Homecoming

“Chacko told he twins that, though he hated to admit it, they were all Anglophiles. They were a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away.”

--Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, (51)

 

My father always said my mother ignored her Asian heritage until we were born, that he barely knew she was Chinese until she became obsessed with us learning the language. My mother’s eyes glazed, shiny like trophies as she explained, “Your great-grandfather (or was it Great-Great?) was the first man in China to own a car!” And then, those trophies dimmed when one of China’s revolutions arose, my great-grandfather (or Great Great) fell out of political favor and was liquidated (“liquefied,” as I would later explain to my friends, solemnly).

I was five and a half years old when my brother and I went to summer school in China. Only a year apart, and with the same highlights in our hair and creamy Zhong-Mei hunxie, half-and-half, skin, strangers’ lips wondered if we were twins. “JingJingPingPing,” my mother would call for us to be examined, and pat our heads with heavy hands.

 

Before we left our clean, English-speaking hotel every morning, my mother forced large green pills down our weak-walled esophagi: Spirulina capsules, which she discovered abroad. We would then take a taxi down a winding city road, my mother arguing with the driver in her broken Chinese, as per local custom.

The school was small, poor, and crowded. My brother and I clung to each other like ivy on frosted New England buildings as the Chinese boys and girls pickpocketed us with whispering eyes.

 

The boys huddled around me, fascinated by the scent of America on my tanned arms. Even though in a large crowd, pulled by my proud Asian mother, I looked just like their sisters and cousins, in the classroom I was easily discernable as Different. We were special, and my mother never saw how we were treated differently.  My hair was a creamy, chocolate brown, not black like theirs, and I had a few lazy freckles sunbathing on my nose from China’s fertile heat. I wore clean white sandals and sundresses from the Gap, and my cellophane eyes were wide and scared. I didn’t even act Right; I did not have the confidence or street smarts to push the maturing boys away like the native girls did. Their curt, foreign words were enough to scare the curious creatures away.

My brother scowled from the outskirts of the pack, but could not elbow his way in. The boys fanned me, oohing and ahhing at my timid responses, whispering and giggling to each other in high-pitched words I could not understand. Even my name was different, Ping Ping; it was a boys’ name, a torture my mother did not understand because no one told her she named her child incorrectly. 

 

 The school building sandwiched a Bathroom between the Playroom and the Studying Room. It was long and tiled with drains in the floor and buckets lining the walls. There were no stalls, no sinks (only a bin with murky water and a once-white rag), and no door to contain its stench. My brother and I would protect our button noses with our elbows, get a running start, and sprint through the passageway from one Room to another. A billowing Gap dress and Squinting Eyes. I never saw either of the two shapely Chinese teachers go into this sewery room, so they must have had their own secret, stalled-room to kohl their eyes and do their business.

I was always afraid to use the open, co-ed Bathroom in that school, and whenever I began to make my way toward that part of the building, guided by the panting stench, bold boys followed me like a swarm of insects to decomposing pink meat.

I always waited to get back to the hotel to pull my Gap dress up and my days-of-the-week underwear down. I never accepted the melting cola-flavored ice cubes, gelatinous in their thin plastic wrappers, that the boys held out to me in dark, cupped hands and yellow smiles.

The temperatures hovered from mid- to high-thirties, in degrees Celcius, day to day. Across the Bathroom were two machines, one that produced boiling water and the other boiling milk, and a rack of cheap metal mugs. Every student was forced to swallow a cup of each, along with discoing heat waves, every day. I could not decide if I hated the clammy, expired liquids more or the acrid taste of the tin mugs, once silver but now dull. I would hold the steaming mug out, disgusted, like a beggar waiting for a stranger to drop something more promising in, like a coin or an unfurling wish. Once or twice I held my breath, ran into the bathroom, and threw the heated liquids down a drain, but the Teacher Women were vigilant watchers, like tall birds with crossed wings and clipped beaks, and the machines never stopped lactating the vile fluids. I quickly decided the stench in the bathroom was not worth my attempts at escape.

