There were other times at school, however, when no one defended her, when she was alone. The time her whole third-grade class laughed out loud because she could not correctly punctuate a date, could not understand why a comma needed to separate the month and the year, but not the month and the day. Even as a child, she had a strong sense of justice and felt it was unfair that only some things had to be cordoned off, excluded. Everyone or no one deserved to be loved. Then there was the time her classmate stole her and her sister’s entire collection of stickers, which the three of them had spent several months curating, through strategic trades and acquisitions. She had begged her sisters to let her bring the stickers to school with her, to show off to her classmates, and though it was their most precious possession and she was just a third grader, finally her sisters relented. It was a glorious day. With the sticker book in hand, she transformed into a real girl, even with her bowl haircut and her hand-me-down clothes, her foreignness and her strange homeschool manners. The other girls spoke to her for the first time, laughed with her, invited her to join their games. She was so drunk with happiness she was careless. She did not watch over her Barbie backpack and the book of stickers inside. She did not notice how one girl kept her occupied on the playground while the other girls performed the heist. Even when she returned from school that day, empty-handed, inconsolable, she did not know what had happened, how she lost the stickers. Her sisters had to explain it to her. Don’t ever trust anyone, they had said. And she knew what they meant by that: don’t trust anyone else, anyone who was not in their immediate family. So, for the rest of the year that she and her middle sister were at the same elementary school, she followed her sister everywhere. To her sister’s immense credit, despite being a full three grades ahead, she allowed it. She knows now what it must have cost her sister socially, to be seen with a third grader, but at the time, she did not understand what her sister had done for her sake. Unlike her, her sister was a beautiful child. She could have made friends. Because of her, however, her sister’s only friend was a girl whose four younger brothers also followed her around. She did not know how she knew this, but her sister’s friend’s family, like hers, was different. They dressed as if they belonged to a different time, or place, or perhaps it was something more abstract, like a different religion, or different politics. At the end of her sister’s time at elementary school, the friend’s family had to move away. She did not know why, but she knew it was not their choice. She has a clear memory of saying goodbye to them, the two parents, her sister’s friend, and her four younger brothers, all piled into a single car already packed with their things. The older she gets, the further she gets from this memory, the more she is convinced the memory is not a memory at all, but something she imagined. A goodbye she had created to fill the absence of a goodbye. The only thing that she remembers for certain is her mother saying it is bad luck to have a daughter and four sons. That was exactly how many children were needed for a funeral, a daughter to cry, and four sons to bear the coffin. Her sister’s friend left, as if in a funeral procession, and so did all the friends she managed to make in the years that followed. They moved away, to Stockton, to Sacramento, to cities in Colorado. It only occurred to her, years later, when she herself moved to Denver for graduate school, that her friends’ families had left the valley because they could no longer afford to live there. In Colorado, Californians were resented, were held responsible for rising home prices and the cost of living. Once, a bouncer at a bar jokingly denied her entry on account of her California driver’s license. It isn’t our fault, she wanted to say to him. All her friends moved away because, like her, their parents did not make much money. As a child, she did not know how to guess how much money her classmates’ parents made. She could not tell the difference between her clothes and theirs, her things and theirs. But most of the other children could already discriminate, and they avoided her like her poorness might be contagious. So, unlike most children, she loved class and hated recess. Those fifteen minutes when she was released into the playground were agony. She would walk slowly from the restroom to the water fountain and back and forth to fill the time. Soon, the other children caught on to what she was doing, and she had to change tactics. She took to walking briskly all over the school, from the library to the restroom, to one end of the playground and back to the water fountain. She found that if she walked quickly and with a sense of purpose, she became nearly invisible. Everyone assumed that she had somewhere to be, that she belonged. At dinner one night, while helping her brainstorm for a job interview, her husband remarks that the movement in her novel is interesting because it is pointless. The book is about movement itself, he