by Weike Wang
And I happily bundle the baby up and take her to the swings.
But when we come back, the best friend is often standing over a pot of boiling water, with her face in the steam. She read somewhere that steam extracts toxins and impure thoughts, like letting your baby cry herself to sleep or putting your baby into a box. She corrects herself: not a box, but something that will meet all of her needs up until she is eighteen and ready to go to college.
She says to be a good mother and wife is to be a perpetual motion machine.
The husband she last saw two days ago. A business trip, she thinks. Chicago? He had told her exactly where at some point but now she forgets. They are constantly missing each other’s calls.
She says the steam is what’s making her face red and puffy. Ignore the obvious other factor.
She says it is a phase that will eventually pass.
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A list of famous chemists:
Alfred Nobel
Fritz Haber
Victor Grignard
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The man who founds the Nobel Prizes is also the same man who invents dynamite, is called the Merchant of Death. Seeking to leave a different legacy, he gives his fortune to start the prizes, including the peace prize. This strategy works, it seems. I tell students about the dynamite and they are surprised.
Fritz invents a revolutionary process—a way to make ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen. It is easy, scalable. Ammonia goes into fertilizer and the process is said to make bread available from air. But Fritz is also a complex person. Being hailed the father of modern agriculture is not enough. He goes on to pioneer chemical warfare, things like chlorine gas.
When I first see a picture of Victor, a French mathematician turned organic chemist, it is his mustache that I will remember—a massive handlebar that grows down from the nose over the mouth and outward, beyond both cheeks. He has a reaction named after him that every orgo student must know. During World War I, while Fritz, a German, is inventing chlorine gas, Victor works for the French to create phosgene, another gas but far deadlier and that smells of freshly cut grass.
Victor wins the 1912 Nobel for chemistry. Fritz, the 1918.
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Recall that in science, perfect reproducibility is the highest form of praise.
When writing Chinese, the sequence of strokes is incredibly important. My mother tries to teach me—Draw the line first and then the dots, not the other way around—but quickly throws her hands up in frustration. Yet this systematic approach produces consistently beautiful handwriting. My mother’s. My father’s. I go back to China and realize that everyone writes this way.
How is it that I can always tell a Chinese person’s handwriting by the way that they write their 5s? An elegant S with a long nose.
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For many years, my parents send me to weekly Chinese school where I am to learn how to read and write. I pay very little attention. I talk all through class.
What do I need Chinese for?
An ancient language. A difficult one.
Yet that was my chance to learn more than I know and I wasted it.
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If she lives here, she is expected to speak the language, Eric says.
Immediately, he apologizes. Immediately, I put the stapler down. But I can’t forgive him. That thing you said, I have heard from other people as well. So I don’t need to hear it from you.
Who am I really trying to forgive? That thing he says I have also thought as well. I have probably even said it. Her poor English is not for a lack of trying. She goes to ESL. She goes to reading groups. She is frustrated—a former pharmacist with a great memory but that memory is no longer there. Yet how this must have felt: in high school, I walk ten feet in front of her whenever we are out in public. She asks for help and I pretend not to hear her. Then when she tells the neighbor there are three panthers in the house, I am mortified. I correct her. Only later do I see humor in it.
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Ching chang chong, sing me a song. Boys on the playground, taunting me. I skip Chinese school that week.
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Ching chang chong, all night long. Boys in the classroom, taunting me. I skip Chinese school that month.
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Who did you play with when you were little?
Do you have cousins your own age?
I don’t feel like answering those questions, so the shrink asks an easier one: What did you do today?
I watched the dog chase himself around a tree. He thought his tail belonged to another dog. This is an improvement, no? It’s like the more evolved form of tail chasing.
The shrink says she doesn’t know.
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Outside, it is freezing. It is a pain to breathe. The weather people predict that this winter will be the coldest one yet and that snow will not just precipitate but may also bury us alive.
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In addition to watching the dog, I am cutting up the eggplants to make a stew. I don’t know how to make stew but I am trying. I see enough people do it on that cooking show.
If my mother were here, she would say, Put eggplant in stew, because in Chinese there are no articles.
In spoken Chinese, everything is gender neutral. There is no she or he. The more I think about this now, the more I like this about the language. Man or woman? Does it matter? A person.
Mao once said that women hold up half the sky.
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I do have a cousin my own age. She grows up in China. When I visit at the end of high school, she has grown into a cool person.
The word for cool in Chinese she has to teach me.
You talk like your parents, she says. It is old-fashioned. She says this smugly, of course. She has to. That is the only way I will remember it for years to come and still feel the burning shame.
I am closest to my grandfather on my mother’s side, though I have not seen him since I left. The last time we speak is when I am twelve and he is dying. I say that I will visit him tomorrow, don’t worry, I will be there.
