Answer: When I was too afraid to commit. Too afraid to say,
Yeah, baby, we might as well go for it since everyone, even strangers, thinks that we’re a couple, we’re that close.
For the first time since I pinned up our photograph, I take it down and study it. Not just look at it, but scrutinize it until I vibrate from remembering Age’s voice and missing his presence. With Age, I never had to work at being anyone but who I was. And the funny thing is, regardless of what I did with Jared that night at camp, I’ve been more naked with Age, fully clothed and just talking.
As I hold the picture in my palm, I can see Age saving every little scrap his mother gave to him—the last notes she slipped into his lunchbox, the how-to guide for staying sane with two little brothers. And especially the videos she made during her last bout of chemo, condensing a lifetime of maternal nagging into ten hours of tape. What girls want (which took a good hour and a half and didn’t cover half the subject since we girls don’t always know what we want). How to get ready for a date (do not shave if you don’t know how). And what it means to be one of the good guys. Age didn’t need that lesson.
If he were on speaking terms with me, I know Age would find some pithy saying, which would reduce down to this: give the scrapbooks to your mom.
So I wrap my arms around these great books, ready to shepherd them to Mama’s office, when I find her standing in the living room, dressed to go out to dinner in heels and Armani, and testing the dirt in her bonsai planter with a frown. Hearing me as I approach, Mama shakes her head in exasperation. “The housekeeper forgot to water this.”
“I have something I want to show you.” I lead Mama away from the miniaturized pine tree and over to the sofa, where I place the scrapbook with the most recent pictures in her lap, hoping that the top layer of her emotional scar tissue isn’t as sensitive as the wound itself. As her tour guide, I open the book, and point to the picture that changed our lives. “Do you remember the day DiaComm went public? Who knew?”
“Who knew?” Mama repeats softly, flipping through a few pages in rapid succession, past the photos of her and Baba accepting the Seattle First Citizen Award, announcing a matching grant for Children’s Hospital, breaking ground at The House of Cheng. Incredulously, she asks, “Did you make this?”
“No, not me,” I say, and as I replace the scrapbook with the one that begins with her wedding photographs, I tell her, “Your mother did.”
Shock radiates through her body; she flinches. Abruptly, Mama whips her head around to me, unable to fathom what I’ve told her, and then looks away hastily because she can’t handle the fact that it’s true.
“Aunt Marnie gave these to me on the night of your mother’s funeral,” I tell her. “Po-Po wanted you to have them.”
Mama’s arms are crossed protectively over her chest. She’s not touching the scrapbook or looking at the pictures.
“See, Mama,” I say, wanting her to remember the happy moments in her past. “Your boarding school, right?”
“I felt free there,” she says so softly, I have to strain to hear her.
“Like how I feel on snow,” I tell Mama, wanting so much to connect with her. “Free. No one knows who I am on the mountain.”
“No one knew me at school. I remember lying down in bed that first night when all the other girls were complaining about how uncomfortable the mattresses were, and I remember thinking that I could sleep well for the first time because I wasn’t afraid.”
After we study another photograph and another, the time feels right for me to lug the last scrapbook onto my lap and open to her baby picture.
“You were even beautiful as a baby, Mama.” Like Marnie before me, I trace her name, written in Chinese, the same character whether Mandarin or Cantonese. “Yu. You are
wang.
See?”
“Wang.”
The way Mama says that Cantonese word for
leader,
as though it were a revelation, I know she’s never noticed any of the hidden meanings, the secret symbols, of her name.
I wrap my arm around Mama’s bony yet strong shoulders, trained and conditioned to bear a heavy burden. No matter what, I won’t let go; my sturdy body won’t let her fall down simply because her stepmother didn’t love her the way Mama deserved to be loved. As we sit there, I silently turn the pages, each photograph whispering,
Remember? Remember?
“Mama, don’t you see?” I tell her, pausing on the photograph of her graduation from Cambridge. “You were always treasured. You were always Yu.”
This is what I’ve wanted to hear from Mama’s perfectly lined and colored lips: that I’ve always been cherished. It’s strange to hear those words coming out of my mouth, stockpiled as they have been inside me, emergency provisions stashed there by Bao-mu who always believed in me, always loved me. Always knew that one day I’d need to share them.
