The Astonishing Color of After(11)



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I didn’t open it, didn’t even look at the preview. There’s a part of me that desperately hopes it’s just one of his usual notes. I’ll click it open to find a silly joke, a sketch he made with some new app, a goofy photo of him and his sister.

If I don’t open it, I can pretend our friendship is the way it used to be.

If I don’t open it, things will not have changed.

Next to me, Dad’s asleep, with the latest superhero movie playing on the tiny screen in front of him. His eyes are shut, his face tipping down, the cheap airline headphones sliding off his head. In his unconscious state, his elbow scoots past the armrest and over into my side. He hasn’t hugged me since before my mother turned into a bird. As though offering a hug would be giving into the grief. As though I’m a fragile shell and he’s afraid of crushing me.

And I thought I had stopped wanting hugs. But that accidental elbow—I welcome its warmth, its company.

My fingers are ice. I curl them into the softness of my neck, seeking heat. Everything is cold. I imagine a diagram pinned up in a doctor’s office, illustrating an electric-blue chill that starts at the outermost tips of the limbs and seeps in toward the center of the body.

Maybe that’s what dying is like. Did my mother feel this coldness at the end? Maybe every time my fingers start to go numb, it’s the shy beginning of death. Maybe my body just happens to be strong enough, alive enough, to ward it off.

Or maybe that coldness is the beginning of how someone turns into a bird.





13





The sky in Taipei is the kind of purple that makes it hard to tell whether the sun just came or went. Dad says it’s evening.

My face is melting; sweat trickles down every inch of me. In a quiet alley between residential buildings, Dad scrolls through his phone trying to find the exact apartment number. The streetlamp stretches its long neck high above, casting down a harsh fluorescent light. The building doors are sheets of scratched-up metal. The windows, to their sides, are caged in by bars. It’s so very different from our neighborhood back home. There are no brightly painted doors and windows with decorative shutters here. No yards or driveways or front porches.

Long red banners are glued above some of the doors, bearing Chinese characters in shiny gold foil, each word the size of my hand. And outside, sitting in the alley itself: a cluster of mopeds and bicycles, clothes clinging to drying racks made of bamboo poles, a dusty sedan. Smells drift around the corner to meet us—a combination of incense smoke and garlicky oil.

The few people who walk past turn their heads to stare. Now Dad’s fumbling through his pockets, his hands noisy with his frustration.

“They know we’re here, right?” Suddenly I’m questioning the decision to fly to Taiwan. I think of the way my mother’s face darkened every time I mentioned my grandparents—is there a reason it was a bad idea to come?

The air is so thick I’m convinced a giant tarp covers the city, trapping the wet heat of our collective breaths. A breeze swims past, but it brings no relief, only brushes the hairs on my arms in the wrong direction. I rub my elbows nervously. Beneath the lamplight, I see my father’s hands shaking. “Dad? Are you okay?”

“Just hang on a sec,” he says tensely. He swings his backpack around to the front and paws through it.

I look out into the empty road and listen to the sound of his riffling. Papers fall to the concrete with a smack and a gasp, fanning out in a mess. Just as I stoop to help gather them, the next door over creaks open, pouring gauzy light everywhere.

A hunched little woman stands on the threshold, squinting out at us.

“Baineng,” she says.

It takes me a minute to realize the woman is trying to say Dad’s name. I stand up fast, but Dad rises out of his crouch more slowly.

The woman hesitates, then says, “Leigh.”

I swallow a gulp of air, letting that one syllable tie a knot in my throat. The voice is both my mother’s and not.

“Name wan cai dao. Chiguole mei?”

This woman clearly does not speak English.

“Leigh!” she says again, stepping forward.

Well, and what was I expecting? That after all these years, my grandparents had bought a copy of Rosetta Stone? Weren’t all those letters from my grandparents written in Chinese? In some corner of my mind, I had imagined my mother’s language skills passing up to them in a sort of backward inheritance.

Dad turns to me expectantly as if to say, Don’t you remember the manners I taught you?

“Ni hao.” I can tell my tones are off as I slide up and down the words. It’s been too long since I last uttered those syllables out loud.

“Waipo hao,” Dad corrects.

Waipo. Right. Grandmother. I figured out that much, but I’m still not quite ready for it. Too many extra beats are spent searching for Mom’s features in that wrinkled face. “Waipo hao,” I finally say. My voice has never sounded so pink.

She says my name again, and a string of words I can’t process. And then, miraculously, something I understand: Very pretty. She smiles at me. Her fingers gently follow a strand of my hair down my shoulder.

Pretty. Piaoliang. With my wide hips and tree-trunk thighs? My face, so much rounder than my mother’s? The shape of my body not at all delicate the way I’d always wished it to be, and my hair brown instead of black?

Emily X.R. Pan's Books