I especially hated naptime on our bamboo mats. The sticky July heat flopped around us like goldfish picked out of glass bowls by meddling children. Because we were American, softer than the tough Chinese children, my brother and I were allowed to unroll our mats onto a hard cot, but the stern Teacher Women would not let us forgo the woven boards. Bamboo scraped against my soft, delicate skin like a grater peeling through a soft French cheese, or a ripe fruit. Once, we were allowed to play with a deck of cards instead of napping (joyfully we constructed a sleek House of Cards), but the gossiping Women, with cigarette smoke circling their heads like uncertain crowns, stomped on the ground and slammed closet doors as if checking for stowaways on a ship, or Rotting Goldfish. They landed like mosquitos on the yellow flesh of my foot. Not to bite but to taunt. Our House of Cards shattered in fragments to the floor.

 

My brother and I could think of few things more painful than our weeks at this institution (maybe a Shark Bite, he said once. Yes, a Shark Bite, I agreed quietly). We cried at the silly foreign cartoons (one was a Monkey Emperor with a magic staff; another was about seven Super-Boys who turned into gourds at night), the heat, the curious dirty children, the curdling milk and water, and the Bathroom.

One day, as steaming tears poured down our cheeks as if served in a silver mug, the Teacher Women swore to us they called our mother at her white, air-conditioned hotel, and she promised to come pick us up early. My brother and I, cookie-dough rears molded by a bamboo mat, stopped crying and huddled together, staring at the ticking clock. We understood the large Arabic numbers on its Face like a mocking smile, numbers we had already spent hours staring at. Like every other student, my brother and I were given a thin blue notebook that smelled of fresh paper and were made to write the digits one through ten one hundred times each, every day. Maybe if my mother knew we were learning American numbers and not Chinese words she wouldn’t have insisted we stay for so long.

The Face didn’t need the military-like, Chinese characters to tell us, You are Not playing on Your Time. It laughed every time the second hand struck one-two, twelve, and every couple rotations we peeked at the Teacher Women and sniffed for confirmation that our mother was indeed coming. They clucked in agreement and picked at their doughy mantou biscuits with beaks.

My brother and I imagined that our mother’s size six feet were click clacking in low heels toward us, right behind the rolled up bamboo mats.

Behind the racks of cheap, metallic mugs that poisoned my mouth and spirit.

Behind the open gutters of children’s urine, feces, and vomit.

Behind the bulldozed house of American playing cards.

With every clicktick of the clock, the absence of the heels’ clickclack became louder, shouting Shouting Shouting! at us. Anguish gushed through my bones, melting in my veins like the cola-flavored ice cubes unwrapped from thin aluminum.

Five o’clock came and went; the Face snickered and pointed at the resented numbers, the American numbers that were supposed to be our allies, and children packed their pencils and walked home with mothers in beat-up sneakers.

I looked at my white leather sandals, resenting the Bird Women. China. The heat, the brazen boys. My mother’s cold obliviousness. Some things come with their own punishment*.

 

She came half an hour after all the other students had left that night, swearing the women hadn’t even contacted her. I never knew if the Teacher Women had called my mother or not; it was Chinese woman’s word against Chinese woman’s word. When we got back to America at the end of that summer, my dad was waiting for us in the JFK parking lot in a new, ugly sea foam-colored Honda van. Early.

Our luggage was the last to come out, and my mother grabbed four black suitcases and ignored an innocent pink stroller panting on the revolving luggage belt, anticipating a warm, fleshy bottom in its lap that meant, Welcome Home!

“You’re not a baby, anymore, Ping Ping, just leave it.”  Someone turned down the volume of the heels’ clickclack on pavement.

I was not Rolled to the ugly sea foam van like the black luggage. I Walked and wondered how long the lonely fold-up stroller danced on that belt until someone pressed it to their chest, to take Home or to throw away.

 

*Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, (107)

Reviews

[Ross]

wow! powerful writing

[E. L. Foley]

Your descriptions of eyes are lovely and apt: "pickpocketed us with whispering eyes", "y cellophane eyes"

This is really an amazing piece.

The only phrase that I found a bit awkward was "mid- to high-thirties, in degrees Celcius''.

Great write!