by Simon Han
This is what Liang remembered, walking back from Jerry’s house: dogs howling in the courtyard as rain struck fur. The air smelled of mud and trash from the cornfields. On humid, moonless nights, it became harder to breathe. Alone, his grandfather did nothing to expand the walls around them. He carried the pocks and creases of history on his face, but no photographs to remember Liang’s parents, to set against altars of incense and fruit and candy and watered-down liquor. At least Liang could see his father through his grandfather: the same dramatic slope of the shoulders, tapering off to smooth and hairless arms. He could look at himself, too: with a mouth and belly that resembled his father’s, Liang always looked full, the other villagers would say. What was the boy filling his stomach with, if not his father’s yellow wine?
You and your father. You and your father. No one ever mentioned his mother.
“Do I have her eyes? Her nose?” Liang would ask his grandfather at dinner.
“Quiet,” the old man would say. “Food’s getting cold.”
Here, now, Liang’s mother’s moon still evaded him. He searched for it on Plano’s main roads, the ones with island medians. He walked farther from the low, castlelike walls that surrounded Montmartre. Many of Plano’s residential communities were enclosed by stone walls, even if they didn’t boast gated entrances. Anyone could come and go as they pleased. The walls serve an aesthetic, or perhaps a symbolic function, a categorical separation of neighborhood streets from city roads.
Cars passed without slowing. Liang could not remember the last time he had driven at this time of night and seen someone walking down this businessless stretch on Legacy. Maybe he had also passed them without slowing.
He tried to count the sidewalk squares and kept losing track. It was hard to count sidewalk squares when he kept looking up. How was it that a sky so sprawling could offer so little to see? During this hour of the night when nothing moved forward or backward, he could have crossed one hundred sidewalk squares or one thousand. At some point Plano Star Care manifested around a corner, the featured business in a familiar strip mall. A banner under the school’s illuminated sign read little geniuses welcome.
He stopped, as if to see where his feet would take him. To his left, on the other side of Sheridan, past a long field of clovers, would be Logan Elementary, Jack’s old school. Next to the school there would be a playground and another stretch of machine-fed blackland prairie, and beyond that an enclave with a small pond where Liang had once spent an afternoon with Jack.
Yes, he had once spent an afternoon there with Jack. The boy Patty called her jīn gǒu. He’d sat on the bank of the pond with him that day, trying to clear the fog between them. One oak tree had burls bigger than his head. Another had fallen, the break from the trunk shaved white like a husked coconut. There was something reassuring about the place, about being led there by Jack. Still, all these years later, Liang could not remember what the two of them had talked about that afternoon. He could not imagine a single line from the conversation they’d surely had. At some point, he’d stared at his son, trying to recognize himself in him. The boy did not have his eyes or his nose, Liang had thought to himself. He did not have his father in him at all.
Now it dawned on Liang that it had taken him all night to even think of Jack. He’d been so fixated on how to prove himself to Patty and what to do about the Annabel problem that Jack had hardly crossed his mind. As Liang made his way past Plano Star Care and the path that led to Logan Elementary, this realization sobered him. Scared him. He tried not to think about what he hadn’t thought about as he finally turned in to his community. Hints of moss climbed up the section of the wall where the name Huntington Villa was engraved. He looked above the Neighborhood Crime Watch sign, but still no moon. Between the houses, no moon. Of course, his mother had never lived on the moon. She’d become, as he learned in primary school, another iteration of myth. The moon goddess Cháng’é drank the world’s last two elixirs of immortality, consigning herself to an eternity of watching bodies warring from the night sky. In some stories, she became Chairman Mao’s late wife, the first of many martyrs to die at the hands of the cruel Guómíndǎng. And Liang’s father? Not the victim, but the villain.
Cháng’é, Liang’s mother. The first person to leave Liang, which made her, in a twisted way, the person he felt closest to. If he could remember his mother as anyone, even as a stain on the moon, then she could always be around.
