by Weike Wang
I am letting her get away with so much, the best friend says. I am letting her pull my hair out of their roots. I am giving her the last bite of pie. What if she grows up too strong-willed?
I think a little strong-willed is okay.
The best friend has gone back and reanalyzed his proposal. Maybe the problem started there. It was very plain, she says, like an agreement between two people. We sat down and talked about it. Then we went out and got the ring.
But isn’t that what you wanted? I ask.
She says yes, then no.
·
Maybe it was me, she says, during one of our movie-watching marathons.
It wasn’t.
Maybe it was.
But you didn’t do anything.
That’s my point.
She cites the studies. A large number of new mothers get enough emotional fulfillment from holding their baby that physical contact with the significant other becomes less necessary.
Things like kissing, hugging.
Sex.
But he cheated on you.
And the best friend has a far-off gaze. Then she says, At full term, my belly button protruded. He would press it often and say, Eject. Afterward, I didn’t let him touch it.
That’s different.
It’s the same. Every time he came close, I moved.
···
When you push against a wall, the wall pushes back on you. This is the most common way I’ve heard Newton’s third law be described.
But I say to my students, Forget walls, think rockets. Newton’s third law is why rockets fly in space. When a rocket shoots out a plume of fuel, the plume pushes back and the rocket goes forth.
In 1999, NASA lost a $125 million Mars lander. Instead of meters, they calculated the distance in feet, but the lander still interpreted this number in meters. Three feet make up a meter, so you can imagine, instead of landing on Mars softly, the lander crashed into the planet like a missile, thinking the distance was three times as far as it should have been.
Eric told me this story and now I use it to drive home the importance of units. He said it was his favorite space mission disaster to tell because at least no one died.
But someone might have gotten very, very fired.
See how important units are, I say to students. You do not want Martians to think you’re an idiot.
I can’t believe I used to do this: get mad at him for being a good person.
A lost package addressed to a house five blocks from us and he walks the five blocks to deliver it. A mistake on our grocery receipt—we got too much change back—and he runs back to the store to return it.
But we could have used that for laundry, I said, and he said, It would not have been right.
At the same time, at any hot food bar, I will take a piece of chicken tender and stick it in my mouth.
I used to call his being a better person than me condescension. You look down at me from that thing—what is that thing called? what did I call it then?—your moral fucking pedestal.
And he said, You know how every cloud has a silver lining? You are the cloud with the dark lining.
I am not a cloud, I shouted. I don’t want to be a cloud.
·
One of my students has asked if clouds are made up of hydrogen, as hydrogen is the lightest element known to man.
Good reasoning, I replied. But if clouds were made of hydrogen, they would explode. See the Hindenburg incident. Hence why blimps are now filled with helium, the second-lightest element known to man, and so are balloons.
This student has since graduated from college and no longer needs my help, but we still keep in touch.
Whenever I think of clouds, she says, or balloons, I think of you.
To my surprise, most of my students keep in touch. I find in my inbox the occasional greeting. Hi, teacher, some of them still say. I am well. I am doing this now. I am reminded of you by many things.
Clouds
Balloons
A running faucet
A satellite
Mirrors
Baseballs
Bubbles
A sunset
A closed door
A full moon
Rocket ships
Chocolate
Glow-in-the-dark anything
A green laser
A green leaf
Teeth
White light
An oil slick
A spoon
Put that way, I don’t mind being a cloud.
···
Eric spends one Christmas with my family. My mother cooks plate after plate of food. If they cannot understand each other, at least she will make sure that he is fed. At breakfast, she brings him a piece of toast. A minute later, a plate of bacon, a bowl of cereal, apple slices, scrambled eggs, string cheese. She has seen the commercials. What this means? Part of a balanced breakfast. She assumes a balanced American breakfast must then be very large.
He eats everything he can. Between meals all he can do sometimes is digest.
I forget this but remember it now: after I put the stapler down, I hear him go into the kitchen and say to her, The sun is here; the moon is there; look, a door! and then I hear her laugh in a giddy way.
Other things that make her laugh. Jokes. Especially terrible ones. How do you get an elephant into an elevator? You pick him up and put him in there. How do you get an elephant out of an elevator? You don’t. You take the stairs.
During one of her good moods, she buys me a refrigerator magnet from a convenience store. The magnet says BEST DAUGHTER, she tells me, and I nod. I can’t bring myself to tell her that it says BEST DOGSITTER.
At first glance the two words are very close. At second, practically indistinguishable.
Two Shanghainese words: Ma zi. Ah zi. One means sock and the other means shoe. I could never get them straight and my mother found this funny.
·
Forget dogsitter. Dog mom. To a woman at the dog park I say that I have cured my dog of vacuum cleaner phobia.
How? the woman asks.
