Issue 34

“Nǚ ér (Daughter),” Mama whispered, splintering the stillness that enveloped us in our Nissan’s murmur.

“Yeah?” I respond indifferently, double-tapping the gingham dress on my glaring screen.

Mama exhaled a sigh laden with exasperation. “I know you’re only in middle school and college seems far away…But don’t you think it’s time to start preparing? Working harder?”

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My finger twitched as Mama’s tone plunged into despair.

“You can’t continue wasting time like this. Time is water in a sponge, you must squeeze it out. You always have time to study more math. Practice more violin. Professor Yun’s daughters do homework in the car while you dawdle here and there–in the morning, after school, right before bedtime. Also, does anyone spend an entire hour eating dinner like you?”

My eyes swerved away from my phone, flitting through the darkness and anchoring on Mama’s face in the rearview mirror. Vibrant specks of gas station and automobile lights frolicked on her glasses like Skittles. A minor itch of irritation bubbled within me before retreating.

This lecture will pass.

“Everyone is striving while you lag behind for temporary happiness. Angelina’s brother spends hours every day completing hundreds of–”

My ears are bleeding.

“You know what?” I barked out of impulse, my voice pricking with bitter shards that slashed through Mama’s ramble.

“All you–all you Chinese people do is compare, compare, and compare! Compare to this kid, compare to that nine-year-old violin concertmaster, compare to these random Harvard siblings with a tiger mom on the internet. What’s wrong with you?” I shrieked. Leaning forward, I dug my nails into the plush foam of the passenger seat.

“You Chinese people,” Mama reiterated slowly in English, the phrase foreign both in language and context. She fell silent, questioning. Interpreting and tasting each word so innocent on its own, yet monstrous when strung together.

“You? What do you mean, you Chinese people? How could you say that to your mother? To yourself? YOUR BLOOD IS JUST AS CHINESE AS MINE!” Mama rivaled screechingly in Chinese, every syllable firing out like quills, tips seeping outrage.

Or was it grief? Disappointment? Shame?

Lashed by Mama’s acidic reprimand, I felt my cheeks bloom into a boiling crimson under the bite of night frost. I sank back into my seat, unsure if I was quivering from anger or embarrassment.

“It’s really all you do, though. Comparing,” I mumbled.

Maintaining her eyes locked on the inky road, Mama replied softly, “Yes, that’s what we do. It’s Chinese culture. It’s your culture. Don’t you consider yourself part of it?”

***

What is Chinese culture? To me…

It’s a ceaseless torrent of indecipherable math problems hurled at me from the instant my hands grasped a pencil–the time when each chubby finger merely resembled a bulbous pea pod. Despite bawling through one progressively more horrid book after another, I was…

Never enough. Never brilliant enough.

It’s an industrious network of children juxtaposed by parents who scrutinize them like jewelers analyzing sapphires. Calculating, establishing product value through a diligent search for scintillating sparkles and glimmers of distorting blemishes. Ambitious jewelers coveting perfection.

It’s my austere Baba when he chastised me for even the most trivial matters, his wrath erupting at the first twinkle of a betraying tear. Petrified, I squelched sobs ignited by furiously arched eyebrows that magnified his forehead wrinkles–canyons carved by hours of memorizing the Chinese-English dictionary. Hours that acted as the key to Měi Guó (America, The Beautiful Country). Hours that collected into alphabet soup serenading sleepless nights, devouring youthful onyx hair. Seized by my 4-year-old shoulders and marched to face the ever so familiar cream wall, I’d be whacked on my behind before Baba’s storming departure.

It’s drowning in apologetic guilt, yet forever being too proud to utter the three syllables of duì bù qǐ. Pronouncing the last character qǐ–briefly dipping in the middle and jolting up into a risen tone–seems to mimic a defiant question. A statement clumsily declaring, I was wrong, but does that mean you’re right? Saying duì bù qǐ is like forcing a bamboo shoot to squirm out of frozen earth.

Shortly after each timeout, I sat alone on the living room futon that creaked with every hiccup. Sometimes, Baba walked by and ventured closer to sheepishly reveal a cluster of dark chocolate almonds melting in his palm.

A bittersweet apology.

