Joan Is Okay(45)

And then there was the dragon, my mother said.

Dragon?

The one that had been hung up on the foyer ceiling and wound its way through the rooms and into the kitchen. Thirty feet long from head to tail, and made from papier-maché.

Oh, that dragon, I said.

We continued to watch TV, and she asked what show it was that we had been watching.

A sitcom called Friends, I said, about six friends who lived in Manhattan with entry-level jobs but palatial apartments, and about chatting in English with coffee mugs.

Friends, my mother said, but after one commercial break started calling it, in English, Buddies.

Kind of silly to watch. Buddies. I don’t like the constant laugh track. I don’t get any of their jokes.



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THE NAMES MY PARENTS had given themselves were Jim and Sue. Ill fitting but easy, though sometimes even they forgot to respond to them. Jim? No Jim here. Oh sorry, you mean me.

The name they had given me was Jiu-an, the simplest Chinese equivalent to Joan. I knew of another Asian Joan in the hospital, many Jessicas, Emilys, and Lindas. Only Asians outside of Asia chose names for themselves that took into account the convenience of others or smoothed out their foreign names to be less offensive to the ear. Like my parents, Tami had found her name in a book, a few months before she was set to arrive. Fang is not pronounced like the very sharp tooth, as he told people that it was, but closer to fong, although not quite like fong.

Each Chinese sound has four tones, and within each tone of a sound there are many characters. The strokes of the characters matter for balance, symmetry. It’s meant to be art.

Jiù (就), fourth tone, twelve strokes, means “at once” or “right away” or “moving toward.” ān (安), first tone, six strokes, is “peace,” or, taken apart, it’s a roof (宀) under which there is a woman (女). What this woman does, no one really knows. She might be happy or sad. She might be hardworking or indolent, but put this woman in a house and you will have serenity and ease. Jiu-an (就安), or just peace or simply a woman in a house.



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BY FEBRUARY 5, THE number of cases in China had doubled to twenty-eight thousand. A flight from Korea originally set to land in Las Vegas was diverted to LAX, when the crew was notified that three passengers on board, three U.S. citizens, had been to China in the past fourteen days. The crew must have then alerted the passengers, and all two hundred passengers must have glanced at the most Chinese-seeming face nearby and wondered, Was it you? Could you possibly, probably, be one of the disease carriers forcing us to land in a completely different state?

I couldn’t help but recall the airline receptionist at Pudong who already thought I had some disease, when that was still just a joke, from one Chinese person to another.

My mother now visited me in the guesthouse every afternoon. She would bring me clothes, brown turtleneck and vest combos, wool socks, that fit better than Tami’s but made me look like my mother. Sometimes we matched totally and the aide would say that we looked like a couple. That’s scary, I said and my mother said we all become our mothers, it’s inescapable, but what’s so scary about coupling with me, for forty long weeks, you lived inside me and you and I were one. I had no good response to that, so we put the kettle on, made tea, and watched any television except international news. Instead of sitting with us on the sofa, the aide would move in and between the rooms, trying to find something to tidy. I told her there was nothing to tidy, I’d been cognizant of not making a mess. But the aide was determined, and often after they left, I would find in the bathroom the first square of the toilet paper roll folded into such an intricate design that it was almost too pretty to be used.

February 8 was the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, or yuán xiāo. Yuán, “first,” and xiāo, “night,” is a holiday to admire paper lanterns and eat round sweet dumplings with friends and family. The rounded shape represents tuán jié, or “unity.”

My mother and the aide had made some and brought them over to the guesthouse. While the three of us ate, my mother announced that she’d booked the first available plane ticket back to Shanghai in mid-March, with Air China, which would never be one of the airlines to ban China, since the crew and company were Chinese. Mid-March was the earliest time she could find. All of February had been booked up.

I pushed the rice spheres around in their soup.

She told me to stop playing with my food.

My mother and her siblings were on a group chat, and more often than before, I would see her scroll through her phone to check if anyone over there was up. The official word from Air China was that by March, its normal flight itinerary would resume.

One sister who was a nurse told my mother not to fret. March was a full month away. The infected cities had been sealed off, new hospitals were being built overnight, and unless you were essential personnel, no one was allowed to leave their house. Such rules were being enforced, you could be fined or arrested for being out without notice. You couldn’t even go to the bank without an official approval slip and someone coming to your door in a hazmat suit for a temperature check.

Their brother was the silent type, but he sent a daily ticker of total case counts and deaths.

Why had none of the siblings emigrated? I imagined not because they doubted the opportunities abroad but because there was no impetus to leave. When my parents returned to China, their families folded them naturally back in. When asked about their time in America, they framed it as neither a total failure or success.