Appropriately enough, the movie was Singles. When it was over, my friend Bryan and I walked out of the theater and saw Rolf in all his near-albino glory glowing there under the marquee with his friend Gerry. Rolf and I exchanged phone numbers, and after some small talk, we walked off in different directions.
Anyway, so get this miracle: he called me two days later, which is a world record when it comes to dating. We made a plan to go out to dinner that weekend, and a few days later when I showed up at his apartment I was happy to find that it was impeccably clean. From there we set off to walk to a nearby restaurant, and on the sidewalk in front of his place he said, “Would it be okay if I put my arm around you while we walk to the restaurant?”
My goodness. That was so wonderful and old-fashioned that I thought we were two leotard-clad midgets in a black-and-white movie embarking on a whirlwind circus romance. I said yes, and off we went.
After dinner we returned to his apartment, and I’m so glad to say that he wasn’t one of those guys who shuffled his feet and waited for me to do everything. He said, “Do you want to watch TV?” and I replied, “Okay.” So then he turned on The Simpsons and promptly pulled me down onto the bed.
Excellent, Smithers.
In the following months, Rolf and I spent a lot of time together, having fun without a lot of money. We walked in Golden Gate Park, collected sand dollars on Ocean Beach, went on road trips, and generally just goofed around.
And as weird as it sounds, I had never just goofed around. It hadn’t occurred to me that having fun was something that could come naturally. Before, “having fun” was just one more thing I had to make time for, like studying. I did not look forward to the effort it always seemed to require. But with Rolf, I discovered that having fun wasn’t that bad, after all.
Previously, I had felt vague satisfaction when I was winning or achieving something, but what was this new madness? Being content by just hanging out was a freaking revelation. We swam in the American River, made yummy sandwiches, spent time reading, and watched the finest movies his noncable TV could provide. Several months into our relationship, I was sitting on the futon in Rolf’s apartment, watching Kindergarten Cop. It was then, strangely, that I came to the slow, sinking realization that maybe I was in L.O.V.E.
What the hell is wrong with me? I thought. I’m sitting here watching this crappy movie, and I’m actually feeling pretty good. I am not even doing anything. Why do I feel not just good, but, um, happy?
It was a very disturbing feeling. Honey Pie was in the kitchen making us milkshakes, and I felt as content as I’d ever been.
So naturally my dad tried to bust us up. He took me to a Chinese restaurant and said, “You’ve got to stop seeing him. He’s too old.”
I said, “Aren’t you eight years older than Mom?”
“That’s different.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is.”
I’m not sure if what my dad meant to say was that Rolf wasn’t Chinese. If he did, he didn’t go there. From then on, he took the high road, which was silence. My mom, on the other hand, didn’t take the high road.
The Reamer sort of lost her mind and yelled, “What are you doing? You’re no better than a prostitute!”
Love you, too, Mom.
Obviously at her wit’s end, she deployed her youngest sister, Deanna, to talk to me. My aunt picked me up in her dazzling, two-tone Mercedes-Benz that she has since totaled and told me several things:
1. If I didn’t drive a Mercedes-Benz by the time I turned thirty years old, I was a complete loser.
2. I shouldn’t be with one guy, I should “screw around” while I still could.
3. I should break up with him so that she and I could party.
You know, thanks, Auntie, but I don’t really want to drive around in your Benz and party with you. Just wanna stay home with my lumbering albino and watch The X-Files. But thanks, anyway!
Thankfully, my brothers were on my side. What was not to like about Rolf? He could throw a football, play golf, and talk sports statistics for hours. Many, many hours. And to them, that was a good thing. Sure, he drove a crappy Sentra, but at least he knew to wear long pants and a long-sleeved shirt to dinner to meet my parents. Heck, he even cleaned the bread crumbs off the tablecloth with his own crumber that he brought along in his pocket. Do you know what a crumber is? It’s that little metal thing that waiters use to comb the detritus off the table, and I never knew any regular person who carried around one of those things. What a freak! He was my freak.
