The Unpassing
Page 22
* * *
I WENT TO TAIWAN, trying to find the village that lived in my memory of my mother’s memory. Those rocks, those cliffs, those hunched old women scraping limpets and mussels at low tide. I slept on my aunt’s floor. We walked the shore often. Ropes of seaweed covered what little sand there was and housed thousands of jumping bugs. They made the seaweed tremble.
We gazed at the cloudy water. “Have you ever seen a whale?” I asked.
“They’re out there,” my aunt said. “I believe they are.”
My aunt didn’t look like my mother at all. There was none of my mother’s smallness, quickness, or nervousness. My aunt had large, muscular arms and a thick blanket of straight black hair that looked like it belonged to someone half her age.
Her breakfast spreads intimidated me. She brought out ramekins of salted, shredded fish, platters of deep-fried silver pomfret or yellow croaker, crab legs, and broths made by simmering small oysters and clams in water. Sometimes she served the broth in big, upturned crab shells. She showed me how to take a chopstick and detach the yellow and gray organs from the shell, mixing them into the soup for flavor. When I tilted the shell like a bowl and drank, she nodded. “That’s right,” my aunt said. “Keep at it.” She had no children. Her gaze on me was hungry, and she broke it only to suck an oyster or clam shell clean and add it to the pile on the table. They clicked like poker chips.
Week after week of eating like that, shellfish and fish at every meal and little else, my lips grew fat and the skin on my face flamed and thickened. Welts appeared on my arms and legs.
And why are you still here, people asked. How long are you staying? On the crooked street outside my aunt’s house, a little girl fed a dog with teats hanging to the ground. When she saw me, she buried her face in the dog’s matted neck and laughed. “Huan-á,” she whispered. A phrase reserved for white Westerners. Halfway between foreigner and barbarian.
I’d thought I might live there. I had imagined the village as a home I couldn’t visualize but that my body would recall. Some smells—fish-heavy trash, reused cooking oil, the damp remains of a typhoon—were like buried memories. I luxuriated in the humidity, the temperate breeze. But the allergies. The language. The sidelong glances. It was a kind of violence, what my father had done. He had brought us to a place we didn’t belong, and taken us from a place we did. Now we yearned for all places and found peace in none.
* * *
THE YEAR SHE DIED, my mother asked me to cut her hair. In her studio in Seattle, she showed me the scissors she used for regular household tasks. She held them by the blades. “Help me. Just a trim in the back,” she said.
“There’s a salon down the street,” I said. “It’s a five-minute walk.”
“They want thirty dollars from me,” she said.
“You need hair-cutting scissors to cut hair.”
“What’s the difference?”
“There’s a difference.”
For weeks my mother had been asking me for a haircut. My reluctance had to do with her hair itself; it was getting sparse. Her part had widened, exposing a distinct strip of scalp, and near her forehead there was an especially disturbing bare patch. It shone. When I glimpsed that patch full-on, it felt like I’d seen something I shouldn’t have.
I spread out a layer of overlapping newspapers in the kitchen and lowered a chair onto the center. My mother was prim as she settled herself on it and perched her hands on her knees. But when I did nothing, she grunted in exasperation. “Just cut straight across,” she said, and made a short chopping motion behind her head.
I pinched a thin section of her hair between my fingers and pulled it flat. It was variegated gray. The white strands were especially wayward. As an experiment, I cut off the smallest length I could, maybe a quarter centimeter, and a sprinkling of hair dust fell from my fingertips.
My mother twisted her head back and examined the newspapered floor. “Don’t be a coward.”
“Turn around,” I said.
“That’s not going to do it. I want it off my neck.”
“Get someone else to do it,” I muttered as I made the next cut. But I knew she didn’t have anyone else. Her friends had not lasted, and her children had scattered.
“Your mood is bad,” she said. She used the phrase “sim-tsîng,” which broken down into its two words meant “situation of the heart.”
I stopped cutting. “This is how I am.”
“I know it,” she said. I couldn’t see her face, but her voice had dropped.
Did she mean that she knew—even knew it well—this enduring strain of unrest?
Later, I let myself into her cramped studio with a bag of groceries. The lights were off, though the day was on the wane. A feeble glow entered from the kitchen windows. From the door, I could see my mother’s figure in the armchair by her bed. Both of her feet were pressed into the carpet. She was making a rhythmic movement, raising one hand above her head and flicking her wrist.
