Chapter 31 - I'll Be a Home for You

Chapter 31

dripping water can penetrate the stone

Aang

The next day, I’m pacing the corridor of the church, waiting for Ms. Leung to invite me into the classroom. I’m going to say I have no idea who sent the email, that I love being here, and no one ever said a bad thing to me. I should say it in Cantonese as well. How do I say love? Shit. I stop pacing and rub my temples. Oi,31 but what tone? No, I should say like—hóu jūng yi.32

“Aang?” Ms. Leung opens the door. “Please come in.”

The second I sit down, she starts talking. “I’m very sorry about your experience here. I’ve already talked to Michael, and I’ll talk to the other kids later. It’s unacceptable and …”

I stop listening to her. A piece of paper with my name on it lies on her desk. My exam. I scored twenty points.

Out of a hundred.

“I failed the exam.”

Ms. Leung looks down and winces. She puts a hand over the paper. “We can talk about that later, but for now—”

“I failed the exam,” I repeat.

Ms. Leung shakes her head. “You couldn’t fail this test. It was constructive feedback.”

“I studied. Every day.”

She turns the exam paper upside down, but the twenty is burned into my corneas.

I press my lips together and open my backpack, taking out the stack of notebooks, any loose pieces of paper I practiced on, the Hong Kong history books, and the Buddhist literature. I put it all on her desk. “I’ve been learning … I mean … I’ve been studying to …” My hands still. Now that I’m trying to say it out loud … studying to do what, exactly? Be from Hong Kong?

“Aang …” My teacher blinks at the mess on her desk. “Have you considered that your motivations are making it hard for you to learn? You seem to think that you have to be here, instead of wanting to be here. Maybe this isn’t the place for you?”

My shoulders slump. If this isn’t the place, then there’s nothing out there for me. I grab the exam paper and slide all the books into my arms, not bothering to put them into the backpack.

My teacher’s eyes widen. “Wait, Aang, that wasn’t—”

“Joi gin,”33 I say quietly. The irony of telling her See you again is not lost on me, but I don’t know the words for This is the last time we’re seeing each other, right?

I rush through the corridors and wrench open the door of the church.

And walk straight into someone.

Everything I’m holding—the papers, notebooks, books—goes flying. And because this day can get worse, the person standing in front of me is Michael.

“Terrific.” I grit my teeth and squat down to gather everything. And because this day can get even more miserable, he crouches down and helps me. He picks up notebooks and books, reading the titles, his eyes flicking between them and me.

“What the fuck do you want?” I hiss.

He tightens his grip around a notebook but doesn’t say anything. He flips through the notebook, filled with only two characters. 香 and 港. He takes in the constant repetition of Hong Kong.

He mouths, Wow. He picks up another notebook, this one with fifty pages of 我唔明.34

His face shifts like he just found out I have a terminal disease and he has to be nice to me now. “You know … I went to Hong Kong earlier this year. For the first time.”

Great. He gets to speak Cantonese. He doesn’t need to practice the characters constantly so they don’t all immediately blend into one. And on top of that, he gets to go to Hong Kong. The papers tear where my nails dig into them, and I speed up the gathering to get away from him before he starts bragging about how amazing Hong Kong was for him.

“I spoke the language and still spent weeks feeling like a tourist in what was supposed to be my homeland. They pegged me as an American straightaway It was brutal.” He sighs and hands me the notebook. “Everyone in the class feels not-really Asian. And I guess it’s not a good enough reason, but excluding you made us feel better about our identities. Not for long. But for long enough that we kept doing it. I’m … I’m sorry for that. But you have to chill with your lectures about Real Chinese Culture because it makes it very hard to be civil toward you.”

My phone lights up. Michael stares at the photo of JJ as the screensaver. “Man, your girlfriend is way too hot for you.”

“She’s not—” I cut myself off. Is she my girlfriend? Is it even worth pondering after yesterday? Probably not.

But the idea of having to change my wallpaper, of not being able to taste the sugar on her tongue when we kiss … of … of having to stop thinking of myself as hers makes me queasy, no matter how mad I still am.

Michael eyes me. “She better be your girlfriend. Otherwise, your wallpaper is even more psycho behavior than all of this.” He picks up the last piece of paper. My exam sheet. He crumples it up in his hand before handing it to me. “By the way, I lied at the party. You pronounced my name correctly. Just use the family name as well next time.”

