by Justina Chen
As soon as Bao-mu sees my face, she sets down her tiny teacup, her eyebrows knitted together into an accent mark of concern. “How go?”
I wish I were little again so I could nestle against her warm body and inhale her strength and believe her when she told me that I was special. That I was destined to do great things, whatever I wanted.
“Everybody had to leave early.” A surge of misplaced anger rises inside me and I glare at her. “Just like you’re going to. How come you didn’t tell me you were leaving?”
Bao-mu abandons her bowl of hot and sour soup at the kitchen table and turns on the light. She bustles to the refrigerator, removing saran-wrapped platters, a feast I no longer feel like eating because she wants me to. Irrational, immature, I know.
“Learn now, learn later,” Bao-mu says, pulling a clean plate out of a drawer. “Doesn’t change anything.” She heaps so much steaming rice on the plate that Mama would have gone into diabetic shock if she saw. “You need eat.”
“I’m not hungry,” I tell her obstinately. My stomach growls in disagreement.
Naturally, Bao-mu has ears only for my stomach. She uncovers every single platter to scoop tofu, Chinese broccoli, and sautéed green beans until there are more calories on that one plate than Mama eats in two days. Maybe even three. Just looking at Bao-mu’s lumpy knuckles that I used to trace like roller coasters makes me feel guilty, guilty that I’ve been abrupt with her, even more guilty that she, a little old lady of over seventy, is serving me. Over her loud aiya protests, I recover the platters with saran wrap and carry them to the refrigerator.
As I do, half of me wants to tell Bao-mu, Yes, it’s time for you to retire, to stop taking care of me. The other half wishes she’d never leave.
“Sit,” orders Bao-mu, placing my trough of a plate on the table.
I sit because four feet eleven inches of female power are glowering at me. For all I get embarrassed about people finding out that I still have a nanny when I’m nearly sixteen, I love Bao-mu.
“I was hoping you would move to Hong Kong with us,” I admit because it’s easier to hide the truth from myself than from Bao-mu. “Remember how you used to tell me you were taking the next plane back to China?”
Bao-mu laughs. “That only when you so naughty. China was just talk.” She pauses from wiping down the counter. “And it work. Sometime, you too good girl.”
“What do you mean?”
“You always stop when someone tell you to. Right away.” She sighs, a creaky breath of regret. “You never tell them stop.”
Every tear I’ve dammed up for seven months presses on my eyelids. I want to deny it, tell her she’s wrong, but how can I when I know that she’s right? I don’t stop Wayne from harshing on me. I didn’t stop Jared.
Bao-mu says, “I so old now.”
“You look so young for sixty.”
Usually, Bao-mu has a good laugh when I say that, but tonight she sits heavily next to me. “I too old to move to China now. I used to America. You not need me anymore. You such big girl.”
What I want to say is that I still need her. But I don’t want to sound like a baby when God knows, I’m not pure and innocent like one. Instead, I nod my head as though I’m agreeing; because Bao-mu looks so severe, I know she’s on the verge of crying, too.
“You need eat dinner,” insists Bao-mu, nudging my plate even closer to me, food-medicine for my breaking heart. “You want disappear like your mama?”
As a matter of fact, I do.
My stomach rumbles with a hunger I don’t want to feel, my mouth bitter with aftertaste from my first family meeting.
“This so delicious,” says Bao-mu, tantalizing me with a crisp green bean between her chopsticks, not in that weird way that Mama’s friends push fattening food on each other because they want each other to gain weight, to feel superior since they’ve got stronger willpower and the fat-free body to prove it. But Bao-mu offers food out of love. “Taste.”
So I take a small bite. And it tastes hot and sour, salty and just a tiny bit sweet.
“My cooking the best,” says Bao-mu, who has never forgiven my parents for hiring Lena, our professional chef, a few years ago.
“Yes, it is,” I tell Bao-mu, who’s been more of a mother substitute than her nickname could ever have promised. I take another bite. “You are the best.”
