by Kat Chow
The way you grieved was through trying to figure out how to survive, the high school therapist later tells me when I am an adult, and I visit her to recall these memories.
The way he grieved, I thought of my father, was through trying to figure out how to survive.
What is grief, if not the act of survival? How can it be anything else but persisting through an enormous loss? After my mother’s death, I learned quickly that I would need to parent myself or find parents in others. It became easier over the years; not because my father became more nurturing, but because I’d become an adult.
It’s radical acceptance, another therapist once told me. You don’t have to like a situation, but you can also accept that it’s true and your reality.
But wasn’t that giving in? I kept asking, over and over.
* * *
After the funeral service, my father and I huddle in the kitchen to assemble trays of lasagna. We boil noodles and sauté zucchini and garlic and onions and simmer them in tomato sauce. While I wash my hands, my father dumps spices into the pan.
I stir the sauce and notice tiny dark beads scattered throughout.
Did you put sesame seeds in here?
No, he says. Oregano.
Oregano? These look like black sesame seeds.
I bring the spoon closer to the light. They are tiny bugs. Drugstore beetles. Dead.
Aiiiiya, these are bugs, Daddy, I say, suddenly taking on my father’s mannerisms. We can’t give this to them.
He examines the pan. Why not? Protein.
We just can’t, I say. Look. They’re everywhere.
Still peering at the sauce, he nods.
OK, let’s just use this sauce for the lasagna you’ll keep, I say. I can make a new one for the neighbors.
He draws his shoulders toward his ears.
Whatever you want, he says. I’m an easy guy.
And we’re Cantonese— I let my voice trail to tee my father up for his favorite joke.
Cantonese people, he says, already laughing. We eat everything with four legs except for tables.
I throw out his jar of infested oregano and study the flecks in the sauce. The beetles are small as punctuation, and their spindly six legs are nearly invisible.
I crunch the lasagna. Sesame seeds. Protein. It’s fine. When I can’t continue chewing, I put my fork down. I wash my plate in the sink using the soap he’s diluted with water and I return it to the dishwasher where they’re stored. I swish my mouth with tap water. I’m worried he’ll notice the shame I’ve tracked into the house like grime, that my inability to eat the bugs means I’ve become soft and wasteful. I can’t tell which would be worse: him seeing my refusal to finish my plate as a sign that I think I’m better than him, or if he thinks it means the opposite. It is amazing how returning to this house is stepping into a warped time machine; the parent-child dynamics remain the same, the behaviors that, for much of high school, I grew to accept. Now, though, I fight against this resentment, the way neglect stings and hurts and feels, often, personal: both like a condemnation and reflection of how much love one deserves.
After, I take the other tray of lasagna—the one without the insects—to our neighbor’s. I ring the doorbell just as I did decades ago. As it was then, the house remains immaculate, sparsely furnished, though the wheelchair lift they recently installed now sits unused. Our neighbor says thank you, and I offer my condolences, knowing what it feels like to be on the other side of the door.
I turn back to my childhood home and take it in from my neighbor’s yard. The rhododendron bushes have grown tall enough to cover the first-floor windows and nearly the second. My father has tried to paint the garage doors to match the house. He wants to cover the rot. But instead of a soft, sandy hue, he coats the doors in an electric yellow, which only draws the eye to the splintered, disintegrated wood. He has also hacked the weeping cherry tree in the center of our front lawn into a seven-foot-tall obelisk. This was my mother’s favorite type of tree, and when I was in elementary school, my family surprised her with a sapling for Mother’s Day. Each spring, she led me and my sisters to coo out our front windows when the blooms emerged. Without the drape of branches, the trunk is menacing. My father had explained: It was dead, and needed to go. But why not get rid of the whole thing? Why leave such a tall stump there? He had shrugged. It was a lot of work. He didn’t have the time.
3.
I send my sisters a selfie: I bite my bottom lip and curve my top one back to expose my teeth. My eyebrows push toward my hairline. I follow it with our favorite question, borrowing our mother’s language.