He stands up and wipes his hands on his jeans. “Well, if your girlfriend ever breaks up with you, give her my number. Tell her I’m willing to overlook that she’s clearly the one who snitched on me.” He walks away.

I push myself off the ground. I throw the exam paper into the garbage on my way out of the parking lot. And when I sit at the bus stop for an hour, waiting for the sorry excuse for public transportation that we have here, for the first time ever, the Hong Kong–shaped wound in my heart bleeds not only for me, but for all of us.

When I walk into the house and see the door to my mom’s study half-open, I don’t tiptoe anymore. I push the door in. Mom startles at her desk.

I start talking before I chicken out. “Every day, I mourn the loss of a culture I never got to experience. How can I miss something I’ve never had? It’s agony.”

Mom doesn’t answer, so I step into the room. “I’m never going to give up.” I point to my grandma’s altar. “I need this to be mine. So please, help me.”

She looks between the altar and me. Her face shifts from surprise to an expression I’ve only ever seen once, when private equity bought the nursing home she works at.

Pure anger.

“You need this to be yours? You want my help?” Her hands tighten on the desk, and my blood freezes. “And what would be the point?” She pushes off the chair. “So you can scoff at our Chinese New Year traditions? How exactly do I help you when your own family isn’t good enough for you?”

The room tilts, everything growing slow and heavy. I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. Her anger evaporates as quickly as it appeared, and her eyes widen in regret.

I spin on my heel and stumble up to my room. The sun reflects off the cheerleading medals on the board, blinding me. I rush to the desk and tear them down. I weigh the medals in my hand as Bruce Lee stares at me.

“Fuck this!” I scream and fling them across the room. They hit the poster, knocking it off the wall.

Remy’s new frame shatters, and the glass goes everywhere.

Mom runs up the stairs and shoves the door open. “Are you okay?” She gasps as she takes in the shattered glass and the medals.

“哎呀,”35 she says quietly.

Her first thought is in Cantonese. Mine never will be. “How is this possible?” I shout. “How is it possible that you speak Cantonese and I can’t? You’re telling me that my family isn’t good enough for me, but clearly, your mother thought that you were worthy of learning how to speak, but I—” I hiccup.

Fantastic. Exactly what I need when trying to get a rant out.

“Never mind.” I slide down the wall next to the desk. “Can you close the door on your way out?” I hiccup again.

She doesn’t leave. Instead, she grabs my garbage can. I stay where I am as she collects the larger pieces of glass. After putting the eighth one in the can, without looking at me, she says, “My mom and I, we lived in a neighborhood of only other Cantonese speakers. I didn’t learn how to speak English properly until I got to school. The first year was not fun, believe me on that.” She starts picking up the smaller pieces. “I wanted to teach you. But I didn’t realize how much effort it takes to teach a language when no one around you speaks it. How frustrating it is to try to get a small child to talk in Chinese when everything is in English. It was hard, and it was lonely.”

My throat is tight, but the words get out either way. “You’re acting like there aren’t two of you in this house who can speak Cantonese.”

Mom shakes her head. “Your dad speaks like a seven-year-old, and it pains him every time he opens his mouth. He wasn’t going to help. So, I convinced myself that it was fine, that you wouldn’t know what you were missing.”

“You were wrong.”

“I know. I took the easy way out. And when you decided to learn on your own, instead of joy, I felt shame. Because you should have already known it, because it was my job to teach you, and I screwed it up. And every time you mentioned your school or your homework, it was simpler to run away from the shame than sit in it.” She gives up on the smallest shards of glass.

I hold my breath, hoping the lack of oxygen will make my brain stop producing the tears in my eyes before they run down my cheeks.

“And it became easier and easier to run away the more critical you became of how we act and what we do,” she says. “You started putting Hong Kong on a pedestal as some holy land that neither your dad nor I should have left when it wasn’t our choice to begin with. But that didn’t mean that it was right for me to choose my own comfort over yours. I’m sorry.” She sniffs and rubs her eyes. “Ugh, tears.” She switches her attention to my bookcase.

My lungs are burning, begging me to take a breath, but the physical pain is better than whatever emotional pain is going to flood my brain the second it gets some air.

With shaky hands, she picks up a book about Buddhism. She goes through the annotated pages, her eyebrows rising higher with every scribble her gaze lands on. “This is … wow.” She closes the book. “Let’s go. No arguing.”

