Sophomore year, I picked up smoking menthols from Fiona. I turned sixteen. Failed my driving test a bunch of times before I gave up. Baba didn’t come home that summer like he’d said he would. Mah explained that he’d signed on for another academic year. I asked if they were getting a divorce. “We need his salary for your college,” she said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
As if to make up for his absence at church, Mah threw herself into her devotionals even more vigorously than before. She hosted Friday night Bible study at our house once a month. Not long after Baba left, she bought a huge Jesus painting and hung it on the living room wall, above the black leather sofa with the rip in the arm. A crown of thorns rested on His head, and rivulets of blood flowed down His temples. Jesus’s soft blue eyes gazed over the furniture—the matching leather love seat to the side, the walnut-and-glass coffee table decorated with a white doily at its center—and landed on the upright Yamaha against the opposite wall, where I took my weekly piano lessons.
Junior year, I learned to drink soju and beer with my friends. Another school year passed, and then it was summer again. I was seventeen. I asked Mah if Baba was coming home. Instead of answering, she said she was switching me to a new piano teacher.
Ping was a grad student in music composition and performance at CalArts up in Valencia. Mah had heard about her because another girl under Ping’s tutelage kept winning first place at piano competitions and junior talent shows all over LA, South Bay, Orange County. Mah wanted Ping to work her magic on me, too.
Last August: the first time Ping came over to give me a lesson, I caught a look of horror in her eyes when she saw Mah’s huge painting of Jesus. I was caught off guard—He’d been hanging there for so long I sort of forgot about it—but when Ping’s eyes met mine, she gave a bighearted, booming laugh. I laughed, too. She looked back at Jesus, then again at me. She wiped tears from the corners of her eyes and shook her head. It was the first time an adult （Ping was twenty-four, she told me later, when I asked） had ever used that secret language with me, telling a joke without words. We sat down at the piano, me at the bench, Ping in the chair beside it. She wore a plain black sweatshirt over green cargo pants, and black ankle socks on her feet. Large, docile eyes set wide apart on her round face gave Ping the appearance of a curious goldfish. When she pushed up her sleeves, I saw that her arms were covered in tattoos. I’d never imagined someone from China like that, the doomed way Mah talked about the Communist mainland: starvation, corruption, pollution.
Senior year now. I turned eighteen in March; only sixty-four days until graduation. Two years, seven months, since the last time I saw my father. I had to come here to find him. Nine days together in Taipei, finally. To invite him home.
I shifted in my seat, peeling sweaty thighs off the molded plastic chair. Lee’s presence irritated me. It was my last night in Taiwan—couldn’t Baba and I have spent it alone, just the two of us? There were things I wanted to talk to him about, like when exactly he was planning to return to LA, to Mah, and to me.
* * *
? ? ?
I wondered if Mah had been one of those girls watching my father at the badminton court. Neither of my parents had ever been forthcoming about the early days of their romance. I’d tried to ask about it, but they only ever gave me desultory answers, claiming there’d been nothing extraordinary about their courtship.
I asked Lee if he knew my mother back then, too. Before he could answer, Baba’s cell phone jingled. “Her ears must be itching,” Baba said, flipping the phone open.
Lee took out the blue handkerchief again, shaking it in the air a few times before refolding it into a neat rectangle. He turned away from us and blew his nose violently, his eyes squeezed shut.
On the phone, Baba repeated my flight info to Mah. He promised to follow Taoyuan regulations and get me there three hours ahead of the scheduled departure time.
“What we’re doing now?” For an instant, his eyes slid toward Lee. “You want to talk to her?” He handed me the phone.
“Hi, Mah.” She asked what foods we’d eaten today, and I listed them for her, everything at breakfast, lunch, dinner, the night market. After a pause, she asked if I’d had a good time. I said yes.
“You still want to come back, right?” She gave a soft laugh. “Fiona called yesterday for you. I tell her you’re not home yet.” What time was it in LA? Fifteen hours behind, so it was Friday morning there. My mother must have been getting ready to leave for work.