Joan Is Okay(22)

I hated this. Hated the sense that I got from Fang that there was some magical beanstalk I had to climb. Nothing good comes from climbing beanstalks, didn’t he know that? There are giants up there.

But Fang did know. The whole point was to climb to the giants and become a giant yourself.

Jiu-an, don’t think you’re any less, he said, and then sipped his Scotch at half past noon.

This is our chance, don’t throw it away.

What is learned outside of the classroom is just as important as what you learn in it, if not more.

Meet the right people. They can open the right doors.

Wouldn’t it be cool if someday you became a senator’s wife?

(The famed MRS degree, because in practice, a female brain is worth nothing. Four lobes of the cerebrum, and I have sometimes imagined one of mine labeled rage.)

After my brother said those things, I realized that he and I had officially diverged. Siblings grew apart gradually, but, on that day, it felt like a cliff and then a crash. I let him talk to me that way because, as a young adult, I had started to recognize guilt, that I’d had our parents since birth and he had not. This point he never brought up, but I could sense between us, he had been left behind. Spoiled, Fang must have thought of me, to have had both Mother and Father all to myself, when he needed them the most. Our mother didn’t hold his hand for long enough, and by the time he saw her again, he was too old.

But as I watched Fang instruct his bodyguard to bring us an assortment of desserts, I felt he had still let me down. Just as I didn’t know about having an older brother until he appeared, I suddenly knew that I once had a brother, but now he was gone.



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THREE PIECES OF MAIL:

A Shen Yun brochure—5,000 years of civilization reborn.

A silken envelope, in an off-white color in between alabaster and champagne. I untied the satin ribbon that was around it and saw that I was cordially invited to Fang and Tami’s annual Winter Bash, the pinnacle of their bashes since there were so many December holidays to celebrate. I didn’t bother reading through the activities, the list of which was long and embossed in gold foil lettering. I was definitely not going to go but debated how to get that message across. If I never RSVP’d, my brother would RSVP for me. If I called to un-RSVP again, I would get another lecture. Texting was the safest but say Fang texted back immediately with a reprimand and an urgency to talk. What’s more important than family? And I know you’re getting my texts, Jiu-an. I know because from my end, I can see when my texts are being marked as read, a setting I’ve told you to turn off for your own benefit but you keep forgetting to do.

The third piece of mail was the strangest. From an unaddressed and vaguely named Asian cultural center, a twenty-nine-page leaflet, all in Chinese, that on the cover wished me peace with a drawing of a female celestial being. The first few pages were about health and how to find your inner serenity. But then the rest of the pages discussed the most effective ways to withdraw from the Chinese Communist Party, and once I realized what I was reading, I carefully set the booklet down and pushed it away.



* * *



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I WAS ASSIGNED TO just one service week in December, and looking at my almost blank schedule in my hospital account, wiping my monitor down to see the twenty-four blank boxes more clearly, I decided that that wouldn’t do. I couldn’t be given a raise for no work. It felt like negligence, theft, like I was only taking from the system and not giving back. I let the other attendings know that I was more than available to step in at any time, no strings attached, and soon I was on service the entire month again, with two Sundays off.

The first Sunday I dedicated myself to cleaning my apartment. I owned a robot vacuum that swept around with no foreseeable plan, taking a different path each time, often driving itself into a corner. Then it beeped to tell me that it was stuck. Like the man in my father’s cassette player, a female voice lived in my vacuum. But she was American, and when she came on to say error, I heard terror, like the woman was afraid.

To Fang, a circular vacuum for square rooms made no sense, and he suggested that I hire a cleaner.

I said our mother used to do that, clean other people’s houses and wipe away their filth.

That’s the past, said Fang. The past is the past. The future is now.

Tami had asked if the robot vacuum was my surrogate child. You like to worry about the vacuum, she said, and that worry becomes an activity in and of itself that fills you up.

Once I passed thirty, many things had, according to some, become my surrogate child. If I bent down to admire a dog around Tami, it became my child. If I stared too long at a clock, it became my biological clock. Once I passed thirty-five, the frequency of child references doubled.

As I was cleaning Robot Vacuum, cutting from around its bristles a lawn of black hair that should’ve left me bald, my mother called to say that there was no one in the house except Nanny and her.

Why’s that? I asked, trying to pry hair that once belonged to me out of my first surrogate child. But I was unsuccessful and decided to put Robot Vacuum in the closet for a time-out.

Terror, it cried, and my mother asked what that was and I said I didn’t hear anything, while shutting the closet door.

She said everyone else left to do holiday shopping.

I didn’t like shopping either, I said, to which she replied who said she didn’t like it? All women liked to shop, and had she the stamina to keep up with Tami for a day, she would’ve gone.