by Tiffany Tsao
I miss her.
Hell, I’m so lonely, I miss them all: Ma and Ba, the rest of the family, even Leonard and his parents.
I’m not sure I anticipated how much nostalgia I would suffer in trying to find out why Estella did what she did. Then again, in these memories I find much-needed company, even if they are of the dead—bodies I’ve brought floating up, bloated faces skyward, eyeballing the stars.
“SO WHERE ARE the polar bears? It’s freezing here.”
Those were the words with which Leonard introduced himself, his body shivering, unaccustomed to how much colder autumn was in Berkeley than LA. At the time, he was cultivating the persona of funny guy, though he would drop this in a few months when he finally realized that humor not only didn’t come easily to him—like a dog with good survival instincts, it refused to come at all.
Estella and I had just finished our first semester at Berkeley. It would have been Estella’s third semester if not for Oma’s sudden death. Why our grandmother kept the diagnosis a secret—not just from her children, but from her husband as well—we never knew. By the time we found out, the time for coherent explanation had passed. The cancer had multiplied, riddled her from head to toe, lodged in her lungs, her liver, her bones, her brain. We knelt, clutched, wept for Oma, but at the bedside of a stranger. She was gone in a matter of weeks. We would never understand.
No one prevented Estella from leaving for college following the funeral. Her clear-eyed sense of duty made none of that necessary. She called the admissions office to explain the situation and push back her start date by a year. They sympathized of course. The financial contribution our family had made was too generous for them not to show compassion. They even sent flowers. Our Deepest Condolences, the card read, toothpicked with a plastic stalk into a spray of white carnations and calla lilies.
Somehow, the family emerged from Oma’s passing, and Estella and I made our way across the Pacific to Northern California. Horrified at friends’ reports of the low quality of housing in Berkeley and its hippie-infested environs, our mother opted to rent us a place rather than buy one. Engaging the services of a high-end leasing agent, the three of us dashed over for a whirlwind tour of suitable properties before settling on a newly renovated townhouse just ten minutes’ walk from campus. We said we could take it immediately and pay two years’ worth of rent in advance, as long as the owner didn’t mind overseeing the installation of double-glazed draft-proof windows and new carpeting, which we would pay for of course.
We knew more or less what to expect, thanks to others who had gone to study in the US before us. Those on the East Coast and the handful in the Midwest complained about the biting cold and the dreary people; those out West, of life being too slow, too “laid-back”; and the brave souls who’d headed to small, isolated college towns in the middle of nowhere pined desperately for the city—for the roar of traffic, for crowded streets, for good shopping, for more than five restaurants. Everyone grumbled about the food: especially the Americanized Chinese restaurants, identifiable by menus listing unfamiliar dishes like “moo goo gai pan” and “Peking ravioli.” Water chestnuts, celery, and flaccid baby corn infested every stir-fry. All the sauces except sweet-and-sour tasted the same. Takeout always came with packets of a radioactive orange gel called “duck sauce.”
On the East Coast, everywhere except New York, the problem was paucity: Good Chinese food was extant but rare, and Indonesian restaurants were practically nonexistent. Consequently, East Coasters looked longingly to the golden West, whose denizens in turn pushed their plates away in mild disgust, emitting sighs homeward across the Pacific.
“It’s not how the food tastes,” our cousin Ricky tried to explain as we sat together on the second night of Oma’s funeral wake. Ricky had come back as soon as he’d heard the news. He’d been in the middle of his sophomore year at the University of Southern California in LA, the city that boasted some of the most “authentic” Asian food in the country. “The real problem with American Chinese food is the size,” he said. “Too big. Too coarse. The meat and vegetables are sliced too thick. Go out for dim sum and each siu mai is the size of your fist. And the portions are double the size of what you get here. Even if you avoid burgers and pizza and fries and eat only Asian food, you end up gaining weight.” Ricky glanced down at his paunch, which was indeed more prominent than it had been when he’d first left for the States. Then he shrugged. “I’ll lose it after college.” Which he never did.
