by Grace Lin
“Where were you?” Lissy said. “Everyone is looking for you!”
“You’re supposed to stay in one place when you get lost,” Aunt Bea said, “so people can find you!”
“Grandma and Grandpa went home, just in case you gave your name card to someone and they brought you there,” Auntie Jin said, her words streaming over Aunt Bea’s.
I tried to stop crying, but I couldn’t. I knew I was too old to cry like this, but the tears flooded from my eyes like an overflowing pot. I hadn’t thought about staying in one place or my name card. I had been so scared, I hadn’t thought about anything and I still couldn’t. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be there anymore. I didn’t want to be in Taiwan. I wanted to be back in New Hartford, back where I knew where everything was and understood everything and I wasn’t a ghost. “I want to go home!” I sobbed.
Mom looked over me at Aunt Bea. “I’ll take her back,” Mom said. “The rest of you can stay.”
Mom held my hand tightly through the crowds, even though it was all wet and slobbery. When we got to the main street out of the night market, instead of going toward the subway, she raised her arm for a taxi. As we got in, she took out a new change purse, green this time, and handed me some tissues.
Seeing Mom’s new change purse reminded me about how she was a visiting ghost, too. Her home was New Hartford, just like mine. But this used to be her home. She and Dad chose to become ghosts. In a way, they made us ghosts.
“Why did you and Dad move to America?” I said after blowing my nose.
Mom was quiet for a moment, and I thought she didn’t hear me. But suddenly she said, “When we left, things weren’t good in Taiwan. There was martial law then.”
“What’s martial law?” I asked.
“It’s when the government is scared and so mistrustful that they are very strict and suspicious with the people,” Mom said. “Sometimes they are so strict that they are cruel. We wanted to get away from that.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Remember Big Uncle?” Mom said. “The government was cruel to him.”
WHEN BIG UNCLE WAS ARRESTED
When Dad was a young boy, Dad’s oldest brother—Big Uncle—was the one who supported the whole family. Big Uncle wasn’t much older than a boy himself, but he was smart and hardworking; the five brothers, two sisters, the parents, and the grandparents all survived mostly on Big Uncle’s salary as a schoolteacher.
But late one night, there was a loud bang on the door, like the sound of arriving thunder. It was the military police! They had some questions they wanted to ask Big Uncle, they said, and they put him in a jeep and disappeared.
The family didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know where he was, what happened, or why. But they knew the military police were always secretive and always serious. The next day, Dad’s mother gathered all the jewelry and money in the house and went from one official to the next, bribing them for information about Big Uncle.
It was a hard time. As the news was whispered that Big Uncle had been taken for political reasons, everyone was afraid. Friends and relatives stayed away. It was almost like Dad’s family had become poison. No one wanted to be connected to Dad’s family because then they, too, might be arrested. And without Big Uncle’s salary, the family was so poor. They even had to beg for scraps to feed their pig. Days and months passed, and you can’t even imagine how poor they became. They had to make horrible choices. Sad choices. When Dad’s mother had a new baby girl, her mother-in-law forced her to give up the baby to be adopted.
Then, almost two years later, there was another late-night noise at the door. This time it was a single soft knock, tired and resigned. Only Dad heard it, and when he opened the door—there was Big Uncle!
He was in rags and looked like a starving beggar. But it was only then that they found out why he had been arrested. A vice principal at Big Uncle’s school had a scholar friend who had been caught with a book on Communism. Because of that, any friends of the scholar and anyone associated with those friends had been arrested. Luckily for Big Uncle, some of those people had connections with the government and were able to get the charges for the whole group overturned, which was why Big Uncle could finally come home.
But even after Big Uncle came home, things weren’t easy. He had been cleared of the charges, but people were still afraid to be connected to him. His reputation was damaged. People looked at Big Uncle as if he were a dangerous bomb. He couldn’t teach at his school—or any school—anymore. It was hard to find a job. It was hard to find friends.
“That’s why,” Mom continued, “when Dad got the opportunity to go work in America, his family said, ‘Go! Go!’ They knew it would take him far away, but they wanted him to be in a place where things that happened to Big Uncle could not happen to him.”