With those words, so simply and easily given, Mama’s body relaxes, and she leans into me. And as she remembers, picture by picture, I learn how much I’ve been treasured, too.
W
ith winter break in
full swing, I’ve got at least ten hours each day to dedicate to Ride for Our Lives. By mid-morning the first day back home, my hsuan has morphed into command central, notepads of lists and notes everywhere. After I get off the phone with Meghan, who, true to her word, has figured out most of the logistical details—“It’s the least I can do for everything your mom’s done for me”—I know that if I were up in my bedroom looking into my ghost-detecting mirror, my eyes would be gleaming, I’m having so much fun. But I don’t have time to preen and instead pick up the phone for my check-in call with Lillian.
“How are the babies?” I ask.
“Zoe isn’t sleeping, and Amanda’s bouncing off the walls. So it’s chaos here, but no one’s got the heart to tell Amanda to pipe down, not when she’s going to be quarantined for a couple of weeks, you know.”
“So when’s her chemo starting?”
“Tomorrow.” Lillian laughs mirthlessly. “It’s crazy, isn’t it? Dr. Martin told me that they have to basically kill the patient in order to save her.”
“Like avalanche control.”
“What?”
“Sometimes you have to set off a couple of small avalanches so you don’t have a huge one.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way.” After a moment’s pause, Lillian continues, sounding a fraction more upbeat, “So I need some good news. Anything. Please tell me you were wicked enough in Whistler for the two of us.”
“Well, if you really want to know…”
“I do.”
“I was.”
“No way!” Lillian shrieks.
“Way!” I shriek back. And then I give her the abridged version of my past. While I’m not ready to provide full disclosure about Jared, something tells me that I’ll spill all to Lillian when the time is right. Still, we do the “ewww” girlfriend shriek together when I get to the part where Jared starts bragging about all his accomplishments. And she does the “you did not!” scream when I tell her about my “no free lunch” comment to him.
“But I need your advice on something,” I say, pacing a circuit from the door to my light table, past the bathroom door, and then around the sofa.
“You? You, Miss I’m-No-Free-Pass-to-Paradise? You need my advice?”
I laugh. “Well, there’s this other boy.…”
“God, Syrah, how many are you juggling?”
“It’s not that.” But then I realize, it is, sort of. “It’s my best friend.”
“Let me guess, that guy at that board shop? I knew you had a thing for each other!”
“Wait, wait—he’s dating someone else, remember?”
“Who is so freaked out by you that she’s signed, sealed, and delivered a restraining order on you,” says Lillian.
“Something like that.”
“And now you’ve finally realized that you want a free pass to his paradise.”
“Lillian!”
But we’re both laughing, and it is almost worth having Age be dating Natalia just to have this conversation with Lillian. Almost.
“Seriously, though, what do you do when you love somebody enough to set him free, and he never comes back?” I stop doing laps around my studio to stand by the window overlooking an arched bridge.
“Well, why don’t you tell him how you feel?”
“Definitely not an option. Let’s just say I’ve seen what happens when someone comes between a couple.” Fifteen years of being blamed for breaking up a family is all this girl can take. But then it occurs to me that Bao-mu might be on the right track. While I’m not about to take Age away from Natalia, I can ask for his friendship. “How about if I let him know that just because he has a girlfriend doesn’t mean he can’t have a girl who’s his friend, too?”
Lillian is quiet, and I know it’s not because she’s tuned me out but that she’s weighing my idea. Slowly, she says, “I think that’s great. You’re not telling him to break up with her and you’re not coming between them. But I still vote for telling him how you feel.”
After debating other possibilities (“putting a feng shui curse on Natalia is not an option”), circling back to Amanda (“let me know if there’s anything I can do”) and Zoe (“when can I meet her?”), and giving each other a pep talk, since there’s still so much to do for Ride for Our Lives (omigod!), I know as far as Age goes, I have to do what I’m comfortable with.
At my light table, I begin to draw a letter manga-style for Age, inviting him to participate in the amateur snowboard rail jam at the event, unless he’s afraid that I am going to whip his burly-burly butt in the competition. Then, abandoning all bravado, I write the truth, plain and simple and unadorned with any pictures: Age, it would mean so much to me if you just showed up. And then I attach VIP tickets for him, his dad, and his little brothers. And one for Natalia, too. I just hope that he’ll read that as a sign that I want him to be my front-door friend.
