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Years and years later, she is sitting in a bookstore in a small town where she lives, listening to a best-selling author tell a story about the author’s immigration experience. The bookstore is overcrowded. Every foldout chair is occupied, and people are standing at the peripheries, between aisles of books, or sitting cross-legged on the floor at the author’s feet. The author is telling a story about the flight from the country of the author’s birth to this country, where the author now lives. The story is linear. The plane flies straight from one country to the other. When the author shares a humorous detail, the audience laughs; when the author sighs, the audience makes sympathetic noises. She is silent. Sitting in the small foldout chair, surrounded by the bodies of strangers, she feels a dull panic unfurling inside her. It is the same feeling she used to get when as a small child she lost track of her mother at a grocery store or the mall. The feeling of being lost. She realizes that she cannot remember her “immigration experience.” Or, in her case, her immigration experiences. She cannot remember the flight she took as a baby from the country of her birth, and she cannot remember the flight she took as a young child from the country where she formed her first memories. She and the best-selling author were the same age when they arrived in this country, but unlike the author, she has no story to tell an audience. No details, no outline, not even a trace. She should have been old enough to remember. She has clear memories of times when she was much younger: the time she fell down the stairs or the time their neighbor’s dog gave birth to puppies. The author is reading from the author’s book now, but she is not listening. She is trying to remember. A flight from Bangkok to San Francisco. A long flight, a full day and night of travel. They were sitting in the middle aisle of the plane, she thinks, but maybe not all five of them, maybe her family was separated, her mother and one sister sitting apart. She was beside her father, she thinks, or maybe it was her mother, maybe they were all together. She is not remembering, she knows, but guessing, inventing. She tries to picture their airplane moving through the sky, crossing the Pacific Ocean, but there is a hole in the sky where the plane should be. The hole is an entrance to a tunnel, she thinks, a tunnel of nothing that swallowed the plane. She read in a book that her friend wrote about the death of her friend’s mother that memories are precarious. Each time a memory is recalled, it must be pieced together again as if for the first time. Another friend once told her that he knew a man who believed he was an angel before he was born. This man could not remember having been an angel anymore, but he could still remember the feeling of remembering that he was. She treasured that: a memory of a memory. She had always been fascinated by traces: the morning frost on the school field, dreams, old photographs, the fog that sometimes settled over the valley, seashells, fruit peels, lost teeth. Her middle sister had collected all their baby teeth in an old pencil sharpener. She doesn’t know where it is anymore, but she can still picture it: a little pink rectangle that slid open like a matchbox. She wonders if it would have been easier to remember her story if her story had been simpler. An immigrant is a person who is born in one country and goes to live in another country. She was born in one country, lived in another country, and then lived some more in yet another country. Does that make her a double immigrant, then? She does not like the word “immigrant” to describe herself. The word is too active, too evocative of movement and agency. She did not go from one country to another. She was brought along. When she was thirteen months old, her mother carried her onto a plane and left the country where she was born. Her mother said she cried the whole way, on the plane, at the airport. Her mother said she didn’t stop crying even when they finally arrived at their new home, a small townhouse on a dead-end street, which would become the first home she could remember. When she was seven and three-quarters, her mother and father led her onto another plane that brought her to this country. Her mother said she did not cry then, and since she cannot remember the flight, she has to believe what her mother said.
What she does remember is crying every morning she woke up at her aunt’s house. They lived with her aunt and her grandparents when they first arrived in this country, in a low, one-story house with three bedrooms, one bathroom, and a large tree in the front yard. One bedroom was occupied by her aunt, another by her grandparents, and the third, which had been her uncle’s room, was set aside for her family. She remembers that the room still smelled like her uncle, cigarettes and leather, and something else that only years later she would come to recognize as the smell of alcohol. The room also still contained his things—model airplanes, helicopters, and cars. She did not know why her uncle collected toys when he was an adult. She did not know where he slept after they moved into his room and nobody told her. She did not know where her aunt slept every night either. It seemed to her that the only permanent residents of the house were her grandparents. Her grandfather, her grandmother, and now her mother, her eldest sister, her middle sister, and herself. Her father returned to Bangkok to finish his PhD. Her father had been working on his PhD for as long as she could remember, and she knew what the letters stood for. Doctor of philosophy, a terminal degree. She was afraid of doctors and terminal illnesses, but she liked the sound of philosophy. It had the word soft inside of it, and ended the way it began, with a gentle puff of air escaping the lips. Maybe she cried every morning because she missed her father, or because she missed her former home, or because she had no friends at her new school. She cannot remember the reason. Maybe there was no reason, or none that she could name, either now, or back then as a child. All she remembers is waking up and crying, or waking up to find herself already crying, her face wet with tears and a sob in her throat. Her mother and her aunt and her grandmother did everything they could to calm her, but she only cried harder. She did not stop. Then one day, her mother made her stop. One day, in the dark hallway of her aunt’s house, her mother knelt down before her and said, it is bad luck to cry when nothing bad has happened, when nobody has died. Do you want something bad to happen? her mother asked. Do you want your mother or your father to die? And she did not. She did not want her parents to die, ever, and the thought that she had nearly killed them, accidentally, with her bad-luck tears, was so horrible and so painful that it changed something inside her. She stopped crying, that morning and every morning afterward, for months, maybe even for years.
