Useful Phrases for Immigrants

by May-lee Chai

  “Oh my god. I can’t believe your dad said that.” I was suddenly thankful my father was too busy ever to notice anything I was doing.

  “I know,” she said. Maria twisted one of her long, dark curly locks around her index finger. “That’s why I’m hiding it. I think Sean and his stupid friends were looking through my stuff.”

  “What a jerk,” I said.

  “He’s a pervert,” Maria agreed.

  Maria’s brother was only a year behind us in school. Sometimes I’d see Sean in the hallway, waiting with his friends to go to the bathroom or lining up in front of the drinking fountain. At Maria’s house, he was a like a little kid, sitting in front of the TV, shooting a toy gun at the Klingons, pew pew pew! But at school, the boys he hung out with whistled in the halls and called girls names.

  I was glad my brother Charlie was three years younger. It made him more manageable.

  At least when we started junior high in September, Sean would still be in elementary school, and we wouldn’t have to worry about him for a year.

  “Look, Lu-lu, do you wanna guess where it was made?” Maria took her bra back and pulled the tag up so that I could see. Very clearly in red letters it said, “Made in R.O.C.” And suddenly my face burned anew. Republic of China. I knew exactly where that was on the map, a small island in the sea next to the bigger mainland. I thought of my grandparents who’d lived in Taipei before coming to America, Ye-ye, who always dressed up in his suit when we went out to eat for dinner as a family, and Nai-nai, who still wore her Chinese-style dresses in America. Still, the image came to me of dozens of old women who looked just like my grandmother hunched over sewing machines sewing little bras for American girls. I felt ashamed although I didn’t know why. I braced myself for whatever Maria would say.

  “Rock,” she pronounced. “Isn’t that funny? What kind of country is that?”

  Poor Maria, I thought, relieved. But then I realized maybe this was secretly why we were friends. I could feel safe with her, always one step slightly ahead.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s like Rocky, the movie.” I laughed. “Yo, Adrian!” I called in my best Rocky voice.

  “Yeah, yeah, it’s just like that,” and she snatched the bra back and put it over her shirt, her fists in the cups. “Yo, Adrian!” she called to herself and then pranced around, maybe she was supposed to be Adrian, or just some woman with a bra, something ridiculous like that, and we both laughed and laughed until Maria farted and then she turned red and ran outside her room, then back inside, and farted again. We both rolled on her carpet, hysterical.

  I REMEMBER my mother originally hadn’t been too keen on the idea of buying me a bra at all that summer. Mama said she was too busy to go shopping for school clothes yet. She was teaching night classes and was gone most evenings. On the weekends, she had papers to grade or “committee meetings.” Besides, she added, “I didn’t need a bra until I was thirteen.” I wanted to add that she hadn’t grown up in America, but in Canada, far away. Who knew what was normal there? Fortunately, the handouts from orientation for junior high were insistent: Normative Underwear Required was printed in bold on the list of things we had to buy before we started in the fall, like our gym shorts and t-shirts in school colors, appropriate footwear (no heels, no black soles that would scuff the gym floors), book covers, No. 2 pencils, and three-ring binders With No Imagery On The Cover. I’d pointed this out to Mama, and she glanced at the sheet and said, “Oh, bother.”

  Mama later handed me the Sears catalog with the corner turned down on the page for training bras. There were three varieties, all of them white as a starched nurse’s uniform. One had a tiny pink-and-blue tennis racket between the cups, one had a white rosette, and one was plain. Mama was going to order one from the catalog, but then she said, “You’re probably going to need to try it on first.” And she’d sighed, in an aggrieved, angry manner, as though I were becoming one more burden she had to deal with in the day. You’d have thought it was like the time my cousin Madison got ringworm and Aunt Mei had to sterilize all their towels. Mama’s voice sounded like I had caught something contagious. I didn’t tell any of that to Maria, though.

  I hadn’t thought much about bras up till this point. My chest was flat and straight, and my belly was round and smooth and pressed against my shirts still. I wondered if my lack of breasts might be due to the fact that I was Chinese, but I had no other Chinese classmates, nothing to compare myself to except my mother, who always seemed perfect in her womanhood, the opposite of me. I had no metric by which to tell what was normal.

