by Justina Chen
Answer:
Mother Nature calls; procrastination beckons. I go to the bathroom, realize I’ve forgotten to eat dinner, and head downstairs.
The light from the open refrigerator door illuminates Mama, standing with her back to me, foraging furtively, her silhouette barely there. Watching her lift the top off a plastic container and slip out a single cold shu mai makes me want to cry. No, I decide, it makes me want to sit her down at the table and force-feed her and ask her how the hell can she go to a four-hour dinner, prepared by the best chef in Whistler, yet allow no more than two or three morsels to pass through her lips? A few scant pounds separate her from being that prospective student at my school, the Skeletal Girl who broke off the edge of the muffin, nibbled on those few crumbs, and called that her big meal of the day.
In the dark hall, I collect myself. Breathing in, I close my eyes and exhale loudly, partly to announce myself and partly because I’m as nervous as I would be going into the no-mistake section of a mountain.
When I round the corner, Mama is taking a glass out of the cupboard, the refrigerator now closed.
“I was thirsty,” she says, as if she has to explain why she’s in the close vicinity of food. She pushes the glass into the water dispenser in the refrigerator door. “What are you doing up so late?”
“I didn’t eat dinner,” I say. Like you.
Mama frowns. “This is the worst time to eat. Food just sticks inside your stomach.”
“My body will survive.” The refrigerator is stocked, thanks to the house manager, with a half dozen bottles of wine, cheese, cold cuts, and Chinese take-out containers. I grab the largest one and sniff. Baba’s favorite peanutty noodles.
Mama recoils. “Don’t eat that!”
“Why not?”
The only voluptuous part of Mama’s body that she actually likes is her pouty mouth. Now, those lips are thin with displeasure when I place the container on the island, not in the refrigerator where it’s safe from temptation. “First Marnie, then Yvonne, and now you.”
“Mama, do you know how much they want to know you?”
“So you’re taking their side.”
“No, I’m just trying to understand.” I shake my head, thinking of all those scrapbooks Po-Po made, the ones I wish I had right now to prove to her how much she was loved. “They talked about you during the funeral. Your sisters are so proud of you.”
Mama looks away from me, her perfect face cold.
“So was your mother. Po-Po had pictures of you all over her bedroom.”
“You shouldn’t have gone there,” she says quietly.
“Why not? I don’t understand.”
“Because they gave me up when I was inconvenient. Lo and behold, now that I have all this”—her diamond-covered hand flings out to take in the length of the kitchen, this entire lodge, all the way down south to The House of Cheng in Seattle—“suddenly they want me. People will use you if you let them.”
“Not all people, Mama. And not if you don’t let them.”
“You’re too young to understand.”
I know I’m venturing into the fracture zone of Mama’s heart, where a single misstep can release a slab of hurt. But I can’t stop now. “This all happened during the Cultural Revolution, right? What would have happened if you stayed in China instead of going to Hong Kong?”
“I would have rather stayed in China, dirt poor, reviled, motherless,” says Mama, her eyes hot. “My uncle—”
“Weigong?”
Mama nods. “Your… adopted grandfather, he was a nice man, but he had no control, no power. My aunt, your weipou, hated that I lived with them.”
“Oh, Mama. What happened?”
Mama takes a sip of water, which turns into a gulp, like she’s trying to fill herself up. Wiping a drop of water off her upper lip with the back of her hand, she says, “When I was five, she told me every bite I took was one out of her own children’s mouths. So I had to eat after they finished their meals. In the kitchen with the servants. It was never enough. Every night she locked up all the cupboards. Not even one crumb would be left on the tables or counters. I got used to hunger.”
Five, that was old enough for me to remember slights like Wayne leaving me behind while he took his kids and Grace to get ice cream whenever they visited. Old enough to know that he and Grace didn’t want anything to do with me, but not understanding why. No wonder Mama doesn’t think she’s worthy of food. Like mother, like daughter, I haven’t either.
I grip the kitchen island, needing her happily-ever-after. “But then you went to boarding school in England, right?”
