Page 86 of If You Could See the Sun
It’s the sort of food she used to make me when I was in primary school: a bowl of steaming soybean milk—not that silky, supersweet stuff you can buy in cartons at the supermarket, but the homemade kind you need to filter through a sieve—an already peeled hard-boiled egg, two platters of Laoganma chili sauce and pickled vegetables, and half a chunk of white mantou.
Though I don’t have much of an appetite, hunger pinches my stomach. I realize I haven’t eaten anything in the past twenty-four hours.
I rip off a small piece of the mantouand chew. It’s still warm, the bread soft and faintly sweet. If only I wasn’t having difficulty swallowing.
“Is Baba joining us for breakfast?” I ask quietly, cautiously, wincing as the words scrape their way up my throat.
Mama doesn’t reply for a long time, the room deadly silent save for the soft crunch of peeled eggshells and the clink of her spoon against her bowl. Then at last she says, still not looking my way, “He already go to work.”
My heart sinks to my feet.
“I’m really sorry, Mama,” I whisper, staring down at a stain on the table. “I just—I wish—” My throat closes up, and I go quiet, fighting back the sudden press of tears. Deep down, I know there’s nothing I can say to change the situation; even if I’m sick with regret, even if I apologize a thousand times, in a thousand different ways, it’s too late. The past is permanent.
“We’re out of duck eggs.”
I jerk my head up, certain I’ve misheard. It’s not as if I expected Mama to respond to my apology, but... “What?”
“I need to go to market before work.”
Mama downs her bowl of soybean milk, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, and rises to her feet. Then, for the first time in months, she looks at me. Her gaze is gentler than I would’ve dared imagine, more tired than angry. “You coming or no?”
It’s been years since I last visited the local grocery store with Mama. After I moved into the dorms at Airington, I was simply too far away to visit home on a regular basis. But even during the summer holidays, I’d turn down Mama’s offers to go shopping—if trying to find the biggest possible cabbage for the cheapest price can even be called that—choosing instead to get a head start on coursework for the next year or polish up my holiday homework.
But not a lot has changed around here since I was twelve or thirteen.
There are still the same clustered shelves of ripe fruit: round nashi pears wrapped in white foam netting, sliced watermelon quarters and whole dragon fruits; the same overflowing trays of recognizable candy usually distributed at weddings: sticky peanut sweets wrapped in shiny red foil, tiny plastic cups of translucent jelly, thick marshmallows with strawberry swirls; the same glass displays at the Asian bakery, showcasing the freshly made sausage rolls and glazed egg tarts and purple taro buns stuffed with whipped cream.
Even the people seem the same: the little girl staring longingly at the row of fruit cakes, the old nainais squinting at the different brands of soy sauce.
And as I drift from aisle to aisle like a fish in freshwater, trailing behind Mama as she slaps a watermelon to check if it’s sweet, weighs out a bag of roasted sunflower seeds with expert precision, a strange feeling washes over me.
Peace.
Because it hasn’t just been years since I last visited the grocery store. It’s been years since I did anything that wasn’t for school, or, more recently, for Beijing Ghost. Years since I wasn’t so busy—always hustling, always striving to get further, do better—I could barely breathe.
The sudden freedom is dizzying. It makes me feel...well,humanagain.
All this time, I’d thought the nickname Study Machine was a compliment of sorts. That it meant productivity, above-human levels of discipline, that I was programmed for success.
Now I wonder if it describes someone devoted to doing at the expense of feeling. Something barely alive.
Mr. Chen’s words resurface in my mind—
What is it that you want?
The answer had seemed so obvious to me then: I want whatever other people want, whatever they assign the most worth to. But standing here in the middle of a crowded supermarket, like some scene from a childhood dream, the first thing I think of is the English program Mr. Chen recommended to me. Well, not so much that specific program, but the idea of just getting towritefor two whole months, or even longer, of having that be what I’m best at...
“Ready to leave?” Mama asks, pulling me from my thoughts. Her basket is only half filled with vegetables and fruit, her hands pale and chapped over the handle. The winter always makes her skin dry, the scar more noticeable.
I’m about to tell heryes, when my eyes fall on the little pharmacy store next to the seasoning section.
“Wait right here,” I say, ducking around the nearest shelf. “There’s something I want to see first...”
Over the course of the next week, I do everything I can to distract myself.
I catch up on all the popular costume dramas from the past few years, the kind that stretch on for over seventy episodes and involve such complicated relationships you’d need a diagram to sort them out. I read books that aren’tMacbethor dry classics or compulsory texts for IB, but fun fantasy novels with magic and mythology. I help Mama cook when she’s working, help Baba fold his clothes even though he’s still not speaking to me. I make long to-do lists, SMART goals, Five Year Plans, then toss them in the trash, knowing how pointless it all is when my future now hangs on such a thin thread.
And no matter what, I try not to think about Peter, or Andrew She, or the fact that the school should be calling any day now to announce what exactly my punishment will be.
