Mama slipped and cracked her head open on the way to the Met. We were dressed up, our Sunday best reserved not for churches but for art and theater and park-traipsing. I had on Mama’s long ruched gown and clip-on earrings, and my hair in an elegant bun. I tiptoed, pretending my scuffed garage-sale flats were a pair of sleek stilettos. The finishing touch was my imaginary silk scarf, an iridescent ink-blue, which I’d been saving up to purchase for real, two hundred dollars at Saks.
Mama is in the room down the hallway. They won’t let me watch the operation. I clutch my invisible scarf and walk over to the chairs in the waiting room, where there’s only one other person, a woman sobbing silently into her open palms. I sit down next to her.
She doesn’t notice me. I toy with my scarf and examine my nails. One hand is painted in varying shades of blue, the other in shades of green. Izzy calls the style “Ocean Shore.” We did each other’s nails two months ago, and the paint is only just beginning to chip. “Mismatching is the new rage,” she’d said, blowing on the tips of my fingers, her breath warm and smelling faintly of the garlic bread we’d had for lunch from the Italian place down the street from her apartment.
Izzy is the most popular girl in my class. She has Karen Gillan’s shiny auburn hair, and I adore her. Everyone does. But Mama doesn’t approve of Izzy. I think Mama overreacts. Izzy is the best person I know, and she thinks I’m cool. I left my local school for an advanced one a few years ago, and I thought the advanced kids would be kind, but they were just as mean. They called me ugly and boring, shouted at me to go home. Izzy saved me last year when she invited me to her twelfth birthday party. She told me later that after we talked in algebra, she realized I was quite chic and cultured, not anything like she assumed. Now I’m friends with her friends, and I’m invited to shopping trips, lunches, sleepovers.
Every so often, the woman in the waiting room gives a quiet sniffle-snort. I turn to her and spread my skirt across my knees. “Parlez-vous français?” I ask, doing my best imitation of Arletty. Arletty is one of my favorite actresses. She was so beautiful and poised. I doubt the woman in the waiting room knows French, but the words on my tongue are like a mouthful of warm soup.
The woman swallows her tears and turns to face me. She looks a lot like Mama, only her dark hair is chopped short and wrinkles fan out from her eyes. “What?” she says in Chinese.
“English?” I try in English.
She shrugs. Her dark blouse looks thin and flimsy, probably made of cheap cotton. “I can’t speak it,” she says in Chinese, then hesitates, switching to a heavily accented English. “No English.”
Just like a child; just like Mama. Even though Mama’s been in America for decades, she only really started learning English when Waigong died six years ago. Waigong didn’t want either of them to know English; he refused to learn a single word throughout his years here and relied on pantomime, and if Mama ever let some English slip at home he’d hit her across the head with his broad palm to make the words fall out of her.
Mama talks about Waigong too much since he died, about how he hated it here, about how he missed China. But how could he have missed it? When the hospitals here are all white and clean, ivory like wedding dresses, when China is dirty and choking on its own smog?
With ceremony, I unwind the invisible scarf from my neck and hand it to the woman in the waiting room. My most precious possession is all I can give her. Gently I take her hand, her pale palm face up, and place the scarf on it, savoring the way the silk feels on my fingers. She doesn’t understand, she’s frightened, but surely she feels the pull I feel toward this scarf. Surely she knows: all the women at the Met are wearing scarves like this one, those women who understand what the inscrutable paintings mean. Yes—there. Simply holding the scarf lends a brightness to the woman’s face, brings her into focus.
