Joan Is Okay(26)

Snow in the city was usually light. Snow in Michigan meant snow that came down continuously. Each time I would look out a new foot had appeared until the window was half covered and the door was frozen shut. The two winters we spent in Bay City, my father took Fang and me to a ski mountain each January and bought us both day passes. For the next eight hours, he promised to be in the lodge, but for the sake of getting the most value out of our tickets, he asked us not to come find him unless it was an emergency, unless we were concussed.

Chuàng, he would bellow, and make his hand into a fist.

Without instruction, I started going downhill. I went down straight, not knowing how to turn, thus only accelerating. Each time I fell, the board flew over my head and I somersaulted from momentum. One, two, three, and laughing from the thrill of three somersaults, I would smash my teeth into the snow that had hardened into ice.

Chuàng is supposed to feel like that—a mix of danger and joy, pleasure and pain.



* * *



—

THE SECOND SUNDAY I had off, I trained to Greenwich again to see my mother. Fang was away on a work trip, and Tami and the boys were at a holiday auction for school. I knocked for only five minutes before a new staff member opened the door, the aide, five two, 127 pounds. She knew how I liked to visit from the housekeeper and, without a word beyond that, led me through the foyer, down the hall.

My mother and I sat, once more, in the kitchen. The aide boiled water and made hot chocolate from it. She put the mugs in front of us and shook up a can of whipped cream. If you asked my mother, she would never admit to having a sweet tooth. But how my mother took her whipped cream: Tell me when to stop, and she would never say stop, she would have you keep your finger on the nozzle until you physically could not. The aide already seemed to know this and filled another much larger cup entirely with cream before passing it to my mother along with a tiny gold spoon.

As she took her sip of hot chocolate and then ate a spoonful of whipped cream, I stared amazedly at her, at some of the weight she had gained back in her cheeks, probably from the pure butterfat. Before leaving the room, the aide drew the curtains to let in more light.

You look younger, I said.

I’m older, my mother said, and blew on the steam. They tell me that you aren’t coming to their Winter Bash. The last two words she said in English, but instead of bash, she said rash. They tell me you aren’t coming to their winter rash.

Fang and I had texted about it, I replied, and he’d already scolded me on everyone else’s behalf, so.

She said the issues between him and me she could guess at. She was our mother, after all. Children don’t change that much, she declared, they have their personalities as babies, as toddlers, and then they keep those same personalities as adults. But why did Tami and I not get along?

I said we got along fine.

But you’re not friends.

No.

She’s not a big sister to you.

And I wasn’t a little sister to her.

You know what they say about Chongqing women, about women from Chongqing like Tami?

That they’re beautiful? Because that’s what my mother said about women in every Chinese city. No part of China had ugly women, it seemed, except Beijing, where the studious, short-haired women lived and ate crispy duck.

Don’t be insubordinate, she told me. Don’t interrupt me while I’m elucidating. I was going to say that yes, while the women there are very stunning, they also know how to live a good life. But a person should also know how to live a hard one, so she can appreciate the good.

I asked what my mother was really trying to say.

It’s a shame Tami doesn’t work anymore, isn’t it?

I said you couldn’t say those things about women, especially not in suburban America.

But was Tami an ordinary suburban woman? my mother asked. She had come here all on her own, she had entered this country on her own merit, on a student visa for graduate school. Why study so hard to achieve all that, just to marry and be a mom?

Three kids are a lot.

It’s not four or twenty.

But it’s not zero.

A woman needs something else that is hers alone. Children leave. Children are not always yours.

Am I not yours? I asked slowly, staring down into my hot chocolate.

That’s a complicated question.

It’s a yes or no question.

You believe that, she said and then nothing. She tried to blow on her steam, but the hot chocolate had cooled.



* * *



—

THE SAME CABDRIVER CAME to pick me up and pulled over after the same red light. He asked after my mother, and I said her physical health was much improved.

Twenty minutes spent in thought and feeling the wind of passing cars rock the cab from side to side.

My brother’s type has always been Chinese, and not American born but mainland. The more money he made, the sleeker his girlfriends became. With Tami, I saw that he had perfected his type. The first time we met, they were both working in finance and living together on the southernmost tip of Manhattan, in Battery Park City. The apartment had a dead-on view of a green blip that turned out to be the Statue of Liberty. I had to move to New York, my brother insisted, since at the time I was still studying in Boston. Once I moved here, the three of us could be close and have meals together, and perhaps his hope was that his future wife and I would be friends.