Ricky, the closest in age to us, was always the most good-natured of our cousins. And also the laziest. Too lazy even to cheat to get good grades, like a lot of the other rich Chinese-Indonesian kids did. Ricky couldn’t be bothered to pay anyone to write his essays or to sit his exams. And he didn’t even have the energy to copy the homework answers his friends would circulate among themselves. Still, he was smart. Even with minimal studying, he managed to squeak by every semester with Bs and Cs. Mostly Cs. Om Benny and Tante Soon Gek weren’t over the moon about their son’s performance, but they weren’t too annoyed either. It meant it would cost them a little more money and trouble to ensure Ricky was placed in all the right internship programs. But since he was being groomed for the family business, his indifference had little effect on his future career prospects. It was the drugs that would do Ricky in—the cocaine and pills he’d discover after college, just when all of his friends were getting over them and stumbling back to their feet.
Ricky: our favorite cousin and, it turned out, the most harmful. I wouldn’t go so far as to accuse him of initiating Leonard’s relationship with my sister. But now, turning the matter over, I believe more hinged on Ricky than he himself, in his pleasant slack-eyed inertness, could ever have imagined. If Ricky had been a more protective older cousin, if he’d been choosier about his friends rather than just falling in with whoever happened to be at hand, if he’d had the vigilance to pass judgment on other people’s choices instead of being indiscriminately happy for them no matter what they decided to do, Estella might never have ended up with Leonard. But Ricky was Ricky. And when he came to visit us during our first semester, he brought along his friend and roommate who had wanted to see San Francisco too.
We knew within a minute of meeting Leonard that he was one of our set. He spoke our language—Jakarta-slang Indonesian sprinkled liberally with English, courtesy of an elite private school education. Fair skin, slanty eyes: like us, of Chinese descent. His polo shirt and jeans were Lacoste and Armani, and on his wrist he sported a Rolex. (“Old-fashioned, I know,” he’d say when people commented, “but what can I say? I like the classics.”) They’d driven up in Leonard’s car because Leonard had thought it would be cool to drive up and down the state.
“You know—a road trip,” Leonard explained over dinner on the first night of their visit. “Like in the movies.”
“Some road trip,” Estella teased. “Don’t those take days? Weeks? How long did it take you? Seven hours?”
“Eight,” Leonard answered. “Bad traffic. Ricky wouldn’t know. He slept the whole time.”
“I was tired,” Ricky protested languidly, nudging a blob of chèvre onto his fork prongs with his knife. “Len, you said you didn’t mind me taking a nap.”
We were at Chez Panisse, which we had specially booked because of Ricky’s visit, not so much because Ricky had wanted to dine there (though if there was anything he did really give a damn about, it was food), but because the restaurant had a reputation and, thus, it seemed the courteous, cousinly thing to do—that is, to go out of one’s way. Though the magic of Chez Panisse’s ambience was lost on Ricky, whose sole focus was on the meal, it seemed to be having a favorable effect on his friend. The rustic wood interior and the warm and whisky-hued lighting, the baskets of rustic flour-dusted loaves and the wildflowers spilling out of brass tureens and clay pots—Leonard summed these up approvingly in one word, in English: “Cozy,” he said. “Do you come here often?”
“Not really,” I said. “Once at the beginni
ng of the school year when Ma was settling us in, and then again a few weeks ago as a special treat.”
“What was the special treat for?”
“Homesickness,” said Estella.