By not vacuuming. By instead waiting for dust to accumulate in all corners of the room and then using the silent dustpan. I say a too-clean house gives me the heebie-jeebies. If you saw my parents’ house, you would understand. It looks unlived in and beige.
To the dog, I say, If I am dog mom, then you are dog son. If you were a Japanese dog, I would say dog-san.
·
I have brief windows of clarity when I see that happiness is not just achievement but made up of many other things.
Like:
Finding keys, wallet, gloves (both of them) in a decent amount of time.
Finding leash—where is leash, where is poop bag, where is dog son?—in a decent amount of time.
Meeting another dog-human pair while waist deep in snow.
Watching dogs bound through snow.
Freezing our faces but not willing to stop dogs from bounding through snow.
·
Signs. I used to not believe in signs. But now I am all about them. At coffee shops when asked for a name to write on the cup, I accidentally give them his.
You’re Eric? says one dubious barista, and I say, Yes, I mean no, then I give her the math student’s name, then I give her the name Joy.
···
It comes as a small shock when she tells me. You’re what?
Going into counseling.
What happened to take nothing and vanish?
But when she’s older, she will have questions. People don’t just vanish.
Amelia Earhart.
It’s just once a week, she says. He still lives elsewhere. Nothing is decided yet.
·
Gut courage that transcended the sanity of reasoning. This is what another pilot said of Amelia Earhart.
When the best friend walks into counseling and sees the husband, she sees the carpets, the drapes, the sofa, everything in the room catch on fire at once and there is much yell
ing.
To him, she keeps saying the words How could you? It has become a nervous tic.
She calls me. I call her. Both of us stand in front of mirrors late at night brushing our hair with our phones held between cheek and shoulder. When we are temporarily not talking about how badly her sessions go, she asks about Eric—had I heard from him again?
No.
Had I written him back?
No.
Had I tried anything?
No. And don’t look at me like that.
I can’t see her but I know that she is looking at me like that. I feel faint all of a sudden. Probably because I have forgotten how to breathe. How do you do it again?
You know, she adds quietly, he was also completely devoted to you. That should count for something.
The way she said that just now makes me think that she has been keeping it from me for a while.
···
In Chinese, there is another phrase about love. It is not used for passionate love but the love between family members. In translation, it means I hurt for you.
My mother says this while standing in the doorway of my bedroom because I have just asked why she couldn’t be more like the mothers of my American friends, why she couldn’t be affectionate like them. She then holds a hand to her heart and says that the Chinese keep their feelings in here and not—she points to air—out in the open. Now, I think, if she knew the right idiom, she would have pointed to her sleeve.
I remember how my father learns English. We have just left China. We are living in that studio. When he comes back from work, he sits down on the floor because there is no desk. He reads from the dictionary. He learns ten new words a day.
In high school, I find his PhD thesis on the shelf. I don’t make it past the first page. The first page is a dedication. For my wife and daughter, it starts and then continues on in perfect English.
I have probably read that page a thousand times. I have run my fingers across it.
A story my mother tells me when I am in college:
Your father, as a boy, carried his youngest sister on his back to see the doctor. The doctor was many miles away. The sister was dying of consumption. He ran on dirt roads, as fast as he could. But before they could get to the doctor, the sister died. Still he carried her to the doctor’s.
When I hear this story, I am stunned. But why had he never mentioned the sister before? Why am I learning about her just now? If I knew about her earlier, maybe I would have understood him more. The need to succeed, to be fearless. But it is the Chinese way to not explain any of that, to keep your deepest feelings inside and then build a wall that can be seen from the moon.
Fast-forward a few years. I have just moved in with Eric. I have just gotten the dog. I want to tell everyone about the dog. But I am nervous to take him back to Michigan because I think my father will be annoyed. He has never shown an interest in animals before. Also, what a dog would do to their beige house.
When he first meets the dog, I cannot read his face. It is a blank face. But everywhere he goes, the dog follows.
He allows him on the hardwood but not on the carpet. He allows him on the carpet but not on the couch. When the dog cries at night from fear of being alone, he sleeps next to him on the floor.
···
A store that sells things I want but don’t need lures me in. It has small gifts and charms. It has an aluminum paperweight in the shape of a heart. I pick it up. I put it down. I imagine my life with it. I leave the store. The same sequence every time.
Aluminum used to be more expensive than gold. Napoleon had an aluminum cutlery set that he used only for visiting royalty. The gold set he used every day.
Finally, I just buy it and take to walking around the apartment with it in my pocket.
What’s this? the best friend asks when she gets an identical one in the mail.
A heart.
I know that, but what am I supposed to do with it?
Whatever you want.
She actually uses it as a paperweight, but then the baby finds it and gums all over it.
·
For the most part, she is a straight-faced baby. Until anyone starts ripping paper in front of her and then she can’t help herself. It is all too funny.
Provide a stream of commentary for your baby, says all the how-to books. So I give it a try when they visit.
