. So I guide-dog us to the day lodge at the foot of the chairlifts.
Next to me, Jared asks, “So you doing well?”
“Doing great.” Yeah, if great means on the verge of hyperventilating because I’ve forgotten what I want to say to him and a gaggle of girls are staring at him like he’s the dessert du jour. Unconsciously, his eyes flick over at them, checking them out. I’m grateful for my gear, which, I do have to say, acts like a fashion power surge, especially when I overhear those same girls shifting their attention off him and onto my “cute outfit.”
“Actually,” I tell Jared, “I feel fabulous.”
“Great, great,” he says, opening the door for me. “Now, me, I’ve been crazy-busy. God, this season already, I’ve been to Europe three times, San Candido, Kreischberg, Berchtesgaden. Some guys want to start filming in Aspen this spring.” Weary sigh before The Jared Johanson Report continues, “Then a photo shoot with Burton.”
Five more data points into his greatness, I’m feeling distinctly unimpressed, and I move up in line for my hot chocolate.
“So you might be wondering what’s going on with my gig at…”
Actually, dude, I’m not. That’s when I realize Jared is delivering his own carefully crafted answers right off his Rude Q and A, the one he thinks he needs to memorize, because in his head, everyone compares him to his big brother and finds him lacking.
I remember what he told me once: “I want that final, I want that podium.”
Instead of awe or adoration, I feel nothing but pity for Jared. And that sets me free.
I tune back into his do-re-mi-me-me-me serenade. “And then this summer, I don’t know, I thought I’d chase the snow…”
His tune hasn’t changed, so in bemusement, I fix myself a cup of hot chocolate.
See, Baba might quote Sun-Tzu all over his book, but as brilliant a military strategist as he is, Sun-Tzu is just not what I’d call a nice guy. I mean, can you trust someone who lops off the heads of two women just because they giggled? So Mr. Sun-Tzu might be right when he said, “Warfare is the greatest affair of state, the basis of life or death, the Tao of survival or extinction.” But that’s the thing. I’m tired of experiencing life as survival, like we’re animals in some dingo-eat-dog documentary. Either Mama gets food, or Weipou’s kids do. Either Baba can love me, or he can love Grace and Wayne. Either Age can date Natalia, or he can be friends with me.
That may be the Tao of Survival. But it’s not the Tao of Syrah.
According to my way of navigating the world, I don’t have to cut Jared down to size to claim victory. Why do that when I can pull a Mama instead?
Fifteen years of watching the master of the social brush-off finally comes to good use. The second Jared stops for breath, I smile politely at him and say, “I’m so glad you’re doing well. It’s been wonderful catching up. Good luck to you!”
Before Jared can blink at me in surprise, his tray laden with an early lunch of turkey sandwich, power bar, and bottled water, I set down the money for my drink and my drink alone, and tell the cashier, “One hot chocolate, please.”
But, gosh, being the good girl is so darn boring. Maybe every girl needs a little Sun-Tzu in her life. Smiling brightly, I say, “Oh, one thing.”
“Yeah?”
“There is no such thing as a free lunch. And by the way, I would never have been your free pass to Paradise.”
For a moment longer, I stare at Jared so that I’ll remember him clearly, not like I was riding to him with the sun in my eyes and he’s some hazy figure who I thought would rescue me from me. But like he is right now: tall, dark, and totally dumbfounded.
Oh, my god, I don’t need you,
I think and grin when it finally dawns on me. I don’t need to be a pro snowboard girl who’s featured on the covers of magazines and in countless ads. I don’t need to reel in an up-and-coming star and stand at his side while everyone congratulates him on his drool-worthy tricks. I don’t need to be less than I am to make everyone else feel better than they are. And I certainly don’t need to buy myself into anyone’s good graces.
I am good enough as I am.
“Goodbye, Jared,” I tell him, and hand him my hot chocolate, empty calories that I don’t want or need anymore.