Nowadays, my parents really don’t like to acknowledge how shortsighted they’d been. He vacuums the cars, digs ditches for them, helps put the Christmas lights on the roof, and does all the other tasks that no one else wants to do. He shucks all the oysters, and cracks the Dungeness crab at dinner, then cleans up all the guts and stinky stuff. When my brother’s Australian Shepherd got skunked on Christmas Eve, it was Rolf who took a shower with the dog and cleaned her up. When another pet bolted into the forest on a rainy night, it was Rolf who went after him. At a restaurant where there was no elevator, he carried my grandmother up two flights of stairs, aluminum walker and all, since she refused to let go of it and no one could wrest the cumbersome contraption from her iron grip. And yet another time, Rolf unloaded countless crates of decorations and beverages for my brother’s wedding by double-parking several cars in succession in Chinatown in a torrential downpour. You would have thought he was a seasoned valet at Trader Vic’s. All these examples serve to illustrate how Rolf will do all that needs to be done. He might be sweating like a pig, but he would never make you feel like he wasn’t happy to help you. He is the ultimate Chinese son-in-law. Except that he’s so white he’s almost see-through.
On the upside, after seventeen years of marriage, my husband’s name has finally been changed. When my relatives used to see him at Chinese banquets, everyone would say, “Who’s that white guy?” But after so many years of seeing his nonblack head in the crowd, now they just say, “There’s that white guy.”
Interestingly, although my parents had had their doubts, it was my grandma Lucy who was always very enthusiastic about Rolf. Maybe because she had survived bombs falling on her head in China, she knew some things weren’t worth getting upset about. She said to me once, “He is very . . . refined.”
“Refined?” I sort of wanted to laugh. She made it sound like he drank fine wines with his pinkie in the air.
“Yes. His mother is teacher so he is very refined.”
Okay, Pau Pau, if you say so. I wasn’t going to dispel any good things she thought about him. She added, “It okay that he not Chinese. You are in love, so it okay.”
She was completely nonchalant, and unconcerned about Rolf’s whiteness. He had mopped her kitchen floor so she was all good with him. After our little chat, she sat with an unconcerned look on her face, and just went back to watching Gunsmoke.
And the rest is history. When the family matriarch gives a thumbs-up to your kind, sweaty, pastel-hued primate, your parents and party-loving auntie just have to shut their yaps.
13
Grandma Lucy on the Page
After graduating from UC Berkeley, I was a butterball bred for high achievement, but I didn’t have any idea how I was going to get where I wanted. I held a series of jobs, including five years as a museum bookstore clerk, a year as a high school admissions officer, and six months as a customer service representative at Levi Strauss & Co. I’d always wanted to be a writer and thought a parody called Wage Slave Luck Club might make a million dollars. Nonetheless, despite a yearning for a more artistic life, I didn’t know how to commit myself to writing while simultaneously earning a living. It was easy to tell myself I was too busy to write. A person could go on for years telling herself that.
But in February 2000, my grandma Lucy died. I was afraid that I would too soon forget how great she was—so kind, quirky, and matter-of-fact. So I started writing little remembrances of her. I wrote little
stuff like how she picked her teeth behind one cupped hand and how she’d sometimes just laugh in someone’s face when she knew they were full of hot air. Because she was the essence of real, all-encompassing love in my life, I wanted to do her memory justice by recalling her details with clarity and authenticity. My writing that came from thinking about her was something I finally felt was truly honest, not boring or phony. I didn’t want to be lazy about remembering her. I wanted to get it right. I was writing about my grandmother, the original Lucy. She was my only Lucy, before my daughter.
I didn’t know then that the paragraphs I was writing would become my first book, The Dim Sum of All Things. I found that having one idea led me to another, and then another. I just kept going. I told myself I didn’t need to know where I was going, but it was just important to keep going. I didn’t have it all planned out.
