American Panda(19)

If I hadn’t been the piece of meat the two dogs were fighting over, this might have been funny.

Mrs. Pan snapped the album shut and stalked off, her head in the air to hide her hurt pride.

Nǎinai nodded her approval at my mother. “Good. You taking care of Mei. That way she won’t end up like Xing, turned by the devil.”

I swear to God, my mother smiled.

And I sank lower into the pile of manure that was my future marriage.

We ordered so much another table had to be dragged over. Before I had even used hand sanitizer, my father attacked, slurping up beef noodle soup so violently broth spewed across the table. He didn’t become Lu Pàng by caring what others thought.

After dishing food to Nǎinai, Yilong stacked her plate five layers high. A few bāos and pork balls tumbled off and she hurried to scoop them back on top.

“You know, Mei,” she said between bites, “you should think about going on a diet. Or you should start exercising, like Bǎbá. Did you know he could’ve been in the NBA? He turned it down for computer science.”

I mashed my lips together to hold the laughter back. Once a week, my father huffed and puffed around the gym with other fifty-year-olds. There was more heavy breathing and yelling of Chinese obscenities than exercise.

“He’s a regular old Jeremy Lin, all right,” I said, expecting to end the conversation since no one would understand my reference.

“No one is as good as Jeremy Lin,” my mother said.

“Lin-sanity,” Nǎinai added.

I choked on my tea. “Do either of you know who Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, or LeBron James is?”

Nǎinai smiled. “Eat your vitamins.”

I answered my own question. “They’re basketball players.”

“We don’t know them because they’re not as good as Jeremy Lin,” my mother said with a shrug.

I had forgotten about what I like to call the Asian Club Phenomenon—that my family didn’t know Brad Pitt or J. K. Rowling, but they knew Lucy Liu and Amy Tan. Was it because so few Asians broke into pop culture that they felt a sense of shared pride, or was it because they felt a bond with every Asian, even the strangers we bumped into at Kmart and Costco?

“Too bad you didn’t go for it, Bà,” I said. “You could have been Lu-sanity. Well, that doesn’t really work. Lu-nar eclipse. You know, because you would eclipse everybody.”

Nǎinai nodded. “Lunar. We use lunar calendar.”

I nodded at her, too distracted to care that she hadn’t gotten my joke. A rare opportunity had presented itself, but it was so risky I was jiggling my leg the way my mother hated. “Do you guys think Jeremy Lin’s mother was right to let him pursue his NBA dream?”

“Do you remember Peter Cheng?” my mother asked. “You got locked in the bathroom at his house when you were little. Well, he was roommates with Jeremy Lin. And Peter is now a lawyer, making tons of money. I heard he bought his fiancée a three-carat diamond. Huge! The size of my fist.” She held up her tiny clenched hand to demonstrate. “So at least Jeremy Lin went to Harvard and has that degree as backup.”

The weight on my chest lightened . . . until Yilong spoke a second later.

“Jeremy Lin probably went into basketball because he wasn’t good at medicine or law. Don’t worry, Mei. You will make the best doctor. Plenty of job offers, plenty of money.”

Nǎinai nodded. “You won’t end up like your mǎmá. Jobless. No offers.”

My mother’s shoulders slumped forward, her posture matching her position in the family—the lowest, almost invisible.

Yilong added, “Your nǎinai told her again and again to get a job, but nobody wants her.”

And I lost it. “My mother dropped out of graduate school to take care of Xing and me,” I fired back. My mother grabbed my arm, trying to shush me. I shook her off.

Yilong glanced at me with wide eyes, then rested her gaze on my mother. “If you’d taught her better, she’d be more obedient.”

I balled the tablecloth in my hands, squeezing to try to calm the bubbling Lu-suvius. I couldn’t win here. If I let any snark seep out, they would only attack my mother’s parenting more, but saying nothing meant I agreed that obedience was a virtue. I tried to tombé, pas de bourrée in my head, but there was too much frustration coursing through my veins. My fists remained tight, and I hoped it was enough to show my dissent without feeding the fire.

In the ensuing silence, during which I could hear my own heartbeat, Nǎinai’s eyes glazed over as they always did before a flare-up of her dementia. As the cloudiness grew, I knew she was being taken farther and farther back in time. Her episodes often involved Communist Revolution flashbacks, mistaking my father for her husband (and arguing with him), or reliving my brother’s disownment. That last one was the most common. Her eyes would fill with tears as she cursed Xing’s girlfriend, the one who’d gotten him disowned, and then she’d pound her fists on the table, her leg, the person next to her until the episode passed.

Nǎinai looked to my aunt as she yelled, “Yilong! Don’t talk to her!” She spat the last word at my mother, the way she normally spoke about Xing’s girlfriend. “Not until she gives me a grandson!” She turned to my mother. “You can’t sit with us until I have my sūnzi.”