In a month, Fiona was graduating with a bachelor’s in political science. Her boyfriend, Jasper Chang, was an English major whose greatest desire was to move to New York and write the twenty-first century’s Great American Novel. Only people who grew up with money thought this way, casting about life without a realistic plan, an inherent trust in things falling into place, Fiona thought. Everyone else begged, borrowed, and stole—Fiona had done all three.
Two years ago, she’d let herself be talked into taking an envelope of cash out of the pastor’s office at Jane’s mother’s church, while her best friend stood watch outside the door. Her hands tingled and her stomach lurched at the memory of it. The money was meant for a team of volunteers going on mission. Jane hated that church, how her mother had been transformed into an evangelical fanatic by those people. She felt none of the guilt Fiona did, only the thrill of subterfuge. In Jane’s eyes, it was a game, something to get away with. What they did wasn’t exactly right, Jane reasoned, but on the plus side, they were definitely sparing some innocent African people from cultish Jesus rhetoric spewed by a traveling band of Christian crazies. Fiona needed the money. There was nearly three thousand dollars in cash donations stuffed inside the envelope. The opportunity presented itself, and Fiona had seized it, with Jane’s help.
She hadn’t told Jasper or anyone else about the inheritance money. Only her mother knew. She could draw from the sudden windfall and pay back the church. Figure out a way to do it anonymously. What about New York? another voice inside her asked. Moving costs, a security deposit, and first month’s rent on a new apartment?
When Jasper asked last week if she would move with him, Fiona couldn’t help but be swept up by the romance of it: a new city, a new start. Her impractical sweetheart. She loved Jasper. And so she’d agreed to go with him. She said yes to New York, yes to living with him. Today, when the inheritance check arrived, Fiona felt like she’d been given a sign. She was suddenly one of those people for whom things magically fell into place. She’d yet to break the news about her decision to her mother, who, Fiona knew, expected her to return to LA after graduation. Nor to Jane, who Fiona assumed felt the same.
When her mother was twenty-two—the age she was now—Fiona was six years old. That was the year she took ballet lessons with Miss Fang. Her last year in Taipei, before she and her mother moved to California, sponsored by her mother’s older brother. She was still Ona then. She thought of what she’d learned as a child about the mystery of her father’s absence—how her grandfather had once promised to make the missing man appear at her dance recital, on Father’s Day, no less. Memories passed through her mind as she left the bank and strolled down Telegraph Avenue. What did she recall of that time? Her mother was her whole world. And Shulin, the downstairs neighbor, who died in the earthquake. Fiona shook her head, as if to clear it. It felt as though she were tunneling down into some secret theater, the air slightly damp there, pictures tinged in nostalgic sepia tones. She burrowed deeper—she let herself remember being a girl called Ona, inhabiting a time when she answered only to that name.
* * *
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Ona’s mother used to watch her ballet class every week through a large window cut into the wall separating the studio from the front office. Chairs were lined up for this purpose, and other mothers sat there, too, observing the girls as they went through the exercises at the barre and took turns moving across the floor while Miss Fang counted the beats out loud. After class, Ona and her mother would stroll down the street for steaming bowls of soup noodles. Her mother liked the Cantonese-style with red roasted beef, and Ona always ordered the thin Taiwanese vermicelli in clear onion broth.
The dance studio and the noodle shop were located in a part of Taipei bustling with college students. They traveled in groups, with their backpacks full of books, eyes bright and darting behind glasses, their conversations filled with words like “project objectives” and “oral presentations.” Even then, Ona knew those students had something her mother wanted, from the way her mother’s eyes followed them down the street. Something else Ona knew: her mother was a “widow.” She’d heard one of the other mothers at after-school pickup whisper that unfamiliar word, then cast a pitying glance in Ona’s direction.
On Sundays, Ona and her mother visited her grandparents at their apartment on Kwang Shin East Road. They rode two buses then walked several blocks, cutting through a large green park with a long soccer field. They’d started this routine only recently, soon after Ona began her ballet lessons with Miss Fang. Before these audiences, her mother fussed over Ona’s hair, inspected her fingernails, made sure she wore clean white socks and underwear without any holes.