The Astonishing Color of After(18)
“Leigh’s almost got it. Keep trying, kiddo.” My father steps his way back from the edge of the lake to help my mother.
Memory-me blows and blows. She straightens the piece of grass. She tries a new blade, pressing her thumbs together even harder. At last, that thin pitch squeezes out loud and true, halfway between a kazoo and a duck.
She glances over her shoulder.
There’s my mother, a silhouette against the fading sky. Her arms circling my father’s waist, cheek against his shoulder. The two of them sway together in time to music only they can hear.
There’s the flash. The colors invert.
When the room returns, I’m sitting on my bed in my grandparents’ apartment in Taiwan. The memories are over.
My thumb and index finger are pinching together so hard it hurts. I look down: The stick of incense is gone. I click on the lamp to make sure: No trace of it anywhere. No ashes. It simply vanished.
Open my palms wide, look at my trembling hands.
I sit there like that, shaking, until dawn.
19
Whose fault was it? That’s the question on everyone’s mind, isn’t it? Nobody will ever say it out loud. It’s a question people would call inappropriate. The kind of thing where everyone tells you, “It’s nobody’s fault.” But is that even true? It’s only human nature to look for a place to lay the blame. Our fingers are more than ready to do the pointing, but it’s like we’re all blindfolded and spinning.
What makes a person want to die?
She had me. She had Dad. She had her best friend, Tina. She taught piano lessons to a third of the kids in our neighborhood.
Anyone who knew her would have said she seemed like the happiest. The most alive. When she laughed, her face bloomed and you felt warm at the center.
Those last few months her laughs came rare. I noticed it, I really did. But I chalked it up to moodiness; she’d always been in the habit of swinging from one extreme to the other. I excused it too quickly, too easily.
Was it my fault? If I had only—
Or if Dad had only—
If Mom had only—
What?
20
Even in the bright morning the air is heavy and presses too close, sticking to our skin, drawing out the sweat.
I turn to my grandmother. “Niao.” Bird. I’m not sure what else to say. How do I tell her we have to find my mother?
Waipo nods, but I’m not sure she actually understands.
We walk out of the maze of alleys to a breakfast shop, where there’s a woman making something I’ve never seen before. It’s called dan bing. Her deft hand spreads a batter into a perfect flat circle, mashing an egg over the top, sprinkling it with scallions. I’m not particularly hungry, probably in part because I didn’t sleep and my body feels sluggish—but even so, my mouth waters at the smell.
The shop sells fantuan, too, and those I do recognize: rice patties wrapped around sweet dried pork song, reddish brown, fluffed like cotton. There was one day, in elementary school, when I brought a fantuan for lunch. When the kids saw the rousong center, they made fun of me for eating yarn, and asked if I was going to cough up hair balls like a cat.
The woman wipes her fingers on her apron, wraps up our breakfast order. Her eyes flicker over me, linger for a moment on my face, as purposeful as a touch.
“Hunxie,” she says to my grandmother, who is pushing coins around on her softly wrinkled palm, counting out payment. Waipo launches into a chain of words so quick I can’t catch any of them. The woman smiles at me, says something about being an American, something about being pretty. The few people eating at the nearby tables turn to point their stares at me. My skin prickles beneath the gazes.
Waipo and I eat as we walk. To-go cups of chilled soy milk are sweating in our hands, condensation gathering into drops, drops gathering into rivulets, the water rolling down my fingers from knuckle to knuckle.
“Shenme shi… hunxie?” I ask. Her eyes gleam. She likes when I try with my Mandarin.
“Hunxie,” she repeats, and proceeds to explain the term.
Eventually, I gather that it means biracial. And then I recognize the parts, like finally seeing shapes in the clouds: Hun. Mixed. Xie. Blood.
Back at home, sometimes people say I look exotic or foreign. Sometimes they even mean it as a compliment. I guess they don’t hear how that makes it sound like I’m some animal on display at the zoo.
One time these two guys at school asked, “What are you?”
When I only blinked, one of them said, “Like are you part Hispanic or something?”
I told them my mother was Taiwanese, and the other guy pounded his friend’s shoulder. “That’s a kind of Asian. You totally owe me five.”
They didn’t say anything else to me before they turned away, laughing to themselves.
It’s not like it happens every day, but it happens enough to be a regular reminder: People see me as different.
And now finding myself so directly named—hunxie, mixed blood—like a label printed out and affixed to my forehead… it makes something twist in my guts in a dark and blue-violet way.
Back at the apartment, Waigong’s lounging on the couch, hogging all the cushions under his back and his elbows. He stares into the television, watching a music video with the volume all the way down. A dozen Asian men are dancing in a hexagonal tunnel filled with flashing lights. The screen bursts into a drizzle of feathers.