On our China trip, I expressed my neurosis openly and freely as I slathered 99.5 percent DEET repellent on my exposed skin. I knew well the phrases in Chinese “I hate mosquitoes” and “A mosquito bit me.”
“You have my skin,” Ma said, observing me. “That’s why they like you.”
It might seem pitiful to focus and obsess on such a tedious topic, but I found myself groping around for subjects Ma and I could both relate to. Mosquitoes, I could talk about, without Min-Wei’s help. Ma and I talked in child-level Mandarin about why they liked us and how and where we had been bitten. We discussed what attracted them and how to prevent them. There wasn’t a day that went by in China when the subject did not come up. The three of us chased stray mosquitoes around our rooms together, laughing and cursing.
In Lupu, despite all of our precautionary measures, I suffered a bite on my leg that swelled up impressively, red and hard. Ma examined the bite and shook her head. She held up her finger, as if to say “wait,” and I did. Then she removed a small, round container of Green Bamboo salve from her bag and screwed off the cap. She dipped her index finger into what looked like Carmex. I propped my foot on the bed so she wouldn’t have to bend down. She rubbed the salve gently on my bite and looked up at me.
“This helps heal mosquito bites,” she told me.
“Okay.”
“Better?”
“Sure,” I said. It was. And for a second I felt that we recognized each other: a mother, a daughter, and a mosquito bite.
ON THE LAST MORNING, as we were getting ready to head home, I tried to wrap up my barrage of questions.
“How do you feel about your life?” I asked.
“My whole life was worth nothing. It was not worth it to marry with Ba. We worked so hard when we were young, but in the end it didn’t work out. I gave him everything. I tried to give everyone a good life and never asked for anything in return. My whole life was my marriage. That’s just what I had to do. And we have a bad relationship.
“But my life is not too bad. I still can eat and still can spend whatever I want [thanks to her daughters and her own thrifti-ness]. That’s enough. I don’t really care what he does now. I can’t change things. It’s too late. The kids have a good life. That’s enough for me.
“Buddhists have to be calm. I want to be a good Buddhist. I don’t want to care about anything. I would like to go to the temple and worship more, but I can’t read the texts.”
“Do you believe you had bad luck?” I asked.
“I don’t believe I’ve had a life full of bad luck, but rather I have a life without hope,” she replied.
Ma never thanked me for the trip—or she never said, in any language, the exact words, “Thank you, Mei-Ling.”
I asked her several times if she liked it, shamelessly fishing for a compliment. I was needy and wanted to be reassured that my effort was not overlooked.
“Are you happy with the trip?” I asked.
“Yes, I’m very happy.”
“I’m happy to be here with you and Min-Wei.”
“I’m happy, too.”
After we returned to Min-Wei’s Taipei apartment, Ma sat down and proclaimed to me, “I want to pay for my trip.”
I knew this was a gesture, this obligatory offer, her way of expressing her appreciation.
“No, no,” I insisted, as you are supposed to do.
“Bu hao yisi.” How embarrassing. “I never did anything for you.”
I shook my head.
“Don’t worry about it.”
She handed me one of the small jars of pearl cream she had bought for each of her daughters.
I went to bed that night and thought about how Ma and I would never truly know each other. Perhaps we could, if I gave up the life I knew, moved here, and gave everything to Taiwan, but I wasn’t willing to do that. I had a feeling that no matter how hard I studied Mandarin or Taiwanese, or how much time I spent in the town where I had been born or the island where my parents had been raised, my birth mother and I would never have a fraction of the relationship she has with Min-Wei or Jin-Hong or my other sisters, or that I have with my own mom in the States. Ma will never be able to tell me one-on-one the stories of her youth. I would never know what she preferred to eat without asking. We will probably never bicker or fight, nor will one of us ever say something so mean that the other dissolves into tears. I will never consult her about my insecurities, my disappointments, and my dreams. That kind of special mother-daughter relationship would always be uniquely reserved for my mom in Michigan, and that was fine. It would have to be.
