She told me that I needed to work on my liáo tiān skills.
What are you doing tomorrow? I asked.
Seeing the rest of your brother’s house. She yawned and I told her to go back to bed.
She said she couldn’t until we’d hung up and she couldn’t hang up until I did. In order to provide more support, she’d promised herself to stop hanging up on her kids. So, if I could hang up, that would be ideal.
But I don’t want to hang up either. It’s not very filial.
You have my permission.
I can’t, I said, worried that my hand would immediately fall off after I put the phone down.
Why would that happen to your hand, Joan-na? Are you the undead?
Humor was a coping mechanism, said the brochures, but they never mentioned how long after a death in the family was it appropriate to start using the word dead. When I still couldn’t hang up on my mother, she told me to count to three with her and at three, we ended the call at the same time.
Afterward, the nurse next to me, who had been sitting next to me the whole time, said that she didn’t know that I spoke Chinese. I apologized out of reflex and when she looked confused, I apologized for confusing her.
No, it’s cool that you do, she said.
There were times my classmates would ask me to translate some dumb English phrase into Chinese just to prove to them that I could, then after hearing me speak Chinese, just to say that I sounded foreign.
I waited for the nurse to do that, but of course she didn’t, since she was a good person and a good nurse, and we were both adults.
* * *
—
MY MOTHER’S WORRIES HADN’T been unfounded. As a child, I was at medium to high risk of not maturing—many trips to the counselor’s office, a persistent lack of friends.
My first counselor in Scranton asked if I had thoughts of hurting myself. You do not smile, she said, and if you do not smile, how is anyone going to know what’s going on in that big head?
The Joker smiles a lot, I replied.
The Joker isn’t real, she said.
That I often answered questions strangely was a reason I was sent to her office in the first place.
Concerns, concerning, and teachers wrote in my report cards that while my academic performance was excellent, they didn’t know much about me, and my personality was a mystery. Compared with other kids, I was too quiet and shy. Why didn’t I ever speak up? Or participate in group discussion? Or have anything else to add?
Because I had only a limited amount to say. Better to distill our words down to a single point, I thought, hence why I’ve always admired bullet-pointed handouts and needles.
But when I said that last part about needles, a second counselor thought I was using recreational drugs. He began to call out specific drugs, asking which ones I’d used, an entire alphabet I was unaware of. I could only say that his list would make a great children’s book, cautionary but educational.
Counselor Three of Bay City suspected that I would find myself later. College was the best years of my life, he said. He had joined a fraternity and met his wife. These things can happen to you too. But a sorority, he clarified, and a husband.
Counselor Three’s office was covered with insignias of our state school, his alma mater. The insignia was a green helmet, like the kind worn during battle in ancient Greece. Our state school was behind in academic anything but was sports champion every year. Counselor Three played no sports though continued to be an overzealous fan.
About the sorority and husband, I said, I’ll have to see. But as my brother had, so would I choose a fancy college far away from where I had been raised and in a state that I’d never lived.
At eighteen, I was dropped off at Harvard, and within a few months my parents had sold most of their things and left the country. The speed and style of their exit would remind me of those old cartoons, the final line. That’s all, folks!
I had been prepared, told on and off again that eventually my brother and I would have to look after each other and be on our own. But was I a child of immigrants anymore, if technically they had returned?
Back in Shanghai, my parents would finally become upper middle class. All of China was rebuilding and all of China needed waterproof tarp. When my father visited me last spring, he said that the next time he was in town, which he hoped would be soon should this new client go through, he would allot more time for me and even park his rental car. In spring, he hadn’t parked. Hospital parking was $17.99 an hour, and if he couldn’t stay the entire hour, then the price per minute was exorbitant. So, he left his rental car running with its flashers on and in direct line of sight from the atrium table where we sat.