by Kat Chow
Thinking of you this way might be disrespectful, I know. This makes you more balloon-like than a mother. But it was unnatural to see you attached to tubes and needles with fluids seeping into you.
I wanted to crawl into your bed and have you hold me like you always did, to return to when you slept in my room and I pretended to snore while you read your kissing books.
* * *
I was thirteen when my mother’s hospital visits began this time around. I had just started my freshman year at a new high school in Glastonbury, about a twenty-minute drive from where we lived in Wethersfield. The school had an agriculture science program, and it was not far from where I had taken horseback riding lessons for the past five years, after begging my mother. I was fixated on horses, like many young girls; but unlike many young girls, I had worn my mother down enough to agree.
I liked that horses provided a place to direct my energy, and that they never demanded anything of me. They didn’t mind that in groups or in new places, my throat often closed while I grasped for something to say. I preferred the interiority that horses allowed: I read novels from the library about girls who rode; I pored over textbooks about different breeds and memorized their characteristics. I was proud of each piece of trivia I collected: Icelandic horses had heavy, double-layer coats and were small, but technically not ponies. A pony is 14.2 hands or smaller. A hand is a measurement used on horses, and is about four inches. There is no such thing as a brown horse; horses that appear brown are bay.
For years, I rode an old horse with a bowed back. He was a cross between a Morgan and an Arabian, which was probably why his owner had named him Sheik. His coat was a deep bay, and he had a diamond on his head and massive ears that gave him the appearance of a donkey. He was not handsome, and this, along with his slow and stubborn nature, made him unappealing to other kids. But I loved him and trusted him. I was not a great rider, anyway, and though he was not flashy and was too frail to jump over large fences, I was too anxious to want to do that in the first place.
I spent hours cleaning his hooves and brushing his coat. With my fingers, I worked through the tangles in his mane and tail, conditioning them every few weeks. He was gentle, and because my mother worked out a deal with his owner, I rode him as many times a week as I wanted. He was, basically, mine. My mother brought him bags of apples that she picked from our backyard, stroking the velvet of his nose before she lifted the pieces of fruit to his mouth. He plucked the slices from her palms with his whiskered lips, tickling her into laughter. Perhaps my mother saw the way that this hobby drew me out of myself, but she could not always fight her resentment. I understood this was expensive, but at the time, I had no idea she had dipped into her retirement account to fund it.
When she drove us home from the barn, she fired her critiques. You should be more outgoing, she said, mentioning a friend who was my age and also rode at the barn. She’s so talkative, and she meets everybody so she can ride their horses for free. You should talk more. Be more like her.
In the back seat, I couldn’t form any words to respond, which irritated her more.
During other drives, she tried to channel her worries into plans for my future.
You can become an equine vet, she frequently said, already supplying what veterinary schools I could apply to after college. I can’t figure out now if this was suggestion or edict, though the message that I was to make this obsession with horses useful was clear.
Sure, I told her. That seems great. I was in seventh grade and barely knew what this meant. I liked this idea because it pleased her; I liked that it was different than being a doctor, which was what Steph wanted, or business school, which was what Caroline wanted. The word want here is tricky, because all of our career paths were influenced by our mother.
When she heard from other parents at the barn that I could switch schools and attend Glastonbury’s public high school for an agriculture magnet program, my mother was ecstatic. It’s free, too, she told my father, her decision already made. Glastonbury was a wealthy town, she knew, and in her view, that must have meant better schools. We did not realize that the program and its counterparts were the town’s way of bringing a racially diverse group of students to the school—who would also leave the zip code by the end of the day. We were positioned as outsiders, referred to as the “ag kids.”
Still, this high school was much bigger than my own town’s. Though there still weren’t many Asian kids, it would be one of the first times where my friends and I could laugh, and I could freely say to my teachers—blithely and boldly—That’s not my name. You mean, the other Asian?
One day in the fall of my freshman year, my father called me at the barn. Though I wasn’t riding that day, I often took the bus there after school. I headed to the cul-de-sac as though I lived there, while my classmates scattered to their McMansions. Those bus rides meant that I could avoid the van that Wethersfield administrators chartered to take me across the river to and from school. It was a transportation service that also ferried elderly patients to their medical appointments. It had the company name—Ambassador Wheelchair Service—emblazoned on the sides, and its engine roared as it rolled down the street.
My father’s call came an hour after school had ended. Someone in the barn hollered for me to pick up the phone.
Hello? Daddy? He never called me here.
Hi, he said. It’s Daddy.
I know who it is.
His voice was stilted. I imagined him dialing the barn’s number from his flip phone in the hospital parking lot, his clip-on sunglass lenses flicked up and casting shadows on his face. He wanted to keep the conversation short since we paid for calls by the minute, and because it was near the end of September, the allotted time in our phone plan was running out.
Your mommy doesn’t have that much longer to live, he said.
What do you mean? I asked. I was suddenly aware of all of the barn’s noises: the clop of hooves, saddle buckles jangling, and one of the riding instructors calling out orders in the arena. I hunched my shoulders. How much longer does she have?
