Bad Bad Girl, page 26
But maybe she knew all along what would happen next: that I would publish that story under my legal name, only to realize that “Lillian” Jen had not written it—that Lillian Jen was the nice Chinese girl my mother had wanted, a daughter who didn’t ask why why why. In fact, almost no one called me Lillian anymore. In my high school creative writing club, I had been dubbed “Gish” after the silent screen actress Lillian Gish—another girl whose last name was Hausman had been dubbed “A.E.” after the poet A. E. Housman—and, never mind that I had never seen any of Lillian Gish’s movies, I had first accepted “Gish” as a nickname, then started using it myself. Probably my mother would not have wanted to know how I now came to realize that this “Gish” Jen had written the story, much less how “Gish Jen” would go on to publish everything else I wrote—becoming a person who was, above all, not her daughter.
Maybe I knew it, it’s true, she says now.
Maybe you knew that your mother was right, I say. Maybe you knew that those books in your father’s library were subversive, and that just as reading had given both you and me ideas, writing would give me yet more.
Maybe.
Far more acceptable was the news that I was engaged.
“Mister!” my father said. “That’s some surprise!”
“You mean someone is going to marry you?” said my mother.
“Shock of shocks,” I said. “Can you imagine?”
“David?” she said.
“Yes, David.”
“When is the wedding?” my father asked.
“When I graduate.”
“Someone is going to marry you!” my mother said again. “David!”
“We’re planning to get pregnant beforehand,” I said.
“Bad bad girl!” My mother hit me, but it was a playful, almost wistful hit. Not long before this, we had had a knock-down, drag-out fight in which she slapped my face and pulled my hair until I shoved her out of my room. I had rowed crew in college, as she knew, and I had stayed in shape after graduation, or tried to, as she might have noticed. Still, she was clearly surprised to realize that she could no longer hit me because I was stronger than she—that from here on out, it would be, as she said, up to my husband to control me.
Poor David, she says now.
I laugh.
David was in fact her dream come true—a Harvard summa cum laude, Stanford MBA who could reach all the high shelves in the kitchen. I don’t think she realized he was also quite the iconoclast: for example, after we had married and carefully shipped to California dozens of elaborate, fragile gifts given to us by guests we did not actually know, only to find ourselves having to pack them up all over again for a move back east, he reacted to my complaints by opening a window.
“Done,” he said, tossing a glass out.
And that weekend we held an enormous yard sale, liberating ourselves of all of it. David shied away from nothing, never waffled, and always spoke truth to power.
Yet with my parents, he was amiable and tolerant. The first time he came to visit, they dug out their one can of beer for him, cleaned the dust off its lid with a sponge, and presented it to him, whereupon he cheerfully drank it, warm as it was. He loved Chinese food and ate everything, endearing himself to them. As for perfecting his chopsticks skills before coming, only to discover that my father and brother were eating with forks—he laughed. Now my mother had just one criticism.
“I don’t like that beard,” she said.
“Too bad,” I said. “He has chest hair, too.”
She looked shocked.
“Because, you know, who would marry me but a barbarian?”
“Bad bad girl! Too much to say!” she said. But this, too, seemed a bit for old times’ sake.
* * *
—
She insisted on her own first choice for a wedding location, “someplace everyone can find it,” the Scarsdale Country Club. David and I thought it conventional and boring. Who knew but that she was right, though, and that the Chinese guests would have a hard time getting to an out-of-the-way place? I could just see them driving around Westchester in their best clothes, lost. Also, this was the first wedding in the family. Could I blame my mother for wanting a proper wedding such as she had not had, a wedding that showed how she and my father had “made it” in America? I could understand how she felt.
If she cared how we felt, she kept her concern well hidden.
She was anxious about the guest list. How to handle my father’s second brother’s two wives, for example? Like her own half brother, my father’s second brother had repeat-married, ignoring the fact that in Taiwan the norms had changed and that men were now expected—can you imagine?—to divorce their old wife first. The old wife now insisted that she was still the real wife, as did her children; my father’s third brother’s wife and children, moreover, sided with her. So which wives to invite and which children, and where to seat them?
“Why don’t we just have open seating?” said David.
My mother shot him a look. I laughed.
She expressed no interest in the many friends we had coming from Iowa and California; nor did she help pick out my wedding dress. I bought an off-the-rack dress on sale for two hundred dollars; she never asked to see it. Two years later, she would spend thousands of dollars on a custom dress for Lisa. But for me, there were no fittings. Neither did she come with me to get my hair done, though she got her own coifed into the sort of bouffant out of which you half expect a small bird to emerge.
Still, it was a perfect October day. My dear friend Lori Kahn sang. David’s niece, then age eight, scattered her flower petals admirably. And his nephew, then five, would have been an exemplary ring bearer had he not decided his jacket was uncomfortable and done a striptease at the altar. I cried as I said, “I do”; David gently dabbed at my eyes with a handkerchief. Our hippie priest gave a sermon about the evils of technology, much to the amusement of the many guests from Silicon Valley.