Or maybe she didn’t stop crying, but she stopped occupying her body more than necessary, so she could no longer tell if she was crying or not, and years later, walking back from the reading with her husband and her colleague, defending Virginia Woolf, whom she felt the best-selling author had slighted, she cannot remember either crying or not crying. Her memories of the time at her aunt’s house are all in the third person. She sees a girl sitting on the edge of a futon in the family room, her face bloated and red, her mouth failing to form words. She sees her aunt and her grandmother standing in the kitchen, their mouths sharp and forceful, their eyes the same. Her aunt cuts through the air with her arm, pointing with her whole hand. Look at this mess, she seems to say, though the scene is muted in her memory, though she cannot hear her aunt’s raised voice. Not the aunt whom the house belonged to, but the older aunt, who had come to visit, or rather to inspect them. And they had failed the inspection. The woman crying in the living room behind the kitchen. The girl on the futon. Another girl standing with a broom in her hand, trying to clean up, to make it better. Maybe she is the girl crying, she thinks, or the girl trying to clean, or maybe the two girls are her sisters, and she is the one who is missing from the memory. If there had been a mirror at the end of the living room, behind her mother, maybe she would have seen herself in the scene, across three rooms, all connected the way she later came to learn only houses in California were. When she lived in Madrid, she used to walk to the Prado and stand before Velázquez’s Las Meninas, which she had seen for the first time in her Spanish textbook. Back in high school, she had stared and stared at the small dark rectangle in her textbook and
had been haunted by the image of the king and queen reflected in the mirror in the murky background of the painting. She was not afraid to look at the dead. She knew that Velázquez and la infanta and las meninas were all long dead, she had even gone to the royal crypts, but it was terrible to stand in the place of the dead, to stand before the painting, which was so much larger than the little rectangle she had cherished in high school, and stand before a painted mirror that reflected not her own face but the faces of the dead. She knows she was not dead as a child in her aunt’s house, but without a mirror in her memory, something to reflect herself back to her, she is not sure if she was alive. In another memory, she and her middle sister are taking a bubble bath. In their former home, there had been no flush toilets and no bathtubs or showers. They washed with a showerhead attached to a faucet, or with plastic buckets. Baths were a luxury available once a year when they stayed at a high-rise hotel on the beach, a vacation paid for by the university where their parents worked. Now, at their aunt’s house, she and her sisters could take a bath whenever they wanted and for as long as they wanted, if their mother was not there. She cannot remember where their mother was that day. At work, probably, at one of her many jobs, day care worker, cashier, substitute teacher’s aide. She cannot remember where her eldest sister or her grandmother or her aunt were either. It was just her and her middle sister, splashing each other with the bathwater gone cold, the bubbles gone flat. She felt guilty and afraid even before their grandfather began pounding at the door. He was yelling something as well, but she could not make it out. She only felt the sound reverberate through her body and the gray water that contained it. In her memory, she is both inside the tub, and outside the bathroom door, she is both herself and her grandfather. When the door between them cracks open, she sees both horrors: two skinny naked children, shivering, and a rimy old man, blind in one eye. She can feel both the shame of being seen and the shame of seeing.