The doctors say she only has a few more months to live. It’s stage four cancer, he said. It’s terminal.
Cancer. Terminal. I turned those words around in my mouth a few times after I hung up. I didn’t know how many stages of cancer there were. Later, I instant messaged this to a friend. I still recall watching our chats appear on the screen, my hope bubbling along with them. Maybe there were five, six? Seven, eight? A thousand stages of cancer?
* * *
That past summer, my mother had been in and out of doctors’ offices to determine the source of her stomach pain. A doctor suggested she had irritable bowel syndrome and walked her through avoiding flare-ups: eat stone fruits, consume more fiber, avoid stress. At that last suggestion, I imagine my mother rolling her eyes. The aches and bloat persisted.
A few months before her cancer diagnosis, our family took a trip to the Pacific Northwest to visit Caroline, who was finishing a summer internship in Seattle.
It was my first time on the West Coast, and I spent much of the visit chattering about the mountains that stretched in the distance. I liked how people there talked about them like celebrities. The mountain came out today. Did you see her? Wasn’t she gorgeous with that sunset?
My family piled into our rental car and road-tripped to Mount Rainier—or Mount Tahoma or Tacoma, as it should be called. We stopped along its base, and my sisters and I posed for photos in front of patches of tall grass. Steph plucked lupine and thistle, which she tucked behind her ears. Caroline and I copied her.
Afterward, we traveled north to Vancouver, B.C.
There, on a sunny afternoon, we explored the city’s Chinatown. In the Classical Chinese Garden, my sisters and I sat on a bench and studied the glossy high-rises that sprung up around the park.
Though none of us noticed at the time, our mother was nowhere to be found. She appeared half an hour later on a sidewalk outside the garden, her face pale and
her jacket tied around her waist. Her stomach had begun to gurgle while my family explored the neighborhood; it was unsettled the whole trip, but this time, the discomfort was urgent. As my mother rushed down the street looking for a toilet, she couldn’t fight her own body.
I can’t remember how I learned this. I recall only that afterward, my sisters and I pretended we didn’t notice. We thought that was polite. It’s OK, I tried to make my face convey. My mother must have sensed my concern. And for her part, she also said nothing.
* * *
In my apartment, I have on my desk that framed photo of our family that Steph gave as a present years ago. I keep picking it up and squinting at it, as if this will help me determine the state of my mother’s cancer. Each of us is tan. Our foreheads are glossy, overexposed with flash or the sheen of grease, and the picture is not centered. How much did her body hurt here?
Right before my family had this picture taken, we had finished dinner at a tourist spot where we dug into a bucket’s worth of steamed Dungeness crab, shrimp, and clams that we dumped onto butcher paper. My mother treated the family, exclaiming how seafood like this was special. I copied her and split the shells and sucked on the legs until I was sated, the Old Bay seasoning tingling my fingers and staining the corners of my mouth.
My parents had learned from a TV program that much of the country’s seafood—especially crab—came through Seattle. The whole trip, beneath his baseball cap and usual sunglasses, my father read out loud every sign he saw advertising crab legs.
King crab legs, forty-nine-ninety-nine per l-b, he said. Dunj-iniss crab, twenty-five-dollars per l-b. Except he pronounced crabs as craps, which made me, Steph, and Caroline giggle.
King craps! King craps! We repeated this in the back seat of the car. Forty-nine-ninety-nine per l-b? Such expensive craps come from kings! If he knew we were teasing him, he didn’t react.
But if my mother is feeling unwell, she does not show it in the photo.
Our bodies are touching or are angled toward her.
Gweilo gum maan mo, she might have said, poking fun at the person we’ve asked to take the photo.
We all grin at this. My mother’s is Cheshire Cat big.
* * *
One morning shortly after we returned from Seattle, my father and I sat in Yi Ma’s condo as we watched my mother relay the symptoms she’d experienced in the past year to Yi Ma and Kau Fu: stomachaches, loose stool, constipation, lack of appetite, exhaustion. Her siblings had decided they’d bring her to Flushing to visit doctors who practiced traditional Chinese medicine.
I wish I’d spoken better Cantonese, because then I’d have been part of this conversation, understanding my mother’s pain as she described it. Now I can only guess the words she used. Maybe it was , ho gui, which means very weary, exhausted. Or maybe it was , tung fu, which I’d always thought meant painful but, depending on the way it’s pronounced, can also mean sorrowful, sad, bitter, or poignant. I can only look these words up now, and it’s simultaneously comforting, gutting.
I’m scared, my mother began to sob into her sister’s shoulder. I looked away. I sensed a shift during this visit, and that my father and I couldn’t give my mother the help that she required. Nothing we said—You’ll be OK, I love you—could relieve her panic. This was a new, chaotic hurt that I tried to push away.
We’re bringing you to see doctors, Yi Ma said.
We’ll get through this. Kau Fu paced the apartment. We’ll see what’s going on. But we need to do this fast. Time is of the essence.
Kau Fu, with his frenetic forcefulness, was the patriarch and oversaw Gung Gung’s money after he’d passed. Still, neither force nor money could solve my mother’s illness, and it unsettled me to notice fear overtake a room of adults. I understood then that life would often slip beyond our control.
