“She told you?”
“Of course she told us. I think this is a very difficult school you attend, lots of talented girls.”
“That’s what it was like.”
“So much talent, though, doesn’t help find a husband.”
“I did find a husband, Aunty Mabel.”
“You found wai guo ren. Maybe it’s better you find Chinese.”
“You mean like Xiao Lu?”
My aunt considered. “Those New York Chinese too small and pale. Maybe Hawaiian, or some big, strong California one. You ever think about moving out to California? We still have relatives there, you know.”
“Your ba-ba so handsome.” In the living room after dinner, my aunt and I were looking through old photograph albums. I remembered that she had once been interested in my father. We had come to a photograph of my parents just before they got married. They were leaning against the railing of a ship, hand in hand, hair blowing every which way, eyes only for each other. Daddy’s face was angled a little away from the camera, smiling and shadowed. Even in that casual pose, you could see the intensity in the twist of his neck. Ma, dimpled in a big-shouldered dress, looked fragile beside him.
“Bau-yu and Pau-yu,” my aunt said. “Similar and not similar.”
We had the same picture in an album at home; I knew the story that went with it. After the ship photographer snapped their photo, they’d set out on a cruise around San Francisco Bay. Although it wasn’t particularly rough, in ten minutes my father had completely ruined his fancy seersucker jacket. “I never saw anyone so sick in my life,” Ma told us. “I had to take it to the cleaners three times.” Back on land, Daddy told her how he’d suffered on his voyage from China. He’d lost eighteen pounds on the way.
I studied the face in the photo, noticed how the young man’s side-parted hair fell in a way that reminded me of Marty’s. Daredevilish.
Then came my parents’ wedding. What touched me most was Aunty Mabel standing alone, her big, good-natured face framed by a bad perm, wearing a light-colored dress with petal sleeves and a straight skirt too tight around the hips. When she smiled her eyes disappeared into half-moons and you could see her crooked top teeth. Ma said that Aunty Mabel did better than anyone expected. She moved to New York and six months later started dating Uncle Richard, who was an accountant at Grumman, where she worked as a secretary.
No photos of their wedding, they’d gone modestly to City Hall. The next series showed my aunt and uncle standing in front of a two-family brick house in Flushing—they’d lived there only three months before my uncle got a job with Martin Marietta in St. Pete. Uncle Richard was chunky and broad-faced and beaming, a heaviness around his chin foretelling the jowls to come. My aunt looked dazed in her heavy jewelry and unbecoming dresses.
“Ding-ah!” she called to my uncle, but he had fallen asleep on the couch across the room.
Me as a lumpy infant, a cowlick I still have springing from the left side of my head. Marty, smaller in every way, and more self-contained. The album chronicled the two of us growing up into our late teens. Between us, often, stood my mother. Seeing Ma and Marty together over and over made me note the difference in their beauty. My mother had a portrait prettiness, with her styled hair and regular features, while my sister’s face was narrower, feline, a little dangerous. It wasn’t just the generation gap—my sister was born knowing something my mother never learned.
At first Ma’s look changed dramatically from scene to scene, her hairstyle and clothing reflecting each passing fashion. You could practically pinpoint the year by looking at her. There we were at Disneyland, in front of Cinderella’s castle, my mother in a modified beehive and Bermuda shorts, me in stripes, my sister in snowflakes. In front of the White House: Ma in a boldly patterned sleeveless shift and the Twiggy crop Daddy had hated so much, Marty and I on either side of her with our arms clutching the crosspiece of the fence, pretending we were being strung up.
Then suddenly my mother’s fashion sense seemed to regress until finally it froze. The pixie haircut, the school-marm outfits, the tight mouth. She remained static, only growing older, while my sister and I blossomed.
Daddy, usually the photographer, was in few of the pictures. I watched him age, hair whitening first at the temples and then clouding through. His eyes got smaller, darker, and more brilliant. His body shrank to bones inside the endless similar sets of loose shirts and trousers that he wore year after year. The ties got more and more excessive. The rare smile become nonexistent. How bitter the lines framing his mouth, how resentful the hunch of his shoulders, how desperately his long hands groped the air by his sides.
For the first time I saw my parents’ marriage as a love story gone terribly awry.
“Your ba-ba ever tell you he want to be pilot?” Aunty Mabel reached down into her wicker workbasket, fished out a card of bright orange embroidery floss, unwound it, and licked the end into a point, which she threaded through a darning needle.
“No, really?”
“He want to join the Chinese air force. You think he’s so healthy, a tall man like that. But he failed the physical. All those childhood diseases make his constitution weak.”
“I thought he wanted to be a physicist.”
“That too. Afterward. Pilot was childhood dream.” My aunt shook her head. “Your father was a genius, you should hear him talk! So clever, all those stories. His sisters would be so proud of him. Too bad he was stuck in the United States. All the time he hopes China opens up again so he can go back. He is almost thirty years old when he comes. You come to a new country too late, you are always stranger. Your mother and me, we go to school here, we make friends. Not so your ba-ba. He is incurable Chinese.” “He did go back. To Taiwan.”
“When a Chinese returns to China, he goes to lao jia.” In the early 1970s, when it was beginning to be possible to do so, my parents had written to their respective families. Ma had received several letters back: her oldest sister had died (one of those aunts whose blurry heads Marry and I had scrutinized in Nai-nai’s ancient sepia family portraits), such and such a cousin was professor of German at the foreign language institute in Shanghai. Since it was impossible for those in China to obtain visas to the United States, would Nai-nai and Ma and Aunty Mabel please come back to visit them as soon as possible. Nai-nai had wanted to, had made plans, but the cancer had gotten to her bones by then. Her daughters had never gone.
My father had received only one letter back, on onionskin paper, the characters drawn with blue fountain pen ink in an uncertain hand. It was from a stranger, a primary school teacher in the town where he’d grown up. So sorry to have to be the one to convey such news to his illustrious American colleague, etc., etc., but Wang Pau-yu’s younger sister had passed away several years ago from the sugar sickness. Diabetes, Daddy explained. She’d been a laborer, a farmhand, unmarried. No one knew what had become of the older sister. She’d held a local government post, and then joined the Communist Party and moved to Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. She’d changed her name and was impossible to trace.
I asked my aunt: “Do you think Ma should have married someone else? Someone more her class?” I remembered Uncle Richard and hoped Aunty Mabel wouldn’t take offense.
She didn’t. “More than difference in class. Difference in character. Your father had a very bad childhood. So insecure, always afraid. Your mother—well, you know, she’s the baby. A little spoiled, like your sister. She doesn’t understand this kind of fear.”