My brother-in-law is still talking. I wait nervously to sing “Amazing Grace.” My family rarely goes to church, and when they do, it’s for the free lunch afterward and the ESL classes. Most of the time I go to church only because of David Ray Wright. He is one of my best friends and one of the few Christians I respect. He doesn’t shout at me and tell me I’m going to burn in hell. No, he actually cares about people. Nevertheless, I usually fake a stomachache just to sleep in on Sunday mornings.
Mrs. Johnson, the Sunday school teacher, plays a nice, easy opening on the piano. I take a deep breath. I stand next to Mingfang, facing the funeral audience. Mingfang loved this song. I will sing it for her for the last time.
Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.
I don’t know if my sister knew God. What does God do to those children who do not have a chance to live?
’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear
And grace my fears relieved.
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.
If there is a hell, is Mingfang there right now? Is it the way those fire-and-brimstone Southern Baptists describe it? Or is it the “Jesus loves you” stuff Pastor John talks about? Are they one and the same?
Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come.
’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far
And grace will lead me home.
Did I escort my sister to her death? I made her run laps. The next morning she’s dead.
When we’ve been there ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun
Maybe if I sing even louder, I really will believe God exists. And that He is a good God, not one who snatched Mingfang from this world. How can God be so cruel? I have to sing louder so even those in the back can hear.
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’d first begun.
The processional has started. My father walks up to Mingfang and looks at her for a split second before walking past her. It’s as if he refuses to let this image of his daughter be implanted in his memory. He will remember only the living Cutie. Now it is my mother. She has such a kind face as she looks at her baby for the last time. Her hand reaches toward Mingfang’s hand as if it might bring her back to life.
And now I am standing by my sister. She lies so peacefully in the coffin. I place her Cabbage Patch doll next to her hand. And then I give her the silver matchbox car to remember our last happy day together. Lastly, I hand to her my high school letter, the “C” I wear on my school jacket; it was awarded for tennis and academic achievement. She lived through my success. Now she can have the trophy.
I look at her face. Mingfang. Cutie, I wonder if you knew. Did you know that I really cared about you? Those brief moments when I would help you with your spelling or give you a small present, and even when . . . even when I made you run, those were an adolescent male’s way of saying, “I love you.”
My friends—Chris, Josh, and Irwin—and my brother-in-law and I lift the coffin out of the hearse. I am the right rear pallbearer. Mirrored in the surface of the lacquered, mahoganylike casket are the puffy cumulus clouds hovering above, and yes, that face—my face. We walk in cadence toward the grave. We lower the coffin onto three longitudinal belts over the grave. A man slowly turns a crank, and the coffin descends gradually into the ground. Wait! Wait! Wait! I want to see my sister. Open the box one more time! I won’t get to see her ever again. Can I please see my sister? Just one more time, please. The words never leave my mouth. Of course I don’t say anything. Not even a whisper. I don’t even cry. I watch the coffin as it is consumed by the shadow of the ground.
16
Red January
3 a.m., One Year Later
I am standing in a red room. Actually everything is red, not just the room. Other than that it is a plain room. I don’t even think there is a door in here.
“Hello, Mingfang. Why are you back? You came back to say hello?” Wait. It’s been over a year since she died. Why does she still look thirteen? Why hasn’t she grown? Her hair hasn’t gotten longer; it still scratches the nape of her neck. She sits quietly in the corner, her back to me. “Mingfang,” I whisper to her. “Mingfang! What are you doing?”
My baby sister turns around for a brief second. Her big, brown eyes peer at me like the eyes of the woman in Diego Rivera’s Panchita painting. But. But her eyes grow larger every second. Stop! I want to yell it out, to scream it out, but . . . but nothing comes out. I want to walk up close to her, but my legs won’t move. Paralyzed. She returns to staring into the corner. I lost my chance. Wait. I feel my voice coming back. “Mingfang. Cutie. Hey, you!”
No response.
“Why are you here?” I ask her, pleading for an answer. “Why are you visiting me every night?”
Nothing. She is done with me. Mingfang rocks back and forth now, mindlessly. I’d always called her retarded. Now she is. Boom. Boom. Boom. She bangs her head into the corner of the red room. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. Louder and louder. Harder and harder.
“Stop hitting your head,” I demand. “Quit it.”
She turns around and looks at me. Her black eyes stare at me with anger. I hate that look. She has never said anything to me since she died. Almost every night she comes to me, and she never says anything. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. I want to place my hand between her head and the wall, but my feet won’t move.
The room recedes. Red turns to black. I might be awake. But I won’t open my eyes. I don’t want to see where I am now. Only a couple of hours left before the test. The verbs. The conjugations. Think about that.
Vine. Viniste. Vino. Venimos? Venieron?
Is that right? I knew the conjugations five minutes ago.
Hablé. Hablaste? Habló? Hablamos? Hablaron?
I have twenty minutes left, three pages of verbs to conjugate. Hurry, Chi. Hurry, Chi. Gonna get my first F. Fail college. Think. I can’t! I can’t remember anything!
