Searching for Sylvie Lee

by Jean Kwok

  You hang in there, Sylvie. I don’t know what kind of trouble you’re in but we’ll get through it together. I’m coming for you.

  Chapter 6

  Sylvie

  Friday, April 1

  One Month Earlier

  It was late in the evening and I sat on the airplane at JFK, waiting for it to depart and bring me home to the Netherlands. When I was little and still living there, I had chafed at the bit. I was a troublesome child, had already started the dolls dancing even then. She has pepper in her butt, the Dutch kids had said. In a society that graded you down if you wrote extra pages for an exercise because you had not followed the rules of the assignment, I had always wanted too much, tried too hard. Just do normal, the Dutch said, and I was many things but never that.

  But as I fastened my seat belt, I felt as if I was returning to a safe haven—east, west, home was best. I was going back to the place where no one had ever needed me to be extraordinary. How many times had I dreamed of going home over the years? Why had I never returned before now? It had been a long trip of the spotted cow, filled with trials and tribulations.

  When I was nine years old and newly arrived in the United States, I had to wear that hated eye patch and the American kids had laughed at me; for that and for my accent and my crooked front tooth. I could speak only a few words of English then. Even after I learned the language, I kept the accent that, for many years, they thought was Chinese—chink, go home to China, you can’t even talk right, stupid Buddhahead—but was actually Dutch. And I had watched as those syrup lickers fawned over the girl with French parents because her accent was so European. Only Amy would dance with joy when she saw me each day. Amy, who slipped her tender hand in mine, wrapping it around my icy heart.

  Where I was cold and false—a beast of artifice like the bejeweled mechanical nightingale the Chinese emperor bought to replace the one of flesh and blood—Amy was genuine, a sweet little piece of licorice, always true to herself. She had a habit of pushing up her glasses with her middle finger, as if she were giving everyone the bird, and I found it incredibly endearing that she had no idea she was doing it. She was a giver while I was a consumer, burning up everything and everyone I touched. Naturally, I had been jealous of Amy ever since she was born. Amy, the wanted child, and the only reason my parents brought me back to the United States, so I could babysit her. Ma cared nothing for what I did. I could go to bed past midnight and she would not even mark it. I often left the apartment without eating breakfast because I wanted, just once, to hear Ma’s soft voice say, “Sylvie, come back,” but she never did. Meanwhile, Amy had to button her coat. Amy could not leave without a warm little bite in her stomach. Amy had help in everything.

  When I had nightmares, Amy would bounce me awake in that little bedroom we shared and say, “You’re speaking monster language in your sleep again.” No matter how many years I lived in America, I always dreamed in Dutch. Dutch was something that belonged to me, or so it seemed when I left the only country I had ever known. It was a complex language, filled with challenging sounds and a wrapped-up word order. Despite its intricacy, it was the language of my soul. Nowadays, we all lived in a time boundary when emotion defeated logic, an era when gut feeling reigned over rationality. There was no patience for the difficult, the indecipherable, yet what else was the human heart but that?

  While at Princeton, I joined the Dutch language table for our weekly meal to converse among others who spoke it. Their surprise, when they first saw me, turned to shock when I started to speak Dutch, at first with some hesitation, then ever more fluently. They delighted in teaching me everything I had missed, from sexual organs to curses that often embarrassed them but not me: cancer, typhoid sufferer, raisin snob, poop catcher, lamb balls. I had to hold myself in so I did not laugh out loud. From this, I learned that curses were impotent unless powered by shame and the appeal of the forbidden.

  And naturally, Lukas wrote to me in Dutch, but our correspondence tapered off as we grew older and were drawn further into our separate lives. When we were little, we would go to the library in our village and Lukas would pore over the art and photography books, inhaling the scent of each page as if he wanted to absorb every image into himself. Off and on through the years, I would receive a letter from him in his beautiful slanted handwriting about yet another new girlfriend (“you would like her, Sylvie, she is as brilliant as you”), his study by the famous Rietveld Academie (“the world has cracked open its lens for me”)—and then, as he was struggling to establish himself as a photojournalist, a view-card only once in a while from places like Bolivia (“freezing my butt off in the Andes Mountains”), Turkey (“stray kitten here has been waiting for me every day outside my door, bringing her home”), China (“leaving Guangdong behind me now”). He was less good with electronics: erratic and confused, sometimes writing me emails that ran on for pages, then not responding to my reply for months, only to later send an apology that he had found his unsent email in his drafts folder.