“Only because England subsidized half of the cost. The other half, I won through a scholarship.” She lifts her chin proudly. “It’s how I got into Cambridge.”
“And that’s where you met Baba.”
She nods. That much, she’s told me. Baba was a guest lecturer in her economics class at graduate school. He was impressed with her questions, she his answers. Supply met demand, a match made in an economically fiscal heaven.
Mama dumps her glass of water into the sink and says briskly, “It doesn’t matter now. It happened so long ago.”
“Is that why Weipou never liked me?” I ask her quietly.
Setting her glass down on the granite countertop, Mama laughs bitterly. I remember how Bao-mu told me that everyone had to destroy their art and valuables before the Red Guard stormed into their homes. More than art was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution.
“It wasn’t you, Syrah. It was me. She couldn’t stand that I survived.”
“You succeeded, Mama.”
Smiling slightly, Mama nods. “Oh, she hated that I married Baba. But she didn’t understand that he made me richer than all this.”
I shake my head, not understanding.
“I know how everyone talked, still talk: ‘Betty, what a gold digger.’ Especially the wives of Ethan’s friends, who worried that I would put ideas in their husbands’ heads, set a trend of trophy wives.” Mama bats at the air with her left hand, the one with the diamond so massive she could knock out somone’s teeth with the right move. “What no one accepts is that you can’t choose who you fall in love with.”
That, I understand. Even though I knew Jared was a player, a guy who bragged about how much he liked women, that still didn’t stop me from falling in serious like with him. And unbidden, I see Age, the boy I’ve been afraid to love.
Mama fingers the large jade pendant that she always wears as her talisman. Jade. Yu. Her Chinese name.
“Your necklace…,” I say.
“This was the first present your father ever gave to me. The stone of heaven.” Mama holds it out to me, but I know the shape of the pendant, its etching by heart, the crane that stands for longevity. Forever, I had always assumed it meant that she wanted to be immortal, not knowing that Baba meant for their love to last forever.
Mama releases her pendant, which drops heavily to rest between her bony clavicles. “What your weipou never understood is that I would give this all up, every bit of it, if I could make your father younger.”
I glance at her sharply, thinking about how many things I would have traded with our Cheng fortune: friends who wanted me for me, siblings who didn’t assume that my life was golden, parents who didn’t jet off at every business opportunity.
“You’ll be diapering your own babies at the same time I might be doing that for your father. No, all the money in the world doesn’t make our relationship sensible.” Mama swipes the counter with a dishcloth, soaking up all the excess drops. “What I found with your father is something Weipou couldn’t stand.”
Without knowing it, Mama has mothered me in the way I needed most tonight, because it occurs to me that even knowing I shouldn’t trust Jared, I couldn’t help falling for him. I’m not stupid for forgetting to apply The Ethan Cheng Way, run the cost-benefit analysis that would have warned, keep away. If Mama had done that, she wouldn’t be with Baba. Even if I had done that, I couldn�
��t have stopped from responding to Jared’s attention.
“So,” I say softly, as I heat up the food in the microwave, “in a way, going to Hong Kong was the best thing that ever happened to you.”
Mama is so quiet I’m afraid I’ve sloughed off too many of her memories. But then she murmurs, surprised, “In a way.”
35
On Sunday morning, the sun creeps across my bed toward me through the open slats of the wood blinds, and as it does, so do all my unanswered questions about Jared. Not until after breakfast, when I’m brushing my teeth, does an epiphany rock me. Sure, I could shoot questions back at Jared when I finally face him: what was the big idea of using me to get to my dad? You jerk, how come you never called me?
But would any of his answers make a difference to me now?
Grabbing my manga-journal from my bed, I bring it with me to the window seat, pulling the blinds all the way up. In the bright sunlight, I begin at the beginning, the way I needed to with Mama last night.
