The Astonishing Color of After(8)

When I was little, I would crawl around on the shaggy rug of his office while he drew on giant pieces of paper torn off an easel pad and taped to the wall. My fingers would trace the air as he taught me the order of the strokes. He’d break down the components of the characters, teach me to identify the radicals—This one looks like an ear, right? and See how this is just like the character for person, but like if you were seeing the person from a different angle?

Mandarin was like a secret language between us—the best was in grocery stores, or in restaurants, how we could talk about people around us and they wouldn’t understand. That boy has a funny hat, I would tell Dad with a giggle.

It was something that Mom never wanted a part of, even though I couldn’t help thinking of it as her secret language to begin with. It belonged to her in a way that it would never belong to me and Dad.

And like so many other things, our secret language faded away. I haven’t spoken a word of Mandarin in years.

I still have a bit of it, of course. Like I remember ni hao, which means hello, and xiexie, which is thanks. There were times when I asked Mom whether she thought I should go to Chinese school on the weekends, like a couple kids I knew. She always stepped around the question.

Maybe next year, she’d tell me. Or, You can take the class you want in university.

I still remember the way she wouldn’t meet my eyes when she answered.

If only I could read the language. Like, really read it. I still know some of the basic characters, like the ones for wo and ni—me and you.

And mama. Mother.

But I can’t read who the letter’s addressed to. I can’t even figure out who wrote it—though I have a few guesses.

“Is it from my… waipo?” The syllables for maternal grandmother get stuck in my throat. Why pwuh is kind of what they sound like. I remember Dad teaching the words to me a long time ago, but I never imagined that I might someday use them in a context relevant to myself.

It’s frustratingly ironic that I’m the one with Chinese and Taiwanese blood running through my veins, and yet my Irish American father is the one who can read, write, and speak the language.

Why was Mom so stubborn? Why did she reject Mandarin and talk to us only in English? The question has bothered me a hundred times, but never as intensely as now, looking at these strange letters. I always thought that one day she would give me an answer.

Dad clears his throat. “Your waigong wrote it, actually. But it’s from the both of them.”

I nod him on. “And?”

“It’s addressed to you,” he says with disbelief.

Excitement and fear and hope and dread churn together in my stomach. I’ve spent years waiting for the chance to know them. Is this finally it?

A photograph falls out of the stack. It’s stiff, the edges crisp, like it’s been carefully kept.

In the picture, my mother is wearing big thick-rimmed glasses, a pale dress, half a smile. She looks young enough to still be a teenager. It must have been taken before she left Taiwan to study in the US.

Was she happy back then? The question wraps around me, carrying with it a bluish slip of sadness.

There’s the sound of air being sucked in quickly. When I look up, Dad’s lips are pressed into a line. He seems to be holding his breath.

“Dad?”

“Hmm?” His eyes reluctantly break away from the picture.

“Will you read the letter to me?”

He blinks several times, clears his throat. He begins to read. Slowly at first and then settling into a pace, his professor’s voice loud and clear.

Mandarin sounds so musical, the way the tones step up and down, each word rolling to the next in little waves. I catch phrases here and there that I recognize—but strung together, I can’t quite decipher what the whole of the letter means.

Dad finishes, and seeing the expression on my face, he explains: “In a nutshell—your grandparents want you to visit. As in, go to Taipei to meet them.”

Is that what the bird wants? My mother’s voice echoes back to me: Bring it with you. When you come.

I turn toward him. “What about you?”

My father gives me a confused look. “What?”

“Don’t they want to meet you, too?”

“We’ve met.”

The words hit me in the chest. “What? You told me you’d never met them.”

“No,” he replies very quietly. “It was your mother who said that.” The look on his face is unreadable.

How is there so much that I still don’t know about my own family?

“They know about Mom?” I ask.

Dad nods.

I listen to the clock striking out each determined tick. If only I could rewind, go back in time and ask my mother every question about every tiny thing. How crucial those little fragments are now; how great their absence. I should have saved them up, gathered them like drops of water in a desert. I’d always counted on having an oasis.

But maybe that’s why the bird came. Maybe she understands that there are too many things unanswered. A shiver ripples through my body. It occurs to me that Caro, who believes in ghosts, would probably call this a haunting.

Bring it with you. When you come. The bird meant for me to go somewhere. I’m almost certain that it could only be where my grandparents are.

Maybe that’s where I’ll find my answers.