Upstairs, lying on my full belly in front of my bookcase, I flip through my manga-journal to the last half-drawn image of Shiraz. As usual, my snowboard girl is flying down some amazingly steep run, living my dream. I sit up, and close the book on Shiraz, unable to finish her. My dream is as far away as Hong Kong.
God, I can’t believe that we’re moving eight time zones away from Age. All at once, I need to talk to him, need the reassurance that we’re still friends, best friends, here in Pacific Standard Time. Without thinking, I spring to my feet, wincing when my knee buckles from the sudden movement.
As I wait for Age to answer his phone, I massage my knee on my chair, and spot the new Snowboarder in my in-box, still embalmed in shrink-wrap just as all the other issues are since my accident.
“Hey,” says Age, his voice surprising me because, I guess, I’d been expecting his voicemail.
I sit up and dispense with any greetings. “So what’s a chiru?”
“What?” he says, and I’m relieved to hear the laugh back in his voice, the way he sounded before Natalia’s grand re-entry into his life. So I tell Age about going to the hospital with Lillian and The Six-Pack.
“If you really want to know,” he says, “a chiru is an antelope. Endangered. In Tibet.”
“God, Encyclopedia Zorrito, I’d ask how you know.”
“Except you don’t have to.”
“Because you’ve got the world’s weirdest brain.”
“One man’s trivia, another one’s treasure.”
“Who said that?” I demand.
“Me.”
“Quoting yourself.” I shake my head, wishing he were next to me so I could poke him in the shoulder. “Some people would say that’s kind of, I don’t know, egotistical.”
“What can I say? I’m great.”
I laugh and lean back in my chair. “Okay, Exalted One, so what do you think? Instead of being a Cheng business-bot, I could be the first sidewalk manga artist in Seattle.”
“Oh, yeah, I can really see you sitting out on Broadway with a can for donations by your side.”
“Don’t forget my sign that says, ‘Let me show you your inner animal.’ You think my parents will be cool with that?”
“About as cool with you flipping burgers all day.”
“Or going pro.” As soon as I say it, I wish I hadn’t, because snowboarding reminds me of Natalia, which reminds me that Age has been an absentee friend for the last couple of days, which reminds me of moving.
As if we’re operating on different planes, Age says as excitedly as the kids at the hospital, “So the new Mack Dawg movie came into the store today.”
“Come on over,” I tell him, willing to break my ban on all things professional snowboarding if it means hanging out with Age. “We can watch it in my studio.”
“I can’t,” he says.
I know the girl behind his can’t: Natalia.
“What time is it?” Then Age swears, making me tense, because I know what’s coming. Sure enough, he sounds like Wayne, who has a million things on his agenda more important than me: “I’m fifteen minutes late. Natalia’s going to freak.”
“Just because you’re a little late?”
Age coughs, and I translate that to mean, No, because talking to you made me late. He says, “I’ll call you later.”
In a moment, I’m listening to a click as Age hangs up. Breathing out in disbelief, I place my phone on my desk, shove back in my chair, but then stop. Recklessly, I rip open the plastic covering the snowboarding magazine. What do I see on the first page that I open to? Naturally, it’s a full-body shot of Sonora Bremen, blond and thin, two years old
er than I am, and the girl who hooked up with Jared right after snowboarding camp. She didn’t last long, either.
What would it be like to be her, or any of the snowboard girls who’ve made it, are under contract with some big-time companies, and are traveling the world? Girls who get to design their own line of boards and clothes and goggles. Girls who everyone aspires to be.
I open my desk drawer, rummage for a pen to manga-journal, and instead feel the framed photograph of me in my snowboarding gear where the housekeeper or my mother or her interior decorator must have stashed it, placing it in solitary confinement for having clashed with the décor. I can barely remember how I used to picture myself in a snowboarding movie, amped up music in the background. How I’d ride the skies into history. How people would breathe my first name in awe—not my last. How I would be Age’s first-string-pick riding partner forever.
The antique mirror hanging above my desk, the one that Bao-mu gave to me to ward away evil, is supposed to reflect ghosts. But in the mottled glass I catch my reflection and gasp. That’s what I’ve become: a barely-there girl. God, when did I disappear? I peer more closely into the mirror and wish I hadn’t. My cheeks look rounder than ever, my eyes smaller than they are. I’m bloated from overdosing on the Wayne Cheng Kool-Aid, the kind that brainwashes me into thinking that I can’t do anything right.