says. It’s about process and not the end goal. She immediately and categorically rejects his interpretation, begins listing all of her characters’ motivations and desires. You are wrong, she wants to say, but she knows he is not, she knows that he saw, like he always did, the assumptions and experiences underlying her most opaque and lyrical work. She writes in the same way she got through recess, by creating arbitrary goals, excuses to move from one place to another, moving in circles, the movement itself an approximation of living, a mimicry of life. Someone else once said to her that the spaces one learns to navigate as a child stay with one for the rest of one’s life. This idea terrified her. She thought of the small, poorly lit, and eclectically furnished spaces she lived in growing up. Was she doomed to move through such dark and cluttered spaces for the rest of her life? Crawling up the stairs on all fours, hiding in the narrow space between the back of the couch and the bookshelf, locking herself in the only bathroom for a bit of privacy, walking out in the cold to do laundry. Once her family moved into a condominium with a washer and dryer in the unit, laundry became her favorite chore. Her mother would jokingly remind her not to put her parents in the wash too because she was in the habit of washing everything she touched, like King Midas, turning everything to gold. Except the change she wrought was not permanent, for soon after drying the clothes, sheets, and towels, she would have to wash them again, wash and dry, wash and dry, week after week. After her family moved into the condominium with the washer and dryer, her eldest and her middle sisters moved away to college. In fact, her eldest sister moved away even before they moved into the condominium, her eldest sister never had a chance to enjoy its amenities. Two and a half bathrooms, a kitchen with a window for ventilation, new paint, new carpets. The condominium was the first home her parents bought. It brought her immense relief to be living, for the first time in her life, in a home that properly belonged to her parents. The previous year in school, as an icebreaker, her sixth-grade homeroom teacher had had the class fill out a sheet of squares. Each square held a phrase inside it, like “has a sister,” or “likes action movies.” The assignment was to find a classmate to sign every square. She was roaming about the classroom, again with the illusion of purpose, though secretly waiting for someone to speak to her, her old habits from elementary school resurfacing on this first day of middle school, when a boy climbed on top of a desk and yelled, Who here is poor enough to live in an apartment? This was the same boy who, at the end of the school year, after a long series of substitute teachers, would instigate an anarchic uprising against the last helpless substitute. In her memory, he appears only twice. Once, atop the desk yelling, and once, at the end of the school year, diving after their class pet, a white rabbit named Snowball, grabbing for the rabbit’s hind legs, squeezing its little body too tightly. She went up to her homeroom teacher and asked if an apartment was the same thing as a condominium or a townhouse. Her teacher said no, an apartment was an apartment, a condominium was a condominium, and a townhouse was a townhouse. She did not know what the distinctions were, exactly, but she did not ask. When her family lived in Bangkok, she heard her parents use the word townhouse to describe where they lived. A townhouse, the house she grew up in, the first one she can remember. It had a small fenced-in yard, two bathrooms, two bedrooms, and a balcony on the second floor, which they would l
ine with candles in October, on the full moon, for the festival of lights. The townhouse also had concrete floors, squat toilets, and cockroaches in the downstairs bathroom and kitchen, but it was a house, built on the earth, with a front door that opened to the sunlight, and she had taken pride in that. The place she lived in the sixth grade, the place her family rented before they bought the condominium, was both better and worse than the townhouse in Bangkok. It had a smaller fenced-in plot of land, the fence built out of wood, and built high, the American way. There was no light but from the sky. Downstairs, there were no windows, and two pillars stood in the center of the space, like the bars of a prison cell, she thought, or the exposed skeleton of some prehistoric animal. There was a single bathroom that the whole family shared, and two bedrooms that opened onto a small balcony. It was not an apartment, despite being very small, and for that she was grateful. She did not have to sign the square. She did not have to admit to her classmates and to herself, I am poor enough to live in an apartment while the rest of you live in single-family homes with green lawns, a pool in the backyard, and large windows that look out onto everything. Some icebreaker that would have been. She does not remember the boy’s name, only that their class pet, Snowball, died, that summer after sixth grade, and she always held the boy responsible for the rabbit’s death.
