by Ling Ma
The congregation stood up and applauded.
Following the service, Zhigang and Ruifang followed the other congregation members downstairs to the musty, wood-paneled basement, where lunch was served. It was Chinese food, thankfully. They said a group grace and mingled with other church members. The congregation of CCCC consisted mostly of immigrants from southern China. They were doctors, real estate agents, restaurant owners. One member owned all the Taco Bell franchises in the greater Salt Lake area.
Zhigang and Ruifang returned the following week, and the week after that.
Among the other wives, Ruifang flourished. She joined the ladies’ committee and helped plan out every Sunday lunch. They organized Bible study groups on Friday nights. Whenever a Chinese holiday approached, the committee prepared big, extravagant celebrations, using the church space to worship and to celebrate at the same time. To teach their children how to read and write Mandarin, they created an after-church Chinese language program, taking up a Sunday collection to buy pinyin guidebooks and teaching materials. When her daughter arrived, Ruifang thought, she could join this school too. And then she wouldn’t lose the language.
There is mystery to how faith takes root and flourishes, how need transforms into belief. Suffice to say, Zhigang and Ruifang came to know the customs and traditions of Protestant Christianity. They learned biblical stories and verses. They learned the hymns by heart. But the thing that Ruifang found most comforting about this religion was prayer. She prayed, at first imitating others during group prayers, and then eventually on her own, alone in the basement apartment. It was during the afternoons, her vision blurry and fingers stiff and fatigued from hooking wigs, that she sat down at the kitchen table and clasped her hands. It would become an important ritual, the one routine that granted her a sense of control. She practically invented her own life in America by praying, she liked to say.
Her prayers began as requests, sometimes bargains. She prayed to be swiftly reunited with her daughter. She prayed that the phone bill, during one particularly rough month when she kept calling her sisters and her mother, wouldn’t be too high. She prayed that her husband might find gainful employment after graduating. She prayed for a grocery store that stocked Chinese items, like rice cooking wine and dried mini shrimp for seasoning. Lastly, she prayed that God would deem fit for her and her entire family to move back to Fuzhou. It was the one request that she always made, without fail, in her looping, repetitive afternoon prayers—no matter how improved her circumstances.
They say that if God hates your guts, he grants you your deepest wish. But God in this case, as in most cases, was by and large impartial. In the course of her life, Ruifang’s wish of returning permanently to Fuzhou was never granted. God did, however, grant her several opportunities to visit. No matter the frequency of her trips, she never regained the same power or inspired the same awe among her sisters, who had long ago ascended to business jobs in the booming Chinese economy, a country that was said, in the 1990s and 2000s, to be progressing at one hundred times the scale and ten times the speed of the Industrial Revolution. The middle sister became a bank manager, the younger sister was a sales executive at a phone company.
In lieu of a permanent return to Fuzhou, God granted Ruifang’s other wishes.
He granted her husband, a few months after graduation, a plum risk analysis position in the federal home loans division of the greater Salt Lake area. He granted her daughter’s safe arrival to the States, and her quick, almost effortless assimilation to this new country, new language. He granted them a champagne-colored Toyota Lexus, which replaced the rusted Hyundai Excel. He granted the family a lovely blue split-level house, financed on a fifteen-year mortgage, with a backyard large enough to accommodate a koi pond and several fruit-bearing trees.
It was this house in which Ruifang hosted numerous CCCC Bible study groups and dinner parties, in which she entertained her sisters and other Chinese relatives when they visited, in which she prayed at the dining table every day, in which she heard the news of her husband’s fatal hit-and-run, in which her health quickly declined after his death.
It was this house in which I took care of my mother in her last months. When she told stories, I tried to record them, though it was not always me to whom she thought she was speaking. I sat next to her bed, listening and, more often than not, deciphering, as her wandering, tangled narratives flowed in a garble of different languages: Mandarin, Fujianese, Chinglish.