Ma would remain an enigma to me. I would never understand truly why she became the woman she became. My sisters’ explanation—“She is a traditional woman”—would have to suffice.
It was a sad resignation, but at least I could say I tried. I had reached out and given what I was willing to give. I do have a few precious memories. I still smile when I think about the time in Yangshou, while Min-Wei and I primped and packed, and Ma lay on her back on the hotel bed and put her feet into the air. She chanted: “We are going to China, China is our home.” Min-Wei shook her head, laughed, and translated Ma’s made-up tune.
I do that, I thought. I often make up random, silly songs and sing them to my husband or my dog. I do that, too.
I think of watching Ma as she looked up and out of the tour bus window and saw for the first time the dramatic lines of the Linjiang Mountains of Guilin. They unfolded like misty giants, craggy and judgmental. The shadows of trees and telephone poles slid across Ma’s astonished face. She just smiled and pointed upward at the mountains. She began talking to herself; no one was sitting next to her. Then she actually started laughing aloud and nodding her head. My frustration with the tour group and my crappy Mandarin melted away.
This is what I had come for, I thought. This is the moment.
Ma did not notice my staring. She just kept looking out the window, pointing and laughing to no one but herself.
16
THE NAMESAKES
For two years, I heard bits and pieces about the Boy, mostly morsels that I extricated from my sisters and from my Australian brother-in-law. The girls continued to refer to the son that my father had with another woman as the Boy, and occasionally the Child, but never as Brother. Likewise, they told me that they did not allow him to call them Big Sister, as is customary in many families. Titles are complicated and important in Chinese culture. You call your mother’s mother something different from your father’s mother. Your father’s younger brother is jiujiu and your father’s older brother is susu. Your older sister is jiejie and younger sister meimei; your younger brother is didi and older brother is gege. Such titles were traditionally expressions of rank and place in the familial hierarchy in terms of respect, deference, and even affection. I liked some of the titles; it was much easier to remember jiefu (husband of older sister) than to memorize five different Chinese names. I also knew the significance of being forbidden to use them.
I asked about this during an Internet chat with one of my sisters one evening.
“Do you speak to the Boy? He calls you auntie and not sister, right?”
“He calls me teacher.”
“He calls you teacher? Does he know you are his sister?”
“He does not know.”
“Does he know that the other sisters are his sisters? Who does he think they are? What does he call Ma?”
“He calls Ma sometime, sometime calls Ma aunt.”
“Okay, so does he know Ba is your father?”
“Yes, he know.”
“And he knows Ba is his father. So he doesn’t know that you are his sister? (sorry, I don’t understand).”
“Maybe he is too little, so he does not know this kind of complex relationship.”
“I guess not! I almost don’t. One day he will.”
“When he grow up. It’s Ba, does the wrong thing.”
“Yes, I know.”
“It’s poor, very pitiful.�
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When I called during the Lunar New Year celebration of 2006, the opening of the Chinese Year of the Dog, Ba tried to get the Boy to talk to me. My sisters and their families already had greeted me, waved and blew kisses through the minicam, but the Boy would not; he hid in another room. When Min-Wei sent me pictures of that reunion, I got a glimpse of this child. He was half turned toward the camera, and his skinny leg was sticking out from under the dinner table. His presence in the photo was obviously an accident.
I had not visited Taitung since the giant family reunion in 1998, when my adopted family and Irene’s family went there for Chinese New Year. I decided to go after our China trip because I wanted to visit Ya-Ling and meet her husband, as well as see our older brother. Plus, I needed to see Ba again; there were still so many questions to ask him. And, of course, there was this Boy.
If this was the Chosen One, I had to meet him.
MA AND I ARRIVED LATE, delayed by storms in Taitung and Taipei. Ya-Ling came with her youngest son to pick us up. She wore a light blue and brown striped dress and her thick hair loose. She looked healthy and quite pretty.
“I look nice for you,” she announced, tugging her toddler son’s hand. “Say hello to auntie.”
He stared up at me with big, frightened eyes.
“Say hello to auntie,” she demanded, and let loose a string of commands in Chinese.