The first pages of my journal show Shiraz splayed in a benched cliff. She can’t move. And in a hyper-close-up, she looks up. The next three panels are zoomed out, not just of any mountain, but one enormous Bold Mountain, all craggy-faced with bulbous cornices of snow. And here, trapped in an ice-clad hell, my rescue fantasy begins. Leg broken and in storm conditions, Shiraz makes it down the mountain by herself without the help of a single macho ski patrol guy.
Just as Dr. Bradford denied me a brace, telling me that it would end up being a crutch I relied on, I know it’s time to retire Shiraz, my personal knight on a shining snowboard. She’s a crutch I don’t need anymore, as wide-eyed and large-chested as she is.
These are Shiraz’s thoughts and actions, not mine.
So I walk to my desk, rummage for a new notebook, but find the diary I had been keeping a few years before the Accident, the one I thought I lost after my one and only visit to Chalet Cheng. As I flip through it, reading my words, I could be visiting an old friend I haven’t seen for such a long time that I’ve forgotten her. But you can’t completely erase the people you love out of your heart, no matter if they’re taking care of a great-grandchild five hundred miles away or they’ve stopped talking to you.
Leaving a few pages between the Old Me and the new, because I’m not sure how to bridge the two, I start on a blank page, unmarked as a fresh powder field. Before I figure out what I want in my future—and what I want from Jared—I need to face what happened that night so many months ago and why. Taking a deep breath, I begin to draw.
I draw how I went to Jared’s room.
How I watched him lock the door.
How the lights went off. How I wished I could turn off the moon.
How I didn’t say a word, not even when his pants came off.
How he told me what he wanted me to do to him. How he said it wasn’t really sex when he pushed me to my knees.
Back off when you feel pain; that’s what my physical therapist told me when I was rehabbing my knee. I flex my fingers, which have been gripped tight around the pen. Who cares that The Six-Pack are so cavalier about sex that heart-to-heart conversations are more intimate to them? For me, that night with Jared was a big deal, and when it comes down to it, what I think and how I feel about it is all that matters. I want to stop now, run downstairs, and gorge on pancakes slathered in butter and thick maple syrup to make myself feel better.
But the only way to purge this pain is to binge on it, not on calories. To remember. So I continue to draw.
How I skulked to my room alone afterward, feeling more naked than I did in his room.
How the next morning I overheard Jared cackle to another camp counselor, “Syrah’s my free pass to paradise, man.” How he laughed like he had won more than his Olympic gold, more than his starring role in a snowboard movie, and a heck of a lot more than me.
How I felt more filthy than rich, especially when the first sweet nothing out of his mouth when he saw me was, “So when can I meet your dad?”
How I finally told him no, when I should have said no eight hours earlier. How he told me that I was blowing what happened all out of proportion since he had a girlfriend and wasn’t planning on breaking up with her anytime soon. How all we were doing was having fun.
How I left him to have fun by himself at the base of the mountain. How I thought—and hoped—he’d stop me, beg me not to do anything crazy. But of course, he didn’t, not when I took a chairlift up by myself, not when I hiked past the SKI AREA BOUNDARY sign. And not when I went into the backcountry, where it’s so cliffy and rocky, none of the campers were allowed there, buddy or no buddy.
Even now when I’m safe on this window seat, simply journaling, those mountains, those fierce, majestic mountains outside my window, make me shiver as I remember how desperately I wanted a way out of my life. Sighing, I continue.
How I can’t remember riding down any part of the mountain, not a single foot, before the snow broke under my board. How I mistook the roar of the avalanche that I set off for a rifle shot to my heart.
How the snow chased me down the mountain the way my guilt and shame did: relentless, overwhelming, unstoppable. How I couldn’t outrun the snow any more than I could my memory of Jared.
How somehow—call it fate, call it luck—I ended up in a benched cliff, twenty feet down, ten feet across. How I looked up and saw that I was eighty feet from the next level of ground. How I couldn’t have moved even if I wanted to because my knee couldn’t bear my weight any more than my heart could bear the weight of my guilt.
How I wanted to die, I hurt so much.
How I began to think about Mama and Baba. Bao-mu. And Age.
How I wanted to see them all again.