But before I see him again—that is, wait for the visa to come through and fly back to China—he dies.
In the same month, my other grandfather dies.
I used to tell Eric, You take for granted this distance, how close everyone is, a few hours’ drive, from one relative to another and no need for a visa.
Which is how families are until one person decides to emigrate.
I’m sure my parents realized this possibility when they left, that returning would be hard.
By the time we make it to China, the funerals have already happened. My mother, grief-stricken, says that she will not be coming back with us. She will be staying in China with her mother.
There is much fighting over this, behind closed doors. That glow you see around a closed door is the property of diffraction. It is light trying to escape the room and move around an obstacle, in this case the door, my parents. I am scared sitting at the edge of my bed.
This is not just about you or me, he says, and stops there.
I have only one parent now, she says. She cries. She says something in Shanghainese. Maybe something like It has never been about me. Aren’t you tired of this? Because I am. This I gather from her tone, the hiccupped way that she speaks when she cries. She must be tired. When the door finally opens, I watch her slump to the floor in a few steps.
Just recalling the way she collapsed, shoulders then knees, fills me with enormous guilt. On the plane back, I almost tell her, when we land, If you want to take the plane back, I wouldn’t mind.
Why do you defend her? the shrink asks. She doesn’t deserve this kind of loyalty.
Because mothers have parents too? Because they have lives beyond their own children?
Because I still want her to be happy.
Many times, she lifted up my chin and said, You must be better than the man you marry. You must succeed beyond him.
I cannot fail her too.
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An equation.
>
happiness = reality – expectations
If reality > expectations, then you are happy.
If reality < expectations, then you are not.
Hence the lower your expectations, the happier you will be.
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Once the psychologists behind the equation reached that conclusion, they stopped and put forth a caveat: No one should lead a life of low expectations. Emotions such as disappointment are also important to experience.
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Little is known about the effects of long-term space travel. Though the primary concern is extreme loneliness.
I am an only child, I tell Eric.
It is an early date. We are at the International House of Pancakes again. I am eating a pancake called Funny Face and he is eating toast.
Something else in common, he says. He is an only child too.
But I am the only child of immigrants, and he looks at me, confused.
What difference does that make?
It’s like deep space traveling.
To think, I once thought doing a chemistry PhD on top of that was a good idea.
What some people say about difficult experiences: If I could go back and do it again, I would.
No, I don’t think so.
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One newspaper article claims that elite American schools are good at producing only excellent sheep, the kind that can jump through hoop after hoop and not ask why.
The same goes for Asians, another article says. Give them a task and they will achieve it with high success. They will do everything you say, but ask them to think on their own and they cannot. They will also never ask why.
The best friend and the shrink say I should care less about what others think of me, so I have stopped reading those articles.
But still there are the remarks from people I have told about quitting the PhD but not telling my parents:
For once, stand up to them.
You just don’t know how to stand up to them.
You cannot live your life for them. Eventually they will die, and then what?
At least the best friend and the shrink say none of that. One says, It’s hard, I know, tell them whenever you’re ready. The other hands me a box of tissues.
I am an excellent sheep.
But what I would give to be a spider right now. Where is an exoskeleton when you need it?
The movie Stepmom makes me cry as well. That movie is always playing on cable, and when I see that it’s on, I must watch it to the end. The conversation between the two moms about the daughter in the penultimate scene makes me cry the most. One mom is dying of cancer and the other is the stepmom whom no one likes. The daughter is twelve and the mom dying of cancer is worried that on her daughter’s wedding day, the daughter will forget her. The stepmom is worried too. She is worried that on this wedding day, the daughter will wish that she had her real mom by her side instead of her stepmom.
My mother has watched this movie many times. She watches it alone in her bedroom, the door slightly ajar. Does she cry during the penultimate scene? She would say no, never, yet she comes out of the bedroom with a tissue over her nose and declares it allergy season again.
What do you like about the movie? the shrink asks.
Not what. I like it because she does.
Advice from the mother: Hold yourself upright when you cry. If you cry lying down, tears will get into your ears and cause an infection.
When I shared this with Eric, he asked how on earth I still believed in that stuff.
That stuff, I said angrily, wanting to shake my fists in his face. Then did so.
Why does she deserve this kind of loyalty? She doesn’t. But she does because she is my mother.
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I discover that winter is here when I go outside with damp hair from a shower and in ten seconds my hair is frozen. There are viral videos of Boston kids doing something similar to test the cold. Except they soak a pair of jeans and then leave the jeans outside and then wait ten seconds for the jeans to freeze and stand up on their own.
Finally, the best friend hires a nanny because this is impossible, the long hours at the hospital and then the long hours at home. She thinks the nanny will give her peace of mind. But then at work, she is constantly wondering if the nanny is doing her job or just watching movies on their TV.