Only now she was gone. Really gone. Maybe that did make her the villain. Your mother left us, his father always said. It was her choice. Liang turned onto Plimpton Court, his melancholy sharpening into anger. What had he done to deserve these blisters on his heels? His mouth was so parched he was tempted to lap up the spray from the sprinklers he passed. He wobbled up the cobbled pathway to his house, only to discover that his keys were not in his pocket. He must have left them at Jerry’s. The others had probably tried to call him. Where was his phone?
He tried the backyard instead. Maybe Patty had left the back door unlocked. How easy it would be for anyone to do this, he thought, as he unlatched the gate.
The backyard was the one space in their house that he and Patty had left largely untouched. The crabgrass had the same off-yellow tint during all seasons, a familiar Velcro texture. One fourth of an acre so bare even the rabbits didn’t visit. Why had he bothered having anyone cut the lawn?
Liang crossed over the grass. How would it feel to leave it tall, dandelions tickling his shins? He had a sudden desire to take off his shoes and socks, to feel with his bare feet. If the back door wasn’t unlocked, he would sleep out here, looking beyond the tapered ends of the fence planks, each one pointing to a different cluster of stars. He would wake up to the moon fading into daylight.
When he tried to bend down to reach for his shoe, he lurched forward, almost falling to the ground. He gathered himself. Why were his shoes wet? There was a figure by the back door. The figure moved closer and became Jack.
“Dad?” The boy was wearing his pajamas and his mother’s slippers. Liang wondered if he had come out to join him, to sleep under the stars together. Then he saw the concern on Jack’s face, a kind of concern too old for a boy, and he knew that Jack had come out to retrieve him.
“Oh,” Liang said. But wait. He was not the kind of father who staggered home every day with the front of his shirt drenched in beer and fire in his eyes, the person you had to throw a blanket over when he plopped stomach down on the couch. Whatever Jack was seeing, it wasn’t right.
I was looking for the moon, Liang wanted to say.
“I can’t find my keys,” he said instead.
Jack put his hands in his pockets, as if the keys might somehow be there. Then he took his hands out. “You could’ve used the doorbell.”
The boy must have known why Liang hadn’t. That was why Jack was lowering his voice, his mother and sister sleeping on the other side of one of the shuttered windows. Don’t be embarrassed, Jack seemed to be saying with his eyes.
“Mom was worried,” said Jack.
“Nothing to worry,” said Liang.
“Don’t you want to come inside?”
“Yes, but . . .” Liang shifted his weight from foot to foot, his shoes making wet, squishing sounds. He had a vague memory of walking into a puddle right before coming here, formed from the mix of sprinkler runoff and one of the leaking trash bins a neighbor had wheeled out to the sidewalk. If only he could get these shoes off. He tried and failed again to bend over. There could be nothing worse than falling in front of his son. He stared at his shoes, as if willing them to come off. When he looked up, Jack was smiling.
“What’s so funny?”
“That sound. It’s like your shoes are farting.”
So this was what Jack saw in him: not a shǎzi—a child. A farting cartoon of a man. Liang’s son, treating him as if he were his wayward little brother. Jack was coming closer. A dim light env
eloped his face, and Liang did not need to look up to know that the moon had finally made an appearance. As he watched Jack’s narrow eyes come into focus, his regal nose, a realization came to Liang. He did not know whether to be awed or horrified by the thought, only amazed that it had never before crossed his mind. It was then that the boy crouched down and reached for one of Liang’s shoes, and Liang recoiled and slapped his hand away.
In the quiet, the slap reverberated. It had been a long time since Liang had heard a sound so loud. The slap had sent Jack’s arm swinging, and as if in one fluid motion, Jack rewound his arm and dropped his hand to his side. Liang could see Jack’s other hand crossing over and rubbing the spot where Liang had touched. Slapped. A tiny slap. The boy was acting as dramatic as his sister did, and for what? To make his father feel worse? Liang’s hand was not a willow switch. Other parents slapped butts, even faces.
