After the entire Valentine’s pizza was consumed, I heard myself say the same thing to my nephews. Shower, brush your teeth, go to bed.
But it’s only seven p.m., they replied.
Then just shower.
What about a story or game night or a movie?
I said I couldn’t be like their mother.
What about homework?
It’s not done?
We’re done with homework.
So, it is done.
Not what we said.
Took me another second to realize that by “done with homework” they meant they were over it and unable to get back into it. Harder to watch my nephews do no work for the evening than to take all of their pages and finish it myself. Paperwork could be glorious, and I hadn’t filled out any since going on leave.
You might have been tricked, said my mother, who found me at the edge of the dining table with a stack of worksheets and a calculator, trying to write my numbers like a child.
Shower, brush your teeth, go to bed, I told her as well.
* * *
—
RECENTLY, I’VE NOTICED SOMETHING. I looked down at my hands and noticed that they are the same shape as my father’s. The same square fingers and fingernails, the same knuckle protrusions and creases around the joints. Not possible, of course, especially with the creases, but once I noticed, I couldn’t stop staring at them. I couldn’t stop holding my hands out and inspecting them from different angles, then looking at myself in a mirror. My face, stature, and the sharp drop of my shoulders were my mother’s. But how I held a fork, chopsticks; how my hands gestured, flexed, and sat in my lap, fingers naturally curled in.
The only difference was that his hands were perpetually pruned and cracked. The smell of grease would radiate off his skin the moment he entered a room. Dandruff on his shoulders, a heavy dusting of it in his hair from dry scalp, but that looked like fine, crumbled plaster. His shoes smelled bad; his feet could smell worse. For half an hour after work he would have to stand in the shower. Outside, in the kitchen, my mother, nose pinched, holding his stained work shirt by the smallest amount of fabric, between her index finger and thumb, and with her arm outstretched, sprinting to the sink as fast as possible where it would be soaked. He was not unclean, yet I thought this, me, his own daughter. He was not withdrawn, unfeeling, incompetent, bumbling, a fish out of water, yet I’ve thought all those things as well. I was guilty of having the impressions of him that a stranger might at first glance. But as his daughter, I should have tried harder, while I still had the chance, to draw him out, to listen and to champion him, them both.
My mother’s hands weren’t so much pruned as sanded down from years of cleaning products and bleach. Her palm lines shallow etches, her fingerprints gone.
They must have fought a ton, but I was buffered from it. Before Fang arrived, I was too young to understand, and after he was here, he could listen on my behalf. The moment he noticed something was off, that a serious fight was about to start, he would say in Chinese, Hey, Jiu-an, let’s go outside.
But it’s freezing out, I replied in English, since there’s no greater way to hurt your family than to not speak in their native tongue even when you can.
So? You chicken? （His English fast improving.） Come on, little chicken, let’s go.
Dozens of times he called me “little chicken” and took me outside to play. When we came back an hour later, the fight was over.
I had taught my father the meaning of that phrase, fish out of water, but he was the one who had taught me. So, here you say “fish out of water.” But there, you would say “like a fish to water,” or rú yú dé shuǐ （如鱼得水）—like a stranded fish put back. He rested his case again. East and west will never get along, never see eye to eye.
Did he mean us? Was he the east and I the west, two fish arguing about the idioms to which they belonged?
Other questions I’d never asked my parents, never thought to find out: Did they fight less after they returned to China? My father soon found better work, and they bought their apartment that was on a high floor and had a closed-in balcony. That their standard of living improved so quickly made me wonder once why they didn’t move back sooner, say ten or fifteen years earlier, why stay so long in America, for what, for whom—proof that even smart people can ask dumb questions. And if they weren’t fighting as much, what were they doing in their less stressed-out spare time? I couldn’t imagine my parents with leisure, with fun （or knowing what to do with leisure if our most prized trait was to endure）， but that’s my blind spot, not theirs. For I knew that they did have fun, through the occasional photo sent over, shots of just the two of them standing side by side next to a turtle pond, or group shots of them at yet another banquet table with unfamiliar faces. Who’s that? I would ask, and get, Old classmates, old friends. We all went out singing last week, or dancing, or turtle watching.