U.S. history was appalling, but I also didn’t know what my brother expected me to do about it. These events predated us and our parents. We weren’t descendants of railroad workers or the first Chinatown restaurateurs.
Nothing to do with us? he’d say. How many ethnic groups has this country ever banned? History repeats itself. Asians are often pitted against other Asians, and even citizenship can’t always save you.
If history did repeat itself, then I needed only to wait for the next round to experience the trauma firsthand. Though maybe the next round was now in my exile from the hospital, the city, apartment 9A, and a virus problem on the other side of the world.
A daughter of immigrants is the daughter of guests, is a part-time guest herself, and the best kind of guest goes with the flow. She stays in a guesthouse.
Asians are often pitted against other Asians—when my brother broached the subject, I didn’t give it another second of thought because medicine still strove to reward merit and the system had treated me well. But at every application gate and interview, I was not so subtly reminded that I wasn’t competing against white or black Americans, I was competing against the Koreans, the Japanese, and other Chinese Americans vying for the exact same spot.
Quotas haven’t gone away, nor have the large groups of us willing to race against time and one another, but never call ourselves a race.
Proud to be an American, a feeling that I lacked but also a phrase that I didn’t think applied to me.
So, othering, did that term apply to me and was it what I’d internalized? Whenever I heard news of deportation or the line that people must enter the legal way, fear of my own removal would start to reflux. Then I had to remind myself that I was born here, that this land was as much mine as it was theirs. But were these facts written on my face? Was my being born here and my parents’ legal arrival carved into our facial features or the color of our skin? And even if I hadn’t been born here, had I been one of those kids brought over by her parents at age two, five, twelve, then naturalized, what made them and their families any less American if they were the most American of all things—fresh off the boat, in search of better days?
Little you can do about which era or group you’re set into here, was another direct line that I could draw. An immigrant family controls nothing, and so raises two average children obsessed with gaining it back, albeit in different ways. The same trait that I was criticizing Fang for was what I liked about attending intensive care units. A ring of twenty beds, an entire wing of the hospital, all under my domain.
* * *
—
SLEEP NEVER CAME, SO I just lay there for hours, watching light come in through the window, through the blinds. I looked for cracks in the ceiling （none found）。 I started to hear not street noise, as in New York, but small, faint sounds—the breeze of a passing car, maybe that cab and its driver.
Then I got up and washed my face.
The kitchen windows were fogged, and as I was wiping off the condensation, I could vaguely make out two figures coming down the footpath from the main house under a giant black umbrella. When the aide and my mother came inside, they dusted off their thick coats and collapsed the umbrella with the push of a button. My mother was holding a small pot; the aide, a tray of tiny dishes.
Nanny’s congee, my mother said, lifting the small pot and nudging the aide, who said she was only following my mother’s instructions.
But improved upon, my mother said.
Alongside rice porridge, they had brought me pickled vegetables, a fermented tofu cube, Jif creamy peanut butter, a hunk of which I plopped right at the edge of my bowl such that it moved down into the congee like a mudslide. Buns filled with sweet custard, buns filled with red bean, savory buns with spinach and minced meat, sticky rice and pork belly wrapped in bamboo leaves and tied with string.
You made zòng zi? I asked, the entire breakfast table covered in food.
I had to, she said. Yesterday, I was so bored, and this was the most time-consuming thing I could think of to do. My own grandmother’s recipe, your great-grandmother, who sadly you’ve never met. But what a good daughter you are, she added with sarcasm, to not even tell me that you were coming, to just show up.
Not very filial, I said.
No, she said.
I felt something in my eyes. A tear or dried specks of dust? I hadn’t cried at my father’s funeral and saw very few people who did. My mother’s eyes were red during the service, but she had cried elsewhere, alone and out of sight. There was sadness in the room, a large rolling cloud of it, but also the expectation to not let your own show.