So, what was he like? Your dad.
Normal guy, I said. Nothing out of the ordinary.
My director said he’d had a look at my file.
Oh yeah?
I know your mom is still in China, but you have a brother here in the States, in Greenwich. That’s not too far.
Not at all.
The two of you get along?
Very much so. I love my brother. We met in Wichita.
Met? You mean where you were born.
No, I was born in Oakland.
And him?
He would probably say Connecticut.
What’s he like?
My brother? Just another average Joe.
* * *
—
THE AVERAGE JOE IN America is expected to move 11.4 times in his life. Who knows about the average Jane. From Wichita, we moved to Scranton, Pennsylvania. From Scranton to Bay City, Michigan. More town than city, Bay City was the last place we would live together as a family, and for only two years. Then counting my moves within Massachusetts, from dorm to dorm and later to New York for work, I was right under the average at eleven.
During my childhood and adolescence, we moved because of my father. His dream enterprise was in construction, like an enterprise that sold tarps, specifically the waterproof tarps used to cover unfinished sites. But wherever he tried to start this business, no bank would lend him money for it and the enterprise would fail. He could look suspicious: gaunt cheeks; extra-small, inset eyes; a few very long whiskers that sprouted out around his mouth. Whenever the business failed, he would wash his hands of the state. Time to start anew, he would say, time to break new ground.
My father was an optimist. For the number three, he would touch his index finger to his thumb, the same hand gesture as for the A-OK.
The only business routes available to him were to open a Chinese restaurant or convenience store, and neither he was interested in. There wasn’t enough time （or money） to go back to school for an MBA, which was where he thought the real problem lay, not in his appearance but the lack of American degrees. He took on odd jobs, washing dishes at restaurants, delivering newspapers, landscaping, stocking store shelves, while my mother cleaned houses. Average people, my parents. Who raised two average kids.
But as average parents, they still differed in small ways. I could have told Reese this memory of my father, but he wouldn’t have understood.
A Chinese saying: Hitting is love, berating is love. Had I explained that to Reese, he wouldn’t have known what I meant. He would have overreacted and judged me. What kind of love is that? What kind of parents did you have?
When my father was truly angry about something, he could berate me for hours but afterward offer to buy me ice cream. My mother could berate for hours too, but no ice cream afterward, and while berating, she could multitask, she could move swiftly through a room to collect a large portion of my things. She would put my things in a plastic bag and double knot the bag. Then she would put the bag on a high shelf. In hindsight, she was trying to fortify something in me. A person shouldn’t sentimentalize or believe anything to be precious. But in a month, there would be two or three bags on that shelf, and inevitably all of my things would be gone.
I hadn’t been an easy child. Quiet, a recluse, and disastrously clumsy. I spilled things like cough syrup as I was taking them, the red dye flooding the dingy carpet of our rental and impossible to get out. We couldn’t tell the landlord so my mother put a rug over it, after which I was berated, then had all my things put into bags.
Mostly my mother wanted to know why I couldn’t be a happier child. Why are you looking at me like that? she would ask, and I hadn’t looked at her in any way. But there we were in a supermarket aisle, across any table, in a car just her and me, my mother in the driver’s seat, speeding past cornfields, miles of flat land, glaring not at me but the road ahead.
What look? I would ask.
That look that I owe you something, that I’ve wronged you in some way.
A pessimist, a constant speculator. Had she known what America was like, she might not have immigrated. Had she not been an immigrant, she might have enjoyed being a mom. Raising you took off half my life, she would say. You’re living proof of where that half went.
（Chemists know this already. All elements on the periodic table decay and in one half life, half the original element, called the parent nucleus, decays into a different element, or the daughter nucleus. No son nucleus, of course. No son could ever be a by-product of radioactive decay.）
Hitting is love: The last day I was in China, I tried to give my mother a hug and she recoiled, but then she brought one hand over my shoulder and started pounding my back as if I were choking. I pounded hers in return and she continued to pound mine. We hacked a little and this went on for a few seconds. It reminded me of chest compressions, the ones that you have to do during codes. You must always stay calm. But you must also be willing to break all the person’s ribs in order to keep her alive.