“I didn’t know Dad had a younger sister,” I said.
“They try not to talk about her,” Mom said. “They were ashamed they couldn’t keep her, and I remember if she ever came up in conversation, Dad’s mom would cry.”
I realized the baby girl was my aunt, an aunt I would never know. I remembered the photo of Dad’s mom on our wall back home, her serious eyes staring out. Those were the hungry ghosts, I thought. Sad memories and bad memories were those ghosts that haunted. When Dad’s mom was getting her photo taken, there had been ghosts around her. Dad and Big Uncle had ghosts around them, too. Everyone did. Even I had ghosts, not as bad as Big Uncle’s, but smaller ones like the mean bus driver and the horrible girls who called me Twinkie and the angry woman at the market in Taichung. Those were the ghosts that always came back, no matter what you did to try to keep them away.
But I thought about Big Uncle and how even though his face looked tired, it still wrinkled into a big smile and his laugh was deep and hearty. I thought about Dad being a young boy, poor and hungry, and then how now he could eat. “The best!” he had said with his eyes sparkling. Those ghosts hadn’t stopped them from being alive and happy. They had learned to live with their ghosts. And I could, too.
Chapter 33
GRANDMA AND GRANDPA WERE WAITING, JUST LIKE Auntie Jin said they would be. When they heard our steps climbing the stairs, they threw open the door and sighed as if they hadn’t breathed all day. When we reached them, they both hugged me tight, and a few more tears crept down my face. It was just so nice to be there, in the kitchen with the round table I ate at in the morning and sofa that I sat on. When I had said I wanted to go home, I had meant New Hartford, but being here felt good. I realized that being here felt like home, too.
Mom gave me a warm cloth to wash my face, and Grandpa poured me a glass of sugarcane juice. I had just finished my second cup and was feeling better when we heard the familiar pounding up the stairs. As the door opened, everyone came in, looked at me, and smiled broad grins.
“Better?” Auntie Jin and Aunt Bea asked as they patted my shoulders. “Good,” Uncle Shin said, giving me a hug. Uncle Flower rubbed me on the head. “Pacy, glad we found you. Glad you are okay.”
“I thought you’d stay a lot longer at the night market,” Mom said. “We’ve only been back a little while.”
“We did stay for a bit,” Uncle Shin said. “But we didn’t think it was as much fun without you there, so we decided to come back.”
“I won a goldfish!” Ki-Ki said, thrusting a plastic bag full of water and a googly-eyed orange fish at me. “We can share if you want.”
“No, I won two,” Lissy said, dangling her bag with a silver and a black fish in it. “You can have one of mine.”
“Did you know,” Ki-Ki said, “you can get a kitten or a puppy from a vending machine at the night market? Really! We wanted to get one for you—well, really, for all of us—but Uncle Shin wouldn’t let us.”
“Good!” Mom said.
“But we brought home a lot of food,” Aunt Bea said. “Just in case you didn’t get enough.”
All the fear I had at the night market was melting away, like ice
in front of a warm fire. I felt embarrassed about crying so much and being such a baby about getting lost, but I kind of liked how everyone was being so nice to me. Auntie Jin got a bowl for our goldfish, and we dropped them in. Lissy said I could choose which fish I wanted, but I knew she wanted the black one and was just being nice. So, to be nice back, I took the silver one.
Aunt Bea and Mom unpacked the food. There was a lot of it—deep-fried golden cubes, pancake-looking bread with green onions, copper-colored rolls of something, meat in brown sauce on rice, a carton of green vegetables cooked with garlic, and fat-fried chicken wings. “These are special,” Uncle Shin said as he displayed the wings. “There are no bones in these. They take out the bones and then stuff the wings with fried rice and egg yolks.”
“This isn’t all for me, is it?” I asked, looking at all the food. “I’m not that hungry!”
“We didn’t know what you would like,” Uncle Flower said. “So we let Lissy and Ki-Ki pick a little bit from every stall, too.”
