by Weike Wang
Now he walks by my desk in the apartment and hands me the phone. He is one of those people—an optimist. He is encouraging me to call my parents and speak the truth.
But my parents and I rarely speak. And when we do, it is not to chat about condiments.
My mother asks: When are you finishing your doctorate? When are you getting a job?
My father asks: When are you paying back your student loans? When are you buying a house?
They both agree that I should stop being a child and start being an adult.
In college, I had a Chinese roommate who called her parents every Sunday.
In college, I had a Chinese roommate who cried for two hours every Sunday.
To prevent this from happening I lie.
They don’t know that Eric and I are living together. I am terrified to tell them. I can’t imagine telling them. Before Eric is even in the picture, my father asks that I do not move in with a guy until marriage and my mother asks that I do not change my last name. They say this sternly. I do not ever hear them use the word sex but it is assumed no sex until marriage. I think the Chinese phrase for it is go to bed. Or maybe go up to bed. I think but I don’t know.
Married women in China keep their last names. My mother finds the Western tradition of changing it old-fashioned: Why bother with gender equality in the first place? For this reason, she has trouble understanding why people still think the Chinese are backward.
I have heard it too. Said by curious classmates, said by a man I sat next to on a plane—the Chinese, being both backward and upside down, a directionally challenged race.
What is repeated many times must then be true.
In China, rain comes up from the ground and lands in the sky. The moon and sun have switched places. Everyone reads from right to left and everyone is getting younger. Hence the belief that Asian women never age.
·
What’s the worst that could happen? says everybody.
And when all this encouragement gets to my head and I finally work up the nerve to tell them: Mom, Dad, I’m not going to finish my PhD. I’m quitting.
My mother says, Don’t call me again. Don’t even think about coming home.
She says, Who do you think you are? You are nothing to me without that degree.
And then she says nothing because she is banging the phone on the counter.
It is a metaphor.
Eric looks on apprehensively. What’s happening? he asks, and when I put the phone banging on speaker he says, Oh, that, and promptly leaves.
·
At our next session, the shrink calls this metaphor psychological warfare. You must rise above it, she says. They’re just words being said many miles away.
That phrase about sticks and stones and bones.
But my bones are very brittle. And I am lactose intolerant.
···
What J. K. Rowling said during a commencement speech: There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.
I realize that I am no good at this wheel taking. There is fear and guilt.
I can’t stand it when they are mad at me. I can’t sleep, and once I can’t sleep, I can’t do much of anything else.
Five sleepless nights ensue, along with fear and guilt and persistent shaking and shivering and trying many times to tie my shoes but being unable to hold the laces and having to ask Eric for help, and wanting to throw up but also being unable to because I haven’t actually eaten anything.
I run from every woman with short black hair and every man of stocky build. At every turn, I think it is them coming to question me.
Accidentally I flip to a movie, some thriller where a young girl is being stuffed into the back of a car by a couple in black masks.
Her parents, I suspect. Who else would do such a thing? And once I reach that conclusion, I scream and throw the remote across the room.
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It is a chicken-and-egg argument.
Did I go into science because I liked it? Or because I was, at the beginning, very good at it and then began to like it?
What Eric likes about chemistry is that the atom is the foundation for everything else. It is four years ago, at the scene of our first date, an International House of Pancakes, after lab, a late dinner or an early breakfast—it’s three a.m., we realize.
To understand life at the molecular level. To understand the universe at the molecular level, he says.
An atom is mostly made up of empty space.
If you remove the empty space from every atom, the entire world’s human population could fit inside a sugar cube.
·
Finally, I tell Eric that this is not sustainable, the persistent shaking, the remote throwing, the dog bringing the remote back each time and placing it squarely in my lap because he thinks I’m playing a game.
They will come around, Eric says.
How do you know?
Because they’re people too.
Somewhere, there is probably a Chinese proverb about this—parents are parents, and to people who are not their children, they are people.
If I am ever to sleep again, I must call them back and lie.
You just caught me on a bad day. I will finish the PhD soon and then get a job.
Good is all my mother says before hanging up.
The power they have over you, Eric says. I just don’t get it.
But you can’t even tell me the worst thing your parents have said.
And that’s a bad thing?
I often wonder what I would have been like if I had been raised like him—notes, stickers, complimentary questions asked at the table, by the hearth. I would probably socialize better in large groups and not stare so intently at shoes. I would hold my neck up high like a giraffe, the most confident of mammals.
···
A joke:
What do you do with a sick chemist? Helium.
Or curium.
Or barium.
···
Being in limbo doesn’t preclude us from sharing nice meals. In limbo, we still have to eat.