The nanny is young, and for a second, she worries about having one of those fiascoes on her hands. But the husband is so busy these days that he doesn’t even notice the new person in the room until, hours later, he looks up from his laptop, is startled, thinks there’s a stranger in the house.
While it is winter in Boston, it is summer in Antarctica. At the start of every session, the math student likes to give me the weather report from there.
It is summer but still unbelievably cold.
Negative 10 with wind gusts of up to sixty-five miles an hour.
Or negative 5 with the humidity of a desert.
Antarctica, I learn, is the driest place in the world despite being made up of ice. No, that is not true, he says, one percent of Antarctica is ice-free.
He shows me a picture of the girl and all I see is a red parka with fur lining and goggles.
She has a lovely mouth, I say. Surprisingly un-chapped, given the circumstances.
The picture he keeps in his wallet. It is an old picture, he says. She has since cut her hair a dozen or so times.
What does her hair look like now? I ask.
He has to take a minute to recall. Short, he thinks. And wavy?
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A hallmark of science is setting out to discover one thing and then discovering something else. The Chinese discovered gunpowder when they were trying to find the elixir of life. The four great Chinese inventions are gunpowder, paper, printing, and the compass.
But China is much more than that, I told Eric. It is both very old and very new. You will see what I mean when you visit.
And when would I do that? he replied. This was after the first time he had asked.
I don’t know, I said, playing dumb. After you marry someone Chinese, I suppose.
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On the coldest day of the year, I bike to the library cursing. I miss him most but sometimes I also miss the car, his attention, me climbing into the front seat with the heaters already blasting. At the library, I meet with student after student. It is tiring, the constant talking, writing, lifting of one’s eyebrows to not look angry.
Are you doing a good job? asks the shrink, and I say I don’t know. Also, how can you possibly know anything?
The shrink smiles. She thinks it’s kind of funny when I try to out-shrink her.
I must not be doing a bad job because the woman who hired me wants to give me a raise. That’s too much, I say. Who would pay that much?
Lots of people, it seems.
Is it four pizzas or five? I calculate and it’s actually twenty-one pizzas an hour. The best friend calls me a rich lady.
A word problem about fruit: You have two apples and two bananas, but how many pineapples do you have?
I read the problem again. A trick of the mind that now keeps happening when I tutor the math student. He brings me a worksheet and I misread every problem.
Is this greater than or equal to pineapples?
Assume a six-sided pineapple, now pineapple, pineapple, pineapple.
Eventually, I tell the math student to look that way, at the girls dropping books and coffee, instead of at me, so that I can stop seeing pineapples.
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Another task the shrink has given me: Do not forget the father. Recall him as well.
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Here is what he said:
The sky is not blue or gray or white. It is the color of one septillion snowflakes falling to the ground. Septillion is one followed by twenty-four zeros, which is more zeros than you can write in one sitting because you are an impatient child. Now sit down, be quiet, and let me show you how to do math.
Mul
tiply, divide, add, and then subtract, in that order because that is the order of operations and the way anything gets done. Here is an imaginary answer that does not exist until I write down the letter i and then it does, right there on the page. Here is a square root, a rational root, a reciprocal, a conjugate, a complex conjugate that is a pain to solve but you must do it anyway if you are to learn anything.
Play with your dolls for no more than half an hour, no more than fifteen minutes, no more than a second, a millisecond. If you learned math as fast as you ran outside to play, then you might be a genius. But you do not and you are not. You’re a hole where knowledge goes to sleep.
Sit here and let me show you how to do physics. Without physics, you will be ignorant of the world. You will be empty, hollow, unable to articulate why, for instance, a rocket flies through the void your teachers call outer space. And why does a rocket fly in space?
I didn’t know. I didn’t even guess. How stupid of me. And he said that too, How stupid of you.
Wire your dollhouse and then you will understand electricity. Wire this bathroom light and then you will really understand electricity. Put the galvanometer here and here and don’t shock yourself. See what happens when you don’t listen to me? You’ve shocked yourself. Now stand up and try it again.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Listen for the Doppler effect or you will never understand sound, and if you never understand sound, then you will never understand melody or harmony or the reason a violin is shaped the way that it is.
If possible, come here and let me show you how real projectiles fly. Here is a stone that you must skip eleven times, no more, no less; you have to get your launch angle just right.
I threw the stone down. It skipped zero times. And he said, You are definitely no child of mine.
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Do your taxes early. Pay your bills on time. Don’t cheap out on your insurance. Open a 401(k). Open a high-interest savings account or don’t and be poor for the rest of your life. Do you want to be poor?
No.
Then think hard about the children that you currently do not have because if they’re anything like you, they’ll want things that you do not have.
He said, On this birthday, you are now four thousand fifteen days old, and if you can tell me what the log of that is, then you can have some balloons. And if you can’t figure out what I mean, then no balloons.