Joan Is Okay(47)

I was confused and made more confused by scenes of physical affection I’d never seen. I wondered why I’d never seen it or if I’d never looked. No, I had looked before when it’d been just Fang, me, and our parents, and physical affection was hard to find. Like night and day, comparing this breakfast scene with those of my youth, when sometimes no parent was around and the only noise was the clinking of my spoon against my cereal bowl, a dim flush mount overhead.

By Valentine’s Day, the case number in China had doubled again, to just over sixty-six thousand. In a speech to the nation, Xi Jinping called the disease a big test for the country, but that they would all, all 1.4 billion Chinese people, cross the river in the same boat, or so the idiom went. Fifteen cases in the United States, when the CDC announced that the disease still had a lot of unknowns and some screening kits had been found to be faulty.

On Valentine’s Day, Fang and Tami went out to eat, just the two of them, leaving my mother and me to watch the boys. We ordered pizza.

When both Fang and Tami ate with us, so much dinner talk revolved around my nephews and their activities. The youngest had started to play tennis, which the middle and oldest sons already played. Fang added a fourth, and now there was serious hope for a doubles match sometime down the line. Boys needed tennis, my brother still said, otherwise they won’t turn out right. Fang wasn’t a strict dad, but he spoke to each son in turn and like small adults. Name three things you did today; list the three you plan on doing tomorrow. He had a 60-40 rule, that 60 percent of his parent voice should be used in praise, 40 percent in constructive criticism. Tami had no such ratio and was far less strict. After dinner, she instituted game night or put on a movie. She would tell the boys to shower, brush their teeth, go to bed, but then be lulled into another ten-minute extension. Was she trying to be a better mother than hers had been to her? Than mine had been to us? A fun mom, or the most American of all things, a mom who was also a friend. Circumstances improve. Time, money, the question of survival no longer hanging overhead. As a child, I hadn’t felt my situation to be lacking until I became an adult. Because a child can get used to anything, a child will find a way to grow up.

After the entire Valentine’s pizza was consumed, I heard myself say the same thing to my nephews. Shower, brush your teeth, go to bed.

But it’s only seven p.m., they replied.

Then just shower.

What about a story or game night or a movie?

I said I couldn’t be like their mother.

What about homework?

It’s not done?

We’re done with homework.

So, it is done.

Not what we said.

Took me another second to realize that by “done with homework” they meant they were over it and unable to get back into it. Harder to watch my nephews do no work for the evening than to take all of their pages and finish it myself. Paperwork could be glorious, and I hadn’t filled out any since going on leave.

You might have been tricked, said my mother, who found me at the edge of the dining table with a stack of worksheets and a calculator, trying to write my numbers like a child.

Shower, brush your teeth, go to bed, I told her as well.



* * *



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RECENTLY, I’VE NOTICED SOMETHING. I looked down at my hands and noticed that they are the same shape as my father’s. The same square fingers and fingernails, the same knuckle protrusions and creases around the joints. Not possible, of course, especially with the creases, but once I noticed, I couldn’t stop staring at them. I couldn’t stop holding my hands out and inspecting them from different angles, then looking at myself in a mirror. My face, stature, and the sharp drop of my shoulders were my mother’s. But how I held a fork, chopsticks; how my hands gestured, flexed, and sat in my lap, fingers naturally curled in.

The only difference was that his hands were perpetually pruned and cracked. The smell of grease would radiate off his skin the moment he entered a room. Dandruff on his shoulders, a heavy dusting of it in his hair from dry scalp, but that looked like fine, crumbled plaster. His shoes smelled bad; his feet could smell worse. For half an hour after work he would have to stand in the shower. Outside, in the kitchen, my mother, nose pinched, holding his stained work shirt by the smallest amount of fabric, between her index finger and thumb, and with her arm outstretched, sprinting to the sink as fast as possible where it would be soaked. He was not unclean, yet I thought this, me, his own daughter. He was not withdrawn, unfeeling, incompetent, bumbling, a fish out of water, yet I’ve thought all those things as well. I was guilty of having the impressions of him that a stranger might at first glance. But as his daughter, I should have tried harder, while I still had the chance, to draw him out, to listen and to champion him, them both.

My mother’s hands weren’t so much pruned as sanded down from years of cleaning products and bleach. Her palm lines shallow etches, her fingerprints gone.

They must have fought a ton, but I was buffered from it. Before Fang arrived, I was too young to understand, and after he was here, he could listen on my behalf. The moment he noticed something was off, that a serious fight was about to start, he would say in Chinese, Hey, Jiu-an, let’s go outside.

But it’s freezing out, I replied in English, since there’s no greater way to hurt your family than to not speak in their native tongue even when you can.

So? You chicken? (His English fast improving.) Come on, little chicken, let’s go.