I stepped closer to turn on the lights but stopped. Her fingers, pinched together, tossed something to the carpet. While I watched, she repeated the gesture six or seven more times, with an air of absentmindedness. She stared right at the old television, which was off. What other permutations of her life would have led her to this point? This plucking of the hair, strand by strand. She was making herself bald, and I wasn’t sure she knew it.
Silently, I approached. I didn’t touch her, but I should have. Such things were possible at dusk, when the lights were off and our minds were sliding through time. We had been unthinking with our movements once, bed-hopping, kicking, clutching. She had run along the water with me, the sky opening wider and wider to accommodate us. In her way, she’d loved that place.
I gazed upon the ravages of my mother’s hair. It used to be thick and willful. I thought of a patch of barren dirt. Then I thought of the lush, long grasses that had lived at the border of our woods, and how we had rustled them as children. We plucked their tips and gathered them into small brushes, and Ruby painted our faces with them, clumsily dusting our foreheads, cheeks, eyelids. “Before, you were ugly,” she said. She held our chins with her small, firm hand. “Now you are beautiful.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m enormously grateful to Emily Bell and Jackson Howard for taking on this quiet, small thing, and for understanding and bettering it so thoroughly. Thank you also to Lauren Roberts and the team at FSG for their care, and to Richard Abate and Rachel Kim for a potent mix of insight, real talk, and advocacy.
The Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, Henfield Foundation, Truman Capote Literary Trust, James Jones Literary Society, and Headlands Center for the Arts kept me going with generous support and recognition, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop opened a world to me. I’m glad for the friendly stewards of these institutions, especially Holly Blake, Nick Taylor, Jan Zenisek, Deb West, and Connie Brothers.
These mentors mattered very much to me: Charlie D’Ambrosio, who gave colossal gifts of time and unsparing attention; Ethan Canin, who delivered instruction and kindness in equal measure; and of course Sam Chang, who’s known me and guided me since I was a pup. Others have left marks as well: Marilynne Robinson, Yiyun Li, Sara Houghteling, Kevin Brockmeier, Leah Price, Daniel Bosch, Pam Houston, and Joshua Mohr. Twenty years ago, Patricia Powell set me on this path.
For reading this novel in its garbled state, I’m indebted to D. Wystan Owen, whose compassion (for characters and author alike) saved this book from the recycling bin, and Alex Madison, who saw the things I couldn’t see and constantly held out her hand. Alongside these two, Jamel Brinkley and Sarah Frye supplied therapy, hilarity, and white lies that sustained me through the writing. Garth Greenwell showed me true generosity and is my model of kindness and grace.
Iowa City would have been a lonely place without Willa B. Richards, who accompanied and inspired me. I’m also grateful for the friendship, strangeness, and brilliance of Yaa Gyasi, Lakiesha Carr, Nyuol Lueth Tong, Will Shih
, Noel Carver, Jake Andrews, Vanessa Roveto, Sophia Lin, and Ellen Kamoe. The enthusiasm of Magogodi Makhene and Sorrel Westbrook-Wilson pushed me onward.
The inexhaustible faith of old friends came in handy when I ran low; thank you to Charlie Black, John Hsu, Jonathan Fuentes, Beth Hillman Tagawa, June Rhee, Rachael Trapuzzano Pruitt, Roger Huang, Daniel Nazer, Kate Leahy, Wendy Yu, Gloria Huang, and many others. Every single day, Frances Chen and Adrian Lu gave me a swift kick in the pants, while Sarah Cove cheered from afar.
Daniel Mosteller, Greg Schmeller, Christopher Busch, and Chieh-Ting Yeh answered odd questions with patience. Thanks also to those who welcomed me to Anchorage in 2004, particularly Gail Voigtlander, Laura Sarcone, and Ambler Stephenson. The exuberant Anchorage Daily News articles of the 1980s supplied a little fodder while greatly brightening my days.
At the heart of it all: thank you to Alan and Bin-Bin, my little family, my whole world, my home.
A Note About the Author
Chia-Chia Lin is a graduate of Harvard College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review and other journals. The Unpassing is her first novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2019 by Chia-Chia Lin
All rights reserved
First edition, 2019
Art on title-page spread by June Park
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71945-6
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