I am back in the red room again. How did it happen so fast this time? Everything is speeding up. I have my rose-colored glasses on again. The redness is darker now. Almost maroon, like blood. I can’t focus on anything, but I know she is here. I can hear her. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
“Hello, Mingfang. You are back in your corner again. What did you do since I last saw you?”
She turns around and her stare eats into my eyes like acid. I’m falling out of the red room again, but I can still hear it. Like the drum of a marching band, the sound is monotonous, constant, deafening. I hear her in the day, too. The sound lurks beneath my thoughts, in between the words I speak, in the air between exhalation and inhalation. During any downtime, I hear the booming, the booming, the booming, so I try not to relax, keep myself constantly studying at school. I’m on the run. But eighteen credit hours and multiple student organizations cannot stave off what I still hilariously call “sleep.”
I try to take a deep breath, and my throat shakes. How did this happen? Everything was normal after the funeral. I wrote thank-you cards to all the families that gave us food and support after her death. But I never finished. I couldn’t. After writing fifty long personal letters, I ran out of steam and simply quit. I did not send out one card. And then I decided to say thank you over the intercom, at school. I started saying it, and then the intercom broke up, and I had to say it again.
After that, things just got busy. Before Mingfang died, I was going for valedictorian, but afterward it became apparent that Christina Laane had wrapped that up. I mean, how does a person score one hundred on everything? So during the final semester of high school, I studied even more diligently, studied every night until I passed out, so that I might get second place. I graduated last May in third.
I chose Texas A&M in order to continue living with my mother, who still suffers. And so I went to my colle
ge classes. I did not think about my sister. Her funeral was months ago. Yes, she would pop into my mind occasionally, but she would never wrest over my consciousness. Don’t get me wrong. I visited her on her birthday and on Christmas, the day she died. I made sure that she had fresh flowers at her grave and that the tombstone was free from bird droppings. I never knew how much birds liked to perch on tombstones.
The point is, I’ve changed. I am not a negligent brother anymore. But it’s been over a year since she died, and there is nothing I can do to bring her back. It doesn’t matter how much crying or wishing I do. She is not coming back. My sister is in the past. I need to move forward. I’ve got to get things done.
I pull the covers over my head. I should get up and study, but who am I kidding? I can’t study. All I hear is the booming. It’s seductive really, the way it crept up. Before I noticed, my fourteen-hour study days dropped to eight. The gym workouts lasted forty-five minutes instead of an hour. Before it all started, I could recall ten pages of notes verbatim. Now I can’t remember the beginning of a sentence at the end of it. My sentences don’t come to a right ending. Professors’ words? Incomprehensible.
At first it was kind of nice to “see” her again. I miss her dearly. But something bad always happens in the dreams. She dies at the end of every dream. Always in red. But now it’s worse. It’s the corner. The stare. I wish she would scream at me to leave her alone! To say how mean I am! But she looks inside me with disgust, pity, loathing, what? She never tells me.
I just need to motivate myself and work harder. I don’t have time to worry about minor nuisances.
Chiufang has nice dreams about Mingfang. “I took Mingfang to SeaWorld,” she tells me. “Mingfang got all excited when she saw Shamu the whale, and then we went to the gift shop and I got her a stuffed Shamu. When I woke up, I just had this warm feeling inside. Mingfang was telling me that she is okay in heaven.” Chiufang is a Christian with a capital C. Then she told me about her shrink’s interpretation of her dream. I wanted to laugh at all that psychobabble, but I just told her I had a Spanish test to study for.
I close my eyes. I think I can sleep now. Thinking about Chiufang’s dream is relaxing. I walk into the red room. “Stop hitting your head against the wall,” I plead. “Please, please stop. You are making me sad. Very sad.”
All is silent now. She lies on the red floor in a fetal position. Her back seems huge now; it is all I see of her. I dare not walk up to her and look at her face.
“Mingfang. Get up. Please sit up! Mingfang. Cutie.” I crouch over her. I wish I could give her a prize, to entice her to open her eyes. “Please sit up. Please wake up. Please.” I reach out to her, but her body retracts into the redness; she’s falling away. I’m rising from the red room. No. I have to tell her something. I have to tell her—
I open my eyes. I’m back in my own bedroom. I roll onto my stomach and cover the back of my head with my hands. Tears soak my sheets. I flip over, stare at the ceiling. I can’t tell anyone about this. They’ll think I’m crazy. But I am! I’ve lost my mind. So I’d better not tell anyone. How can I be living in the middle of a town, in a house with my parents, and be so alone? I used to never cry. Now I cry every night. After every nightmare. I need to study. I kick the covers off of me. You’re going to fail. You can only remember things in the distant past, things you don’t even want to remember. Everything else is scratched out by a red marker—you can’t connect two thoughts. It’s hopeless. I’m going to drop out of college if I can’t think straight. I don’t care anymore. I’ll do anything. Anything to stop this. I’m so tired. I just want to go to sleep. A sleep without dreams.