We served our favorite dish, Beef Wellington. It was 1983, after all; we had yet to hear the word “cholesterol.” And so—chateaubriand, duxelles, puff pastry. My father and I danced to “Top of the World,” his favorite Carpenters song, and really did appear to be on top of the world. My mother did not dance, having her hands full keeping the peace.
That’s right! she says now.
George and Georgiana Ping danced and raved. An outgoing guy who immediately took off his jacket, George boasted a slight potbelly, bushy eyebrows, and a Chicago Cubs tie clip. He had a respectable jitterbug, but could not hold a candle to Georgiana. Unlike the other Chinese women, every one of whom wore a qípáo like my mother’s, Georgiana wore a gold lamé wrap dress with a ruffled V-neck. Her lipstick and nails were fire-engine red, and her hair was as loose and wavy as that of a European nymph just done with her bath in a stream. Both she and George were impressed, not so much that I was a Harvard grad as that I was marrying a Harvard grad.
“Summa cum laude in applied math!” George said. “That’s not easy!”
“You made it!” Georgiana told my mother. “You made it!”
Standing stiffly in her silver qípáo, my mother accepted their tribute with dignity.
“Too bad the Cubs finished fifth in their league,” she said lightly. “The Yankees finished third.”
George laughed. Georgiana smiled.
“Your son still play?” he asked.
“No, he retired a long time ago.”
“Mine, too,” he said. “He did great in high school but got outclassed in college. He’s still a fan, though.”
“Same here—but come meet him. Reuben? Reuben! Come meet someone. Reuben is on Wall Street,” she told George as Reuben headed their way.
“Going to be a millionaire?” said George.
She winked. “He’s going to hit it out of the park, you watch and see.”
Nobody has anything to criticize, she says now, recalling it all.
And that was what mattered? That people weren’t gabbing viciously later?
Chinese people like to criticize, she says.
And how about me, your daughter? Did that matter?
I always said no one would marry you.
But lo and behold, someone did.
The Chinese have a saying, Cōngmíng yī shì hútú yī shí, she says.
Meaning?
Meaning, Smart his whole life, stupid this once, she says.
My mother having proven a better correspondent after my grandmother’s death, her brother wrote on behalf of the family to express their delight:
Congratulations! We received your letter announcing Lillian and David’s wedding. The whole family is very happy, though it’s a pity we can’t witness the grand ceremony in person and enjoy your house full of congratulatory guests. You must be overflowing with infinite joy. We have sent some small gifts.
And your birthday is coming soon! May you live as long as the South Mountains, with blessings as boundless as the East Sea!
Here our television factory introduced Hitachi technology and equipment and built a new branch factory in the suburbs. The entire project was completed last autumn. With self-design, construction, installation, management, and production all deemed excellent, it won a silver medal, and I was awarded first prize by the factory department. I received a certificate and a hundred yuan. (You may laugh.) What’s more, a few months ago, the city government awarded me a senior engineer certificate. After so many decades of difficulty, I have found some comfort in all this.
So my mother and her brother were both, in their different ways, back in the fold. And so, it seemed, was I, thanks to David’s footing the bill for trips.
You know what I found after you died? I say now. I found your pocket planners.
What pocket planners? my mother says.
Remember those little notebooks you used to keep? The size of a checkbook? You used to record things in them. For example, on January 30, 1979, you wrote, “Mother passed away 9:00 pm” and circled it in red. There are many medical developments, too. For example, on July 3, 1984, you wrote, “8:00 am by-pass operation Dr. Eric Rose 17th floor intensive care.”
Dad’s first bypass.
Right—when he was sixty-five. Then there are anniversaries, snowstorms, and hurricanes, as well as, on October 8, 1983, the event you thought you would never see: “Lillian wedding.”
Those important things, she says.
Including the trips to Sanibel Island and Bar Harbor we treated you to.
We had fun.
I’m glad you remember. And interestingly, you credited not David but me for them, writing “Claremont Hotel Southwest Harbor 207-244-5036 (L. paid 2 nights $169.80 x 2 = $339.60 do not accept credit cards).”
That is to say you are a good daughter.
The kind of daughter who if need be would make regular payments to support her mother. The kind of daughter who, wild as she was, did get married and could now be counted on to do her duty.
Someday you will be old, too, she says. And that day, tell me—who is going to take care of you? If all your children are useless good-for-nothing, are you going to take care of yourself?
We were getting along so much better that she even took a sudden, strange interest in the trouble David and I were having getting pregnant.
I don’t see what is so strange, she says now.
It was just such a narrow slice of my life that you focused on, I say. As if my most important function was to make babies.
I write down what’s important, that’s all, she says. Other things I leave out, just like you.
The doctors never fully understood why David and I struggled. But after many consultations, exams, blood draws, and shots (which David bravely administered after practicing on an orange), something finally worked. We bought a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, and though some of its recipes seemed written for four-stomached ruminants, we followed them to a T.