He thought of apologizing, but to do so would be to make all this a bigger deal than it was. Jack seemed to have already recovered, standing before him. The realization that had come to Liang was that Jack did not look like him because he looked like Liang’s mother. A woman neither of them had ever seen.
Yes, that was Jack. Jack was his mother. And here was little boy Liang, plopping himself on the grass. He yanked at the laces, then pulled at the shoes without untying them. Eventually he got them off. Jack backed away, as if waiting for Liang to turn back into the father and give him permission to take his leave. Just as Liang was about to give it, Jack asked, “Something to drink?”
“Beer?” Liang grinned, but the boy did not laugh.
Inside, Liang lumbered over to the kitchen and drank straight from the faucet. Jack was in the middle of taking a glass out of the dishwasher but Liang waved him off. He went back for another gulp from the faucet, and another. Jack looked on as if he had something to say. He put the glass in the cabinet and stood there.
“Go back to sleep,” Liang said.
“Okay. Cool.” As Jack walked away, he muttered something else that Liang did not catch. Jack could not go back to sleep because he had stayed up all night waiting for his father, but Liang did not know this. He listened to the boy’s soft thumping steps and thought how it was past his bedtime.
By the time Liang got his pants off and flopped into bed, the nightstand clock read 1:45 a.m. His head throbbed and the red numbers stared out at him with judgment. He considered waking Patty to tell her that he was back. Or maybe Annabel, so the girl would say Daddy, Daddy. It would be nice to hear that, especially now. But the two lay next to each other sound asleep, and they did not move.
Patty and Annabel would leave him one day. Jack would leave him one day. When the legendary archer Hòu Yì watched Cháng’é drift away into immortality, had the archer considered that his body carried behind it the gust that sent her off in the first place? That he was the reason she was leaving?
A flap of the heavy curtain had been pulled back from the window, revealing the soft box glow from the moon. Liang thought of walking over to take a closer look, but the sheets were cool, and the bodies on the bed were warm. There was nothing he needed to do for now. When Patty woke up in a few hours, it would be her first day off from work in half a year, and she would be full of plans.
Later, in a long line to check out at Costco, she would reveal to him that she had invited Elsie’s parents, of all people, to their Thanksgiving party. She had extended—what did they call it?—an olive branch. If she was going to bring up the sensitive issue concerning their daughters, she might as well do it over mashed potatoes and that barbecue pork Liang still needed to preorder from First Chinese Imperial.
“Excuse me,” someone behind him and Patty in line would say.
But they would not move, not at first.
5
Jack’s parents had not even prepared a turkey. They spoke of “Thanksgiving” the way they spoke of the “red” in “red light,” as a word that made one thing different from another, otherwise similar thing. On the day of the party, their house announced to the others on Plimpton Court, we have company, too—more company than you do. None of the neighbors had been invited, not even the Martinezes, whose son, Marco, a school pariah ever since his failed push-ups debacle, Jack now avoided.
It had been a long fall, made worse by the general feeling that fall had not ended, and the holidays were an illusion. His parents had argued bitterly about dinnerware and whether or not to move the dining table from storage into the playroom. (Did this mean she no longer had a playroom? Annabel had whined.) Then the guests began to arrive, all of them late, some apologizing that they would have to duck out early even before stepping through the door. They smelled like the food that they’d brought, the usual Chinese restaurants.
For Jack, parents at these kinds of parties, Thanksgiving or not, all blurred into the same concoction of a person. “Āyí hǎo, Shūshu hǎo,” he greeted the pairs as they shook off their sweaters and light jackets. “Āyí hǎo, Shūshu hǎo,” Annabel repeated after him, until the first and only white family, the Louise-Deflieses, arrived, and his sister frothed at the mouth with excitement, she and Elsie firing language at each other that no one, not even their parents, could understand. The dǎodànguǐ Jack’s mother had portrayed during her dinner table quips with his father did not resemble the delicate, church-dress-wearing Elsie in front of them. It was Elsie’s mother, appearing almost grandmotherly compared to Jack’s mother, who sneaked her husband an are-you-seeing-this look when Annabel grabbed Elsie by the wrist and dragged her friend, head bobbling from the force of the tug, up the stairs to play.