ME: What doing Chow girls?
Before I transferred to my company’s New York bureau, I made this face often to a friend whose desk was near mine. We threw this expression to one another when we fizzed with stress, didn’t know what to say, or were sorting through some shaky opinion—usually from a man—that had been stated as indisputable fact on Twitter or in an article or in a meeting. We sat behind our monitors and flung this look at one another in lieu of words, or frustration. One summer, one of the interns noticed and lobbed it back to us. Charmed, I told her it was a face my family made, but I didn’t elaborate. I didn’t say that each time I made it and they returned it, or vice versa, that I felt like I’d passed my mother on to them. A virus, or a gift. I couldn’t tell.
My sisters respond within the hour with their own photos, Steph at a hospital in Manhattan between seeing patients, Caroline near her office in Silicon Valley, steeped in the California sun, her hair now blond, her most recent dye washed out. Our expressions are photocopies of a photocopy of a photocopy.
Occasionally, my sisters and I export this roll call to our family group text.
CAROLINE: Daddy, what about you, what doing?
Days later, likely missing the previous messages, he surfaces and sends us a photo of two cherry tomatoes from his garden on a metal plate.
DADDY: This is the first harvest of my cherry tomatoes.
I have never seen our father make our mother’s teeth face; I have never seen him jut out his top incisors to tuck over his bottom lip, eyes bulbous. Maybe he’s self-conscious about all of the dental work he needs, or maybe he feels it’s not his to make.
But I can picture it: He unlocks his jaw, his gums red and swollen. Usually gnashed when around me, but now softer, fang-like, playful. The gaps in his teeth reveal his fillings and his need for dental implants. How is it that in my own pretend, my father still cannot afford to fix his teeth, and I still cannot figure out how to help him.
* * *
My father invites my sisters and me to Connecticut to sort through our mother’s belongings. He’s read an essay that I’ve written about a pair of my mother’s old Sperrys that he gave me right after I graduated college. The leather was faded, the soles with no traction. When I slip them on, I think about the last time she might have worn them, her feet sweating, my toes and heels digging into the imprints that hers left behind. This scares me, though, being so close to her. I want to tell him about this twist of longing. I want to ask him if that’s what everything in his house does to him. Instead, I write about it.
Maybe you gals want to come to the house, he says after reading the essay, to see if you want any of your mommy’s stuff?
Yes, we agree. It has been nearly five years since we all have been home at the same time. We book our flights for August and don’t ask questions. We will hang out in Connecticut, then New York, where we’ll explore the city and watch the free tennis matches at the U.S. Open. This will be our family visit in lieu of seeing one another for the holidays, we agree. We’re also planning a trip to Cuba in March. The U.S. government eased its sanctions on Cuba, making it possible for Americans to travel there. My father wants to look for his father, he tells us. Steph, who is still trying to get pregnant, will not join because of Zika. But Caroline and I say enthusiastically, offering to plan the trip and foot the bill: Yes.
Inside the house, my sisters and I ri
fle through our mother’s closet. We work quickly and quietly as we tug our mother’s dresses and shirts from their hangers, and her bras and panties from the laundry baskets and drawers. We drag them across piles of newspapers and receipts that have accumulated, my father’s towering stack of Wall Street Journals that date back to the 1980s tucked behind his door.
Try this on. I toss a shirt to Caroline. It has navy flowers and a pale polka-dot print.
How’s it look?
It fits you really well, we say. The slopes of her shoulders are like our mother’s.
Steph pulls on a lilac dress with rough, wide stitches, and she passes me a matching one that is highlighter yellow. This looks hand-sewn. We later learn that Yi Ma made it for our mother. The fabric is stiff and tight along my back and hugs my hips.
We sort through more of her clothing. We try on dresses and create piles that we’ll each take. We discover our mother’s old dildo. Our father, who lingers in the bedroom in order to inspect our progress, is near Steph when she comes across it. At her reaction, he steps closer to take a look. She flinches and tosses it into the trash. Of course, all of this fazes us. But we are too mired in the dust and the day to react. We will laugh years later.
