Joan Is Okay(11)

I hadn’t been an easy child. Quiet, a recluse, and disastrously clumsy. I spilled things like cough syrup as I was taking them, the red dye flooding the dingy carpet of our rental and impossible to get out. We couldn’t tell the landlord so my mother put a rug over it, after which I was berated, then had all my things put into bags.

Mostly my mother wanted to know why I couldn’t be a happier child. Why are you looking at me like that? she would ask, and I hadn’t looked at her in any way. But there we were in a supermarket aisle, across any table, in a car just her and me, my mother in the driver’s seat, speeding past cornfields, miles of flat land, glaring not at me but the road ahead.

What look? I would ask.

That look that I owe you something, that I’ve wronged you in some way.

A pessimist, a constant speculator. Had she known what America was like, she might not have immigrated. Had she not been an immigrant, she might have enjoyed being a mom. Raising you took off half my life, she would say. You’re living proof of where that half went.

(Chemists know this already. All elements on the periodic table decay and in one half life, half the original element, called the parent nucleus, decays into a different element, or the daughter nucleus. No son nucleus, of course. No son could ever be a by-product of radioactive decay.)

Hitting is love: The last day I was in China, I tried to give my mother a hug and she recoiled, but then she brought one hand over my shoulder and started pounding my back as if I were choking. I pounded hers in return and she continued to pound mine. We hacked a little and this went on for a few seconds. It reminded me of chest compressions, the ones that you have to do during codes. You must always stay calm. But you must also be willing to break all the person’s ribs in order to keep her alive.



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DURING MY OVERNIGHT SHIFT, a new number with a Connecticut area code texted me with the sentence, This is your mother. I ignored the text, because of so much spam these days and my mother was in China.

I was at the foot of a bed of an eighty-year-old man whom we were trying to resuscitate but who ultimately could not be. Ten years older than my father and I had watched him die because I had been watching his cardiac monitor, but with machines, there was always a paradox, if I’d been watching this monitor, had I really seen him die? Afterward, I did the death exam. Check the eyelids and the pulse, close the jaw. No one cried. The family wasn’t here. Then I sat down in the nurses’ bay, at one of their computers, to note the time of death and to start the postmortem care. The body had to be bagged and taken away, the area disinfected and remade for the next person. During this lull, my phone rang again with the same number and I picked up. It was 2:00 a.m.

This is your mother, said a voice that sounded a lot like hers. It’s late but I need someone to talk to. I’m having terrible jet lag.

My mind made the quick switch out of hospital mode and into real life. It was as simple as switching languages, from English to Chinese, the latter in which my parents and I had always communicated.

But your number, I said. It says you’re calling from Connecticut.

Which is where I am. Why else would I have jet lag?

Greenwich? You’re currently in Greenwich, Connecticut?

Am I cutting out or something? she asked. Am I not coming through clear enough?

Very clear, I said.

Your brother. He coerced me. He dangled plane tickets in front of my face.

I asked a few more questions. When did she get in? Why had no one told me? How long was she staying? The winter? She was here to spend the rest of winter? Why had she not told me? How did she know that I was awake?

I’m telling you right now, she said. And you are awake, aren’t you?

The other questions she dismissed as logistics, for me to confirm with someone else, like Fang. She just needed someone to chat with, complaining that everyone in Connecticut, everyone in this small tiny state, was asleep.

To chat is to liáo tiān, or literally “to gab about the sky.” For the past eighteen years, calls with my mother were purely information driven, and even when we lived in the same house, it was not like her to find me just to chat.

If you don’t chat with anyone, Mom, if you just lie perfectly still, then you’ll fall asleep.

No, I won’t. And I’m not tired, she said. She announced that she would kick off our liáo tiān with a slew of nice things. All children like to hear nice things and all adults are children at heart.

Joan-na, I would’ve moved in with you, but you don’t have any kids. I would’ve chatted with you before, but I didn’t want to waste your time. More mothers should learn to let go, and what I hoped for you was a busy life. Now that you have that and a successful career, you should thank me for being your mother and not a burden on your life.

After I thanked her, she said that I’d matured, a second nice thing. Parents run out of steam, immigrant parents especially, and once Fang had met all her expectations, she feared that I, being second born, would be the one to rebel. Horror stories. The youngest child squanders her chances to become an entitled brat and to gnaw on the bones of the old, which was the literal phrase. But thank God you didn’t become one of those and now make your own money. A woman must make her own money, because without money there is no power, and a woman must have power.

I looked at the clock on my monitor. It was 2:23 a.m. Then 2:24 a.m.