And the townhouse on Weyburn Lane, the house that saved her from the boy’s cruelty, was also the house that saved her family from their homelessness, their living off of other people’s kindness or greed or desperation. There had been another house, near her future high school, where she and her mother and her sisters lived the summer after they were kicked out of her aunt’s house. The woman her mother rented from had left the country where she was born for the same reason her mother and father left the country where they were born, but unlike her parents, this woman had the paperwork to prove that she had to leave, and this paperwork gave her certain benefits her parents did not have. One benefit was the woman’s house. It did not belong to her, not really, but to the government. Later, she would come to learn that there were houses and even whole buildings like this in her town, where the government housed people with certain paperwork. The woman was elderly and lived with her granddaughter and her son. She remembers playing marbles with the granddaughter on the living room floor or under the kitchen table. Her only memories of the woman’s son, the granddaughter’s father or uncle, are from this same vantage point, under the dining table, from where she could only see his shoes. The man was the only one who wore shoes inside the house. She and her mother and her sisters had a room to themselves, with a lock on it, just like in her aunt’s house, but in this house, there was a small TV in their room, so she and her sisters spent the whole summer watching Sailor Moon marathons. She cannot remember why they did not play outside. Maybe it was not allowed, maybe it would have been suspicious to the neighbors to see so many children playing in the street when there was only supposed to be one child who lived in the house. She cannot remember her mother ever telling them they could not go outside, but she does remember knowing that they were not supposed to be there. The woman was not supposed to have renters. In this country, a single-family home was meant for a single family. Once, when people came to inspect the woman’s house, in the same way her eldest aunt used to come to inspect them in the past, she and her mother and her sisters had to hide quietly. She remembers sitting on the edge of the bed in the master bedroom, making no noise, making herself disappear. In her memory, the room is dark, it is evening, but they cannot turn the lights on because they are hiding. She remembers her father would call them from Bangkok regularly. On the phone, she begged him to take care of her favorite pillow, Big Pip, whom she had left behind. Her mother had said that if she brought Big Pip on the plane, the airport security in this country would cut him open looking for drugs. Years later, her middle sister said to her one day, Do you know why Daddy came back? No, she said. It’s because of what I said, her sister said. I told him no and no. Her sister meant in answer to the two questions their father always asked, Are you safe? Are you happy? No and no, her sister had said, and she could not remember saying yes and yes, though she must have said it, must have said it over and over again, every time. She said and did whatever her mother asked her to, because she wanted to be good, because she wanted to do the right thing. Her sister brought her favorite pillow—Small Lay, ironically Big Pip’s older brother—along on the plane and they did not cut him open at immigration. Her sister still sleeps with it today, a pillow their mother had sewn by hand years before her sister’s birth. Big Pip is decomposing slowly in a landfill somewhere, she thinks, where everything eventually ends up.
For her husband’s thirty-second birthday, they decide to drive from the small town where they live to another small town an hour away, in the mountains, where there is a large contemporary art museum. At this art museum, they wander upon an exhibit on light. The exhibit consists of a series of dark rooms that they enter through dark hallways. In one room they enter, there is a small pillow-shaped box of light projected onto the wall and an armchair placed in front of it. She recognizes the pillow shape as the shape of a television screen, a rectangle, with the four corners pinched in. Above the screen, two lights hang from the ceiling and emit a dim orange light into the corners of the room. The quality of light in the room immediately saddens her. She recognizes it with her body, though not yet with her mind. I was born in this room, she thinks, and I will die in this room. Born, not as a body, but as a consciousness, the way beings are born in the higher planes of the celestial realms. This light gave birth to her consciousness, she thinks, though there is no memory yet attached to this thought, this knowledge. She feels small inside the room, but already very old, as old as she will ever be, like the night she turned ten. She knew then that she had reached the end; it would only be double digits from now on. She knew she would not live to see a hundred. She and her husband sit on a bench in the back of the room and attempt to draw and write in their respective journals in the dim light. Other museum guests enter and exit the room. She hears a woman’s voice say, This one is not even worth it. A family with two little boys enters and the boys run right up to the box of light. You can’t even touch it, the bigger boy says, you can’t even put your fingers inside it. Before they leave the room, she walks up to the light and learns that the boy was right. What she had thought was a projection on the wall is actually a hollow, a pillow shape cut out of the wall, opening into an empty space. The light coming from that emptiness.