17
Magic Juice
November 12, 1997;
Yassela Orphanage, La Paz, Bolivia
It is almost ten years to the month since my sister died. God creates life circles. Events repeat themselves in almost mystical, déjà vu–like ways. Some people learn from their past and handle their present in a more sanctified, mature manner. Others fall into the life circle and disappear into the black hole of despair, reliving their past suffering and injuring themselves in the present. Will I come full circle, or will I fall into that black hole? Ring around the rosy, pocket full of posies. Ashes to ashes.
I stand on the roof of Yassela orphanage taking in the sky above me. Below me, on the second level of the orphanage, girls stand around the outdoor cement basin scrubbing their clothes. The crunching-scrunching noise of the scrubber against the hand-me-down clothes is almost hypnotic. I see an older girl washing her clothes. I don’t know her name. Her hands are pruned and covered with soapsuds. I walk down the stairs to the second level. Her wide, round face frames her almost Asian-looking eyes. Her face, wider than it is long, is almost a caricature. A simple pug nose dots the space between her eyes. Having been separated by several thousand years, two continents, and thousands of miles, the Asian meets the Aymaran. I find my ancestors, my sisters, my brothers, my blood in these indigenous Americans, for I am more related to this Aymaran than my Caucasian friends in Boston, Massachusetts. Aymara even sounds Taiwanese to me.
She works diligently at her duties, washing baby clothes and hanging them on the clothesline. She glances at me as I walk down the stairs to the first level of the orphanage—the kitchen—where four girls are cooking lunch. A little girl, her cherubic cheeks aglow and her thick dark hair tied back in two matching ponytails sprouting sideways out of her head, skips up to me. She hands me her doll and runs away quickly. The doll sees out of only one eye and suffers from severe balding. Funny, isn’t it? The only opportunity to see golden hair around here is on the movie screen or on the heads of Barbie dolls.
“What’s the name of that little girl?” I ask a girl named Diana as she stirs a pot of soup with an oversize spatula.
“Her name is Natalia. She’s four,” she tells me.
“Natalia? I don’t think I know her. Who does she belong to?”
“She is Daniela’s.”
“Who is Daniela?”
“Daniela. You know Daniela. The big girl upstairs washing the clothes.” The girls giggle silently among themselves.
“Why isn’t Daniela playing with you guys?”
“You know. She’s different.” She tips the end of her nose up. A cacophony of cackles emanate from the group.
“You mean she’s stuck up.”
“Yup. She does not like us ‘kids.’ ”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. She keeps to herself. She does her chores, washes her kids’ clothes, meets this man at the door every day at three o’clock, and goes to bed early.”
“Natalia.” She magically reappears, peeking around the door frame of a dark room.
“Natalia, don’t you want your doll back?” I ask her.
She takes a tentative step toward me. I take the doll and make it walk along the cement ground. “Hola, Natalia. Me llamo Raquel. Me gustaria tener una amiga. Puedes jugar conmigo?”
Her eyes grow bigger and she tilts her head to the left. She hops up to play with her new friend, Raquel. She lifts up the doll and takes it to a nice warm spot on the cement floor outside, well within a spotlight of Andean sun.
“Hola, Raquel. Vamos a jugar ‘la casa.’ ” A little girl who may have never lived in what you and I would call a home still plays house.
“I think Natalia likes you.” I hear a teenage voice from behind me. “She usually doesn’t like new people. Especially men. You must remind her of her father.” I turn around to see the older girl. “Hello, my name is Daniela,” she says, “and you must be Dr. Chi.”
“How did you know?” I ask.
“There aren’t too many men working in this girls’ orphanage, and besides, how many Chinese men do you know in La Paz?”
“I guess you are right,” I say. “I see you washing clothes a lot.”
“I wash clothes every other day.”
“Every other day? Why don’t you just wash once a week and save time and effort?”
“Because we only have two pairs of clothes. One is worn and getting dirty and the other is dirty getting clean.”
“Oh. I see,” I say. “So, why are you here?”
“Why am I here? Because I live here. Why would I be here if I did not live here?”
“I mean what brought you here?”
“Oh.” She turns, deflecting my gaze. “You mean why am I a street child?”
“Yes, if you want to put it that way.”
“Because my mother beat me,” she says, puckering her lips. “She used to beat my younger sister and me every single night, so we left home. We lived together as sisters on the streets for a long time—two years.”
“Why did you leave the streets?”
“We got tired of the streets with the drugs, beatings, pimps, drunks, cold, and hunger.”
“Do you like it here?”
“Yes,” she says, “and no. I don’t want Natalia and Maria to grow up and live the life that I have. We have food and beds so I cannot complain, but I feel that they don’t want me here.”
“What do you mean, they don’t want you here? Isn’t it a home for street girls?”
“Yes.” She nods and straightens up, arms akimbo. “I am not a young street girl, innocent and cute. You see I have scars on my face. The badges or ‘medals of honor’ that say that I am a veteran of the streets.” She pauses to see if I comprehend, then says, “The administration doesn’t like us because we are difficult to deal with. No one likes an old street girl. The heart hardens as we get older. We go from innocent little children to little punks and criminals.” She crosses her arms. “At least that is what most people think.”
When Invisible Children Sing Page 14