It’s Mama at 9 pm, returning home from a sticky star-studded Texan dusk, a weary smile crinkling her eyes as I flung myself onto her apron and whiffed the canvas cloth saturated in restaurant grease. Clung to her legs as she fingered through the rainbow of homemade bows I shoved into my hair that morning. Licked my lips when she promised to bake red bean rice cake, confectionary magic whisked up during my dreams so that I awoke to glutinous fragrance the next day.

It’s my wài pó (grandma), sweeter than tofu pudding. A wài pó who scrambled to talk with me in every phone call, her local dialect’s perplexing accents cascading out and tickling my ears. Accustomed to only Standard Chinese, I instinctively winced at hearing the unfamiliar tongue–until I grasped a shimmer of recognition.

“Xiǎng Wài Pó le ma (Do you miss Grandma)?”

Wài Pó hushed herself with childlike eagerness, as if my answer to her regularly asked question was a baffling riddle.

“Dāng rán (Of course)!” I’d exclaim in reassurance, hoping Wài Pó could detect my vigorous head nodding. I enjoyed picturing Wài Pó clutching her aged telephone with both small, sun-spotted hands. Once a rich wine red, Wài Pó’s telephone began its life in the 1990s, connecting her and Mama, then a budding entrepreneur in Shanghai. Who knew that Wài Pó would one day sail her love across the Pacific?

“Xiǎng Wài Pó le (She misses her grandma),” Wài Pó would repeat a few times smugly, audibly in glee.

I miss Wài Pó.

I miss my culture.

I miss how, in the three times I met her, she marveled at how much I’d grown, only to still call me a xiǎo bǎobǎo (little treasure baby). I pulled back in shyness when she cuddled her fragile face to mine, giggling moments later as feathery heather gray wisps teased my cheeks.

I miss Wài Pó squeezing every droplet of her affection into the few weeks we’d share in a lifetime. During those days, an ever-changing fruit medley swirled around me as Wài Pó busied herself over skinning apples and rinsing Kyoho grapes she handpicked from nearby fruit stands. Every time Wài Pó caught sight of her outdoor cat, she clambered to hoist it up for me. While I cooed sappily, Wài Pó weathered rounds of swats that swelled into scarlet marks. Sitting on her bamboo mat, as I babbled about Easter egg hunting and slapping mosquitoes under July 4th fireworks, Wài Pó listened intently, immersed in my chaotic Chinese describing America. When I plopped myself at Wài Pó’s wooden table to savor sauteed fern and meatball soup, she observed in delight, her chestnut eyes gently perched on me for the entire meal. Everything tasted better knowing that no one in the world would look at me in the same way Wài Pó did.

Most of all, I miss Wài Pó’s signature platter of Chòu Guì Yú (Stinky Fish), Anhui province’s boasted delicacy that bears a notorious odor symbolical of foot stench. After I endured my first disorienting 15-hour plane ride to China, Wài Pó welcomed me with her Stinky Fish, its malicious stench snaking into and appalling my nostrils. Ironically, the dish was exquisite–adorned with a dynamic array of chilies and ginger slivers, a single grand fish laid cradled in a fiery pool of garnet red sauce. Sandwiching a minuscule morsel of fish between my chopsticks, I nibbled gingerly as the pungent flakes blossomed into a miraculously piquant aroma. Responding to Wài Pó’s expectant peer that flicked between me and her salty peculiar creation, the ends of my lips inched to an awestruck grin.

***

I am clay molded by the hands of Chinese culture. Aged hands that tenderly paint me in Wài Pó’s warmth and phoenixes gracing Mama’s Qipao dress. Rough hands that place me in the kiln’s fiery embrace, as algebra forges a hardened callus on my finger and disciplined scoldings crystallize my heart into jade. Unwavering hands that swash on silky glaze and lift me to the stars as Goddess Cháng é bathes me in moonlight, illuminating love, pride, and resilience. I am whole.

So, perhaps I owe a long overdue word with Mama. D-duì b-

Let me try again.

I’m sorry it took me too long to learn that if I cherry-picked my culture, what’s left behind is bland, like naked wontons without the scorch of chili oil.

And, to my beloved Stinky Fish, unleashing your tear-jerking curls of putrid steam, how does forgiveness sound?

Grace Huang is a junior at West High School in Madison, Wisconsin. She loves writing about childhood and the Asian-American experience. Her work has been published in the New York Times and recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the Wisconsin Young Writers Award, and the Ringling College of Art and Design. She has two cats who enjoy hogging the keyboard of her overheated laptop as she types up daydreams.