“Well, if I lived here, I’d come every day,” he blurted. “Even for takeout.” It might have been funny—the idea of a college student eating at Chez Panisse seven days a week was comically extravagant, even by the standards of our set. But his timing was bad. As a response to my sister’s statement about missing home, the remark came off as insensitive. We laughed feebly, as we’d been doing at his jokes since he and Ricky had arrived a few hours earlier. And we kept it up through Saturday, Sunday, and Monday morning—through seal watching and gummy clam chowder at Fisherman’s Wharf, through shopping in Union Square, through the marijuana haze and faded tie-dye of Haight-Ashbury. Thankfully, the jokes Leonard attempted came regularly but not frequently, with several hours’ space in between each one. And no wonder: It must have been very hard work for him, now that I think about it, and now that I know he had no sense of humor. He must have been trying to impress us. Each joke, before he inflicted it upon us, must have spent several minutes undergoing meticulous assembly—which is probably why he reused the polar bear joke as we parted.
“You never showed us the polar bears,” he said with a grin at Estella and me, breathing through his mouth in deliberate puffs so they turned cloudy in the morning air. “Call me if you’re ever down in LA. We’ll hang out.”
“What did you think of him?” Estella asked me as we watched the car drive away, Ricky’s head already nestling in the hammock of his seat belt.
“I’m not sure,” I answered.
“Really? I thought he was okay.”
“Don’t know. Something’s not right. And his jokes were terrible.”
“Well, yes. There is that.”
“But there’s more.” I drummed my fingers against my lips, trying to locate it exactly, the thing about Leonard that was off. “Did you see him glower when you teased him about his road trip not being a real road trip?”
“Did he?”
He did. I remember how it surprised me, that sulk, vanishing even as it spread across his face, like a passing shadow. “I think so,” I answered. “Briefly.”
“He’s not bad-looking.”
I shrugged. “Could be worse. But he looks like a little kid.”
“I think it’s his cheeks. They make him look like a baby angel in an old European painting.”
“Baby with a temper,” I added.
“Well, he’s friends with Ricky, so he can’t be too bad,” Estella mused.
Only later would we know that this conclusion couldn’t have been further from the truth.
* * *
The madness of the initial few weeks made it easy to forget our weekend with Ricky and Leonard. Estella and I had always had studious streaks, much to the bemusement of our family and friends. Keeping up with macroeconomics, statistics, and calculus extinguished the small spark of a social life that we’d managed to kindle during the first weeks of the semester. And the introductory-level entomology course, which we’d picked for fun, ended up taking more time and energy than we’d anticipated—not because it was difficult, but because it offered us, for the first time in our lives, an outlet for the unorthodox obsession we had developed in preadolescence.
It had started with the ant farm our father had bought us on one of his overseas business trips: a flat, transparent rectangle bordered in red plastic and divided into two. The underworld was to be filled with the packet of white sand that came with the farm, and the surface world was decorated with red plastic cutouts of a barn, a silo, and a picket fence. The instructions said to send for our ants by mail to the address listed, but Ba told us that this only worked if you lived in the US, where the manufacturer was based. So we asked Mardi, our houseboy, to collect local ants for us instead. Big ones. He did—presenting us with a glass jar of leggy auburns with blackish abdomens that he pinched between his thumb and forefinger and hurled with expert aim, one by one, into the narrow opening at the top of the farm’s frame.
The instruction manual informed us that the colony would only last one to three months without a queen ant to produce eggs and give its members a sense of purpose. That was enough for us. Spellbound, we watched them tunnel through the white sand, depositing each grain in slow-growing piles on the surface before descending yet again for more. When they cleaned themselves with their mandibles, they resembled tiny armored cats, grasping threadlike legs between threadlike legs, nibbling at particles invisible to our clumsy human eyes. And to communicate with each other, they touched feelers in a wispy dance that ended with the ants brushing past one another as if they’d never exchanged intimacies in the first place.
Then, after a week, the colony began to wither. Two ants began sleeping all the time. Then five. Then more. They lay strewn all through the tunnels and on the surface. Every now and then, one would convulse before flopping down again in a crumpled heap. And when they finally gave up, their bodies would stiffen and curl into balls.
The survivors created a graveyard, hoisting the corpses in their mouths to the far corner of the surface world and dumping them there in a heap. But the disease continued to spread. Perhaps the farm’s configuration was unsuited to the tropics. The underworld had always been foggy with condensation. Now, with the bodies piling up and more succumbing to illness each day, the moisture looked pestilential and unclean.