Oh, Syrah Cheng? She could have been great if she didn’t chicken out. If she hadn’t screwed up and let herself get screwed over big-time by Jared Johanson.
I rear back from the mirror and head to my bookshelf, where I shelved a box with all my ribbons. Standing on my tiptoes, I reach for it, but as I do, a book falls from the shelf like snow sloughing off a cliff. I wince as it smacks the crown of my head.
“Ow,” I moan, my hand rubbing my skull.
I bend down to hurl the book, vent all my frustration on it. If I ever doubted Bao-mu that ghosts fly in breezes and topple otherwise stable glasses from shelves and wipe out hard drives, my skepticism vanishes the moment my eyes land on Baba’s book, The Ethan Cheng Way: From Rags to Richest.
A sign, Bao-mu would say. You suppose learn from this.
After it was published last year, I had glanced through Baba’s bestseller, called that half-assed effort good enough, and shelved the book out of sight, out of mind at the top of my bookcase.
Putting it in Chenglish, I was ambushed at the family meeting, and I was ambushed by Natalia. Maybe I couldn’t help her moving in on Age, but it was my fault for not being prepared for the Cheng assault.
Sitting down, I hold Baba’s book in my lap, wondering if the ultimate how-to lesson is somewhere within. What I need is a step-by-step plan to win over my parents, Grace, Wayne. And myself. That’s what I find in the table of contents. To paraphrase the great Ethan Cheng, 99 percent of negotiation is preparation (introduction). Identify your goal (chapter one). Select your partners (chapter two). And then obliterate your obstacles (chapter three).
Looking up from the book, my eyes graze over the ghost-detecting mirror. I think about how everybody else takes what they want. They don’t stop whatever they’re doing. Right away. Why don’t I grab what I want, this once?
Slowly, I get to my feet, thinking about my goal; how after tonight, I’d just love to prove Wayne wrong: I can be a snowboard girl, one who’s so successful, my busy career will be just as all-consuming as everybody else’s in my family. Hong Kong? Hardly. My schedule is going to keep me busy flying around the world for competitions. I’ll be the one that other girls like Natalia wish they were.
At my computer, I open the spreadsheet I started a year ago, the one with the list of companies, their local sales reps, and addresses. I find the one I’m looking for, the man who asked to see my video after I finished it. It’s as if all my ambivalence and insecurities about snowboarding disappear. My fingers strike each key hard as I type:
From: Syrah Cheng
To: [email protected]
Subject: Checking In
Dear Ralph,
You gave me your card after I won three events at Alpental last year and wanted to see my video résumé. I’m sending you a CD tomorrow. I’d love to talk when you have a moment.
Syrah
My hands feel as icy as if I’ve been standing on a mountain in skin-burning cold. When you approach a cliff, you can’t overanalyze, you can’t stall. So before I get scared and talk myself out of it, I hold my breath and hit Send.
14
Come Tuesday morning, I wake from the same dream I’ve been having since my first day back on the slopes, the one where I’m snowboarding, whole again, only I’m wearing a leash, the kind that kids who are learning to ski sometimes wear. The thing is, I don’t know who’s holding my reins, slowing me down, but I’ve got a good suspicion. She’s bubbly, wears pink snow pants, and rides with her arms poised in second position like a ballerina. And she’s the reason why Age hasn’t called to check in yet again this morning.
With my eyes still closed, I breathe out the sensation of being tethered and inhale deeply, catching the scent of my favorite soy sauce eggs. The last time Bao-mu fixed those eggs was before Mama declared it was time for me to lose my baby fat, and lured a fancy American chef away from the top spa in Scottsdale. Another inhale. As a way of returning to my reality, this isn’t so bad, even if it means that Mama and Baba must have extended their second trip to D.C. in a week. That’s the only explanation for why Bao-mu would dare the wrath of Lena the kitchen warlord and whip up anything with the artery-choking fat content of (the horror! the horror!) eggs.
