Page 8 of Never Thought I'd End Up Here
My aunt’s words ring inside my skull, and I wonder if my mom’s thinking of them too.Ignorant foreigner.“I … I do speak to my grandparents,” I venture through the lump in my throat, desperate to defend myself. “I called my nainai just last week.”
My mom draws in a deep breath and sighs again, as if there’s an excess of oxygen inside the vehicle. “You saidlove you, dudeat the end.”
“What’s wrong with telling her I love her?”
“You called your nainaidude,” she emphasizes.
“Respectfully.”
“You don’t even know who Tang Bohu is.”
I hesitate, trying to place the name. “Who is that? One of my uncles?”
Dad makes an impassioned motion for me to stop talking.
“Look, this is a serious problem, Leah,” my mom says as she turns onto the main street. “How long has it been since you visited China? Do you not remember anything anymore?”
I’m not sure how to answer that. I gaze out the window, at the smooth, winding roads and the lush lawns and the ocean simmering on the horizon, peppered with little white boats, the clear sky opening up around us. When I think ofhere, I think of LA. These are my most intimate, immediate surroundings. This is the place where I grew up, where I learned to ride a bike and spell my name and play soccer, where we buried my pet goldfish and planted a cherry tree and set up a tent in our backyard to watch movies at night. But I don’t think of China asthereeither. It’s not the same as when my friends talk about traveling to France or Bali for the holidays, some hazy, distant destination I know only from photos and travel brochures. Although my memories of China are flimsy, stretched almost translucent over a total of five summer breaks from my childhood, I always have this feeling that my bones will know the place, even when I don’t.
“I’m not sure,” I mumble.
“Well, if you’re actually sorry about what happened today, and if you’d like to prevent anything similar from ever happening again, we’ll need to make some changes around here,” my mom says with a terrifying note of resolve in her voice. When she decides on something, she means it. Last year, she made an abrupt announcement that she felt the house chores weren’t being evenly distributed enough. By the end of the evening, she’d created a very strict roster we’ve been following to this day. Tonight is dish duty for me.
“Iamsorry,” I say quickly. “We can go to my aunt and my cousin right now—I can write them an apology letter—”
“In what, English?” my mom says with a scoff. “If you’re apologizing to them, it better be in perfect Chinese. You should start practicing. No more English allowed in our house.”
“What?”
“Starting now,” she repeats. “Xianzai.”
“But—that’s—” I splutter. “I don’t—”
“Yong zhongwen” is all she says.Use Chinese.
Nobody speaks again for the rest of the car ride.
***
All throughout the next week, my mom is in a strange mood.
She stays up in her home office until midnight; when I go to sleep, it’s to the sound of the printer whirring or her computer humming. She disappears at dinner to make important calls, speaking in a hushed voice. She cancels our pizza night on Friday and cooks for the first time in a month to make sweet-and-sour pork ribs and sticky pineapple rice. She keeps her word about only speaking in Chinese; the one time she weakens is when she accidentally locks herself in the garage and I can’t figure out where the key is.
Then, on Saturday, she lowers herself onto the couch next to me and holds up a document.
I hit pause on my laptop. “What is that?” I ask warily, rubbing my eyes.
I’ve spent the past two hours binge-watching a documentary about the career revival of a famous singer-songwriter. The last scene had been of her sobbing into a napkin in the darkness of her studio, while screenshots of absurdly mean comments floated around her like digital phantoms.
Of course, I know how things will go from here. She’ll remember why she got into the industry in the first place: because of herpassion for music. Maybe she’ll receive a heartfelt message from a fan, or she’ll find a video of herself playing the piano as a toddler.This is what it’s really about, she’ll say,not success.She’ll then wake up one morning with a melody stuck in her head, and she’ll hurry down to the studio, and the rough, original audio will transition into the final song, which she’ll play at sold-out stadiums, having become successful at last.
“An application,” my mom says.
“An application for what?” I ask. “And are we finally speaking English again?”
She ignores my second question. Just waves the document around with excitement like it’s a winning lottery ticket. “Journey to the East.”
I stare.