One day, our timing will be right, the stars will align, and Hong Kong will be a distant memory. And when that time comes, I’ll tell Age everything. As I’m about to seal the envelope, I stop, because the hallmark of our friendship has always been about telling each other things we can hardly admit to ourselves. Like how I’ve been a closet snob, too spineless to stand up to my parents and introduce them to Age, the boy who has always had my heart.
So I rip out the pages in my manga-journal, the ones that I wrote back in Whistler with the blow-by-blow account of The Jared Episode, and slip them inside my letter to Age. I don’t want to hide that old history anymore, at least not from Age.
W
ith my PowerPoint slides
saved onto CD, Rude Q and A memorized, and power parka on, I’m armed, ready, and puffy. According to the daily schedule Mama left on the kitchen table for me this morning, my parents are home this evening, which means it’s time for me to persuade them to support Ride for Our Lives. From the sounds of the argument I can hear yards away, a battle is being waged inside Baba’s studio-study.
Baba’s voice, stinging, rings into the dark night. “Could you please explain to me how it is possible to lose thirty-five million dollars in a single quarter?”
Through the windows I see everyone arranged in their normal pecking order: Baba at the head of the table, Mama to one side, Wayne to his other, Grace next to her brother and Mochi on her lap. There wasn’t a memo about a family meeting on the kitchen table, in my inbox, or on my door. Could I possibly have been so disastrous at the last meeting that I’ve been dropped from the cc line?
Wayne rattles off numbers, using data to brace his deficit: “Sales were up fifteen percent—”
“But did you even look at their competitors?” demands Baba. If my dad is the emperor of the Cheng dynasty, then Wayne must be his eunuch, whose sole, emasculated purpose is to serve.
That truth hits me as hard as plowing head-on into a tree. Wayne is living my nightmare where all the possibilities for what I do with my life dwindle down to just one: adding to the Cheng coffers whether or not he yearns to do something different.
Through the window, Grace shakes her head at me in silent warning. I divine her meaning: danger, danger. Stay out while you can.
Wayne’s shoulders are hunched over, human origami, so that he’s as small and unnoticeable as possible while Baba rails at him. What should be sweet payback for years of being the big butt of Wayne’s cutting comments is painful to watch. Especially since I remember how Grace told me that she can only remember Baba yelling at the two of them, virtually nothing else from her childhood.
To create a diversion, I step inside the office.
“Syrah, do you need something?” asks Baba mildly, like he hasn’t just been berating Wayne.
Maybe it’s Baba’s gentle tone, the way he normally speaks to me, that makes Wayne’s eyes go as cold and flat as a snake’s, his Chinese horoscope sign. Or maybe it’s just me. Whatever it is, Wayne snaps, “This is a private meeting. We’re discussing some important issues.”
“Yes, I know.” My hands feel cold and sweaty as I look at Baba, not Wayne, for permission. “I can come back later.”
“Actually, we’re finished,” says Baba.
While Baba leans back in his chair, Wayne glowers at me. Instead of feeling intimidated, I feel sorry for him, this grown man who can only make himself feel like a bigger and better version of himself by whittling me down.
“What do you need?” asks Baba.
Quickly, I pop the CD into his office computer and project my PowerPoint presentation onto the large screen on the far wall. My manga drawing of Amanda on her snowboard is practically life-size. I swallow. Looking directly at my family, I tell them what I want: “I need your help.”
“ ‘Ride for Our Lives’?” Wayne throws down his pen in disgust. “What? I thought we went over this already. We’re not subsidizing your career.”
“Aren’t we subsidizing yours?” I counter softly, but my gaze doesn’t waver off him. However sorry I feel for Wayne, I won’t play the adoring little sister to his bullying big brother, and I definitely won’t be his willing punching bag anymore. It’s as if Bao-mu is by my side, not letting me forget that I am a Cheng, too, because in a voice that sounds so confident I don’t recognize myself, I say, “This has nothing to do with jumpstarting my career. It’s about saving lives for kids like Cindy and Jack.”