  I told Amy she should not lose herself in her fantasies, but I was the one who had spent my life on dreaming. When I was living with Helena and Willem in their cold house, I longed for my own ma and pa, whom I had never met, parents who would love and accept me as I was. Then, when I was finally allowed to return to my real parents—They only need a child minder for their new daughter, Helena had told me—I clung to memories of Grandma back in the Netherlands. Her warm arms, her smell of Nivea cream and Chinese hair gel, of the rice and meat porridge she made for me and Lukas after school, of warm caramel waffles from the street markets and licorice in long, pointy plastic sacks. Lukas, who always had a new joke to tell me as we walked to school each day, and who made me toss stick after stick into the swirling water so he could capture just the right photo. Fool that I was, I always yearned for that which I did not have.

  It was a risk, returning to what I cherished as my homeland. I dreamed of plaice and yet I ate flatfish; I always expected too much. Yes, that was the reason I had never gone back to the Netherlands on vacation, not even on our marriage-trip. I had changed and I was terrified that my dream of the one place I truly belonged would be overwritten and I would have nothing left, no solace at all.

  But then Grandma called, her voice so weak on the phone. Sylvie, you must travel back to see me. Quickly. Quickly.

  There were only a handful of people whom I genuinely loved in this life and Grandma was one of them. She reached out because she was on the edge of her grave, close to being with the ants. My sweet grandma, who had held me as I cried over some cruel words Helena had said to me. I clutched at the raw pain that convulsed my chest. How many years had it been? Now, suddenly, there was almost no time left—and, even if only temporarily, the trip would allow me to leave behind the wreck that was Jim, my career, and the rest of my life.

  When I had repeated Grandma’s words to Ma, Pa, and Amy, Ma had stiffened, and I knew that she too grasped what Grandma truly wanted. We had never spoken of the jewelry, but Grandma must have revealed her secret to her only daughter.

  “I want to say goodbye to my mother—I mean, Grandma,” I had said. Ma had flinched. I had kicked her in her tender leg on purpose and I was glad. She had not been there for me when I was a child, and Grandma had. Then I had lied as hard as glass, telling them that work was sending me there. I knew that would pull Pa over the rope like nothing else, and Ma always did whatever Pa said, as if she were paying penance for some crime she had committed. If only they knew that the successful, competent Sylvie had nothing anymore. Would they be disappointed in me?

  Then Ma had surprised us all by saying, “Maybe I go with her.”

  We all stared. Ma never went anywhere. She was afraid to burn herself with cold water. Even when I tried to take them out to dinner, she protested about the expense, the trouble, the unsafe world outside of our apartment. What the farmer did not know, she would not eat. Go nowhere, do nothing, then you’ll be safe.

  Pa turned to her, angered, rearing on h
is back paws. “What?”

  Ma looked down, blinked away tears: I spotted a ship with sour apples on the way. She said in a choked voice, “She is my mother.” Guilt engulfed me like a cloud of hot steam and I could hardly breathe for a moment. How could I have overlooked this? Always only concerned with myself. Grandma would be filled with joy to see Ma again.

  “No,” Pa said, his face hard and stern. Sometimes I hated him. “Amy need you here.”

  At this, Amy’s jaw slackened. “Are you crazy? She doesn’t need to change my diaper.”

  “I can pay for the tickets,” I said, even though in my head, I watched the figures dwindle in my savings account.

  But Ma was already shaking her head, always the peacemaker, her own needs buried under a mountain of obligation. “No, I must work. You go, Sylvie.”