So I wrote about her in all the in-between times of my life. Back then, my husband was in graduate school, and while he studied, at home I would write just a paragraph or two between doing dishes or folding laundry. I was an office manager at Mother Jones magazine, and I jotted down ideas when I was on my fifteen-minute break at work, or even when I was on the bus, scribbling two-word phrases on my Muni transfers.
Frankly, my life greatly resembled that of the book’s main character, Lindsey Owyang. I was a receptionist and office manager whose creative bursts at work were relegated to posting pithy threats on the vending machine about not leaving Diet Cokes in the freezer to eventually explode all over the frozen packets of tofu burgers.
In between unjamming the copier and fulfilling the sandwich needs of my superiors, I harbored my secret wish of becoming a writer:
In the middle of the night Lindsey awoke and could not get back to sleep. She felt restless and hyperawake, as if she had dreamed something thrilling but could now not remember no matter how hard she tried to conjure the dream back. She flipped out of her pink sheets and grabbed her Chococat notebook and poised a pen above the page, willing herself to remember.
It was times like these that Lindsey knew she wanted to be a novelist, but the more she tried to put words down on paper, the only thing she could visualize was the ink drying up inside the pen’s cartridge.
From her vanity she gazed out the window at the night sky that was dark and inky, but clear. She felt as if she were the only one who might at this very moment be noticing that the Financial District now lay perfectly still like a geometric pack of stars and galaxies that floated against dark blue glass. She stared for a long time at the impersonal city view, a night skyline of baby supernovas that burned its image in her head like a silent film she had watched long ago.
For a half an hour Lindsey sat wide awake. Eventually she did begin to get sleepy again, and she accepted the gentle pull that drooped her eyelids like velvet curtains. She slipped back under her blankets, and as she lay her head against the pillow, her aspirations, like loose rocks in the caves at Ocean Beach, washed back into a crevice of her mind where they would have to wait, dormant until the next wakeful night.
That part of Lindsey Owyang’s character was me, and in retrospect, I recognize now that my real motivation to write a novel began when I started to write about my grandmother. And although I hadn’t consciously realized it, apparently I had a lot to say about being Chinese. Having spent so many years trying to identify myself without the Chinese thing, interestingly, the themes of identity and feeling caught in the middle of two cultures was exactly what ended up propelling me.
Every day it became clearer to me that I needed to write a book about being Chinese American. I actually felt sick to my stomach sometimes, nauseated by anxiety and ambition. At Browser Books on Fillmore Street I once saw Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter on the shelf and had to run out and immediately go to the bathroom next door at Peet’s Coffee. When going to a bookstore spelled immediate bowel problems, I knew I needed either a writing career or a lifetime supply of Pepto-Bismol.
At night I would sneak out of the bedroom as Rolf slept, and I’d write stuff in the kitchen. I wrote descriptions, small paragraphs, single sentences, or single words that happened to be on my mind that day. It was something, and that something was better than nothing. I told myself it was okay not to have a master plan, or even an end result in mind. I remember one night I just got out of bed and wrote down some stuff I was remembering about my grandmother:
One time I accompanied Pau Pau to Chinatown to buy groceries. I went to her apartment but she wasn’t ready yet. I found her in her room standing in her high-waisted granny underwear and a long-sleeved silk undershirt. She pulled on a pair of Jordache jeans and a T-shirt that said FOXY LADY, which my aunt had given her as hand-me-downs from her disco days. Pau Pau topped off the outfit with a polar fleece vest and her favorite quilted jacket.
Pau Pau wore her salt-and-pepper hair in a bouffant. It used to be as big and poufy as Angela Davis’s afro in the 1970s, but now her perm hovered about three inches from her scalp, bringing her height to just about five feet tall. After lacing up her Famolares, she went to a nearby chair and reached into the pockets of her previous day’s pants, which were draped over the back. She pulled out fistfuls of hundred-dollar bills and stuffed them into the pockets of the pants she was wearing.
“You shouldn’t carry that much cash with you,” I said.
“What’s big deal?” she asked. “Is just mah-jongg money.”