  But when I talked to Cindy Van Lenten, I noticed she was even thinner than I was and six months older, which gave me some relief. I asked her straight up if she was going to try to do without, but Cindy shook her head gravely. It was too risky, she said. If you didn’t wear a training bra in gym class, for example, and your boobs started to come in, they could grow crooked and they’d be two different sizes. They would never be normative when you grew up, she said, unless your training bra was there to press them into place. That’s what the orientation packet meant. They hadn’t fully explained because they didn’t want to scare us.

  I nodded because that seemed right. Adults were just like that. They only ever said half of what they meant.

  LATER MAMA told Aunt Mei about my needing a training bra. I couldn’t believe my ears, the way she just blurted it out. I would have thought having gone through this herself when she was young, my mother would have had some sensitivity, but adults were always disappointing me.

  It was late in the summer, Mama’s night classes finally over, and so we’d gone to pick up Madison to play at our house, but Madison was still at her swimming lesson. Aunt Mei let us in to wait. She said the twins were sleeping finally. We all sat down in the living room, Mama on the piano bench and me on the armchair and Aunt Mei on the rocker. There were laundry baskets on the sofa and a diaper pail in the corner, and for the first time, the house didn’t smell like Madison’s rabbit.

  “I was just soaking myself,” Aunt Mei said. Then she unbuttoned her blouse, and I got to see her nursing bra, bright white and thick with snaps and triangular flaps that exposed the nipples, which were swollen and purply red, the areolas dark as bruises. She put a wet, cold Lipton teabag over each nipple, sighing. “Old wives trick, my mom used to say.” She laughed, a short bark, like a seal. Then she closed her eyes and leaned her head against the afghan draped over the back of the rocking chair.

  “I bottle-fed Lu-lu,” Mama volunteered. “I wanted to breastfeed her, but I was under a lot of stress. I lost all my milk.” (I kept waiting for her to add, “And she turned out all right,” as she did at home, when she’d told my brother and me this story.) “But when Charlie came along, I was able to breastfeed a full six months. And he had quite the appetite.”

  “My mother breastfed me until I was almost four years old,” Aunt Mei said with her eyes closed. She rocked back and forth, back and forth.

  “Oh, is that so?”

  “Mom was old school. Everything had to be the way her mother had done things. And Po-po was a tyrant. I remember growing up Mom and me had to scrub the floors on our hands and knees. Po-po said it was the only way to really get the dirt. She lived to be ninety-seven if you can believe it. Outlived Mom by five years.”

  “Did I meet your grandmother at the wedding?”

  “That was her in the wheelchair with the oxygen tank.” Aunt Mei let out another seal bark laugh. “I don’t think she knew who I was anymore. Kept calling me by my Mom’s name. Really, she took care of me more than my mother. She lived with us the whole time I was growing up so Mom could work.”

  “When did your father die?”

  “Dad died of a heart attack before I was born.”

  “That’s right. It must have been hard on your mother.”

  “I always blamed everything on his dying. If I’d grown up with a father figure. A father, I mean. If I’d gotten used to having a man in the house. Maybe I’d understa
nd them better.”

  “No,” Mom said. “Nothing prepares you. Nothing helps.”

  Aunt Mei looked as though she were asleep, slumped as she was into the rocking chair, but her right hand was moving, patting at the teabags on her nipples, adjusting them, prodding them, her fingers fluttering over her pendulous, milky breasts like nervous, flesh-colored moths while the rest of her body just lay there, dead.

  I looked away quickly, held my book before my nose, but I couldn’t focus on the words on the page. Seeing Aunt Mei prone and lifeless made me nervous, made my heart beat too fast. I wasn’t sure who I could share this story with, not Charlie, he was a boy, and not Madison, who was too young, but it didn’t seem like something Cindy Van Lenten or Maria Glinbizzi would appreciate. We had the usual things we talked about, TV shows and movies and books and other kids at school and weird things teachers had said or done when they thought we weren’t looking. I couldn’t see how to bring in such a separate, adult experience.