“Hah-low auntie,” he said.
We loaded our suitcases into the car trunk.
“Where is Ba?” Ya-Ling mumbled. “He said he would be here, but I have been here a long time and he is not here.”
The day’s rain had paused briefly and the air had chilled, a welcome break from Taitung’s heavy summer heat. During the ten-minute drive from the small airport to our parents’ home, we chatted about the China trip, the weather, and Ya-Ling’s work as a teacher-in-training.
The city had grown since I had visited eight years before. Taitung still had more farm fields and swaths of undeveloped land than most regions in Taiwan, but those pockets of emptiness were disappearing. The roads were paved, and new developments and businesses were opening in every part of town. A fancy hotel called the Formosan Naruwan, reputedly the first four-star in Taitung’s history (it was unclear to me who was giving those stars) had opened, and we would visit it a few times during my three-day stay when we were desperate for something to do while it rained.
When we arrived, the house was empty. Ba’s car was nowhere to be found.
“He leaves during the day,” said Ya-Ling. “He leave the Boy here. He tell him to watch TV and he disappear. No one know where he goes.”
THE FIRST THING I saw when I walked into my birth parents’ home was an eight-by-ten-inch photograph of President George W. Bush and me.
My mom had insisted on snapping the photo at the White House correspondents dinner in May of 2004. As an award recipient, I had been invited to a reception with the president, and I got fancy for the occasion, with a silvery, formal gown. The president, decked out in his tuxedo, has his arm around my shoulders as if we’re old chums. Given that I personally cannot stand most of his policies, the prominently displayed picture of Mr. Bush and me was a jarring reentry to Taitung. It had been placed strategically in the front room, in the wood and glass cabinet that overflowed with unopened bottles of Remy Martell and Kinmen liquor, rusty toenail clippers, a white ceramic cat, a roll of masking tape, a plastic gummy watch with one strap cut off, and piles of other useless knickknacks. Ya-Ling told me that Ba shows visitors that photo proudly but usually adds: “I did not raise her. I did not fulfill my responsibility as a father.”
The house was in absolute disarray. I always thought of that home as chaotic, but now it was as if it had vomited up its own contents. I wondered if it was because Ma had been in China, or if this was its normal state. The stiff, mismatched wood and wicker chairs in the living room were covered with children’s shirts, pants, and schoolbags. In the dining room, the round table was stacked high with Chinese bread, tins of cookies, bowls filled with chopsticks, baby bottles, cans of baby formula and powder, bottles of soy and hot sauce, and dishes with uneaten vegetables covered in cellophane. A coat rack threatened imminent collapse under mounds of hats and jackets. In the kitchen, baskets, plastic buckets, crates, containers, and bags stuffed with raw carrots, turnips, mushrooms, bean sprouts, and several other vegetables I did not recognize covered the floor. Two huge refrigerators were bursting with frozen foods, vegetables, pork, yogurt, cow’s milk, soy milk, and a small package of expensive, bitter chocolates that I raided every once in a while to keep my sanity.
From the screen door, I could see that the backyard was strewn with clean and dirty clothes. Umbrellas and cans of bug spray were stacked on buckets stacked on empty boxes, next to brooms, rakes, and mops. On the second floor, two desks laden with computers and books were crammed in the wide part of hallway that links two wings of the house with the third floor stairs, alongside plastic storage containers filled with books and files and Ya-Ling’s husband’s musical instruments.
Every inch of that house was an absolute assault on the senses. By now, I could admit that coming “home” to Taitung did not evoke a feeling of nostalgic longing. By now, I believed it was dishonest to try to stir up some kind of fond memory for someplace I had never lived. I had once yearned to know these hallways and these rooms, these smells and these sights by heart. I had imagined my own sisters’ memories—of bouncing on beds, of playing hide-and-seek in cornfields, of walking to school together, hand in hand—and wished that those recollections were my own. But now I realized I was glad they weren’t, because with the good came the bad, and the bad was morphing into an uncontainable beast.