Look, Caroline says. She holds our mother’s engagement ring up for Steph and me to see. It is a single diamond on a silver band. Simple, not flashy. Our father chose it. My mother once mentioned to me that Gung Gung had complained about the diamond’s imperfections, and that he’d called my father cheap. Caroline has discovered it mixed with loose change on a vanity in their closet, hidden underneath our father’s faded grocery store receipts.
I thought she was buried with that. I return to the image I’d always conjured of my mother in her casket, her plasticky hands clasped, the ring hugging a swollen finger.
She must have gotten too bloated and had to take it off when she was sick. Caroline looks at me. Are you and C.J. planning on getting engaged?
Oh. I am suddenly embarrassed.
You can have it, if you want, Caroline says. You should take it.
Ah, I say, shifting on my feet. We’ve talked about marriage more generally and what that looks like for us, yes—
I’ll hold on to it for now, but if anybody needs it—Caroline wags her eyebrows—you know where it is.
She slides the ring onto my finger. The band is bent on one side, and this groove unnerves me. I begin to sniffle and reach for a tissue to wipe my eyes, then nose.
Allergies, I say to my sisters as I take the ring off. All the dust. They don’t call me out.
It takes two car trips to haul all of our mother’s belongings to Goodwill. We drag them to the drop-off area and are in the car when an employee begins to haul her bags inside. I run back and stop him. Wait, I forgot something, I say, rabid as I unknot a bag and pull out a shirt. It does not matter to me which one. Just the act of retrieving and keeping something of my mother’s is enough.
* * *
Mommy, you linger everywhere in this house. So many of your belongings hold memories of you. You always crouched around corners, ready to jump out at us when we passed. You liked to stand very still by the coat closet while I used the bathroom next to it. When I emerged, you leapt from the shadows.
Aaahhhhhh, you shouted.
Aaaaaahhhhhhh, I screamed. I flailed and shrunk from you as you enveloped me in your arms.
I catch myself doing this to C.J. now. When he is about to walk into a room I am in, I inch to a spot where I think he cannot see me. I hide, not moving my body, and then, gleefully I launch myself at him and grasp for his arms.
I gotchu! I collapse into him in a fit of laughter while he yelps.
Kat. He clutches his chest and catches his breath after I’ve frightened him near the top of his apartment’s stairs. One of these days I’m going to accidentally elbow you in the face or something.
I gotchu, I gotchu, I gotchu, I chant giddily, not wanting to stop.
In our childhood home, you are folded inside each of the drawers and the closets. These are your ultimate hiding spots. When we least expect it, you, as a memory, vault from them. A jack-in-the-box.
* * *
The next day, Steph, Caroline, my father, and I glide down the Merritt Parkway to New York. Behind the wheel, I navigate us into Brooklyn along I-278. Manhattan bursts into view across the river.
See that? I point past Caroline’s lap out her window. This sight stuns me each time, the way the towers stretch upward and the sky wraps around them. It is mostly glints of sun refracting off metal, all confident show. A look at how beautiful I am strut onto an enormous stage. How could I look anywhere else with this sight before me? How could I not feel an opening of my self when I see this cityscape? There is also a familiarity here, the way the skyline encompasses so much, including the Mahayana Temple at the base of the Manhattan Bridge, our histories merging with a new possibility.
That trip and drive and seeing the city with my family, it gives me for the first time in years a flash of a feeling—an awe, a calmness. I’d experienced it in high school driving across the Connecticut River, and then in Seattle looking out at Portage Bay. I’d always thought it meant I was home. But it is the slow spread of radiant joy. A gentle hope.
Later, my family huddles in C.J.’s apartment. He is out of town and has offered it up to us for the weekend. I will move in with him here in just a few months, bringing me closer to Connecticut.