She doesn’t use her serious tone often. Directed at me, it’s so surprising I forget not to breathe.

We go down to her study, Mom still clutching the Buddhism book. She hands me the bowl of water from my grandmother’s shrine. “Go, pour fresh water in.”

When I come back from the kitchen, we bow three times. Mom adjusts the horse and the cigarettes and looks at me expectantly.

I make no comments about the lack of incense, and she smiles.

“In Hong Kong, not liking the incense smell would have been a weird quirk,” she says. “But here, it’s suddenly a sign that I’m not Chinese enough.” She arches her eyebrow at me, and my gaze falls to the floor. “As soon as you step out of Hong Kong, you’ll always be held to a higher standard, and yet at the same time, you’ll never be Chinese enough. You’ll never win.”

She turns my Buddhism book over in her hands. She looks at her mother’s photo and mutters something in Cantonese with her head bent. She then hands the book to me. “You can learn the language, the food, the history, the religions. But you’re already starting whole. Learning can only make you more. Don’t think not knowing makes you less. Don’t think it makes anyone less.”

JJ’s words echo in my head, and I turn away from Mom. I brush the daffodil pollen off the altar with one hand, the other squeezing the book. “I just wanted somewhere to belong.” My voice catches.

“But you do belong,” Mom says. “You’re Chinese American. I’m Chinese American. It’s a culture created for us by us. It’s not worse than what they do in Hong Kong, and it’s not better. It’s just different. It’s proof that we made this place our home, along with millions of people who look like us, no matter how hard they tried to make us leave.”

I clutch the book to my chest.

It doesn’t feel enough.

But what did I achieve by searching for something better? I made Michael and others hate me when I could have had Chinese American friends. I poked my parents’ wounds that were already hurting. I left JJ in Boston, forcing her to drive two hours back alone and upset. If something had happened to her, that would have been on me.

My blood congeals with guilt and shame. It will take a long time to unclog it.

But I can start now.

“I’m sorry, Mom. I’ll … I’ll try working on accepting this.”

“Take your time.” She grins. “I’m proud of you. All of you. Look at how much you’ve achieved this year! You joined the cheerleading team, you won fourth place in a national competition, you captained your Mathletes team to Nationals. And you took your first shot of vodka!”

My eyebrows shoot up. “How did you—”

“Remy told me, and don’t interrupt me. You’d think don’t interrupt your elders would have shown up as the first rule when you googled how to be Asian 101.”

I drop the book and hide my face in my hands, groaning.

“Too soon?” She laughs. “By the way, I fished your pot out of the trash and cleaned it. The weather is too warm for claypot rice, but we could still make it. If you’re willing to defy the great Hong Kong tradition you’ve read about?” She extends her hand to me.

I grab it and let her pull me to the kitchen.

The rice soaks while we prepare the rest of the ingredients. Mom’s cutting up chorizo because we couldn’t find laahp chéung36 anywhere. I’m on soy sauce duty, smashing garlic and peeling ginger.

Mom puts on the TV in the background. I don’t know if she does it on purpose, but it’s a rerun of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

A cartoonish version of an Asian.

I smash the garlic too hard, and half of it catapults off the counter.

My mom’s knife hovers above the last piece of chorizo. “You know that it was your grandma who proposed we call you Aang?”

I freeze midway through picking the food off the floor. “It was?”

“Yeah.” Mom pushes the chorizo into a bowl and starts cutting the mushrooms. The knife hits the cutting board rhythmically. “When I started school, I kept using my Chinese name. My mom loved it. She went to a feng shui master to get it chosen. 劉慧鳳. It means wise phoenix.” She looks at me. “I’m sure you know what a phoenix symbolizes?”

“It’s associated with good luck and good fortune. It’s a symbol of grace, femininity, and the Chinese empress.”

“That’s exactly right.”

A warm feeling spreads through me. It doesn’t even matter that I quoted this from Wikipedia. I drop the ingredients into the pot with the soy sauce and turn on the burner.

“Either way, Mom said that I’d choose my English name when I started school. But where we lived, everyone used my Chinese name. So I didn’t see a point in changing it. That was my mistake. The White kids and teachers kept mispronouncing it. And something would die inside me every time they butchered it. So I chose the simplest, the most basic English name, and I made it easier for them. But their faces were always like, Well … Jane is not your real name, is it?” She cuts the mushrooms more aggressively. “And they were right. It’s not my name. But I’m not gonna give them my name. They don’t have the right to destroy how beautiful my name sounds.”

