If You Could See the Sun (15)

“No! Too inconvenient for you!”

“It’s not inconvenient—”

“Just listen to me—”

“No—”

Ten minutes later, I’m sliding into a pair of faded Mickey Mouse slippers while my aunt hurries into the kitchen. She yells something to me about tea, but her voice is drowned out by the roar of the range hood and the loud pop and sizzle of spices heated in oil.

As I wait for her, I sit myself down on a wooden stool near the window—the only surface not littered with old jars and boxes Xiaoyi refuses to throw out.

Maybe one of the reasons why Xiaoyi’s flat is so comforting is that it always seems frozen in time. The fridge is still covered with photos of me as a baby, head unevenly shaved (Mama swears it’s the secret to shiny, straight black hair) and dressed in baggy split pants that give no consideration to privacy. There are photos of me as a toddler, too, from those last days before we moved to America: me making the V sign with two fingers from a crescent-shaped bridge in Beihai Park, willow trees swaying in the background, the emerald river water flowing underneath; me chewing happily on the end of a bingtang hulu at a Chinese New Year parade, the sugar-coated haw fruits glistening like jewels.

But even the unsentimental objects in the room haven’t moved an inch all these years, from the butter cookie tins filled with threads and needles and the pair of strange walnut-shaped balls meant to improve blood circulation, to the jar of paper origami stars and vials of green medicine oil perched on the windowsill.

I’m distracted by the savory aroma of herbs and soy sauce wafting out of the kitchen. Seconds later, Xiaoyi emerges with two plates of steaming dumplings and a bottle of black vinegar balanced in her hands.

“Yan Yan, quick! Eat before it gets cold—the dumplings will stick!” she calls, disappearing back into the kitchen before I can even offer to help.

Soon, the small fold-out dining table has been weighed down by enough dishes to feed everyone in the building. Aside from the dumplings, Xiaoyi’s also made fluffy white steamed buns with embedded red dates, sweet-and-sour pork ribs sprinkled with cut scallions, and a thick rice congee topped with delicate slices of century eggs.

My mouth waters. The cafeteria food at Airington is pretty impressive, with daily specials like xiaolongbao and fried dough sticks taken straight from the pan, but it’s still nothing compared to this.

I grab one of the buns and sink my teeth into it. The warm dates melt on my tongue like honey, and I lean back, a happy sigh escaping my lips.

“Wa, Xiaoyi!” I say, ripping out another chunk of the bun with my fingers. “You could start your own restaurant!”

She beams. This is the highest praise for anyone’s cooking—unless, of course, you’re eating at a restaurant, in which case the highest praise is naturally to compare it to home-cooked meals.

“Now, Yan Yan,” she says, helping herself to the dumplings, “what brings our busy little scholar over to see her old aunt, hmm?”

I swallow the rest of my bun, open my mouth, then hesitate. My invisibility issue is the whole reason I came here, but it hardly seems like the kind of conversation one should have over a plate of cabbage dumplings.

“Oh, it’s nothing, just...” I stall, searching for another topic. “Did you know my parents were thinking of sending me to America?”

I expect Xiaoyi to look surprised, but she simply nods, clasping her hands together over the table. “Yes, your Mama told me a while ago.”

My gut clenches. How long have my parents been planning this without telling me, preparing for the very worst as I prepared to return to school? I was with them all summer, laughing and chatting with them every breakfast and dinner. If they could hide so much from me so easily, what else—what other hardships and burdens and worries—have they kept to themselves?

“Why don’t you look happy?” Xiaoyi asks, reaching over to smooth my hair. “I thought you would want to go back to America, no?”

Go back.

The words scratch at my throat like barbed wire. Go back, as if the teachers and kids at my school in California weren’t always asking me the same thing: if and when I’d be going back to China. As if there’s still a home in America for me to return to, as if America is home, and Beijing has been nothing more than a temporary stop in between for an outsider like me.

Yet the truth is, I remember far less about America than my relatives realize.

The memories I do have come in bursts and flashes, like something from a dream sequence: the sun pressing down on my bare neck, a too-blue sky stretching out overhead, cloud kissed and endless, palm trees swaying on either side of a quiet, suburban road, pale hills rising in the distance.

There are other memories too: the bright, stacked aisles at Costco, the crumpled In-N-Out burger wrappers littering the back seat of our rental car, filling the tiny space with the smell of salt and grease, and Baba’s voice, with its uneven inflections and stuttered pauses, reading me a bedtime story in English as I drifted off to sleep...

But simmering beneath it all was this—this tension. A tension that grew with every odd look and ill-concealed insult and racist joke tossed my way, so subtle I didn’t even notice it building inside me day by day, the same way the teachers failed to notice Rainie Lam’s slowly changing hair color over the years. It wasn’t until I stepped out into Beijing International Airport, suddenly surrounded by people who looked like me, suddenly both seen and blended in, that I felt the full weight of that tension right as it lifted off my shoulders. The relief was dizzying. I was free to simply be a child again, to shed the role of translator-chaperone-protector, to no longer feel the need to constantly hover around my parents in case they needed something, to shield them from the worst of America’s many casual cruelties.