We moved her bed down to the dining room on the first floor. She liked the morning light there; the trees in the backyard provided seclusion. Her face, slabbed on a down pillow, looked big and plumped from constant, coerced rest. From this face, the spurting of stories continued with unstanched flow, as if from a main artery, whether I was there or not, whether she had visitors or not. I was afraid of what would happen should the stories begin to ebb. I braced myself, then eventually lost myself in her telling.
And her remembering elicited my remembering.
I remembered the earliest days I spent with my mother, when I was two, three, and four, which were the years right before she left with my father to move to the U.S. They say you’re not able to remember that far back, that memories don’t form when you’re that young. But I did remember. We lived in Fuzhou. Every morning when I woke up, she explained the day’s itinerary, often the same as the previous day’s. First, we would have breakfast. Next, we would go to the markets. She spoke to me in a way that assumed my intelligence, even though I didn’t have the vocabulary to respond. We ate a breakfast of congee with pickled mustard, and fried dough sticks on the side. I had to drink a cup of warm milk. We rode to the street markets and bought cockleshells and long beans and bok choy. The streets were dense with bicycles; I rode on the handlebars of hers. In the crowd, two men carried the opposite ends of a large stick, from which hung an enormous dead pig by its bound feet.
We lived in an apartment complex that housed other university students and their families. In the evenings, in the courtyard, they played badminton and volleyball. They drank beer and shelled peanuts. She allowed me to do things for myself, and only helped me when I asked. Some nights I could climb into the tall bed beside her, and some nights I could not. She’d lift me up just high enough for me to scramble up to the top. If she said to go to sleep, then I would lie quietly until I went under.
I was calm and obedient in my earliest years; even my mother attested to this. I could sit by myself with a book for an hour, going through the pages over and over. I seemed to lack all neurosis or anxiety. I didn’t even cry very often. She thought that maybe that serenity was inherited from my father, but it was actually, I wanted to say, a quality owed entirely to her. It had to do with the way she managed our days, so steady and constant and regulated. I have looked for that constancy everywhere.
Then she was gone, moved to America, and I was transported to live in another part of Fuzhou, with my grandmother and grandfather, who, despite their best intentions, alternately coddled and neglected me. We lived on the middle floor of a three-story concrete apartment building that, like most homes, had no plumbing. I was fed and cleaned and allowed to watch soap operas; for the rest of the time, I was left to my own devices. The days were devoid of order or meaning. I played ninja with a plastic sword on the concrete balcony, often the only place where I was allowed outside. The willow trees draped their branches over me, my mother combing my hair with her fingers.
Once, when I was five, I managed to wander outside on my own. I attempted to befriend a young pretty neighbor, the wife of a train conductor, who smoked her daily cigarette next to the trash bins. She seemed friendly and solicitous until she grabbed my wrist and gashed a scratch down the length of my forearm with her long, dirty nails. It broke skin, a hint of red. Hearing my cries, neighbors came out on their stoops and balconies, and subsequently, the whole neighborhood erupted, indignant, against her, an explosion of insults and accusations that turned personal. How she drank too much, how her hus
band had a gambling addiction, how she spent so much money on clothes and makeup, but so little on making her home. It was like a public stoning.
It’s fine, it’s fine! my grandmother insisted, trying to quell the scene. But their yelling only ceased when the woman’s husband came home and dragged her back inside.
The world beyond the balcony was hysterical, uncontrollable. My grandparents, in response, further submerged me inside their apartment. My grandmother invented ripped-from-the-headlines cautionary tales of kidnappings of children and told them as bedtime stories. The plot template: A child wanders off from his or her grandparents, gets taken by strangers, and never comes back. The moral: Don’t stray from your family. Don’t talk to strangers. Stay inside. Be good.
The tantrums began during this period. In the middle of the night, I would wake up gasping, as if struck in my sleep by some unknown force, and kick my legs and shriek. This would last anywhere from a few minutes to a full hour. These tantrums happened once a week or so; my grandparents would hold my legs down, cajoling me, bribing me. Even as they happened, I wished they would stop, but I couldn’t stop; the anger was overwhelming. As I grew older, they occurred with decreasing frequency but didn’t stop altogether, embarrassingly, until my late teens.