  “She has the right to see her mother,” I said, facing Pa. I was not afraid of him, not like Ma and Amy. My own guilt at neglecting Ma’s feelings built up in me like hot air, egging me on. Pa was so unfair, so old-fashioned and sexist. My voice rose. “Why are you stopping her?”

  A dark streak of red raced up his rigid neck, the strained tendons prominent. “You have no respect,” he ground out.

  “No, stop,” Ma said, stepping between us with fluttering hands. She spoke so quickly, I could barely make out the words. “No matter, no matter. I not go. I not want to. Sylvie, please stop. Please.” She was almost in tears, a pale pink flush drowning her eyes.

  I watched her with sharp and painful pity and sighed, my anger deflating like a pricked balloon. How could I ever convince Pa if Ma insisted on fighting against herself? I turned to Amy. “Do you want to come?”

  Amy, so much like Ma, had eaten from frightened hare meat. Her eyes enormous behind her thick lenses, she said, “A foreign country? Thanks, but I haven’t even been anywhere else in the U.S.—unless you count Hoboken. Strange language, weird food, terrorists . . . I’ll stay right here.”

  “You need to expand your horizons.”

  “I like my boundaries just where they are, thank you very much,” Amy said, and that was the end of our discussion. Secretly, I was relieved. I would be able to return alone.

  The flight attendant’s voice came on through the intercom, telling us to get ready for departure, first in English, then in Dutch. I felt her words sink into my bones. The engines roared and we took off.

  Part 2

  Chapter 7

  Amy

  Wednesday, May 4

  I spend the entire flight counting the number of rows to the emergency exit in case we crash, not only due to fear but out of loyalty to Sylvie. The plane is too hot. The huge, heavy man next to me keeps claiming the armrest with his plump elbow and I decide to cede him this battle, scrunching myself as small as possible in my seat. I’m thankful I have the window. I’m so worried about Sylvie that I don’t have much anxiety left to wonder if we’ll crash. Any terrorists can wait until after I find out what happened to my sister. I’m too nervous to sleep, even when they turn off the lights. There’s a wide selection of movies available in the screen built into the back of the seat in front of me, but they all seem to revolve around murder or sex. Finally, I plug my headphones in and tune in to the music station, trying to relax. The constant hum and vibration of the engines makes me feel nauseous, and that giant man looms beside me. It’s like there’s no way out. I don’t have enough air. But I can’t panic. Sylvie needs me. I breathe shallowly for hours in the dark.

  After what feels like an eternity, the lights come back on and the flight attendants hand out cardboard boxes filled with our prepackaged breakfasts: a flat container of blueberry yogurt, a little closed cup of orange juice, plastic utensils so we can’t attack anyone, and a cold turkey and cheese sandwich on hard bread, plus coffee or tea. I ask for tea. I’m already vibrating with tension, lack of sleep, and fear; I don’t need much caffeine. The man next to me has slept soundly with his special neck pillow and now stretches. Since he’s awake, I slide open the window shade and a shaft of the bright morning sunlight slices into the dark cabin like a knife.

  Below me, I spot flat, inscrutable postage-stamped parcels in various shades of green, pieced together like a puzzle, lit up here and there by geometric slashes of brilliant orange, white, and yellow: the famous tulip fields. No hills, no skyscrapers, no forests. This alien landscape seems bizarrely orderly and unreal. I, an urban introvert, am disconcerted by all of this verdant openness.

  The flight attendant announces that we’re about to land, in both English and Dutch. I wish she’d stop doing that. I know we’re going to a foreign country, but the constant Dutch on the flight hammers the point home. What am I doing? Of all people, I’m completely unprepared for this. What can I do for Sylvie anyway? Sylvie is extraordinary.

  Sylvie was named a Baker Scholar at Harvard Business School, and graduated in the top five percent of her class. When I was flailing around after college, I asked her how she’d done it. She had just started her management consulting job and, like old times, we were following Ma around the temple in Chinatown after Chinese New Year.