I had no idea how or when I was going to use this description, but I felt the need to remember it. I suspended judgment and told myself not to worry about the outcome. It was many months later that I incorporated these paragraphs into a scene with Lindsey going shopping with her grandmother. But if I had never written this little passage, maybe I never would have gotten started. And if I hadn’t first taken those small steps in writing remembrances of my grandmother, The Dim Sum of All Things would not have existed. Years later, when I would do book readings in stores, it was always so flattering when people would say, “The character of Pau Pau was so real. She made the book come alive.”
And I owe it to her that my writing life came alive. Growing up in the 1970s with frequent trips to San Francisco’s Chinatown, I strolled with my grandma Lucy, my pau pau, under neon signs that crackled with electricity and spelled out IMPERIAL, EMPRESS, COCA-COLA, FAR EAST, CHOW MEIN, and PEPSI. The Transamerica Pyramid rose up from the east of the Financial District, and cable cars click-clacked straight up California Street like the city’s own roller coaster. From the same corner you could see pagoda-shaped turquoise and red streetlamps, and lacquered crimson pillars encircled by golden dragons just like the columns found in the Forbidden City in Beijing. But instead of marking the entrance to the Temple of Heaven, these stately embellishments marked the front door to the neighborhood’s temple of finance, the Bank of America.
Across the street was a giant cross at Old St. Mary’s Catholic Church, and everywhere there were signs in both English and Chinese, a neon peacock, and tourist shops selling kimonos displayed on mannequins standing in elegant poses. None of the mannequins were Chinese; they were all white, like gigantic Barbie dolls. You’d think an impressionable child might be confounded by all the conflicting imagery, the cacophony of sounds resulting from the constant colliding of two disparate languages. What did I see, hear, and experience in that day-to-day, back-and-forth existence between American life and being Chinese? Was it confusing? Horrifying? Outrageous?
No, Kind Reader.
It was fabulous.
14
Misery Is Not a Contest
At my grandma Lucy’s funeral I was a blubbering mess, as were all my mother’s sisters. At the end of a Chinese service, it is customary for people to line up and each approach the casket to bow three times to the deceased to pay final respects and to say good-bye. While my aunties and uncle spontaneously engaged in a collective grief circle, through my teary haze I noticed they were all sort of hovering, waiting for my mother to join them. In that horrible moment, they so
mehow needed her despair to match theirs, to make the intense farewell to my grandmother complete.
Through my own sadness and soggy Kleenex, I watched this scenario unfold. My mother is the least sentimental of her siblings, and I wondered what was going through her sisters’ and brother’s minds as they wailed with fervor and she stood sad, but still stoic. Their sorrow was real, of course, but was hers any less so because she held in her emotions? Demonstrative outbursts are cathartic, but as I think back now, I wonder if there wasn’t also a smidgen of competition going on, as if my mother’s siblings were each trying to imply, “Mom and I were the closest, and to prove it, I am going to cry the loudest.”
It would be facile to say that my mother’s lack of tears was proof of a lack of connection between her and her own mother. However, these days, other facets of my mother’s relationship with her own parents come to my mind. In the years of both my grandparents’ illnesses and subsequent deaths, it now occurs to me that it had always been my mother who drove them to appointments, got their prescriptions refilled, argued bills on their behalf, completed various chunks of paperwork, and took responsibility for all the tedious, complicated tasks and duties of theirs that would have otherwise fallen through the cracks had she not stepped up. Someone had to be responsible. Most likely, she didn’t even want to be the one, but she stepped up to the plate. Over and over again.
My mother was also the busiest of her siblings during that time. As in their earlier years, while her sisters were pursuing pleasures, she, again, was the stalwart. Yes, maybe she was crabby. And difficult. And mad. But as I think back, she was working a full-time job, was still dealing with us three kids as we were each successively leaving the nest, and she was probably going through menopause. But despite these challenges and all her daily duties, there is no way to deny the fact that the Reamer. Got. Things. Done.
Tiger Babies Strike Back Page 7