The Sorrows of Others, page 12
The two of them exchanged a look. This upset me more because it confirmed that there were things only they shared, that they were keeping from me.
“Come, Eileen.” Ahyi grabbed my wrist.
“No!” I shouted.
“Let’s go for a walk outside.”
“I don’t want to go anywhere with you!”
“She’s too old to be acting like this,” said my mother.
Ahyi was standing between us, facing me. Her back was to my mother.
“Like you were never a kid before,” she said, her eyes fixed.
It didn’t seem like she was seeing me at all. Her gaze reached all the way through me, and frightened me. She looked so much like Yeye.
She let me go. My skin flashed yellow where her fingers had been. I ran to my room and stayed there until the morning.
My father came to me that night after our guests had left. My mother must have told him what happened. A week later, Ahyi came to dinner without Yeye, with her usual tray of rice, which I ate, and the week after that was the same. “Where’s Yeye?” I asked her. She said her father didn’t like riding in cars; they made him nauseous. Perhaps that was true. My mother started going over there once a week for dinner, without the rest of us, and I accepted this as punishment for what I had done.
“Your mother, like anyone, is who she has become,” my father said, shifting closer to me on my bed. Both of us stared at our feet. “You’ll understand one day. Part of loving someone is accepting what you don’t know, and what you do know. That is what makes a family.”
It’s possible he was saying this for himself as much as he was saying it for me. To this day, I have no idea how much he knew, how much my mother told him. Out of respect for them both, I do not ask.
In a month, I was adding and subtracting fractions with an addiction that made my brain thrum. The method—matching denominators, basic addition and subtraction of numerators, simplification—became instinct. It felt almost joyful to make numbers appear large—or, as Yeye put it, ugly—only to reduce them at the end to their true forms. 12/32 became 3/8. 14/35 became 2/5.
Grading my work, Yeye’s eyes were downturned, his shriveled lips pushed out. Farsighted, he held the worksheet away from him. His chin became like the moon, craterous, and retreated into his neck. He moved his middle finger down the page and across as he reviewed.
“Good,” he said, circling my grade at the top. He slid the worksheet to me. A tall skinny 100. “See? Who said you’re bad at math.”
His compliment kept me in a good mood until the evening, when my mother called me into her bedroom. I walked in just as she drew the last blind, twisting the stick that made the shades fold inward. When I got older, I would play moments like this in a sequence. Me entering her room, my mother engaged in some small task that announced her dominance over the space. Adjusting the mirrors that multiplied her presence. Closing the French doors to the bathroom behind her, glaring at me the whole time. And now, shutting out the night.
“Sit,” she said. “How are your lessons going?”
“Okay.” I knew she wanted something more precise, something quantitative, but I had learned from her how to withhold, the silent authority that came from keeping always a part of yourself, no matter how small, back.
She sat next to me on the bed and took out her hair clip. “You’re lucky, you know. To have such a good teacher.”
“Yeah, Dad told me.”
My mother smiled, but her eyes didn’t move. The goldfish did not appear. I brought my pinky up to my lips and began biting the skin around the nail, a habit I’d picked up recently. My mother knocked my hand away.
“I got a one hundred on a worksheet today,” I said, caving. “And in the past week, my grades have all been in the nineties.”
“That’s not bad,” she said. “There are still a few weeks before you test. Keep working hard and listening to Yeye.”
“So what was it?” I asked.
“What was what?”
“The revolution in China.”
The question sounded abrupt and strange even to me, though my thoughts must have been circling around this for at least the past month. I believe it was why I caused a scene at that dinner. It would be years before I realized that what I was asking about was her. As long as I accepted my mother as a mystery, I didn’t wonder at her steely quiet. I might have never wondered, at least not for a long time, had Yeye not appeared in our lives.
She played with her clip in her lap, making the teeth open and close.
“It was a time that your father and I, and Ahyi, grew up in. The government was changing. Many people were afraid of intellectuals.” She paused. “Do you know what intellectual means?”
She said the word in English. I did know, but I shook my head.
“It means highly educated. Someone devoted to their studies.”
I joked, “Like me right now.”
My mother stared me down, her big eyes dark and muted.
“During that period, anything anyone did that didn’t praise the new government was considered punishable. Books, music, art. History, too, because it held the country’s past, which the government was trying to erase. You can see how it would be difficult for intellectuals, people whose lives were devoted to these subjects, to keep doing their work. But Yeye assumed he was safe. He came from a very brilliant, well-respected family, but he was a mathematician. He’d seen a few teachers from the wen hua department get carted away, but no one from his side.
“One morning he arrived at his office to find a poster on his door accusing him of hiding foreign documents. Officials searched his office and found letters written in English. Yeye explained that the letters were between him and a friend he’d made during his year abroad. They discussed ordinary things, mostly a way for him to practice his English. He told the officials to read the letters so they could see for themselves, but the officials were, like most people at the time, illiterate in English. They didn’t appreciate what they thought was taunting. Yeye lost his position at the university over this and was forced to work as a janitor at a high school for many years before being allowed to return.”