Then, at my four-month ultrasound, the technician grew strangely quiet. We knew something was wrong. Still, we were unprepared to hear that the baby had hydrocephalus—water on her brain. That was, it turned out, a symptom of Turner’s syndrome; she was missing one of her X chromosomes, which was not always a fatal anomaly. However, in her case it was.
You wrote: Thursday, June 9, 1989, “Lil at Prenatal Diagnostic Center (Baby no chance to survive),” I say now.
That was important, my mother says.
She came to Boston for the dilation and evacuation, and though she saved very few notes in her planner, she did save one from David reading “10:15 Mom + Dad—gone to church. Back in couple minutes. D.O.”
David and I had not been to church since we were married. But we went then, that we might kneel in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary not unlike the one that had graced the end of the St. Theresa’s parking lot. There we cried and prayed for our daughter’s soul, even though we didn’t believe in souls. My mother cooked us dinner—something she had never done before and never did again. It meant a lot to us.
* * *
—
How did we manage to become pregnant again? We worried that we would lose this pregnancy as well, but instead, the baby grew and grew. “Mother-baby disproportion,” the doctors noted, and indeed, short as I am, my belly was as dramatically cantilevered as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house. I could barely reach the steering wheel of the car. When David tried to have the airbag in its center disabled, the garage mechanic informed him it was illegal until he saw me; then he did it anyway. Even other expectant mothers shook their heads. “Are you sure it’s not twins?” they said. “Sometimes they miss one on the ultrasounds.”
My mother rented an apartment near us; she wanted to be there when the baby was born. (Noted in her planner: “Lil expects this month. Arrive Watertown 6/30/91, Sunday.”) Since the apartment was next door to a health club, my father took this opportunity to take swimming lessons at the pool. It wasn’t the first time he had tried to learn to do something he’d seen us kids do: once, at a ski area, he had insisted on trying to learn to ski but refused to let any of us teach him. We found him hugging a tree, with one ski on either side of the trunk; he was wearing his Russian fur hat and an overcoat.
“Do you need help?” we asked.
“No,” he said.
Now he wanted to learn to swim, even though of the five kids, only Reuben and I knew how. Reuben, natural athlete that he was, had picked it up the way he picked up all sports, and I—inspired by my weekend at Annie Dreyfus’s house on Shelter Island—had taught myself to do the crawl by watching others and cautiously experimenting. As I hadn’t thought to teach myself to tread water, I almost drowned during the Harvard freshman swim test, but I could swim. My father could not relax enough even to learn to put his face in the water.
“Like this,” I said, and showed him again what the teacher had shown him. “Like this.”
It was no use. I wished he were younger. As for my mother, did she really have to mock his trying?
How can he learn to swim? At his age? she says now.
You didn’t have to call him crazy, I say.
But what is he? You tell me.
He was full of life. He was full of “Yes” and “I try” and “Let’s go.” The words “too old” never crossed his mind.
He is crazy, she insists still. He is crazy.
In a kinder vein, she took David and me shopping for a crib, changing table, and rocking chair.
On July 28, 1991, you wrote: “Contractions at dinner,” I say. And then on August 2, “4:18 am (Lil c-sect.) Luke Jen O’Connor 9 lb 8 oz 21½ L,” followed by his Chinese name—Kāng Rényào—in characters.
A number one son! she says.
Did that really still matter to you?
Chinese people believe that way, she says. And I am Chinese.
She wrote to her family in Shanghai:
Our first grandchild—and it’s a boy! Nice and fat, and very alert. In America, they grade the baby right away, using something called an Apgar scale. And our number one grandson got a perfect score. A+. How do you like that? We are very proud.
Luke peed on the nurse first thing, then fought his way out of his swaddling; it was easy to spot him in the nursery, as the nurses quickly gave up trying to bundle him and simply draped his receiving blanket over his bassinet. Dave and I called him Houdini. He had a hearty love of lunch, and a shocking shock of black hair. My mother loved to hold and rock him, and made a basket of red eggs to celebrate his one-month birthday. I can still see him in his white wicker bassinet, surrounded by the many stuffed animals he had been given, including a black-and-white dolphin-like creature we would soon be able to identify as an orca whale—sea animals, we were to discover, being just one unit in a parent-child curriculum that also included trains, dinosaurs, construction vehicles, and planets.
He would have been a hugely happy eventuality no matter when he was born. But he was especially so because he was born in August when I was thirty-six, just as I had been born in August when my father was thirty-six. As the Chinese astrological cycle is twelve years, that made his zodiac sign the same as my father’s and mine, too. We were a trio—as my father put it, “big sheep, middle sheep, and little sheep.” What could be happier? Yet one part of the huge happiness of that time was the sense that his birth had precipitated a sea change in my mother. As terrible a mother as she had been, she now seemed to have become a devoted ābu—grandmother—to everyone’s delight.