Steph and Caroline share the bed, and my father stretches out on an air mattress in the living room.
It’s kind of weird to sleep in C.J.’s bed, don’t you think? my sisters say while they help me stretch a set of clean sheets across the mattress.
Oh, it’s fine, I say. There’s no other space.
I drag the couch cushions into a closet that has been repurposed into a cramped office, and I sleep on top of them. In the middle of the night, when the cushions keep sliding apart, I crawl into the bedroom and stand over Caroline.
Move over, I say to her. I poke her shoulder until she stirs. Hey, move over.
Agh, Sticky, Caroline says, her eyes still closed. It’s too hot. There’s no room.
Please. Just do it?
She scoots closer to Steph, and I squeeze myself onto the edge of the bed. I try to give Caroline space, but eventually, I spoon into her and she lets me. My drool soaks into her pillow.
It occurs to me that those couple of days we spent at our childhood home might be the last time we’d be there together. Family makes a home, yes. Or maybe we make a mausoleum. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
4.
Caroline and I are in Havana with our father walking along Barrio Chino, a few blocks of restaurants and apartments. My father keeps remarking about this city: This is like China thirty years ago. And: Everything is always rationed in Communist countries. They keep watch on their people.
He says This is like China thirty years ago so many times, he must be wading in memories of his own childhood or imagining his father’s life here.
We meander into the various associations’ buildings. These tongs are organized by the surname of their members and the villages in China from where they came. At the start of Chinese migration to Havana, Barrio Chino and the Cuban Chinese population quickly became structured around these tongs. They provided space for the thousands of men to share meals, organize politically, send remittances to China, and find housing. Most of these tongs backed China’s Nationalist leaders and raised money to fight the Communist Party.
Here, my father moves as though the more animated he becomes, the more likely people will recall his father. Frenetic forward motion, doesn’t take off his backpack or introduce himself, just waves a portrait of his father and punctuates the air with his sweeping hand gestures.
Before leaving for Cuba, I took the portrait of my grandfather that my father had found in Toronto a few years earlier. He had set it on top of his TV in the kitchen, near the other photographs of our ancestors. I made copies so
we wouldn’t lose the original, and I tucked them into a folder to carry with us. The photo shows my grandfather in a suit with fat lapels and a striped tie. He is ageless, and could be anywhere between twenty and fifty. His thick hair is slicked back and it glistens on top of his head. Full, well-groomed eyebrows. Full, wide lips. Cheekbones so prominent they cast shadows. When I saw this photo for the first time, I texted my sisters. How come his eyebrows are so nice? How come we don’t have his cheekbones, geez. He has the same eyes as my father. Undeniably a handsome man.
We meet up with a documentary photographer named Pok Chi Lau, a former professor at the University of Kansas whose work focuses on the Chinese diaspora. I’d heard from various people during my research that Pok Chi would be here helping another American woman who, in a previous visit to Havana, found her grandfather’s remains. Pok Chi and I had corresponded for months about my family’s own search, and once we arrive in Havana, he introduces my family to Mitzi Espinosa Luis, whose grandfather immigrated to Cuba in 1918 from Guangdong Province.7 She works at Min Chih Tang, one of the tongs that provides lunch to the elderly in Barrio Chino, and she patiently listens to my father run through the brief list of what he knows about his father.
Mitzi studies the photo of my grandfather. She does not recognize his face from the records, but then, there are many men and many faces. She invites us to look through Min Chih Tang’s logs later in the week.
My father continues his boisterous approach with anyone he meets, on the street, at restaurants, in the fluorescent lobbies of other tongs. He turns strangers into hesitant confidants, and Caroline and I trail him, offering to hold his backpack or papers. He asks things such as, Did this person know anything about his father? Could he look in their record books? Could they help us to look in their associations’ crypts in the cemetery? He relays the story that I’ve only recently learned—how a man he had met many years ago in Toronto’s Chinatown claimed he knew my grandfather. When my grandfather died, the man said, he had a mistress who was pregnant.