Over dinner one evening, we told our parents what was happening.
“Have you fed them enough?” our mother asked, though her expression made it obvious that she didn’t want to talk about the ants at all.
We told her the manual said not to overfeed them, but she shrugged. “Did you feed them any meat? Ants like meat.”
Desperate, we cast into the farm a fingernail-sized sinew of poached chicken. The few ants who were still healthy swarmed over it happily, and we were delighted that the problem had been solved.
The next morning, we discovered they too had grown sick, had plastered themselves onto the chicken flesh and were twitching like the others. The moisture had worsened, spreading to the surface as well, where the chunk of meat lay steaming in its own juices. By the next day, Death reigned supreme. We left the farm alone for a week, hoping for the miracle of mass resurrection. But then the farm began to mold over, and Nanny helped us disassemble it and wash the sand and dead bodies down the kitchen sink.
“Don’t be sad,” Nanny counseled. “Ants aren’t very smart.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.
“If the ants were smarter,” Nanny replied, never skipping a beat, “they wouldn’t have died so easily.”
Our mother was glad that the ants were gone. She’d never concealed her belief that girls and bugs didn’t mix.
“Pretty girls don’t play with ants,” she’d informed us when Mardi had first helped us assemble the farm. “It’s weird. And ants are dirty. I don’t know why your father got you that filthy thing.”
The truth was, our father probably hadn’t put that much thought into it. He’d likely bought it on an absentminded whim, or at the last minute from some store in an airport. Despite our mother’s disgust, the ants left a deep impression on us. Even watching them die had been enthralling. Creepy-crawlies became our guilty pleasure, like the stash of Swiss chocolates Ma kept under her bed to binge on before purging. Mardi, who also helped with the gardening, proved a willing accomplice: Whenever he found an interesting specimen, dead or alive, he brought it to us for examination. One time it was a freckled green grasshopper the size of a chocolate bar. We opened the lid of the cardboard box in Estella’s bedroom and recoiled at the force of the grasshopper’s spring as it launched itself onto the top shelf of a bookcase. Shrieking, Estella ran for the door to call for help, but at that moment it adjusted its forewings, revealing a netting of translucent vermilion underneath. We sat back down to behold it, charmed.
Another time, Mardi presented to us, in an empty Fanta bottle, an expired carpenter bee, its wrestler’s body burly and its thighs furred black, its wings dark and iridescent like polarized sunglasses. Its mouthparts were unfurled, and it looked as if it were mocking us, sticking out its tongue.
We lingered on the fringes of the soccer field at school, scouring the grass for signs of life; we borrowed from the library science books on insects and spiders. Our choice of illicit fascination was far more unconventional than those of our peers. Most of the girls were into makeup—experimenting with eye shadow and lipstick in the school bathrooms in the morning, and washing their faces clean before their drivers came to fetch them home. Rumor had it that the boys circulated porn magazines among themselves.
When we hit our midteens, Estella and I stopped indulging our insect obsession. The peer pressure had proved too much for us, and though our friends hadn’t dropped us, they had started making fun. Someone had slipped a bottle of anti-lice shampoo into Estella’s backpack one day. Another time we were standing around during lunch break when some jerk dumped a whole Ziplock bag of dead flies on our heads. Anyway, the hobby had reached the limits of its expansion, seemed stunted somehow: There were only so many dead bugs we could collect, only so much we could learn from the limited selection of books available to us.
But then came college and, with it, the freedom to expand one’s mind, to let it ooze in whatever direction it fancied. At least, that was how the American kids saw it. Their eagerness was contagious.
“Seriously?!” exclaimed a senior girl in a blue bandana and a yellow T-shirt that read GOT RICE? We were at a freshman-orientation pizza party thrown by BASA—the Berkeley Asian Students Association—and we’d just told her what classes we’d signed up for: all economics-major requirements.