The Astonishing Color of After(42)

I swallow a sigh. Don’t Waipo and Waigong get sick of her?

Feng describes something with her hands, drawing wide circles, looking almost like a caricature.

And across from her, just outside the kitchen, Waipo is clutching her stomach, eyes squeezed shut, leaning heavily against the doorway to the kitchen, laughing like it’s all she knows how to do.

On the TV an audience is also laughing. It’s like the universe has perfectly timed some ridiculous joke to sync up everywhere, and I’m the only one not in on it.

I kick my shoes off loudly.

“Leigh,” says Feng, “lai chi.”

Come eat. Like she’s the host. Like she belongs here more than I do.

I yank my chair out from under the table as loudly as possible.

“Maybe we should put on some yinyue?” Feng says, looking pleased with herself for mixing English and Mandarin. “Yinyue means—”

“Music,” I say before she can finish. “I know.” My good mood from the walk with Waigong is completely ruined.

“Oh.” She studies my face for a moment, and I try to make my features hard as stone. “Is everything okay?”

“Sure,” I say. “Yeah.”

Feng turns back, saying something in Taiwanese. At first I wonder if she’s calling Waipo’s attention to me being horrible. But my grandmother responds by gesturing excitedly with a hand in the air. She makes her way slowly across the living room to click off the TV and turn on an ancient CD player.

Strings croon like a wave. A glockenspiel joins in above, the spare notes delicate, like bells hung from stars. A woman begins to sing, her voice buttery and warm with slow vibrato. The words are in Mandarin.

Feng sings along—she has a surprisingly good voice, and she smiles through the lyrics, her face taking on more color and radiance.

“This song was very popular back in the day,” she says during a part that’s just instrumental.

And then I realize the melody is familiar to me—somehow I recognize it. But at the same time I’m certain I’ve never heard it before, because never in my life have I listened to lyrics that weren’t in English. Could it have been something I heard as a baby? Does memory even work that way?

And then it strikes me. I haven’t heard this song sung, but I’ve heard it played on the piano. This very melody turning in the upper octaves, an accompaniment rolling beneath the left hand. When I close my eyes, I can see my mother leaning over the piano, eyes squeezing shut, hands feeling out the song. All I knew was it was improvised—it was one of the pieces she would play that never came out the same way twice.

In the chair beside me, Waigong draws little smiles back and forth in the air with a finger, moving in time to the music, like he’s the one conducting the orchestra.

“The name of the singer is Teresa Teng,” says Feng. “Deng Lijun. Have you heard of her?”

“Ni mama zui xihuan,” Waipo says. Your mother’s favorite. She brings over the CD case. The album cover shows a rosy-cheeked woman, her black hair curled and fluffed, the expression on her face soft and demure.

How many other songs would I recognize if we listened to this whole CD?

Waipo fills the table with dishes full of toppings for the congee. There are the sugary black pickles and silky slivers of bamboo shoots dripping with oil—I used to love those. I can’t remember the last time I had them. There are also sautéed greens I don’t recognize, red sausage slices, and ruddy blocks of either a paste or tofu. In the last bowl, there are little knots of something brown and squishy soaking in a syrup, with cooked peanuts crowding the edges.

I follow Waigong’s example, reaching with chopsticks to help myself to a little bit of everything.

“Waipo, ni zai nali—” I start out with my voice strong and firm. Where were you… I struggle to find the words in Mandarin. I want to ask her myself, to see her face as the question registers.

“Just say it in English,” says Feng, watching us eat. “I’ll translate for you.”

I’m barely able to bite back the harsh response boiling up into my throat. I want to snap at her that I don’t need a translator—but that’s a lie. I do. I need her if I’m going to get the answers to my questions.

“I want to know where she was born, and where she grew up,” I say reluctantly, dragging the words out of my mouth, hating the sound of them in English. “What it was like, with her—with her family.”

Feng spins it into Taiwanese. I wish she would stick to Mandarin so I can hear how things are said.

Waipo looks directly at me as she answers. I’m grateful for her gaze.

“She says she was born just outside the Alibung Mountain district. Her parents had no money, and they already had a son. She was just a girl. So they sold her to another family.”

I shake my head. “But you”—I turn toward Feng—“she was their daughter.”

“Once she came of age and married into another family, she’d be that family’s daughter. So it wasn’t economical for her parents to keep her, to have to feed and raise someone who would leave. It made sense to sell her off.”

My grandmother nods matter-of-factly.

I think of the woman in the memory. The balding man carrying the baby. “Was this a… commonplace thing?”