How the search-and-rescue effort for me became a search-and-recover mission after the ski patrol spotted the avalanche, calculated my chances of survival after three hours of being buried in cement-like snow: ten percent.
How Baba and Mama infused another million dollars into my search, which brought in more volunteers and avalanche dogs onto that mountain than any in Whistler’s history.
How a dog bounded over to me as if I was a ball he had found.
How I’ve felt guilty and unworthy and ashamed ever since ski patrol piled me into the toboggan like I was an idiot for riding in terrain way above my level.
And that leaves me with answering the hardest question of all: why did I go where I shouldn’t have been? And finally, finally, I put a name on it:
How it all began because I felt unloved, unwanted, unnoticed.
I draw through Grace’s first call. And her second, hearing the phone ring only when I finally set down my pen, exhausted but exhilarated that I survived. As I write Exhuming My Past at the top of this section of my manga, I answer, “Hey, Grace.”
“Syrah, I’ve been calling and calling you,” she says, sounding annoyed.
With those words, I don’t need to ask Grace why she’s calling. I know. The same way Age used to, and Bao-mu still does, Grace is checking on me. And I know that even if I felt used up and burned out and lonely after my night with Jared, I have never been truly alone.
“You called at the perfect time,” I tell her.
“How’s that?”
I cross out the title, because the past isn’t and shouldn’t be dead and buried. It’s a living presence that affects me as much as it does Mama, Baba, Grace, and even Wayne.
“I was getting ready to do some battle,” I say.
“What?”
“Excuse me,” I correct her with a smile. While I may not need a knight to rescue me, I do need a Round Table of trusted advisors. “So what do you wear when you think you’re going to run into an ex for the first time?”
“Anything that makes you feel strong,” says Grace immediately, and forcefully as only women with tons of experience do. “Think power outfit.”
It’s easy to picture Grace in one of her power suits. Put her in business clothes and even the mighty media would quake. Consideri
ng all I’ve got are the black pants that I wore to Po-Po’s funeral and a pair of jeans, what I’m feeling is a severe power shortage. But that’s my problem, not Grace’s.
Unless I want to totally freeze in the snow outside, jeans it is. But downstairs in the mudroom, as I bend over to put on my clunky black shoes, I spot my gear hanging in my locker, not the boy’s jacket that Mama detests or my wide-legged androgynous snow pants, but the body-conscious, never-before-worn snow jacket and pants, hot pink and vibrant orange, that Mama had specially designed for me before my accident.
And there, there waiting on the heated floor like a pair of faithful dogs, are my old boots, a little scuffed, a lot worn, and infinitely more beautiful than any strappy heels.
After all the gear is zipped and buckled, reluctantly, I take a good, long look at myself in the mirror and am surprised to see someone I like. These last couple of months, I’ve holed myself up, waging a Cultural Revolution of my own, attacking my Four Olds: Old Culture, Old Habits, Old Ideas, Old Family. Most of all, I’ve been purging Old Me.
“Welcome back,” I tell my reflection.
“Syrah, you ready?” calls Mama from down the hall. “Did you find—” And then she walks into the mudroom and does a double take. “You look beautiful in that color.”
“Thanks for packing this,” I tell her, meaning it. And I throw my arms around Mama, who doesn’t feel nearly as breakable in her fur coat. “You don’t know how much I appreciate it.”
When I strut out to the garage, I do feel beautiful. Maybe Mama and Grace have a point about power clothes. All I know is, put a parka on this girl, and she might as well wear a sign, traffic-cone orange so that everyone stops to look.
DANGER: GIRL IN GORE-TEX AHEAD.
36
Take four hundred of the best professional snowboarders from forty countries, add a couple thousand onsite viewers and a hundred million more who’ll be watching the coverage on TV, and you’re talking Wicked in Whistler. The competition is being staged on Blackcomb Mountain, which has been turned into a parade of parkas by the time we arrive. Here I thought being an hour early would be enough time to stake out a front-row position to stalk Jared, but by the gaggle of girls parked beyond the finish gate, I’m about two hours too late.