February: a cold and dreary month but also when many nicer places have prix fixe menus to bring in poorer customers such as us. We go to an upscale Italian restaurant in Back Bay where the scenery is quintessential Boston—a row of lampposts, a row of brownstones, a crystal chandelier in every window. Is it brownstone or is it brickstone? To me, the latter one has always made more sense. At the restaurant, I can decipher some of the menu through deductive reasoning. Antipasto is not-pasta, like antimatter is not-matter.
Eric wants to know, if not now, then when. If he has a time line, then he can better plan for next time. If in a few months, then he will keep the ring box in the drawer. If in a few years, then he will put the ring box into storage and ask again, when I am ready.
I sometimes think Eric was destined to go into science. Edison tried ten thousand lightbulb filaments before he found the right one. Between Leonardo and the Wright brothers, it took five hundred years for man to fulfill his dream of flight.
After mentioning that I don’t really know when, I list some girls with whom he might be happier. Mutual friends. These girls are fun and vivacious and have the same interests he does, in music specifically. They are fine with just listening to music as an activity. They like the Beatles and progressive metal and bands I don’t know. They could talk with him about polyrhythms. Polyrhythms are a thing, I think.
I look out the window at the falling snow.
I mention the happiest of our mutual friends, a girl who is prone to spontaneous acts like bounding through six feet of fresh snow to buy used books at the bookstore.
But I don’t want a girl who bounds through six feet of fresh snow, he says, while swirling red pasta onto his spoon. I want a girl who stays inside.
That night, I lie with one cheek on his bare chest. I listen to heart sounds, the ones of va
lves opening and closing as blood goes from atrium to ventricle, ventricle to arteries, and back around. The circulatory system is a closed system, which means nothing goes in and nothing comes out.
The first rule of chem lab is to never heat a closed system or it will explode.
···
The most emotionally charged experiences, particularly those linked to fear, activate parts of the brain responsible for long-term memory. This makes sense evolutionarily, since being able to recall fearful events is critical to not dying in the wild.
One example is childbirth. Mothers are often amazingly accurate in recounting the duration and intensity of pain but are less so with the specific details of the child.
It takes my mother ten hours and twenty-three minutes to give birth.
I am induced.
No pain meds.
What did I look like? I ask, age seven.
Like a baby.
Anything else?
Like a potato.
The reverse must also work, that of the child recalling memories of the mother.
This is also what the shrink has asked me to do.
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Once, she parks the car horizontally across the driveway such that for my father to leave, he has to drive across the lawn, through the rosebushes and then the mailbox. There is no mail that day.
Once, she cuts all the phone cords in the house. She is tired of calling places like Big Lots and Marshalls and asking if they can offer her a job. Over the phone, they can hear her accent and say that the job was recently filled. But after she cuts them, she regrets it. How can she call China now?
Once, she sits in bed for three days and three nights, drinking cooking wine, writing letters. I don’t know to whom. I think the letters say something important. But I can’t read them because they are written in Chinese.
In return, my father breaks every single plate in the house. Then he stands in the doorway of her bedroom yelling. Don’t just sit there and feel sorry for yourself, he says, Get up. She gets up, gets angry, pushes him out the doorway so that he stumbles and falls. How she manages to do that is a feat. She is a petite bird and my father, a bulwark.
What else? the shrink asks.
Maybe this: I felt invincible when smashing those beakers. But then I felt worse. It was unkind to make the beakers suffer on my behalf.
Attributing feelings to inanimate things is probably a symptom of only-child-ness. Who else to talk to when the parents fight except walls and banisters and things?
···
It is now another meal on another day. Deductive reasoning breaks down in restaurants where everything is written in French.
So I must ask, What is an aperitif? What is an amuse-bouche? What is a la carte de vins?
This restaurant is very elegant, the tables made of marble. I envision my mother picking up the napkin with two fingers and spreading it across her lap. The image of the uncouth Chinese she first encounters in America. She doesn’t understand why we are considered rude, considered dirty, until she walks into a Chinese buffet and walks out. In Shanghai, nothing is like this, she says. In Shanghai, the floors are clean. The waitstaff is nice. In Shanghai, you can get any kind of food you want. But what is sweet and sour pork? she asks, and is not pleased when she tastes it. In Shanghai, you can’t get that.
Wine, Eric says. Vin means wine.
A cart of wine, I think, and ask the waiter to please bring the whole cart over, along with a big straw.
What happens if Oberlin gives me an offer? Eric says.
Is that what you really want? I say.
It might be ninety-nine percent of what I really want. It is the best school for what I want to do.
Then, I guess, I would keep the dog.
Would you consider coming? he asks.
·
In the mind of a scientist, beauty is simplicity. The most elegant experiment is the one that takes no time to set up and gives the answer to every question.
Yes, I had considered it.
In an ideal world, I would go with him without qualms. Ohio, I would say, how different. Let’s have a new adventure there with the dog.
But once there, I would be plagued by other thoughts.
I am the girl who followed you and I know what happens to those girls. They are never happy and then they carry that unhappiness everywhere.