When I moved to the U.S. at six, I was unrecognizable to my mother. I was angry, chronically dissatisfied, bratty. On my second day in America, she ran out of the room in tears after I angrily demanded that she buy me a pack of colored pencils. You’re not you! she sputtered between sobs, which brought me to a standstill. She couldn’t recognize me. That’s what she told me later, that this was not the daughter she had last seen. Being too young, I didn’t know enough to ask: But what did you expect? Who am I supposed to be to you?
But if I was unrecognizable to her, she was also unrecognizable to me. In this new country, she was disciplinarian, restrictive, prone to angry outbursts, easily frustrated, so fascist with arbitrary rules that struck me, even as a six-year-old, as unreasonable. For most of my childhood and adolescence, my mother was my antagonist.
Whenever she’d get mad, she’d take her index finger out and poke me in the forehead. You you you you you, she’d say, as if accusing me of being me. She was quick to blame me for the slightest infractions, a spilled glass, a way of sitting while eating, my future ambitions (farmer or teacher), the way I dressed, what I ate, even the way I practiced English words in the car (Thank you! I yelled. Scissors! I screamed). She was the one to deny me: the extra dollar added to my allowance; an extra hour to my curfew; the money to buy my friends’ birthday presents, so that I was forced to gift them, no matter what the season, leftover Halloween candy. In those early days, we lived so frugally that we even washed, alongside the dishes in the sink, used sheets of cling wrap for reuse.
She was the one to punish me, sending me to kneel in the bathtub of the darkened bathroom, carrying my father’s Casio watch with an alarm setting to account for when time was up. Yet it was I who would kneel for even longer, going further and further, taking more punishment just to spite her, just to show that it meant nothing. I could take more. The sun moved across the bathroom floor, from the window to the door.
The first time I was forced to kneel was when I was seven, after she caught me playing Homeless instead of House. Playing Homeless was what it sounded like; I pretended that I was homeless. My parents had just bought a new refrigerator, and I salvaged the cardboard box it came in and filled it with stuffed animals. We pretended we lived in the box, on the street of some big, metropolitan city. We shook a tambourine and asked imaginary passersby for change.
She grabbed my arm and led me down the hallway of our tiny apartment, and into the bathroom. In the bathroom, she ordered me to kneel, fully clothed, at the head of the bathtub, the drain between my knees. She said that such a self-nullifying act of pretending to be homeless could only be punished by another self-nullifying act. I would have to be nullified twice over. She set the timer on my father’s watch for fifteen minutes. She switched the lights off and left. I was alone.
When the watch alarm sounded its harmless little cry, the door opened. My mother came in and sat on the toilet seat.
I turned to look at her. She had been crying.
Turn around, she said. You have no business looking at me.
When I averted my gaze, she continued. We didn’t come to America so you could be homeless. We came for better opportunities, more opportunities. For you, for your father.
And for you, I said, trying to complete her thoughts.
She shook her head. No, not for me. For you. We brought you here to study hard, grow up, get a job, she continued. So you have no business being homeless. Do you understand?
I nodded.
I can’t hear you.
Hao.
You’re not in Fuzhou. Say it in English, she said in Chinese.
Yes, I said. I understand.
Yet when years later I was accepted into colleges, it was she who did not want to pay the tuition to send me to my first choice, despite the scholarship that would have offset a good amount of it. In the end, my father insisted. Your only child, he appealed to her. He was my permissive parent. He could not deny me. And because he had spoken with my mother before the car accident, the summer before senior year of high school, she had allowed it. I always felt that she held it against me in the four years before she too passed.
