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"I think Mom is trying to say she's tired," he would whisper when my mother became moody.
"I think she's saying we're the best darn family in the country!" he'd exclaim when she had cooked a wonderfully fragrant meal.
But with me, when we were alone, my mother would speak in Chinese, saying things my father could not possibly imagine. I could understand the words perfectly, but not the meanings. One thought led to another without co
"You must not walk in any direction but to school and back home," warned my mother when she decided I was old enough to walk by myself.
"Why?" I asked.
"You can't understand these things," she said.
"Why not?"
"Because I haven't put it in your mind yet."
"Why not?"
"Aii-ya! Such questions! Because it is too terrible to consider. A man can grab you off the streets, sell you to someone else, make you have a baby. Then you'll kill the baby. And when they find this baby in a garbage can, then what can be done? You'll go to jail, die there."
I knew this was not a true answer. But I also made up lies to prevent bad things from happening in the future. I often lied when I had to translate for her, the endless forms, instructions, notices from school, telephone calls. "Shemma yisz?"-What meaning?-she asked me when a man at a grocery store yelled at her for opening up jars to smell the insides. I was so embarrassed I told her that Chinese people were not allowed to shop there. When the school sent a notice home about a polio vaccination, I told her the time and place, and added that all students were now required to use metal lunch boxes, since they had discovered old paper bags can carry polio germs.
"We're moving up in the world," my father proudly a
And we did move up, across the bay to San Francisco and up a hill in North Beach, to an Italian neighborhood, where the sidewalk was so steep I had to lean into the slant to get home from school each day. I was ten and I was hopeful that we might be able to leave all the old fears behind in Oakland.
The apartment building was three stories high, two apartments per floor. It had a renovated façade, a recent layer of white stucco topped with co
My mother was not happy with the apartment, but I didn't see that at first. When we moved in, she busied herself with getting settled, arranging the furniture, unpacking dishes, hanging pictures on the wall. It took her about one week. And soon after that, when she and I were walking to the bus stop, she met a man who threw her off balance.
He was a red-faced Chinese man, wobbling down the sidewalk as if he were lost. His ru
The rest of the day-while riding on the bus, walking in and out of stores, shopping for our di
As soon as we got home from grocery shopping, she began to put the cans and vegetables away. And then, as if something were not quite right, she removed the cans from one shelf and switched them with the cans on another. Next she walked briskly into the living room and moved a large round mirror from the wall facing the front door to a wall by the sofa.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
She whispered something in Chinese about "things not being balanced," and I thought she meant how things looked, not how things felt. And then she started to move the larger pieces: the sofa, chairs, end tables, a Chinese scroll of goldfish.
"What's going on here?" asked my father when he came home from work.
"She's making it look better," I said.
And the next day, when I came home from school, I saw she had again rearranged everything. Everything was in a different place. I could see that some terrible danger lay ahead.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked her, afraid she would give me a true answer.
But she whispered some Chinese nonsense instead: "When something goes against your nature, you are not in balance. This house was built too steep, and a bad wind from the top blows all your strength back down the hill. So you can never get ahead. You are always rolling backward."
And then she started pointing to the walls and doors of the apartment. "See how narrow this doorway is, like a neck that has been strangled. And the kitchen faces this toilet room, so all your worth is flushed away."
"But what does it mean? What's going to happen if it's not balanced?" I asked my mother.
My father explained it to me later. "Your mother is just practicing her nesting instincts," he said. "All mothers get it. You'll see when you're older."
I wondered why my father never worried. Was he blind? Why did my mother and I see something more?
And then a few days later, I found out that my father had been right all along. I came home from school, walked into my bedroom, and saw it. My mother had rearranged my room. My bed was no longer by the window but against a wall. And where my bed once was-now there stood a used crib. So the secret danger was a ballooning stomach, the source of my mother's imbalance. My mother was going to have a baby.
"See," said my father as we both looked at the crib. "Nesting instincts. Here's the nest. And here's where the baby goes." He was so pleased with this imaginary baby in the crib. He didn't see what I later saw. My mother began to bump into things, into table edges as if she forgot her stomach contained a baby, as if she were headed for trouble instead. She did not speak of the joys of having a new baby; she talked about a heaviness around her, about things being out of balance, not in harmony with one another. So I worried about that baby, that it was stuck somewhere between my mother's stomach and this crib in my room.
With my bed against the wall, the nighttime life of my imagination changed. Instead of street sounds, I began to hear voices coming from the wall, from the apartment next door. The front-door buzzer said a family called the Sorcis lived there.
That first night I heard the muffled sound of someone shouting. A woman? A girl? I flattened my ear against the wall and heard a woman's angry voice, then another, the higher voice of a girl shouting back. And now, the voices turned toward me, like fire sirens turning onto our street, and I could hear the accusations fading in and out:Who am I to say!…Why do you keep buggin' me?…Then get out and stay out!…rather die rather be dead!…Why doncha then!