Page 5 of Never Thought I'd End Up Here
“To sleep,” I finish, looking off to the side. Xiyue has already moved on to the neighboring table, where all the elderly aunties take turns pinching her cheeks and showering her with their blessings. “To sleep forever.”
“I believe you’re describing death,” Cyrus says.
“At least it’s attainable.”
He makes a light scoffing sound. “A low bar.”
“Yes, well—” I’m distracted by a sudden, harrowing realization as Xiyue begins walking over to us. “Oh my god.”
“What?” he asks immediately, shifting forward.
“We’renot expected to say anything, are we? To Xiyue, I mean.”
“Of course we are,” he says, looking confused by my panic. “It’s basic etiquette. You don’t need to give a speech—just offer up a few congratulatory words or something.”
“I—I can’t—” I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. My Mandarin skills are limited to simple greetings and common sayings in my household, such as “stop leaving your cups everywhere” and “clean out your wardrobe” and “math requires practice.” None of them are applicable here.
“I know,” one of the kids speaks up from the other side of the table. She looks no older than eight. Her hair is bunched into pigtails that bob around when she grabs another handful of candy. “Zhu nimen xinhun yukuai, zaosheng guizi.”
“What—what does that mean?” I ask, tracking my cousin’s movement out of the corner of my eye.
“It means you wish them a happy marriage, and hope that they start a healthy family soon,” Cyrus explains.
I hesitate. “Are you sure?”
“You can look it up if you don’t believe me,” he says, rolling his eyes.
“Okay, thank you so much,” I tell the little girl, both genuinely grateful and devastatingly humbled to be receiving Mandarin help from someone half my size. “And thank you too, I guess,” I say to Cyrus with far less enthusiasm. “So it’s … What was it again?”
“Zhu nimen xinhun yukuai, zaosheng guizi,” he advises. Even though we’ve both grown up here in LA, his pronunciation is perfect, but I don’t have time to be annoyed about it.
“Got it.” I repeat the phrase rapidly under my breath as my cousin and her husband approach.Zhu nimen xinhun yukuai, zaosheng guizi.It’s only a few words. Even though I might not understand them, I can rely on my short-term memory to know the sounds. I just have to focus and recite them until it’s my turn.Zhu nimenxinhun yukuai—
“I thought your Mandarin was decent,” Cyrus says.
Dammit.
“Please don’t talk to me right now,” I say, wiping my hands against my dress. “I’m concentrating.”
Zhu nimen xinhun yukuai.
“I can tell. Your concentrating face looks the same.” He points to the space between his brows, then to mine. “You get this little crease here.”
Xinhun. Xin. Hun.
Zhu nimen xinhun—
“But really. Have you been slacking off on your Chinese studies these past two years or what?” Cyrus asks.
I glare at him. “Could you not—”
“Hi!” Xiyue appears at our table, her husband following close after her. She smiles over at me expectantly, her glass of wine refilled. And then she waits. Her husband waits too. This is my first time seeing him up close, and he has the sort of face that just belongs to a banker: a soft jaw, gelled hair, round glasses. He would look great with square frames though. I’m debating whether to offer this fashion tip when I remember what I’m meant to do.
I rise hastily to my feet and hold up my untouched glass of orange juice. “Zhu nimen …” As I talk, I notice that the ballroom has fallen quiet. A few people are even pushing back their chairs or craning their heads to look at me.
It’s a strange feeling, but not a new one.
Most of the guests here must still think of me as the model, thanks to my mom’s constant promotional-slash-humblebrag posts on WeChat. That’s what everyone from my current high school knows me as too—and it’s by design. After the Incident, after the first and second school I transferred into and left again because nobody wanted me there, I knew that unless I wanted to graduate a social pariah, I needed to change something. Not in anEat Pray Loveway, but quick, shallow changes, Band-Aid fixes to hold myself together while everything was falling apart.