In the next room, she remembers what the dim light reminds her of. Her mother, or, more specifically, her mother’s bedroom. Her mother, who suffered from headaches and migraines and, later, from vertigo, always kept her room dimly lit. Often, her mother would lie completely in the dark, and it was only when she entered, when she pierced the skin of the darkness, that her mother would sometimes ask or permit her to turn on the single shaded lamp in the corner of the room. A lamp that not so much gave off light but gave shape to the darkness. She does not remember her mother experiencing pain when they lived in Bangkok, does not remember her mother complaining or asking for help. She does not remember her mother experiencing pain when they lived at her aunt’s house either, or at the elderly refugee’s house. In the same way that she did not experience fear until she was safe, her mother did not experience pain until she could afford to. It was only after her father returned to them and after they found a place to live, and her mother had a room to herself again, a room she did not have to share with three children, that her mother’s body could finally acknowledge the pain she endured. Her mother’s feet hurt from standing eight hours a day at the cash register. Her mother’s chest hurt, because her heart, which had always been weak since she was a child, could not endure the pain of having missed the death of her mother and the death of her brother in a country that was not only an ocean away, but also, more importantly, an expensive round-trip ticket away. Her mother’s head hurt from a day spent under fl
uorescent lights, a day riding buses, and waiting for them, in the sun, or in the cold, a cold that others in this country, this golden state, did not recognize as cold, but that her mother could not get used to. Her mother, who had previously never depended on her, never complained to her, now did so loudly and frequently, and she, loving her mother and wanting to be close to her, she, still a child, would often pad into her mother’s dark room, crawl into her mother’s warm bed, and, in the dark or in the dim light, attend to the needs of her mother’s body, pressing her mother’s chest with her small hands, as if resuscitating her mother, bringing her back to life with each push. When she tired of this, she would place her head on her mother’s chest, as if the weight of her small head could provide any relief from her mother’s pain. Her middle sister had the strongest hands and was usually their mother’s preferred masseuse, but when her sister wasn’t available, she would rub her mother’s feet, her small, delicate feet, as flat and thin as paper. She cannot remember when it happened, when her mother ended up in bed, in the dark room. In her memory there are only two mothers. The mother who was their sole protector, the mother who was always absent, always at work, always moving frantically from room to room, place to place. The clearest memory she has of this mother is of her running after a bus, sprinting, really, with a speed that astounded her and her sisters, who were trailing far behind. She and her sisters had not believed that they would catch the bus; they had already resigned themselves to waiting for the next one. She does not remember where they were going, where they had to be, or where the bus stop even was. All she can remember is her mother’s incredible speed, a speed she had not realized her mother was capable of. It was a moment that broke the frame she had of her mother, a moment that revealed her mother’s determination, strength, and her desperation, the limit of her self. Her mother could not wait for the next bus in the same way she and her sisters could. She could not believe that the mother supine in the darkness was the same one who had sprinted after and caught the bus. This second mother, the one whose husband had returned, whose family was reunited, who had done her duty as sole parent and who had survived, was motionless. She did not have language for this change in her mother. It was only years later, at the contemporary art museum, when she tells her husband that the dim lighting of the installation reminds her of her mother, that the language presents itself to her. How long did her depression last? he asks. I don’t know, she says, maybe a year, maybe several. She resists the word depression. A word her mother never used. Once, while they were sitting in the car in the parking lot of a strip mall, her mother had said, looking up at the pink sky, I feel things as well, even though I’m not a writer like you. Her mother felt things, felt them far more deeply than she did, and it was this knowledge, the knowledge of her mother’s wordless depth, that compelled her forward. Onto another memory, and another. Her father asking her and her sister to go to the park with him every day after school because he was unemployed. Her father teaching her how to ride a bike so she could get herself to school. Her middle sister telling her elaborate bedtime stories to cover the sound of their parents and their eldest sister shouting. Her eldest sister coming home one night escorted by the police. Her sisters teaching her how to do her makeup. Her grandmother offering English biscuits from a round red tin. The memories are endless. They tire her; she must rest, the way her mother did, so she and her husband lie down on the floor of another dim room and gaze at another box of light. The light is dark brown when they first enter the room, but slowly brightens to neon orange. If she dwells in her dim memories long enough, she thinks, maybe something will lighten in them too. She lies on the floor, feeling the soft weight of her husband’s head against her chest, and waits. But the memories, unlike the box of light, do not brighten under her gaze, but grow dimmer and gauzier. She strains to distinguish them, and then she lets them go.
Names for Light Page 12