She points the knife at the TV. “Your grandma was watching this show on the hospital TV when you were born. She thought that Aang had something special about it. And I agreed. It was made up by Americans, but from Chinese characters.” She throws the cut-up mushrooms into a bowl. “We thought you’d have your cake and eat it too.”

It has to be enough.

I lower the heat on the burner and come up to her. I hug her so hard, I’m scared I’m about to break her ribs. She squeezes me even tighter.

The door opens, and my dad walks in, back from his board game club. His gaze locks on the pot first, then sweeps across the chopped ingredients. His eyes become distant, like he’s seeing something beyond what’s actually there. He turns around and leaves the kitchen.

My shoulders sag, and I lean more into Mom. She brushes my hair away from my face. “He misses talking to you.”

I frown. “But we do talk.”

“No, you don’t. Besides exchanging niceties, you haven’t talked to your dad for a long time. And he’s tried. You, on the other hand …”

… fixated on the one thing he couldn’t give me, ignoring everything else. His seven years in Hong Kong were the most valuable thing he could offer me.

I swallow the lump in my throat. “Mom, can you finish the soy sauce? I need to do something.”

Her face breaks into a beam, and she gives me a thumbs-up. “I’ll handle it.”

I leave the kitchen and walk through the corridor to their bedroom. I knock on the door. “Dad? Can I talk to you?”

“Just give me a second.” His voice is muffled. When he opens the door, he’s trying to stash a tissue in his back pocket.

Oh god, I’ve made the three people closest to me cry in two days. It’ll be four when I tell Remy I broke his frame.

I take a step toward Dad. “I’m … I’m so sorry. I’ve been behaving like a dick—I mean, really badly—for so … so long. We can cook something else if you want to. Or you can disown me. That works too.”

His sniff turns into an amalgamation of a chuckle and a cough. “You’re so dramatic. No wonder you do well in cheerleading. I love you.” He brings me in for a hug. When did I get taller than him?

Still hugging me, he speaks quickly, as if he wants to get the words out as fast as possible. “Being adopted out of Hong Kong wasn’t easy. The family wanted an Asian child, but they didn’t want an Asian child. And I’m working on it, but it hurts, and it’ll never be a finished project, and it’s something that I need to do on my own, okay?”

I wonder why they went to such lengths to get a child from a culture they were ultimately uninterested in engaging with. I guess my dad has been asking himself this question for most of his life. I hug him tighter and nod.

He lets me go. “Now, let’s not leave your mother cooking on her own for too long. She tends to get distracted.”

We go to the kitchen together, where an acrid burnt smell assaults my nostrils. My mom scrambles off the barstool. “Oh, Aang, Justin, fancy seeing you here!” She lowers the volume on the TV. “Let me wash the rice!”

She watched one thing, and it was most definitely not the soy sauce. I sigh, get a fresh pot, and start again. My dad settles into the newly vacated chair and watches me. If this is the most he can do, I need to make peace with that. On the TV screen, a cartoon man shouts about the destruction of his cabbages. I chuckle. One day, I should actually watch the show.

I cut all the ingredients before mixing the ginger, garlic, and sugar into the soy sauce on the stove. The savory-sweet-smelling vapor spreads around the kitchen. A faint smile appears on my dad’s face.

My mom notices the smile as well. She turns to me, her hand in the bowl of wet rice, circling it around. “How about I teach you some Cantonese?”

I stop mixing the sauce. “Really?”

“Yeah. Repeat after me. 屌你老母.”

My dad snickers.

I frown. “What does it mean?”

“I’ll tell you after you repeat after me.”

“Díu néih lóuh móu,” I say slowly. I cringe.

“Don’t make that face. Your tones are fine. You’re saying exactly what you’re supposed to.”

“But it doesn’t sound right.” I switch off the burner when the soy sauce bubbles too much. I stir, watching the ingredients swirl.

Mom tilts the bowl, draining the water into the sink. “What do you mean? You’re just speaking with an American accent. It sounds exactly like it should, coming from you.”

My knee-jerk reaction is to argue that I shouldn’t sound like that. But what is the alternative? Just never say anything? I repeat it again, the sounds not coming out perfectly, but more easily. “So, what does it mean?”

“Fuck your mother.”