I open my eyes slowly and remember that it’s Bao-mu’s birthday. We’ll both be eating eggs this morning to wish her long life, and Bao-mu’s probably waiting for me. But I can’t resist checking e-mail—no response from RhamiWare, and definitely no message from Age. Bao-mu’s gift is behind my snowboarding gear, and I wince when I bend down to grab it, because my shoulder is still stiff from falling on it four nights ago.
Before I can head downstairs to the kitchen, where I thought she’d be, Bao-mu surprises me by opening the door to her suite. “I been waiting for you,” she says. Bags under her eyes mar her normally unlined face, her mouth puckered with sour worry.
The birthday wish dies on my lips, and I rush over to Bao-mu, demanding, “What’s wrong?”
“Christine call last night. My granddaughter had baby yesterday. Too early. Baby not ready come out yet.” A frown wrinkles Bao-mu’s smooth forehead. “I need go. Today.”
“Today?” I repeat faintly. Wait, I want to say, I just found out that you were leaving. But she is leaving. Bao-mu’s suite, which is typically a study of neatness with every book, frame, and plant in its place, looks like the aftermath of an earthquake or the mess made by an overwhelmed person who doesn’t know where to begin, abandoning one project to start another and another. Random piles of books and papers dot the bamboo floor, creating a sporadic tree line. Only the middle shelf of her bookcase has been cleared off. A few paintings, including the best of my elementary school art projects, lean against the far wall.
“You didn’t sleep,” I accuse her. “Why did you cook those eggs?”
I know why she cooked them instead of sleeping: because she loves me and knows how much I savor every bite of those forbidden salty eggs.
Bao-mu maneuvers slowly around her coffee table, stacked with clean teacups, looking around helplessly, lost and unsure.
Seeing Bao-mu like this, as if her age has caught up to her over the course of a phone call, makes me want to cry. According to the chapter in The Ethan Cheng Way I read last night when I couldn’t shake the fear that I’d never regain my feeling for snow, sometimes it’s better to act than to do nothing.
I figure, this is one of those times. Besides, I’ve traveled so much, packing I can do with my eyes closed.
Huskily, I tell Bao-mu, “Let’s pack your clothes first.”
Bao-mu nods and follows me into her bedroom.
A large suitcase lies open on her lo
w platform bed.
“Okay,” I say decisively, “you need enough clothes for a week. Three pants, four shirts, a sweater, a jacket, and underwear.” Out of her drawers, I pull out the elasticized pants Bao-mu’s so fond of wearing, no matter how many custom-made slacks Mama brings back for her from Hong Kong.
“And this,” says Bao-mu, handing me the cashmere sweater I bought for her two Christmases ago, the one she’s never worn even though it’s her favorite color, tangerine. She strokes it lovingly the way Grace does Mochi or a mother might a beloved daughter’s hair. “I been waiting for special occasion wear this. When Christine see me in this, she say, Mama, you look so successful.”
I want to ask her why it matters what her daughter thinks, her daughter who has never taken the time to call on Bao-mu’s birthday or remember Mother’s Day. Her daughter who Bao-mu sees only when she visits California, and never the other way around. Bao-mu always demurs with a “Christine medical doctor. She so busy.”
As I place Bao-mu’s underwear inside the suitcase, I notice her precious treasures on the bed: the black-and-white photograph of a much younger Bao-mu and her husband, a stern, unsmiling man. Her daughter, surly, wearing graduation robes. But when I pick up Bao-mu’s cell phone, the one Baba gave to her that she rarely uses because she says the sudden ringing, ringing makes her think a ghost is calling, I know she’s truly going for good.
“You call me anytime,” Bao-mu says before turning abruptly to the closet. She walks slower than usual, like she’s the one who was used, bruised, and abused.
As she stands on tiptoes to grab her shirts, I nudge her gently aside. Since I have studied with the master and commander herself—Bao-mu the Great—for the last fifteen years, I order rather than ask, “Just tell me what you want.”
“I be okay,” Bao-mu replies, but to my relief retreats to her bed, her weight a bare suggestion, hardly indenting the mattress.