While I was at school the next morning, my mother and her siblings visited doctors in Flushing who practiced Chinese medicine. They felt her liver and told her it was swollen and hot.
You say you have irritable bowel syndrome? they asked. This isn’t it.
One doctor suggested she head to an emergency room.
At this, I imagine my mother recoiling in denial, then fear. That would mean that whatever she had was serious.
You should listen to that doctor, her siblings insisted. You should let us take you to an emergency room.
My mother reached for any excuse to avoid a hospital visit, but she could not find one that her brother and sister could not knock down.
Later, at Yi Ma’s condo, my aunt began to trim my mother’s nails, which were usually long and carefully rounded. Though my mother left her fingernails unpainted, she inexplicably always kept her toenails coated in a deep burgundy or plum, one of the small vanities she allowed herself. But that evening, my mother’s fingernails bent like squishy plastic and tore. As Yi Ma leaned closer to examine them, my mother began to cry.
This was when we knew something was wrong, Kau Fu later tells me. It was unnatural how soft her fingernails were. They shouldn’t have been that soft.
The next morning, Yi Ma and Kau Fu brought my mother to the emergency room.
No more discussion about this, they said. Just come.
After waiting hours to be admitted to the hospital, my mother learned that despite working for years for one of the largest health insurance companies in the nation, her insurance was no good in this situation. No good because the hospital, according to my father, was in a different county and was out of network. My mother worried that a visit to the emergency room would easily swallow an entire month’s paycheck or more. She couldn’t afford that. She had to return home to Wethersfield to consult with my father about bills. Tuition was almost due for Steph and Caroline’s schools. There was my horseback riding. The mortgage. The car payments. The credit card balances.
My mother and her siblings sat on the couch until late in the evening, their backs stiff as they solidified yet another plan. First, they had to determine what was wrong. Then, in the absence of effective insurance coverage, they would pool their resources to defeat this sickness. My yi ma would sell the building that she and her husband had bought decades earlier. My kau fu would dig into his savings account. They’d ask my father to put his properties in Hartford on the market. This wouldn’t be lucrative, but anything would help; they were lucky to have assets in the first place. But whatever they did, they needed to act quickly.
Time is of the essence, Kau Fu kept saying. Time is of the essence.
He wrote his youngest sister a check for two thousand dollars. He knew it would not be enough to cover all of her medical bills, but it might help her take the necessary next steps. You need to go to the hospital.
* * *
Two years earlier, doctors sliced a nine-pound cyst from my mother’s swollen stomach. The tumor was benign, and it made her look pregnant.
After her surgery, she was determined to resume her routines. One weeknight after dinner, she brought me to the barn. It was the middle of winter, and the temperature was somewhere in the teens. We were the only ones there.
She helped me saddle Sheik.
Do you want to ride him? I asked her. We can just walk around the ring.
Oh, no, that’s OK. She was uncharacteristically hesitant.
Are you sure? I knew that she was curious about riding. She spent so many hours watching my lessons. Through osmosis, she gathered the basics: heels down, toes up, tuck your seat, shoulders straight, arms bent slightly, hands gentle, thumbs up.
Here, take my helmet. I strapped it under her chin so that it was snug. I led her to stand on the mounting block. From those stairs, she surveyed the dim arena around us as though she was taking in its dusty, cobwebbed expanse for the first time. I brought Sheik to her.
Put your left foot in the stirrup, I said. And swing your right leg over the saddle.
As my mother edged her toes into a stirrup, Sheik shifted his weight and sidestepped from the block.
I don’
t know, she said. She clutched the saddle’s pommel.
You’ll be OK, I said. Just get on.
I don’t know, she said again. She backed away. She rubbed her belly, which was still healing from the recent surgery. Maybe some other time.
I was only eleven, but I understood then my mother’s unspoken fear, and how she felt the need to hold her body together.
You sure? I said, hopeful. He’s so slow anyway, he won’t go anywhere.
She looked at Sheik, and then me, and shook her head.
Later that night, as we did most evenings, we sat in front of the computer in a drafty room off my parents’ bedroom and played a game called Horse Land. It was slow with our dial-up internet, but together, we cared for our own fictitious horses. We named them after ones from real life: Sheik, Peaches, Snipper, and Razz.
After I went to bed, my mother continued with Horse Land, casting aside her usual rounds of mahjong or solitaire. She sat in the dark, the screen illuminating her face as she dragged her cursor over different horses until she, too, knew everything about the dozens we owned, including how much to feed them and when they needed their stalls cleaned. And because they were pixelated creatures, she was unafraid of riding them. Here, the pains in her stomach had no effect. Money was no matter. Under my username, my mother entered competitions where she and our horses leapt over fences and won ribbons. She owned a bustling stable that had a surplus of funds, and she made me into an expert rider. I wonder now what plans she had for us in this game. If she looked at the roster of other players and saw this as a competition, or if there was a pleasure that she derived from cultivating this online life.
I grew bored and stopped playing before my mother died. I became more interested in instant messaging friends.