American Panda(31)
Oh, and speaking of circulation, I read about these spoons that fight fat. I ordered them, of course. You press and push, push the fat away. Poof! Your belly needs it! Luckily your forearms and calves look good. Those are my genes. These spoons will make you měi, Mei.
I know you get out of class in ten minutes! I expect a call then! It’s your mǔqīn.
CHAPTER 12
MEI-BALL
AT THE DIM SUM RESTAURANT, I saw Xing first and needed a moment before I could alert him to my presence.
He was so familiar (always on his phone, not paying attention to his surroundings), yet I didn’t know this person in front of me with lines on his face and wearing a button-down instead of a hoodie. Part of me wanted to reach out and touch him, to make sure he was really there. My parents had scrubbed him from our lives so thoroughly I used to pull out his Dartmouth sweatshirt just to make sure he hadn’t been a product of my imagination. That ratty sweatshirt was all I had left of him since my parents had thrown his stuff on the lawn, then changed the locks. I hated my shiny new brass key, which had replaced the worn silver one. I refused to carry it with me and was locked out of the house more than once, but somehow it felt better to sit and wait on the porch than to carry physical proof of my brother’s nonexistence.
“Xing?” I finally said.
When he saw me, his face completely brightened, the way it used to when we made blanket forts. But then the hesitation crept in. We approached each other slowly, not sure what to do. A handshake was completely weird, but so was a hug since we never did that even before our four years apart. We ended up with an awkward turtle dance, where he stuck his arms out reluctantly, I sort of bobbed and weaved a bit, there were plenty of jagged starts and stops, and finally we managed a one-second hug where he patted me on the back and I didn’t fully enclose my arms around him.
Um, success? I guess that was the most affection any Lu ever exhibited.
Our table was tucked in a remote corner, accompanied by wobbly chairs and a stained tablecloth. A Chinese woman, a stranger, stared at us from across the restaurant. Was she judging my chunky figure or American clothes? Probably a mix of both.
Most of the waitstaff spoke Cantonese, not Mandarin, so we ordered by pointing to dishes on passing carts. As usual, many servers ignored us, some were rude, and others tried to push the less popular items like chicken feet. The best carts never made it past the central tables, so Xing took a cue from our father and chased down the shrimp dumplings, stuffed eggplant, and turnip cake. Only, he managed to do it without creating a Lu Pàng–size scene.
The smell of the food stirred up memories of lazy Sunday afternoons with my family, stuffing ourselves so full of shrimp we could barely move. Even my mother’s clucking tongue had been silenced by thousand-year-old egg congee.
And now we were divided. Those memories were fading.
Xing and I clicked our chopsticks together—a toast he had created to distract my younger self from our parents fighting about the thermostat, my mother’s cooking, the amount of tofu in the house. Well, more accurately, it was my father yelling as my mother cowered.
My shoulders relaxed, falling away from my ears. Okay, we could do this. Yíbù, yíbù, until we took enough steps to wade through the crap.
But then it was like my brain couldn’t take it anymore—the chopstick toast, the dim sum smell, the fact that Xing felt both like my blood and a stranger. . . .
I hated myself at the moment, for lots of opposing reasons. I hated that I had let this go on for so long, let others decide for me that my only sibling was going to disappear from my life. I hated that I was disobeying my parents right now, choosing the person who had so easily abandoned me and ignored my subsequent phone calls.
And I hated myself for adding yet another secret to my already overloaded plate. It was like trying to contain three spoonfuls of stuffing in a dumpling—it was so overfilled the skin barely met on any side. All the secrets threatened to spill at any moment. If I ever tried to finish the dumpling, it would explode when I squeezed—meat and veggies everywhere.
This had happened to me, literally, when I was little and learning how to make dumplings. It seems like it should’ve been a small issue—maybe even something many parents would have laughed at and given the child a pat on the head for being cute—but to my parents who grew up with nothing and scrimped and saved every grain of rice, wasting food was punishable. That was when I learned life was unfair.
I knew the danger of what I was doing, yet I had done it anyway. There was no one to blame here but me. I had called Xing first.
Shit. Maybe I should run for it now while I still could. We hadn’t actually spoken yet—it was salvageable.
But then he smiled at me, and I remembered. How he knew my—correction, our—parents, and I didn’t have to explain myself. He knew the culture, not just as a whole, but through our little window.
We didn’t speak as we loaded our plates, and it shouldn’t have surprised me—we had four years of ground to cover—but it still made me anxious. What if too much had been lost to time and we could never get it back? What if it would never be the same again and he would forever be a stranger?
“How could you just disappear like that?” I blurted out, my voice shaky. “I tried to call you so many times.”
Xing’s mouth was open, a piece of eggplant a few inches away, but it slipped from his chopsticks and clunked onto his plate, spraying sauce. He was frozen for a second before closing his lips. . . . But he left the sauce where it was, which reminded me that he was still the same person I remembered, never cleaning up after himself.