Sitting by her bed in the last days of her life, I didn’t mention any of this. A part of me wanted to remonstrate with her, to list out all her infractions in a final accounting, but the last days are for relief, not for truth. Besides, even if I spoke the truth, would she understand it, as I pecked through sentences in my garbled Chinese? Sometimes she didn’t even know it was me, confusing me with her sisters, her mother, or a distant relative I’d never heard of. She referred to me by their Chinese names, it was all a scramble.
Sometimes, she just talked to herself in English. It actually wasn’t that strange. Both of my parents talked to themselves in English routinely, reenacting conversations with American acquaintances, colleagues, the car wash attendant, the grocery cashier, while they mindlessly washed the dishes or vacuumed or washed their faces in the bathroom. They were performing their Americanness, perfecting it to a gleaming hard veneer to shield over their Chinese inner selves. Please and sank you.
Sometimes, thinking I was one of the church ladies from the Chinese Christian Community Church, she would ask me to pray with her. Even though I had given up praying since high school, when my father passed, I clasped my hands and bowed my head. I took her requests and prayed whatever she wanted me to pray.
Dear God, I began in English. Please bring back Zhigang, beloved father and husband, back from the hospital. Please help him recover quickly and come home soon. Amen.
Keep going, my mother urged.
Okay, I relented, and put my hands together again. Don’t allow a senseless accident to take away his life. He had the right of way when he crossed the street. Because as it says in 1 Corinthians 10:13, But God is faithful; He will not suffer you to be tempted by more than you can bear, I recited imperfectly from memory. We believe that whatever you ordain, it will not be more than we can bear. That is why we ask you to bring back Zhigang, because we would not be able to bear it. I exhaled, a shaky breath. In Jesus’s name we pray, Amen.
Amen, she repeated, then smiled at me. Let’s do it again.
No, that’s enough, I said.
My father had worked hard his whole life, taking late hours at the office, coming home to cold leftovers in the fridge. He received promotion after promotion, in part because he went into the office on weekends too. His work ethic was like that of many other immigrants, eager to prove their usefulness to the country that had deigned to adopt them. He didn’t get to enjoy his life nearly enough. One exception that I remember: The afternoon my father and I passed our U.S. citizenship test together, he took us to the KFC across the street and ordered a deluxe combo of fried chic
ken with all the sides. I wasn’t particularly hungry, but because he never treated himself, I ate a few pieces alongside him, feigning a festive, abundant appetite. We sat in a booth next to the window, and it was there, with the view of trucks ambling down the freeway, that he seemed to lose himself in memory. He told me that when he was a kid, growing up in the Fujianese countryside, meat and eggs were so scarce that they were only consumed during Chinese New Year. He grew up with his grandparents, tenant farmers. During the New Year festivities, his grandmother would prepare two eggs per person, fried on both sides with soy sauce on top, with crispy edges. That was his favorite dish when he was a kid. It was hard to conceive of anything better.
But when we moved here to Salt Lake, he added, your mom and I went to that buffet restaurant, Chuck-A-Rama. I had never had fried chicken before. And I thought, this is better. Fried chicken is better.
My father rarely spoke of the past, and perhaps it was only after having officialized his severance from China that he felt free to speak openly of his life there. I kept quiet so as not to break the spell, hoping he would say more. And he did. He spoke of the mornings in the Fujianese countryside, waking up early and walking through the mountains to collect firewood with his lucky pet goat. In the afternoons after school, he taught himself English using a translation of the French novel The Red and the Black. He looked up every single word in a Chinese–English dictionary.
What’s the book about? I asked.
It’s about a man from a poor background who wants to better his life.
Does he make it?
My father smiled. He does, but it comes at a cost. There’s no happy ending.
By this point, the sun was low in the darkening sky. Across the freeway, the USCIS office had closed and its employees, the same ones who had officiated our U.S. citizenship, were pulling out of the parking lot. There was a pile of discarded bones on the table. We had ruined our appetites and my mother would be annoyed if she’d already prepared dinner. But KFC was his victory lap and I couldn’t interrupt it.