Her spine curled as her body softened. The bones in her back protruded like bolts, as though my mother were held together by metal.
She sat up. “You’re fortunate, Eileen, not only to have such a wonderful teacher, but also to be able to study without worry or shame.”
“What about my real grandparents?” I said, riding the excitement of the story. “Did they die in the revolution?”
My mother blinked twice. “You shouldn’t talk of death like it’s the easiest thing in the world.” She stood and walked to the front of the room. She flicked the lights off, as though whatever she said next could only be heard in darkness. “No more questions. You won’t fall asleep with such a full head.”
The room was veiled in rose gold, the just-risen sun filtering through the humidity. It wasn’t raining now, yet, but the forecast said sprinkles on and off for the next week. The rain was letting up. Autumn was moving in.
We practiced decimals. Lining up the dots for addition and subtraction. Counting the numbers behind the dot for multiplication and division. Converting into a fraction, a percentage. With the placement test approaching, our lessons had become mostly drills. Yeye gave me a geometry worksheet and left me alone to work while he smoked in the backyard.
In the past when he’d done this, I’d been impressed by his timing, how he never failed to lower himself into the chair, spreading his fresh tobacco scent just as I was completing the last problem. I’d made a game of trying to beat him, but even as I got faster, he seemed to anticipate my improvement. That, I thought, or his cigarettes kept getting shorter.
I boxed the last answer and waited for his return. When he wasn’t back, I decided I would bring the worksheet to him. I walked to the back door of Ahyi’s house, into the wonky rectangle of light on the linoleum kitchen floor, and saw Yeye’s sandaled feet, tall white socks crossed right over left. I got closer until my nose was touching the glass.
The sky had lost its warmth in midmorning. It was pale blue, with clouds in lumpy, ragged sheets. I had planned on tapping the glass with my nail. Yeye was just to my right in a monobloc chair, but something about his posture—leaned back but rigid, eyes closed in a deliberate, unnatural way—stopped me. His left hand, the one holding the lit cigarette, was shaking a little, hovering above the chair arm. A cloud moved in front of the sun; it shadowed Yeye’s face. I thought I saw that the corners of his eyes were wet, but seconds later, once the cloud had passed, his face was restored to its previous glow. Yeye opened his eyes directly to the sun. He brought the dying cigarette to his lips and pulled.
I walked back to the table and waited for him.
A week after I took the test, Yeye died in his sleep. Days later I found out that my score did not meet the mark, and I believe everyone was relieved that Yeye had been spared this final disappointment. The school year passed uneventfully, and the next summer and all the summers after that would return to the dry heat.
I’m able to recall that summer in detail, and I’m not sure if that should be attributed to the unusual weather or Yeye’s presence. It’s become a prophetic season in my mind, one in which it was determined that I would not lead an academic life. Benny would end up at Harvard. I would not.
My parents are in their sixties now. I recently turned thirty-five. I live in a college town not far from where I grew up. It was a job at the college that brought me back to Texas, after so many years away, and my mother’s insistence that I be closer. In the intervening years, I’d accumulated my own heartaches, for which I suffered flagrantly. My family had watched me suffer, including Ahyi. She is retired now and comes to visit me every so often, making the two-hour drive.
We were sitting on my patio one morning, just the two of us, watching the day begin, when Yeye drifted into my thoughts. I had stopped thinking about him while I was absorbed in my own hardships. Now I returned to that summer. It was the first time I felt comfortable telling Ahyi what I knew, what my mother had told me. While I could never say that Ahyi and I were close before—our relationship through my mother something we’d both taken for granted—an ease had found its way into our dynamic, perhaps because she had seen me at my lowest. I was starting to consider her an older friend.
“How old were you then, eight?” she asked.
“Ten,” I replied. “My father mentioned it, so I asked.”
“If you’ve already heard the story, then what do you want to know?”
“You’re his daughter,” I said, as if that clarified anything.
I was about to retract my question by way of apology, ashamed for still coveting stories that did not belong to me. Then she began.
“It must have been the sixty-ninth year. Your mother and I were in eighth grade. We were best friends. Our families were close. People would call us ‘Twins!’ as if it were our names because we were together so often. We both joined the Red Successors so that when we reached high school, we would automatically become Red Guards. We were just kids. We wanted to be part of something.
“Things were starting to get extreme around that time. The movement was exciting—I don’t know if you can understand. Your mother’s parents ran a very successful tea parlor that had been the family business for generations. A beautiful space. Tall ceilings, the walls decorated with red paper cutouts that your grandmother created painstakingly, each one completely different, like snowflakes. Kids at school began picking on your mother. I remember one boy yelling in the hallway, Your parents serve tea to rich pigs! She was embarrassed and scared of losing her place in the Successors, so she tipped some of the Guards off about my father, your Yeye.
“I suppose she thought she was saving herself. She knew he had letters from the US because he’d used them to teach us English some evenings at our house. She would only tell me much later, when we were able to touch these old wounds without reopening them, that she figured they would knock him around a little and destroy the letters, but also that she couldn’t say she was thinking much at all. She couldn’t have guessed that the Red Guards, the oldest of them just seventeen, would come to our house at night and beat my parents in front of the town. Your Yeye was punished not only for having the letters, but because—”
“They thought he was being arrogant when he asked them to read English,” I said.