  “A lot of it is keeping your head clear, Amy,” she said, holding the tip of her bundle of three incense sticks into the flame of the oil lamp until they caught fire. “Princeton, MIT, Harvard, it’s the same pressure. Everyone’s just razor sharp. At Harvard, this one woman was so fast with numbers, it was like she’d swallowed a calculator. People would open their mouths and words like ‘IMF austerity measures’ and ‘trilemma of free-capital flows’ would pop out. I was very intimidated at first. Sometimes people think it’s about competing with each other because they divide you into sections and everyone inside a section is graded on a bell curve. That kind of thinking makes you insane. I never considered anyone else. I only made sure I competed against myself.”

  I fanned my incense sticks and hers to put out the flames. Thick plumes of smoke spiraled upward. “Umm, so positive thinking saved you?”

  She flushed a bit, the dimple in her cheek appearing. She carefully wedged her incense into the sand-filled urn in front of the enormous golden statue of Kuan Yin, goddess of compassion, and bowed low a few times, her posture perfect. Then she turned to face me. “That and I figured out how every syllabus was structured and only spent time on the important issues. I had no choice—I had the receptionist job at the construction company in the afternoon and waitressed until late at night. I only had the morning to get my work done. I had to be really efficient. I’d let the others take the easy questions in class and wait to answer the hardest ones. I’m Asian and a woman, which shouldn’t matter but did anyway. It was clear sometimes that no matter how hard I worked, I didn’t qualify to be a member of the in club. But the worst was the money.” She sighed and rubbed her eyebrow. “Everything cost hundreds of dollars. I didn’t know that an unspoken part of the Harvard MBA was the social aspect—all those invitations to events and galas where you could rub elbows with powerful people. There was no way I could keep up, so I didn’t try. I’m no good at making people like me, anyway.”

  I had finished my bows and knocked her with my shoulder. We’d had this conversation before. “That’s ridiculous, Sylvie.”

  She hugged me then, enveloping me in her scent of smoke and oranges. “That’s your superpower, Amy, not mine.”

  My throat chokes up. Why haven’t I heard from her? Like I said, Sylvie is extraordinary. Remove the extra and that’s me: ordinary. I’ve just wasted so much money buying this expensive plane ticket to the Netherlands, where I won’t be any use at all. I am sick to my stomach. What will happen to me and my loans now that Sylvie’s—I stop myself before even thinking the word. How could I be so selfish?

  I’m overwhelmed the moment I step inside Schiphol Airport, a name I can’t even begin to pronounce. It’s futuristic and spotlessly clean, a spaceship complete with a disembodied female voice reminding me to “Mind your step” at the end of every automatic walkway. The people seem to be uniformly tall, their heads hoverin
g far above mine. I am lost in a forest of trunks. The babble of incomprehensible words around me forms a stream of sound that I wade through, ignorant and alone. I long for home, and Ma and Pa. How can the signs be in so many different languages?

  I walk to one of the huge bathrooms. The stall doors run all the way to the floor. I have a hard time figuring out how to flush the toilet. I try to check myself in the mirror but the mirrors are hung so high that I can only see the top of my head and a bit of my glasses. Beside me, a tall woman washes her hands efficiently, then strides toward the exit without a glance at the mirrors, which are exactly the right height for her. In fact, no one puts on lipstick or powder. I smell no perfume either.

  Did Sylvie really live here for much of her childhood? The one she had before I existed. She doesn’t often speak about her life in the Netherlands, but when she does, her skin flushes, her eyes soften. I know she loved it and longed to return. How could Ma and Pa have sent my own sister here? Had they planned to give me away too? Ma, who holds and pets me, but whose eyes follow Sylvie with so much yearning—Sylvie wriggling away whenever Ma had tried to wrap her arms around her until Ma stopped trying; Sylvie leaning against me every time we watched TV together; Sylvie holding my hand in the street. Even now, we always walk arm in arm. When Sylvie went away to college, I sobbed myself to sleep, counted the days until the too-short breaks when she came home again. That had always been Sylvie’s role, to go forth and have adventures. My job was to wait for her to return home safely. Now the country mouse has been forced into the great devouring world.