Eric has said this many times before. The comparison you are making is not the same. Ohio is still part of America. They still speak English there. You will have less trouble making friends. And who knows, you might even like it more than the city, what with all that space and fresh air.
After we’re home from the French restaurant, it is the start of another big fight.
Though big is also quiet, because when mad, Eric says nothing. He sits and stares off into space.
When really mad, he stands up and goes to another room.
I find that I am most like her in this way. I will follow him into that other room to say the same things I had said in the room before. Hello, are you listening? Hello, are you deaf? But that anti-temper of his is unassailable.
It’s late, he finally tells me. Let’s just try our best to go to sleep.
Then he turns the shower on for me. He hands me a freshly laundered towel. And I almost don’t want to take it. A moment ago I had said, Let’s just stop talking about it and break up. Yet the towel he gives me, he still drapes carefully around my neck.
···
Studies have shown that dogs do not adjust well to new homes and will inevitably try to find their way back to their old one, even if it means running head-on into oncoming traffic.
But what about their owners?
Do they run into traffic after them?
When I show these studies to Eric, he says, This tells me nothing.
It tells you something.
Here I go again, out into the wind and snow to walk the dog, who is so worked up to get to the park and pee on a snowman. Then we see the toddler who runs across the tundra to hug the yellow snowman and the mother who runs swiftly behind to stop her.
···
Tonight I can’t sleep. I think perhaps I would be more comfortable on the couch instead of the bed, but once on the couch, I realize the leather is very cold, the ceiling is very dark, and any second now, spiders could be crawling out from under the seat cushions and into my mouth.
On average, a person swallows eight spiders a year in her sleep.
Scientists have been trying to debunk that myth for years. They keep saying that we humans are too big, that to spiders we are just landscape and that our vibrations (breathing, snoring, beating of the heart) would send any spider crying for the hills before it got anywhere near the mouth.
But once I heard the number eight, I could never un-hear it.
Also, can spiders cry? I don’t know.
At dawn, Eric carries me back to bed and I ask him what he thinks. He is groggy but sharp. He reminds me that spiders have exoskeletons and the point of exoskeletons is to keep all the fluid in.
···
Come visit, come visit.
Okay.
By train I go, arrive, and wave to the best friend from a sea of other people. Here I am in bright yellow pants and a white sweater and a coat that is too thin. I have not visited her in a year. I have forgotten that all of Manhattan is a wind tunnel.
You look like a banana, she says when she sees me. It is a joke, but I am sensitive. Bananas are packed with nutrients, she says when I start to freak out.
The best friend is one of the lucky few. Her parents are similarly strict and push her into medicine. Begrudgingly she goes. In college, she studies biology and likes that lab mice do not talk back when she kills them. The idea of bedside manners. The idea of giving families bad news. But in medical school, she finds it not terrible. The other students are but not the patients; they are kind. The ones who are not kind, she doesn’t fault because they are in extreme pain. After her first twenty-eight-hour
shift in residency, she still has the energy to call me. She is hyped up on coffee. She keeps talking about pigeons. How do you know that you couldn’t have done something else? I ask. She says, Honestly, I can’t see myself doing anything else.
I have requested of the shrink: Find me the thing that I can make the greatest impact in and I will do that thing.
You and everybody else, she replied.
For a while, I have a running list of other viable occupations. Writer of tour group agendas. Taster of new and bizarre foods. Watcher of people from park benches.
We don’t even make it out of Penn Station before I say to the best friend, about science, I think there is still magic in it but I couldn’t find it.
Forget science. What about Eric? He might leave without you.
But what am I supposed to do?
Make him stay. Or go with him.
I can’t.
Which one?
Either.
The best friend now sees that I have packed nothing for this visit. No water or change of clothes. No bags. I have just brought myself and the banana suit.
Never mind, she says. What can I do to help?
We go café hopping. SoHo. The Village. Skim cappuccino, please. We go bathroom hopping soon after. I find it bizarre that she knows where all the good hotel bathrooms are in the city but is clueless when it comes to subway stops. It is better to walk anyway, she says. That spiel about clogged arteries. The bathrooms, though, are exceptionally nice. There is one with glittery blue tiles. Another with cloth napkins and a lady butler.
I never thought sitting on a toilet could be so relaxing. It is a high-tech toilet from Japan. I press the button with a beaming sun and get mood lighting. I press the button with a musical note and get Mozart.
At last the news she’s been waiting to tell me comes out.
Oh, baby, I say.
Due this summer. She rubs her belly, still flat, but growing a millimeter each day. Stretch marks terrify her, and then there’s the actual work of raising a child.
How hard can it be? she says.
Not hard, I say. Just don’t shake her too much, let her sleep, let her do what she wants, tell her the usual things like follow your dreams, and then remind her that sometimes these dreams must be let go to make way for more realistic ambitions like money to pay the bills.