Jack’s father sheepishly volunteered to tag along behind the girls, which prompted Elsie’s father, a thin, professorial man, to more confidently take the lead before Jack’s father could. Left alone with Elsie’s mother, Jack’s mother told her Welcome for the fifth time.
Jack kept count: of repeated words, questions, conversation topics. He had nothing else to do; there was no one his age at the party, though his mother had tried to act as if the four teenagers who had come with their parents were in range. There was nothing worse than introducing yourself to high schoolers as the One Who Lives Where You Were Forced to Visit. But he had to stay downstairs at least until they’d eaten. His mother had told him so—a rare order, which had made him want to heed it.
It took twenty-two minutes for his mother to announce that it was time to eat and thirty-four seconds for Jack to pack his Styrofoam plate. Adults leaned against kitchen counters and wall niches, balancing sesame noodles and chāshāo ròu over wineglasses and speaking to those whose children they recognized.
Some āyís were more familiar than others. One had been in their house many times before. His mother’s version of an Elsie, with a face as wide and round as one of those Bratz dolls Annabel was always asking for. As Jack was trying to finish his food, the āyí wandered over to his corner of the piano room, one eye on him and another on his mother beside her, a lasso of questions connecting them.
“And what is yours learning now, in middle school?” the āyí asked his mother.
His mother laughed. “I think Huáng Āyí is asking you a question.”
Jack wasn’t so sure. Most āyís did not speak to him; they spoke about him, through his mother. What could he say, anyway? School bored him, not because memorizing facts about ancient Mesopotamia and photosynthesis was easy, but because such knowledge felt like cheap padding: second-rate, knockoff knowledge. The real stuff unfolded out of sight. All the dangers the teachers had prepared them for in those first weeks could not have magically vanished. If he could have gotten his head out of his books, he might have heard the bomb threats that Naveen Naidu had surely muttered under his breath in Honors Science, or caught the mysterious hand that had slipped inside Brett Liggett’s boxers in the locker room. There was even an eighth grader who had gotten pregnant and still wore tight T-shirts though she was showing, who was debated over during
lunch with an equal mix of reverence and fear, though Jack had never gotten a look at her except as a passing blur in the traffic of the hallways. Huáng Āyí and Shūshu had a daughter like that, he remembered. Her name was Charlene. He’d heard that she dropped out of UT Austin and now modeled for underground car racing websites, though he’d failed to find her with any of the search engines.
“The world,” he offered to Huáng Āyí, with a shrug, “and stuff.”
That was when his mother stepped in. She talked about her changing attitudes concerning private versus public, the competitiveness of Plano schools, pre-pre-SAT-for-admission-to-Duke-TIP classes starting in Jack’s grade, maybe they should move to Frisco, ha-ha, not to mention Annabel’s school! In Annabel’s Montessori-inspired school, she said, the teachers treat the students as if they are both their equals and their own children. His mother’s teeth were stained red, he’d noticed, as she emphasized, in English, the word inspired.
“Oh, how wonderful.” Āyí made her wine go away. “That could go in a brochure.”
“Yes, Helen. But—” His mother laughed abruptly, then filled the silence by playing with Jack’s hair, something she rarely did. “Her school is like a foreign country. The children are very accomplished. They don’t do childish things. This is good, usually.”
Evening had settled; his mother kept the curtains open. Then one of the teenagers was directed to play the piano, Annabel’s future piano. The shiny block of keys had sat untouched for so long it seemed a miracle that music could suddenly pour out of it. His mother had not protested when Jack asked to quit after a year of lessons.