  Madison’s pet bunny hopped cautiously past the living room door and slipped behind the sofa. I saw the curtains rustle and knew it was moving deeper and deeper into hiding where it could chew on power cords and the underpart of the couch undisturbed. I knew because Madison had told me about her parents’ fights, how her mother had threatened to get rid of it after coming home and finding a giant hole in the middle of a cushion, white stuffing like snowflakes spread about the carpet.

  “We’re going to buy Lu-lu a training bra this summer,” Mama told Aunt Mei.

  All the heat in my body rushed to my face. I looked daggers at my mother, but she was folding the laundry from one of the baskets, smoothing washcloths against the arm of the sofa.

  “Time flies,” Aunt Mei said.

  I used to like to eavesdrop every opportunity, gathering their secrets like breadcrumbs that would lead me from a dark forest someday, but lately they didn’t even try to hide their problems from me. They spoke in front of me as though they thought I should care. Aunt Mei had even told the nurses in the hospital it was okay for me to come up and visit her after the twins were born. Technically, I was too young, only eleven, the hospital had a sign that said visitors had to be twelve or older. But Aunt Mei insisted and told the nurses I was twelve. “Let Lu-lu see her cousins,” she’d said. Charlie had had to wait downstairs, but the nurses had led me to a long glass window and pointed out the incubators where the twins lay inside.

  “Can you see ’em?” The nurse smiled and tapped on the window, pointing, as though we were in a pet store staring at puppies through the glass. But puppies were cute.

  I’d nodded then, solemnly, although all I could see was light reflecting off all that glass and plastic and metal.

  When I came back down the elevator, Charlie was sitting in the molded plastic seats of the lobby reading a comic book.

  “I saw them,” I announced.

  He looked up.

  “They look like sea monkeys,” I said. It wasn’t fair that Charlie was allowed to be oblivious and happy. I pointed to the picture of the horned, smiling anthropomorphized brine shrimp drawn on the back of his Fantastic Four comic. “They’re really ugly.”

  Charlie nodded and turned back to the comic. “That’s what Uncle Roger said.”

  FINALLY, UNCLE Roger and Madison came back from the Y. I could hear the car pull up into the driveway. Madison came running inside, her towel over her shoulder. Her damp hair lay slick against her head, making her look even more doll-like than usual.

  “Don’t wake the babies,” Aunt Mei hissed, and Madison stopped in her tracks.

  But one of the twins woke up. A tinny shriek echoed from their bedroom.

  “Come on, Madison,” Uncle Roger said from the door. He held the screen open for her. “Don’t bother your mother.” And Madison ran out again.

  Aunt Mei got up and came back with a twin on each forearm. She brought one over to me.

  “Don’t you want to hold her,” she said, and I knew I wasn’t allowed to say no.

  The baby was small but grew heavy against my arm when no one took it back. I was afraid I’d hurt it, so much more fragile than a plastic doll, though about the same size. I looked into the tight balled-fist of its face, watched it open and close its lipless mouth. It wasn’t as pretty as a baby doll either.

  I had to sit very still on the sofa, my arms growing stiff from the weight of the baby. Uncle Roger was helping Madison catch fireflies on the lawn. I could hear their laughter through the window.

  Mama and Aunt Mei talked and talked. Who knew they could be so interested in the amount of poop the twins were now depositing into their diapers, the color and consistency and smell? They used to talk about Uncle Roger and Papa (“The Lin Boys,” as Aunt Mei called them), comparing their temperaments, gauging their emotions. Sometimes they talked about their own families who lived far away, comparing the problems of cousins I’d never met but whose names were familiar only in relation to stories set in the long-ago times before my mother and Aunt Mei were married. “I married too quickly,” Mama said once. “I just wanted to get away from my family. I’m too impetuous.”

  “You? You’re a rock,” Aunt Mei said, then laughed.

  “Oh, don’t call me that,” Mama said.

  “But it’s true! My rock!”