“You’re lucky we chose,” Lissy said, “or else you’d be stuck with more stinky tofu. They make it grilled and fried, and Uncle Shin thought you might want to try both.”
Everyone laughed at that, but I was grateful. Just the smell of that tofu would have ruined the rest of the food.
“Well,” Mom said, “I don’t think Pacy can eat everything, so why don’t we all have a second dinner?”
“We should do this every night!” Uncle Shin said, and then he stopped and gave a wry smile. “I meant the second dinner every night. Not Pacy getting lost.”
“Yes, not that,” Uncle Flower said, and looked at me. “That was terrible, not knowing where you were. We thought you had disappeared.”
I shivered. I had thought I had disappeared, too. But I hadn’t. I was still here, and I was glad.
“Hey,” Ki-Ki said. “Where’s the big one?”
“Oh, the special one!” Auntie Jin said. She looked around and then picked up a plastic bag Shogun had left on the chair. She took out a big carton and opened it on the table. A warm, savory smell drifted out, and I knew right away what they were.
“Dumplings!” I said.
Everyone laughed, and I joined in. But sitting at the table, I remembered how I had sat there on the first day of painting class and said to Mom, “I don’t want to know who I am, then!” That wasn’t true. I did want to know who I was. I had thought of myself as a lot of different things here in Taiwan—a Twinkie, a ghost, an artist—and I hadn’t felt that my Chinese name fit. But as I looked around the table at everyone, with their faces smiling at me, I felt safe and treasured. I guessed I was a precious thought, after all.
Chapter 34
FOUR DAYS LATER, LISSY, KI-KI, AND I WERE GETTING ready for the exhibit. Grandma said we should look nice, since we were the artists. At first I thought that meant I had to wear my special Chinese dress, but Mom said to save that for Grandma’s party. So I just wore my strawberry dress again.
Grandma, Aunt Bea, Auntie Jin, and Uncle Shin came, too. Grandpa wanted to come, but he had to work. The exhibit was in the same building we had our classes in, but on a different floor. It was new to have so many people in the elevator with us. It felt unfamiliar pressing the number five instead of the other three numbers we were used to, and when the elevator doors opened, the floor was really different, too.
Instead of a hall of classrooms, there was a glass wall on one side with clean Chinese writing on it. I think it probably said GALLERY on it, because I could see it was like a museum inside. Pictures hung on the wall under spotlights, little sculptures stood on blocks, and the floor was shiny and polished. I felt a little awed and unsure if we should enter. But I thought I saw Alex and Eva from my class in the gallery, so we went in.
Everything looked so good, like real artists had done it. One wall had all the work from Lissy’s class. About twenty scrolls hung next to each other, each painting mounted on red silk with a dragon pattern on it.
“Which one is yours?” Mom asked Lissy.
Lissy walked down the length of the room. “Here it is,” she said, stopping in the middle.
To me, it looked just like everyone else’s but with different characters. Well, the brush strokes were thicker. Lissy’s painting had only one character, so the marks were thick. The scroll to the right of hers had a whole line of characters that looked like a map of dance directions.
“What does it say?” I asked her.
“ ‘Happiness,’ ” she said. I looked closer. I had stamped “happiness” on my painting using my teacher’s chop, but I didn’t remember the character looking like that. Maybe I was remembering wrong.
“Mine is over here!” Ki-Ki said, pulling at us.
The paper cuts in Ki-Ki’s class weren’t mounted on scrolls but were instead framed under glass. If the teacher hadn’t given us the talk about mounting the paintings, I would’ve thought it was kind of cheap that we didn’t get ours framed, too. Anyway, the paper cuts were a lot smaller, so they were probably cheaper to frame.
Ki-Ki pointed at a red paper cut on the wall. It was like a snowflake, but it had intricate flowers and leaves radiating out of a center star. I was really impressed.
“Did you really do that?” Lissy asked. She was impressed, too.
Ki-Ki nodded. We all crowded around it.
“So good, Ki-Ki!” Uncle Shin said. “Was it hard to do?”
