“Me?” said her mother. “Me?”
“Mom,” said Fiona. She remembered something her mother used to say to her, when she was a child. “You’re my own heart, walking outside my body. I have to take care of you.”
“Oh, Ona,” her mother said softly. “My crazy, windy girl.”
Fiona would have to pay back the church money another day, another year. She’d give half of what she had to her mother now and keep the other half for her move to New York. None of this made any sense, given her usual system for making decisions: collecting data points, setting budget constraints, a lengthy Pros vs. Cons list. She realized she’d never considered the question her mother had posed today: Are you happy?
* * *
? ? ?
Fiona sat in her mortarboard and black polyester gown in the orchestra section at the Greek Theatre, waiting for her row to be called up. It was an especially hot Friday morning in the middle of May, and Fiona fanned herself with the paper program for the poli-sci ceremony.
She thought of that Father’s Day ballet recital years earlier, when she’d believed the yarn her grandfather had spun about inviting her father to watch her dance, if only she could keep it a secret. She’d been caught under her grandfather’s spell. After the earthquake, she found out her mother was in on the lie; she wasn’t a widow, and Fiona’s father wasn’t dead. The last piece of the story, as her mother told it finally; all this time, her father never knew he had a daughter. Fiona didn’t exist to him. Was it cruel of her grandfather to stir up her imagination, fuel a false hope to glimpse her father’s face in that darkened auditorium? She chose to believe that he did it because he loved her. And she forgave him for what he did to her mother, too, making her father leave. Her mother had no choice but to accept the boy’s disappearance, but then she did the one thing no one expected: she left the family. For six years, she lived on her own. Her mother had survived, day by day. She was a Lin, after all.
She thought of Shulin, who died in the earthquake that day. Fiona remembered afternoons watching cartoons on the television in Shulin’s living room—Astro Boy soaring through the sky, a magical robot cat with a bottomless pouch of toys, the colony of blue forest creatures who lived in mushroom cottages （she’d learned they were called “Smurfs” after she came to the US, amazed that they were suddenly speaking English on this side of the world）—the sun streaming in through the windows, casting patches of light and shadow on the parquet floors. She imagined her grandfather and her childhood friend meeting in the mythic afterlife, the place where the Monkey King was finally allowed to rest, after passing the monk’s tests. Shulin was still a little girl there, and Fiona’s grandfather held her hand. The picture made Fiona smile, impossible and tender. Suddenly the little girl was Fiona herself, looking up at her grandfather. Then she changed again, and became her mother. She wore Fiona’s commencement gown. Or was it a black funeral robe now?
After the ceremony, her mother would spring for the additional service the university offered for shipping official diplomas, which included professional matting and framing. When it arrives at the apartment a month later, she would hang it up proudly in the living room. Anyone who came over would be sure to hear about it: Ona, my daughter, the college graduate.
Fiona crossed the stage and shook hands with the dean. Squinting against the sun, she found her mother in the audience. She waved, and her mother beamed and waved back. Her stepfather and Conrad sat to her mother’s left, and on her right side, Jasper held a bouquet of sunflowers. Jane, up on her feet and clapping wildly, next to Won—their old friend; he and Jane had driven up from LA together. Fiona felt a thrill, seeing them all together in a row, cheering for her.
She remembered the admiring gaze her mother had cast toward those college students in Taipei, when they slurped down hot noodle bowls after her ballet class. Fiona had thought her mother wanted to be like those young men and women, free to fill up her life with books and learning, if only she wasn’t saddled with a small child. She realized she’d been wrong about her mother’s eyes trailing after those college students in Taipei; her mother’s gaze had always returned to her. Fiona could finally feel the power of her mother’s eyes on her. She turned a silly little pirouette and bowed, surprising herself, then walked down the stairs to exit the stage.
Go Slow
The year we turned sixteen, Fiona decided it was time we learned to drink. We drove to the Norwalk swap meet and laid out fifty bucks each for fake IDs from a passport photo, faxing, and color copy stall. A Gujarati family owned the business, and the girl we paid off had graduated from our high school a few years back. When she handed us the finished IDs, we knew right away we’d been scammed. They were flimsy laminated jobs no better than Blockbuster membership cards, overexposed photos of our unsmiling faces glued onto a rectangle of white paper with california identification card typed across the top, our names and birthdays below, minus those crucial five years to age us up to twenty-one. We were too embarrassed to demand our money back. Still, we were eager to test them out. That was when we called Won. He said he knew a place, and the three of us set out one Saturday night in Shamu, Fiona’s hatchback she named after the Sea World killer whale because of the corroding white patches all over the black paint.