  LAST YEAR when Aunt Mei and Uncle Roger were going through their “difficulties” and Uncle Roger spent more and more time at work and didn’t come home at all one weekend, Aunt Mei had brought Madison over to our house and sat in the dining room with Mama, crying. Mama told me to keep Madison entertained, so we were allowed to let our Siberian Husky, George, inside the family room, and we played Star Wars. We strapped a plastic bandolier across George’s back so he could be Chewbacca, which meant Charlie was Han Solo. There was only one girl in Star Wars, but I let Madison play Princess Leia since her mother was the one crying, which made me feel generous. That meant I had to be C-3P0, but that was okay, because in my version, he was smart and bossy and everyone else listened when he told them what to do.

  We’d escaped the trash compactor three times and were en route to blow up the Death Star the second time around before Aunt Mei was finally ready to take Madison home. We were sitting on the couch cushions on the floor in X-Wing formations, brandishing paper-towel-roll light sabers. When we turned around, Aunt Mei was standing in the doorway, arms folded across her chest watching us. She wasn’t crying anymore, but she wasn’t smiling either. She was staring at us playing.

  Mama called through the door, “Hurry up and finish. Madison has to go home.” And we charged Darth Vader and killed him and then blew up the new Death Star in our wake as we fled, running back and forth across the linoleum. George’s paws kept sliding, and he plowed into us, then howled.

  We all laughed, even Mama.

  “Come on. Playtime’s over,” Aunt Mei said, her voice flat.

  Madison gave me back her light saber. “Mommy, George was Chewbacca,” she said.

  But Aunt Mei wasn’t standing in the doorway watching us anymore. She’d already left.

  THE TWIN in my arms raised a fist and punched its own eye. I thought it would’ve cried and braced myself, my whole body tensing, but instead the baby merely twisted its face into a surprised knot and tried inserting its fist into its mouth.

  “Do you want the baby back?” I suggested hopefully.

  “You can keep holding her,” Aunt Mei said. Her eyes were half-closed, as she leaned back in the rocker, pushing her feet against the floor so the rocker creaked back and forth, crik-crik, crik-crik. “It’s okay,” she said.

  “I think she’s hungry,” I said.

  I was hoping Mama would notice that I’d been holding that baby for a very long time now and wanted to go and play, but Mama didn’t say anything. She picked up the other twin and rocked it in her arms. “Aren’t they precious? Aren’t they just like little dolls at this age? I almost wanted a third child, but Walter felt two were enough.”

  “Two is a hell of a lot,
” Aunt Mei said.

  “Walter always gets his way,” Mama said. “He pretends to be very easy-going, but in fact he’s the opposite. Extremely stubborn. A workaholic. We never do anything anymore. We never go to the city. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about marriage—”

  At that moment, Madison came in the front door, her hands cupped together, holding a firefly. Madison, secretive as her bunny, her black eyes taking in everything and revealing nothing, tossed the bug into the air. It circled through the room dizzily, up and down, but I couldn’t see its light blink. In the yellow glow of the living room lamps it just seemed like an ordinary insect.

  “Madison, cut it out!” Aunt Mei barked. “What did I say about no horsing around?”

  Madison turned on her heels and fled. The screen door slammed shut behind her, and the baby in my arms erupted into a long, piercing wail.

  Aunt Mei and Mama turned to stare at me, their eyes fixed on me as if they’d only then remembered I was in the room. I thought they were going to yell at me, but then Aunt Mei burst into laughter. Not her seal-bark laugh but a new sound, a laugh that honked through her nose. Then Mama laughed, covering her mouth as though she were coughing. She bent at the waist and put her hand on Aunt Mei’s arm, and Aunt Mei’s face turned bright red from the effort as she honked-honked-honked through her nose and Mama wheezed another laugh into her hand like a sneeze.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked. I couldn’t help but smile, they were laughing so much, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why on earth they were laughing at me.

  I REMEMBER we didn’t actually get my bra until it was almost time for school, just two weeks to go, and we’d already picked up Charlie’s supplies from the A&P, the crayons and glue and blunt-tipped scissors they still required in elementary school although Charlie had been allowed to use regular scissors and even an X-Acto knife at home for years. But finally, one Saturday, Mama acted as though she suddenly remembered something she’d been forgetting and told Papa to watch Charlie. “Girls’ shopping day,” she said, and blessedly he didn’t ask any questions.