“No,” Ki-Ki said, shaking her head. “But it took a lot of time. Especially cutting the little pieces.”
I was feeling a little jealous. Where was my painting? The work from my class had to be somewhere. I looked around and saw a row of olive-green scrolls on the wall in the other room. Those must be ours.
I left everyone with Ki-Ki’s paper cut and walked over to the scrolls. Yes, they were my class’s. Mounting the paintings did make them look finished. The brownish-green silk had a subtle, small leaf pattern all over it. I was glad it wasn’t red, like Lissy’s, because I didn’t think red would look good with my pink birds. And there they were! Right at the end, next to Audrey Chiang’s painting.
I felt proud when I saw my painting. Somehow, the mounting had made the colors more delicate-looking, and the sheen of the silk seemed to make my painting glow, too. I glanced over at Audrey’s. Hers looked better, too. I worked hard not to glare at it.
Lissy came over to me, holding something in a napkin.
“There are refreshments!” she told me. “Just soda and different kinds of cookies, though.”
She stopped in front of the paintings. “Which one’s yours?” she asked, cocking her head. I pointed. I didn’t tell her that the three birds were supposed to me, her, and Ki-Ki. She might think that was stupid and laugh.
“Huh,” she said. Then she squinted close. “What does the chop say?”
“ ‘Happiness,’ ” I told her.
“No, it doesn’t!” she said. “I should know. I had to paint that character a hundred times.”
“Happiness is what the paper said,” I insisted. “Maybe it’s just another Chinese word for ‘happiness.’ ”
Uncle Shin, Mom, and Ki-Ki came over. Uncle Shin and Mom had cookies in their hands, and Ki-Ki had cookie on her face.
“This one is yours?” Mom asked. “Very good!” Uncle Shin nodded in agreement.
“But that doesn’t say happiness, does it?” Lissy said, pointing at my chop mark.
“Hmm,” Uncle Shin peered close so that his nose almost touched the paper. “No. It says, um, how do you say it… ‘unchangeable’, ‘permanent.’ ”
“ ‘Unchangeable’?” I said. I didn’t even remember that being a choice.
“More like ‘lasting,’ ” Mom said. “ ‘Forever.’ ”
Forever? Oh no, someone must have mixed the teacher’s chops up, and I had used the forever one. That made no sense with my painting! Why would three birds wish for forever? Why would Lissy, Ki-Ki, and I wish for that?
Then I saw Audrey Chiang. She was wearing a dark purp
le dress with black buttons. She was walking to her painting, which meant toward us, with a tall, thin lady with short hair. I guessed she was her mother.
Audrey nodded at me, and the woman said something in Chinese, probably asking if Audrey knew us. Audrey nodded again, and the woman smiled at us.
“Ni hao, ni hao,” she said, and then she said something to me in Chinese. I tried to guess what she was saying. Either she was asking if I was in Audrey’s class or which painting was mine. Or maybe she was asking if I liked painting. I had no idea. So I just shook my head.
“Bu hui shuo Hanyu,” Mom jumped in. I could figure out what Mom said there! She can’t speak Chinese.
“Bu hui shuo!” the woman said. I knew that, too. Can’t speak Chinese! Her eyes widened as if Mom had said something horrible, and she looked at me as if I had suddenly turned into a purple worm. She was definitely Audrey’s mother.
The woman said some more words in Chinese to Mom. I couldn’t figure those out, but Mom looked embarrassed and shook her head. Again! I wanted to let out a big sigh. The same heavy, discouraged feeling draped over me, like it always did when this happened. I glanced at Audrey, expecting to see a mirror of her mother’s scorn.
But when I looked up, Audrey looked… sorry? She looked uncomfortable, as if she thought her mother’s words were rude. Her eyes met mine, and she gave me a small, rueful smile.
I was confused. Maybe Audrey wasn’t that bad? I wasn’t sure, but suddenly I didn’t hate her completely. I still wanted my painting to beat hers, though. Then Mom and Audrey’s mother stopped talking, and Audrey and her mother walked away.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing important, hello and where do you live,” Mom said. “Those kind of things.”