Joan Is Okay(2)

Elope is a funny word and, in hospital-speak for patients, meant “to leave the building at the risk of yourself and without a doctor’s consent.”

After I mentioned my father’s passing, Madeline gasped, covering her mouth and, for a second, shutting her eyes. Through her fingers, she asked if that had been my last conversation with him, and the sound I made, was it, then, a sound of grief?

I said, No, not really, and left it at that.

Reese and Madeline asked me a few more questions, like when I last saw him, and how long has it been since I left China?

You were born there, no? Reese asked, and I said I was born in the Bay Area.

California, Madeline said. A great place to be born.

But Oakland, I said, to not seem like I was giving my birthplace too much credit.

Right, Reese said.

Still, Madeline said.

I told them that the last time I saw my father was in spring. He had been in New York for business, a possible opportunity here, a new client, and, on his way back to JFK, drove past the hospital and met me in its first-floor atrium that had fake greenery and a small café. He bought me a cup of coffee and I was almost done with it when he had to leave and catch his flight. But to China, I rarely went, nor did I consider myself too Chinese.

The moment those words left my mouth, I wondered why I had said them. What was wrong with being too Chinese? Yet it’d always seemed that something was.

I felt a draft but that was impossible. Our shared office was a windowless room with a dozen desks lined up against the walls and a refreshments station in the back. The door opened to a hall that had no open windows and was used only to transport equipment. A folded-up wheelchair, an empty bed, pushed by hunched-over techs.

Madeline asked if I wanted some gum and it seemed we all did, so we passed the gum packet around and discussed the fresh minty flavor. She asked if I wanted the rest of the pack, international flights were long. How long exactly?

I said sixteen hours, to which Reese replied shit.

I was surprised that neither asked where in China I was going. The country was huge and much of it rural. Google Maps didn’t work there. But there were only two cities most people knew about, and I was going not to the capital but the other one by the sea.



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I MET MY ONLY brother at JFK later that night. Eight years older, he was in what he called the new and fit middle age. It didn’t matter to him what age I was (thirty-six)—I was younger, would always be, and he liked to tell me what to do.

Fang was rich now, his Connecticut house massive. Since he had arranged the travel, we boarded first class, where I had a small room by myself, my seat the size of a one-person L-shaped sectional, with a divider to my left that pulled open and closed. For the hour before takeoff, my brother visited me in my room to talk about how great first-class amenities were: the meals and service, different options of heated blankets, ability to recline and lie down, the L’Occitane bathroom kit, blue pajamas with red piping—things our father never had nor could appreciate.

Because he grew up in a village, I said.

It wasn’t a village, Fang said. A small town in the countryside, yes, but not a village. Don’t talk about things you don’t understand.

Then Fang explained the L’Occitane kit. He opened his bag and held each item out between his two index fingers. This was a mini tube of toothpaste. This was a retractable comb, earplugs, moisturizer, and cologne. Tiny, powerful mints. He promised that once I flew first class, I would never be the same, there was no other way to travel.

When the meals came, we ate them in our respective rooms with silverware and drank our glass flutes of Veuve Clicquot. From across the aisle, Fang asked when I would be getting promoted at work, and I said I was already an attending/the most senior person in the room.

Sure, he said. But it can’t hurt to ask, there’s got to be one position higher. I said probably. He replied most definitely. Then we finished the champagne and gave back our meal trays and prepared for sleep.

But for the entirety of the flight, I didn’t sleep. I didn’t use the L’Occitane kit or my blue pajamas. By accident, I pushed the call button, and soon a pretty Asian flight attendant came by to ask if I needed fresh towels for my face or help with my recline. Her teeth were very white and she said that a total recline was what these chairs were built to do, to go flat like a twin-sized bed and provide passengers maximal support. Unbelievable to me that she could smile and talk at the same time, a task I once thought humanly impossible. When I didn’t have a request for her, the pretty attendant reclined my sectional, pulled closed my room divider again, and dimmed the lights.

Waiting for us at Pudong airport was our mother with newly permed hair, a colorful crossbody purse, and ankles that shimmered from her translucent silk socks. My mother liked to break my name into two syllables.

Joan-na, she said, and assessed my shoulder.

During residency, I had lost the weight of a forearm. I’d since gained it back, but my mother still liked to check, and to ask if I was eating enough, if I had already eaten, if I could eat any more.

Greetings between some families can be so anticlimactic. My mother and I spoke often enough through phone calls and texts, but after two years physically apart, there were no big embraces or kisses.

She didn’t greet Fang as he was already at baggage claim, ahead of the crowd. I had forgotten about crowds in China, that being in a crowd here was like being lost at sea, and for airports, train stations—for any transportation hub, any city really—for all the tourist sites, all the shopping centers, especially around the holidays, especially food markets, escalators, the phrase rén hǎi exists, or “people sea.”