Here’s a clean diaper so you will feel nice and dry. Here is another clean diaper because you pooped yourself as I was putting on your first one. Now I am buttoning your shirt—one, two, three buttons—and pulling up your fuzzy white pants. Shall we read a book next? If so, which one? How about the one with all the bears? You shaking your head like that tells me you are not liking any of these bears.
Shall we eat? Is that a yes?
How about I just start ripping paper like this so you can laugh.
You laughed too hard.
Here is another clean diaper.
A cheeky how-to book says for the first few months you are just trying to keep the baby alive. Then for the next several years, you are just trying to keep the baby from harming itself.
So the best friend has also become her savior—Don’t touch that. Don’t eat that. Don’t put your whole fist in your mouth and try to swallow.
There are not many pictures of my mother and me when I was this age. We did not have a camera then.
But here is one.
She is holding me up on the coffee table to dance. We are both wearing ten layers of clothes. This must have been winter in China, when we also didn’t have any indoor heat. We are smiling though.
Say cheese, I am later taught to do. School photos. Class photos. Photos with new friends. In China, we say the word for eggplant. It lifts the corners of the mouth in the same way.
···
The shrink unearths a true statement: Without your parents, you lose contact with everyone else in your family.
She means the ones who are still in China, which is everyone except for us.
I reply, I would try to keep in touch if I could. I would write or visit. I would definitely call.
But then on the way home, I realize that I have no phone numbers or addresses. And even if I did, what would I say to these people who are my family but whom I have met only a handful of times. If I went by myself I would not know what to say. I could follow the conversation, but I could not retort or banter. It is true what Eric said about the humor being lost.
Before I leave for college, my parents buy a house. Every penny saved has bought them a two-story with a yard, a brick facade, in a nice neighborhood.
Jia is the Chinese word for home.
So wrapped up am I in the notion of being gone that I don’t notice what they are trying to do.
My mother says: It is important to your father that you have a jia.
My father says: It is important to your mother that you have a jia.
But the house still needs renovations.
To cut costs, he does all the renovations himself. He rewires everything. He puts in a new heater, new floors, crown molding, light fixtures that my mother picks out. He builds an entirely new deck. She wallpapers each room, lining up the end of one scroll with the beginning of another. They work late into the night. She hands him tools and helps him lift the ladder. She puts down the tarp on which the ladder will go.
·
There is a funny online video I am now remembering. In China, a team of reporters had asked college students to call their parents and tell them I love you. For all, it was the first time they had done so. The responses:
Uh-huh.
Are you pregnant?
Are you drunk?
I am stepping into a meeting now.
But then one student says I love you again.
Why are you telling me this? asks the mother.
Because I love you.
And the mother, rather stoically, says, This is the happiest day of my life.
·
These w
ords come back to me:
You cannot live your life for them. Eventually they will die.
I hope they never die because once they do, I will be alone.
···
In April, the snow finally starts to melt.
The Chinese word for chemistry is hua xue. The first character means to change, transform, melt. The second character means to learn. Said with a different inflection, xue could mean snow, hua could mean speech and chemistry becomes the melting of snow, becomes the learning of speech.
All of May it rains. When I have to go out for food or the mail, I look angrily up at the sky.
It rains when it is sunny. Is that even a thing?
Apparently, they are called sun-showers.
When it finally stops raining, we are able to go out.
But the dog is Velcro. Every pollen or stem or leaf that falls from flowering trees sticks to him. So I spend, I think, an hour each day pulling plant life off him.
You silly thing, I say. So attractive.
·
He might actually be a very smart dog. What else would explain this: my peeling a banana and him smelling it from two rooms away, then appearing at my feet and looking at me, inching closer and closer, until I have handed over the fruit.
···
The best friend calls to tell me something. She is back in the bathtub.
Again?
Just for a minute, she says. Though it has become one of the only places where she can think. It is the first hot day in New York. It is the first hot day in Boston. Everyone in these cities is outside except for us.
The something she calls to tell me: We’re old, she says. Also, she is now the same age she first remembers her mother being.
Isn’t that strange?
It then strikes me that I am now the age when my father began sending those letters. I am now the age when my mother decided to go with him.
What courage.
If I had to leave America now, I would be terrified. There is the fear that I will not like this new place and vice versa. There is also the fear that I will never truly fit in and be forever getting in and out of cabs.
I call her immediately.
Mom, are you there?
Where else would I be? she says.
I say nothing about the courage. I say I was just checking my phone’s signal.
The longest phone call we have is during the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Summer Olympics. The sheer number of people on that stage, the very long history of that country. My country? More so her country. It is four hours of colorful costumes and drums and calligraphy. I am watching it from lab and she is watching it from home. But during the call, we say very little to each other. What is there to say? I am thinking the whole time that this is incredible, how did the Chinese pull this off, how is anyone going to top this? I am immensely proud.