I put my suitcase on the floor. Ma asked me if I was hungry.
“Yidiandian.” A little.
Ya-Ling and she discussed whether Ma should cook, or whether we should eat at a restaurant. Ma wanted to cook, saying it was a waste to go out. I fell into passive mode, knowing that it was the only way I would last three days here. I knew most decisions were out of my hands, and it was best to go with the flow.
A FEW MINUTES LATER, Ba walked in, claiming he’d been at the airport. Ya-Ling looked at him doubtfully, but I gave him an overly cheerful, “Ni hao Ba!” and a clumsy hug. Upon entry, Ba immediately handed me $250, for no particular reason. In form, I tried to refuse. He said, as usual, it was a pittance, considering he did not raise me. He gave me a necklace of fake pearls he bought in China (I knew they were fake because I had learned in China how to rub the pearls together and test the grain; these were perfectly smooth plastic). Then he announced that his son was going to be home soon, and that he wanted me to meet him, and that his son was going to call me jiejie, Big Sister.
Ma and Ya-Ling watched me, waiting to see what I would do.
I was not sure what to say. I had given this a lot of thought but was still undecided. Part of me wanted to stick with the society of sisters who refused to acknowledge him as a brother, if only to strike out at Ba’s loathsome behavior. I also felt the fierce instinct to fight for who I love and what I believe. Yet another part of me, like my sisters, felt sorry for this Boy. It was not his fault that our father was stuck in another era. It was not the Boy’s fault that he was all that my father had wanted, all of his life. Still another part of me did not want problems. I came back to Taiwan so rarely and was not convinced that this was worth a fight.
So I said nothing. I just watched Ba leave on his moped to retrieve his son from school. I sat in the living room with Ya-Ling and her boys while they watched Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and other DVDs she had asked me to bring from the States.
My mind raced when I heard the voices and footsteps on the front porch, the click of the lock and the squeak of the screen door.
Then he was there.
The Boy walked into the living room, a tall, lanky child of eight, wearing glasses and a lopsided grin. He had olive skin and blunt-cut hair and long legs and arms. He did not look at
me directly or address me, but he glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, obviously aware that I was the famous American sister that Ba had told him about. He pretended to go look for a ball, game, or something to fiddle with. Ba barked at him to greet me. The Boy hung back. Ba took him by the arm and placed him before me.
The Boy stood awkwardly, jiggling his limbs, wanting to escape our gaze and the grip of his father. He bounced a tennis ball. Ba pointed to me or, rather, jabbed toward me with his long-nailed finger.
“Say hi to your jiejie, your Big Sister,” he commanded in Mandarin. “Call her jiejie.”
The Boy stared at the ground, and I stared at him. The child sensed Ba was giving him permission to do something special—usually forbidden. The calm, rational Mei-Ling fought internally with every ounce of her strong and opinionated personality. As much as Ba was ticking me off, I saw that this child was no monster. He was not some terrible incarnation of the sins of our father. He was just a skinny little kid.
“Ni hao,” I said.
“WEI-SHENG! SAY HI TO YOUR JIEJIE!” Ba demanded.
“Jiejie, hao,” the Boy said in a small voice, slowly looking up at me. Hello, Big Sister.
“Ni hao,” I said again.
Ba let go of the Boy’s shoulder and smiled triumphantly. The Boy bolted into the kitchen and upstairs.
EVERYTHING THAT I had heard about the Boy was true.
I had wondered if perhaps my sisters exaggerated Ba’s strange behavior, but in fact Ba did have a disturbing relationship with Wei-Sheng, whose name I picked up quickly because everyone was constantly yelling at him.
Ba and his son slept in the same double bed in Ba’s room, which was equipped with a television set and a poster of Tom Cruise. Ba still helped the Boy with his bath. Ba took the Boy to school every morning and dropped him off at home after his after-school classes, often abandoning the child and disappearing for hours. Wei-Sheng ended up watching television, playing games on the computer, or aggravating Ya-Ling’s boys. On weekends Ba would take the Boy to the child’s mother’s family house.
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