In the days, weeks, and months that followed the best-selling author’s reading, she tries to gather her memories, to collect them, the same way her middle sister had collected their baby teeth in the pencil sharpener. Her father had encouraged her sister’s collection, not only of teeth, but of magnets, seashells, and other junk. Her father had said the urge to collect things was a mark of genius, the urge to give order to a disparate and divergent world, to find patterns, to complete a set. Her father collected stamps. Whenever he received a letter in the mail, he would rip off the corner with the stamp and place it in a bowl of water. When she was old enough, her father would let her peel the wet stamps off the wet paper. She had to be very careful, to pull slowly but steadily or else she would rip the stamp in half. Despite her best efforts, she often ripped the stamps anyway, in half, or in shreds, sometimes leaving a corner behind. Her father never scolded her, never got upset. Recalling her memories now was like peeling those soggy stamps as a child. She had to be very careful, to work slowly, but not too slowly, and to apply just the right amount of pressure. If she pulled too slowly, the memories ripped in half, and she lost them before she could remember in full. If she pulled too fast or too hard, she was left with only a trace, a strip, or a corner of the memories. She sat in her office with its bare bookshelves and cavernous ceilings, or sat at her desk in her bedroom, a thin white curtain separating her from the parking lot and the street beyond, and submerged herself into the bowl of water sticky with the residue of glue. It was only in this water that patterns began to come loose and emerge. She learned, for example, that she had two discrete sets of memories. Memories of school, and memories of home, or more accurately of homelessness. She does not know if she has a right to that word, if it is a matter of rights, of right and wrong, but it is the only word that she knows for the time at her aunt’s house and the time after they were kicked out of her aunt’s house. Kicked out is what she has always said to herself. She cannot remember actually ever saying it aloud, we were kicked out, my mother and my sisters and I. Perhaps someone else had said it aloud, her eldest sister. It sounds like something her sister would say. Flippant and bitter. It sounds like her sister, but she cannot hear her sister’s voice. She cannot hear any voices speaking of what happened. No one spoke of it in her family. It was another blank space in her memory, another tunnel of nothing that she had to crawl through on her hands and knees to emerge on the other side: in another bathroom, in another woman’s house. The woman is not an aunt, is not a relation in any way, is hardly even a friend of her mother’s. They are guests at the woman’s apartment, more so than they were at her aunt’s house. The situation is precarious. She does not like the woman’s broad face, does not trust her, but the woman tells her to take a bath, to enjoy it, to take as long as she wants, so she sits in the clean, white tub while her mother and the woman talk in the living room. It is only now, as an adult, that she realizes that the baths had been used to distract her, to appease her, the warm water like a sedative, a drug, so she would not ask questions, so she would not cry and make a scene. Maybe, she thinks, this is why she has never been able to enjoy a bath, even though she tried many times, knowing that it was one of the few pleasures allowed to women. Once, she had lit candles and incenses and poured out a jar of bath salts, but after only a few minutes in the tub, she convinced herself that her bathroom was haunted. She realizes now that she was right, the bathroom in her old apartment had been haunted, though not by a ghost as she thought. It had been haunted by her. One can be a ghost while one is still alive, she thinks, if one carries what one cannot remember. Empty memories, blank memories, absent memories. The empty but occupied space inside of her was a breeding ground for ghosts. Her middle sister believed that empty spaces invited ghosts to fill them: basements, attics, closets, stairwells, the space underneath a bed. As children, she and her middle sister slept together in the same bed, and they had a bedtime ritual of tucking their blankets underneath their feet. They did not tuck the blankets under the mattress—the boogeyman could have easily pulled them out that way. They tucked the blankets around their feet and underneath their legs. It was only when she felt her lower body wrapped tightly in this way that she felt safe. The boogeyman, she knows now, was also a ghost conjured by fear. They could not name what they feared, she and her sister, but they could name him: a boogeyman who lived under their bed. She did not remember feeling afraid at her aunt’s house, or in the places where they lived afterward, places she can hardly remember. The fear came only later, after she and her family found their own place to live. Or maybe the fear was always there, but it surfaced only after it was safe enough, when it knew that she could manage it—by tucking in her blankets, by avoiding baths. Lately, she has been hearing a ringing in her right ear. A buzzing, as if an animal were trapped inside, or as if she were hearing the sound of her own blood pounding. It is loudest when she awakes from a nightmare, or when she is working late at night, still at her desk while her husband is already in bed, or already asleep. The categories of illness baffle her. It is not a mark of mental illness to hear a buzzing that others cannot, but it is a mark of mental illness to hear voices that others cannot. The sound in her ears, she thinks, however, is a voice. The voice of the memories she cannot recall straining to be heard, which is why the sound fills her with panic, with the fear of drowning. She will drown in this blood in her ears, she thinks, in this water of stamp residue.
Her memories of school are clearer. At school, she had her own cubby and her own desk, where she could keep her things. She remembers clearly her plastic pink Barbie backpack and her red-white-and-blue tracksuit, which she knows she also wore on the flight she took to the United States. She knows this only because there is a photograph of her and her sisters posing at an airport in their brand-new clothes. Maybe the picture was taken at the airport in Bangkok or the airport on their layover, if they had a layover. She does not think it was taken at the San Francisco airport. When she looks at the photograph, she is surprised by how big she looks. A seven-year-old turning eight in three months. It is incred
ible to her how little she can remember of that time. She remembers the first rainy day in the second grade. They had recess indoors, and she wanted to play with the Lincoln Logs, which, it turned out, was a toy reserved for boys. Two boys did not want to share the logs with her, but a third came to her defense. How would you feel if you were in a new country and you didn’t have any friends yet and you didn’t speak the language? The boy had said all of that. A whole speech. The only thing was, she did speak the language, had been speaking it since she began speaking at all, but she did not tell this boy because she did not speak to boys.
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