Ahyi nodded. “They left my father with two broken ribs, bleeding into the street. They kicked my mother’s head until she was in a coma. You know all of this already?”
“Yes,” I lied. “But continue, please.”
“When my mother woke up, she couldn’t speak or walk, the damage to her brain was so bad. She would be in a wheelchair the rest of her life. Your mother’s plan backfired. The Guards, excited by their first big public beating, grew more aggressive. A week later, they barricaded your grandparents’ tea parlor while your grandparents were still inside and burned the whole place to the ground. Your mother was in school when it happened. From anywhere in town you could smell the smoke.
“That night my father opened the front door and found your mother covered in soot, kneeling and touching her head to the ground. If anyone saw her, both she and Yeye would have been in trouble, as what she was doing was considered a feudal gesture, so Yeye pulled her inside, and that’s when I saw her. ‘Forgive me, forgive me!’ she cried and cried. But I had sworn in my heart never to speak to her again, and I didn’t think it was right to feel any differently simply because she was an orphan. I slapped her and told her to shut up. I struck her again and again until I was beating her with whatever part of my body I could. My father pulled me away.
“After that your mother lived with us. For the first year she and I did not speak. We established a routine, avoiding each other and taking turns caring for my disabled mother.”
Ahyi began rubbing her knees, rocking a little backward and forward. I wondered if talking about this was causing her physical pain, but I didn’t want her to stop.
“Forgiving her was the hardest thing I ever did,” she said. “And I didn’t do it out of nobility or a good heart like my father. It’s just what happened after enough time had passed. As an adult, your mother met a decent man, your father, and together they moved to the States. They sent money back to Yeye and me every month. My father, after he retired and was free to care for my mother full time, insisted that I move, too, so I did. Then my mother passed, and that’s when you met Yeye.”
She looked around, blinking. The day had grown light. Soon, the morning would be taken over by birds, and their song, as delicate as it was, would close the door on the careful quiet that roomed this conversation. I knew we might never open it again.
“What was it like once he returned to the university?” I asked, keeping my voice steady. “After the politics died down.”
Ahyi stared in my general direction. “He was exonerated and permitted to return but didn’t. The high school where he was a janitor was a short walk from our house. The hours were flexible. It was the easiest way to keep caring for my mother.”
“And what about you?” I said to change the subject, in case she was beginning to suspect what I knew. “How come you never got married?”
“I could ask you the same thing. Even our naughty Benny found a wife! Why haven’t you found a husband?”
“I’m young still by today’s standards.”
“Today’s standards, yesterday’s standards. After thirty, it’s all the same to men. There’s a saying that goes Better luck finding pure gold than a perfect man. I decided long ago that it would be better to skip the man, go straight for the gold with those odds!”
She was in a jokey mood, as she often was these days, retaining that upbeat quality she’d always had but with a softer touch. Or it’s possible I’m the one who changed. When I was old enough to care, I learned that Ahyi was more successful than my parents, who’d both worked in computer software. Ahyi had been a real estate agent. Toward the end of her career she was mostly selling to millionaires in California who viewed Texas as the next frontier. How different she seemed now from that intimidating, efficient woman I’d grown up watching.
That night, I had trouble falling asleep. I thought about calling Benny but wondered if a call that late would worry him, coming from me. Years ago, in my twenties, I wanted to die because a man I loved had left me for another. The second time I woke up in the hospital, my mother was there. The goldfish beneath her eyes had set, I noticed, and I wondered when that had happened. She got into the small bed with me and bowed my head to her chest. It’s one of the only times I can remember us touching.
“Is this the worst you’ve ever felt?” I asked.
“Yes,” she’d said. “Yes.”
Compromise
My name is Sui and in June I’ll be turning sixty. I have three adult children; their names are Charlotte, Pam, and David. My husband died in October, while the leaves were still green and clinging to their branches. Now it is spring and there are new leaves, and I am a widow. Such are the major facts of my life.
I live alone in the house my husband left me. I work as the secretary at Royal Dental on Lamar Boulevard, a job I’ve had for about as long as I’ve been in the US, long enough to watch the practice pass from Dr. Baker, the original proprietor, to his son. I take in the mail and water my plants. On weekends I prepare a meal whenever I get hungry, which is sometimes twice and sometimes four times a day, indulging a little in the absence of structure. I talk to my children on the phone whenever one of them thinks to call. I say hello to my neighbors, who are comforting to me in the same way that my house is, as guideposts in time, reminding me of who I am. I have known most of them for over twenty years. They’re the closest I have to friends. When I wave to them from across our yards, I think how lucky I am to be standing at a distance, oblivious to the details of their lives, how they move inside their homes, and to not have to see their faces up close. A person’s face is like a house, I think. The marks and stains and sunken places are proof of what has happened, but they cannot tell the whole story.