I drop the mixing spoon on the ground, and the sauce splatters on the white floor. “Mom!” I stare at her, wide-eyed, horrified, while my dad laughs out loud.

“What?” She grabs the spoon from the floor and cleans it. “If you can’t swear in Cantonese, you can’t talk in Cantonese. Bet your teacher didn’t teach you that.” She takes over my role, mixing the soy sauce.

“No, she most definitely didn’t!” I cover my face, but the laugh that erupts from my mom makes me laugh too. My dad cackles even louder. Eventually, I have to sit on the barstool next to my dad’s, clutching my stomach. My parents … are definitely their own thing.

Next to Dad, my phone pings. He doesn’t read the notification but smiles at the wallpaper. “Would you like to invite JJ for the meal?”

“No,” I say quickly.

Both of them raise their eyebrows at me.

“I mean … we’re … I don’t know if we’re broken up or not—”

“Absolutely not!” Mom drops the spoon into the pot and waves a kitchen towel around. “Whatever happened, apologize! You’re not depriving me of my daughter-in-law!”

“Daughter-in-law?” I blink at her. “We’re not married. And we’re seventeen.”

“You won’t be seventeen forever. It’s time to think about bringing a nice girl home. Especially one who’s a future doctor with good earlobes.”

“Mom …” I shake my head. “I know our whole talk was about not defining identities, but you’ve never sounded more Chinese than in this moment.”

She throws the towel at me. My dad swats it away before it hits me. “Ignore your mother. She gets intense about matchmaking.” He smiles gently at her before turning to me. “Do you want to tell us what happened?”

“She … involved herself in something that I asked her not to get involved in. And that led to some negative consequences.” I look around our kitchen, at my mom mixing the soy sauce and my dad, here with us. JJ caused some positive consequences as well.

“Please be more vague.” Mom scoffs. “Teenagers.”

“He said what he needed to say.” My dad pats me on the shoulder. His gaze falls onto my T-shirt, on the Chinese characters printed across the chest. 水滴石穿.37

“Dripping water can penetrate a stone,” he says. “A classic.”

I’ve always believed the proverb. That over time, with enough effort and persistence, I could overcome the seemingly impossible obstacle of not being born and raised in Hong Kong.

“People always interpret it as being about hard work,” Dad says. “That they’re the dripping water, doing the impossible. But sometimes we are the stone, getting slowly destroyed by forces we can’t control. Or sometimes we sit next to the stone and are slowly driven crazy by the constant noise.”

My mom puts the pot of soy sauce in front of my dad. He inhales the scent. “And from time to time, what we need is for someone to make the dripping quiet down.” He meets Mom’s eyes, and so much emotion passes between them that I have to look away.

Someone has looked at me that way before. JJ, in the car when we shared the seat, and the constant dripping of not being enough did quiet down. In the girls’ bathroom, after we lost Mathletes Nationals. In the Polish restaurant, right before I got the email and everything came crashing down.

Being with her has been the most peaceful I’ve ever felt, even before we got together. Being her friend and teammate, having a crush, and falling in love … It’s the most authentic thing I’ve ever done. Just a guy in love with a girl.

It is … liberating.

I check my watch. Two p.m. Doable, and both of my parents like driving. “Would you like to go a road trip to Philadelphia? Preferably today?”

My parents exchange a look.

“Why Philadelphia?” my dad asks.

“I have to buy a really specific suit.” I point to my mom. “It’s for your daughter-in-law.”

She squeals. “Great American road trip! Here we come!”

We finish cooking. My parents comment that chorizo makes the rice taste good.

“But not better or worse. Just different,” I add.

We’re all lying. It tastes like shit because, clearly, claypot rice is ridiculously hard to make, and none of us knew what we were doing, even with the recipe. I propose we grab Panda Express on the way to Philly.

We get into the car and drive. About three hours one way. Plenty of time for them to teach me more swear words, but I generously let my mom spend thirty minutes doing a sales pitch for gap years. Apparently, they’re not only for mentally unstable White kids anymore.

And the hole in my heart, in the shape of Hong Kong, starts mending. It’ll take a long time to heal. And there’s always going to be a scar that hurts. But it won’t be a wound.

31 愛

32 好鍾意

33 再見

34 ngóh m̀h mìhng

35 āiya (There’s no direct translation. It’s generally used to indicate surprise, frustration, exasperation.)

36 臘腸

37 séui dihk sehk chyūn