Joan Is Okay(44)

Nanny’s congee, my mother said, lifting the small pot and nudging the aide, who said she was only following my mother’s instructions.

But improved upon, my mother said.

Alongside rice porridge, they had brought me pickled vegetables, a fermented tofu cube, Jif creamy peanut butter, a hunk of which I plopped right at the edge of my bowl such that it moved down into the congee like a mudslide. Buns filled with sweet custard, buns filled with red bean, savory buns with spinach and minced meat, sticky rice and pork belly wrapped in bamboo leaves and tied with string.

You made zòng zi? I asked, the entire breakfast table covered in food.

I had to, she said. Yesterday, I was so bored, and this was the most time-consuming thing I could think of to do. My own grandmother’s recipe, your great-grandmother, who sadly you’ve never met. But what a good daughter you are, she added with sarcasm, to not even tell me that you were coming, to just show up.

Not very filial, I said.

No, she said.

I felt something in my eyes. A tear or dried specks of dust? I hadn’t cried at my father’s funeral and saw very few people who did. My mother’s eyes were red during the service, but she had cried elsewhere, alone and out of sight. There was sadness in the room, a large rolling cloud of it, but also the expectation to not let your own show.

Triggered by as simple an act as my mother bringing me food and ordering me to eat.

Triggered by as simple a scene as a random father pushing the backs of two young kids across the street, pushing them to school and their futures, I have been on the verge of tears before. The welling up inside me, enormous amounts of water, and then forcing the water back down.

Much of any culture can be linked back to eating and food, food and care, eating and language. To eat one’s feelings, to eat dust, words, to eat your own heart out, to eat someone else alive, to eat your cake and have it too, things that are adorable (puppies, babies) that are said to be good enough to eat, to have someone else eat out of the palm of your hand, to be chewed out, a dog-eat-dog world. Chinese isn’t any different from English in this way. Chī for “eat,” and chī sù, to only eat vegetables but also, colloquially, to be a pushover. Chī cù, to eat vinegar or be jealous. Chī lì, to eat effort, as for a task that is very strenuous. To eat surprise, to be amazed, chī jī ng. To be completely full or chī bǎo fàn, and thus to have nothing better to do. To eat punishment or get the worst of it, chī kuī. And, most important, to eat hardship, suffering, and pain, chī kǔ, a defining Chinese quality, to be able to bear a great deal without showing a crack.

The price of success is steep and I’ve never been able to distinguish it from the feeling of sacrifice. If I could hold success in my hand, it would be a beating heart.



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ON FEBRUARY 1, THERE were more than fourteen thousand cases of the virus in China and more than three hundred deaths. All forty-two Apple stores in China had closed (following the closures of both Starbucks and Ikea), out of what the CEO stated to be an abundance of caution, and with twelve cases confirmed, Australia would deny entry to all foreign nationals traveling from China. No deaths outside of the mainland, eight cases in the United States, which had announced its own ban on Chinese travelers the day before.

On February 1, the New Year bash was happening, as planned, over in the main house. While the caterers were still setting up, I’d gone inside to fix myself a plate of food and say hello to my nephews. This three-person blob was always moving, sprinting, and play-fighting with one another with plastic guns that shot foam bullets. I asked the blob how school was going, and since no one wanted to talk about that, our interactions stopped there.

You could be a good aunt, Tami would often remind me in the same breath as pointing out which thing around me I’d treated as my surrogate child.

That I didn’t like kids was her suspicion, and that I’d remained childless not by choice but from some horrible mental or biological glitch. I didn’t dislike kids, I’d said, and I certainly didn’t dislike my nephews. But you’re not in love with them, you don’t coo after them, she’d explained. When they were small, you never asked to hold them, which had hurt her, my not wanting to hold my own nephews and cradle them or put them on my shoulder and fly them around like human planes. (I feared that I would drop them. I had no natural desire to hold a child.) And why is that? A woman’s maternal instincts are strong and the smell of a baby’s head is like freshly baked bread. (I had none of these instincts, it seemed. I couldn’t smell the bread.)

When I found Fang in the foyer, supervising a small crew as they hung up festive decor, I told him that I wasn’t planning to stay at the party.

He didn’t look up from his phone and was rapidly tapping away on its screen.

You’re mad at me, I said.

And you’re difficult, he said.

But so are you.

He glanced up for a second, one eyebrow cocked, and I knew what he wanted to say—yeah, but not as difficult as you, no one is as difficult as you—and had he said that, I would have taken the bait, I would have escalated it—except that would have made us children, two brats, aka siblings, bickering about who was more of a pain in the ass, more spoiled, and who our parents liked more.

Suit yourself, he said.

So, since I wasn’t at the party, I could only hear the music and sounds of guests arriving, greetings of joy. I could watch from the guesthouse windows their cars, a string of them, being parked along the driveway by a courteous valet. Then around 10:00 p.m. or so, as I was watching TV and giving myself half an hour more before bed, my mother came into the guesthouse and plopped beside me on the couch. She asked to stay in the second bedroom for the night. The main house was too loud. For activities, Fang had hired an ice sculptor and a pianist. The sculptor was a small Asian man who carried a foot-long electric sword and hacked away at ice blocks for hours to turn them into ice animals, like prosperous fish and rats. The pianist was a tall Asian woman who sat in the foyer, in front of a white baby grand, pounding away at it with dramatic chords.