Feeling lighter than I have felt in a long, long time and bathing in my own alpenglow, I fly across the snow and make my way to the VIP tent.
A
fter the closing ceremonies
on Tuesday, you would think that I could find a spare moment to talk to my parents about Ride for Our Lives in the five hours it takes for us to drive home. But this time, when I present my plan to them, I want to be prepared, completely buttoned up in the Chengian way. Besides, I want to savor this time with them, and I ask Baba random questions about his childhood. After a couple of stories, like the one about how he and his two older sisters used to torment their grandfather by hiding his slippers, Mama shyly shares one of her own.
“I used to love to catch frogs,” she admits.
“You’re kidding.” This comes from Baba and me at the same time.
“Not the big, scary, buggy-eyed ones, mind you. So don’t think about ordering any for our ponds,” Mama warns Baba. “The little, tiny ones. They were so precious and delicate, I hated the thought of anyone stepping on them.”
My mother, shopper of Chanel and champion of pygmy frogs. Who knew?
“Was this in Hong Kong?” I ask.
“Yes, of course. Weipou would swat me when I came home dirty, but…” Mama’s voice trails off before she turns around to smile naughtily at me. “It was worth it.”
Too soon, the front gate to our house opens. The thing is, tonight, as the gate shuts behind us, I don’t feel corralled the way I usually do, but invited into a special sanctuary. It’s a feeling, I decide, I could get used to.
When the landscape architect told Mama that traditional Chinese gardens are a perfect mix of yang—everything that’s public and rational and open—and yin—all that is private and emotional and hidden, I thought,
Alright, boys, let’s just flush another six digits down the drain.
But he did have a point. Not everyone belongs in my private, emotional, hidden heart. No wonder Mama and Baba only invite the people they most trust and admire to our home. Selectivity isn’t snobby; it’s necessity. How else are they supposed to keep themselves sane and keep human leeches at bay?
The driveway wends down to the house in the feng shui way, bending and twisting, always a surprise around the corner. Just like life. Which is why I really ought to write a letter of apology to that landscape architect for scoffing at him. I’m on visit 1,095, give or take a couple dozen, and it’s taken all this time to finally appreciate the symbols Mama layered into The House of Cheng. Those craggy boulders excavated from China? They’re auspicious. Those bats on all the upturned roof eaves? They convey everyone who ventures within our walls with the Five Blessings: longevity, wealth, health, virtue, and peaceful death (admittedly morbid, but infinitely practical).
As we approach the main house, I ask, “Can you let me out here?”
“Why?” Both my parents swivel around in their seats, surprised at my request.
Ridiculously, I’m close to crying, because I finally, really and truly, feel like I belong in The House of Cheng. I tell them, “I just feel like using the front door.”
A large box from
Vancouver waits on my desk, occupying so much space the bonsai and my new snowboarding magazine perch precariously close to the edge. Wrapped inside a blanket that still smells of Po-Po’s bedroom are her three scrapbooks.
Surrounded on the floor by this semicircle of memories, I can’t decide what to do with these scrapbooks. Sure, they belong to Mama, but considering that we haven’t mentioned her mother, the funeral, or Vancouver since our kitchen talk in Whistler, I have no idea what she’ll do with them. Burn them, toss them, or, like me, shelve them up high where she’ll wish she could tuck them out of sight, out of mind the way I tried to forget
The Ethan Cheng Way.
Somehow, as I lift an album to my lap, so heavy I need both hands to manage it, I don’t think Mama will get off as lightly as I did if one of these guys fell on her head. I smile, thinking about Bao-mu’s commentary on that sign:
You might as well break head, you forget your past.
I’m steaming in my jacket, so I leave this three-volume encyclopedia of Mama to hang up my hot pink parka in my closet. There, on the wall, is the picture of me and Age, snowboarding buddies.
Question: When did
avoid
turn into a
void
in my heart?