Izzy got a real scarf just like my imaginary one for her birthday last year. Her party was a night I’ll remember for the rest of my life. For dinner we had lasagna and fluffy red velvet cake. Izzy’s friends talked a lot and sometimes they talked over me, but I didn’t mind. I liked listening to them. Then Izzy’s parents put on a movie: Breakfast at Tiffany’s, with the doe-eyed and soulfully beautiful Audrey Hepburn. Izzy and her parents and the other girls had seen it before, at least a dozen times, they said, but it was my first time, and it was like tasting chocolate after years of nothing sweet. It was romantic and indulgent, and how badly I wanted to be like Audrey, so glamorous and carefree. Mickey Rooney as the angry Mr. Yunioshi sent the girls into peals of laughter, and I laughed with them at how ridiculous he was, at his chipmunk cheeks and ugly accent and squinched eyes. When the credits rolled, we all applauded and cheered, even Izzy’s parents, who hadn’t been able to resist watching with us. I loved the movie, and I loved Audrey, and when I got home I told Mama all about it, every single detail of the night.
I was floating on clouds, flitting around Mama as I expounded on the delicious details, but she stayed on the couch, her expression unchanging. When I plopped next to her with a blissful sigh, she leaned back, crossing her arms and huffing a sigh.
“What’s wrong with you?” I said, turning to face her. “Didn’t you hear everything I said?”
“Are they your friends, those girls?”
“Of course.” I sat up straight, astonished by the question. “They’re my best friends. And Izzy is my best, best friend.”
“And they’re kind to you? Izzy is kind? Her parents are kind?”
“The kindest,” I said immediately.
“They listen to you? They care about you?”
“Obviously,” I said, my mouth dry.
Mama laced her fingers together, which meant she was about to say something that she didn’t like.
“I’ll show you the movie,” I said quickly before she could open her mouth. “You’ll like it, I promise.”
Her fingers were interlocked so tightly that her knuckles had turned white. “I’ve seen it,” she said in a soft voice. Then she looked me in the eyes and smiled, so convincingly that for a second I thought I had imagined her discomfort. Her hands relaxed and she studied my face, tucking a stray strand of hair behind my ear. I ducked, swatting her away. I hated that she treated me like a child when I was almost a teenager. “We can watch it again.”
We borrowed the DVD from the library, and that night we watched the movie, spending hours afterward attempting to recreate Audrey’s polished updo.
Of course, I didn’t tell Mama everything about the party. Like the next morning, when I woke up early, before all the other girls, and snuck upstairs, out of the basement and into Izzy’s bedroom, where she’d dropped off her presents. They lay in a pile in the corner. I dug around until I found her scarf. It was even more gorgeous the next morning, sparkles dotting the silk like stars. I draped it around my neck, and I stared at myself in the mirror for the longest time, until I heard Izzy’s parents stir in the next room, and I had to take off the scarf and rush back to the basement, into my sleeping bag, pretend to sleep while my heart drummed my whole body.
I wear my imaginary scarf for special occasions like today: seeing Monet’s paintings up close. I learned about Monet for the first time in art class two years ago during the unit on French Impressionism, when the teacher turned off the lights and projected Monet’s paintings on the wall. They were dream-cast, storybook, and I fell in love. Monet is Izzy’s favorite artist, too. It just shows that Izzy and I are destined to be best friends.
Even Mama likes Monet. I showed her a photo of “Impression, Sunrise,” and she said that everything else faded into the background, until she could imagine herself standing at the prow of the painted boat, her hair streaming back in the wind, a blurred figure composed of bold streaks of paint. Mama has a way of injecting herself places she doesn’t belong, places she can only access in dreams, just like me.
The woman has scooted away from me, to the edge of her seat as if I am contagious. I feel bare without my scarf. She stares into the distance, looking haunted. I don’t want her to start crying again. “You’re pretty,” I tell her, enunciating my English, and it’s true.
“Little girl,” the woman says in Chinese, her face softening. “Why are you here?”
“My Mama hit her head.” I mime it, my fist the rock driving into my head.
She nods. “I’m sorry.” She takes a deep breath, drawing out her exhale the way a plane draws contrails across the sky. “My daughter is ill. Cancer.”
The word silences us. I wonder if her daughter is in the operating room alone. I wonder where the woman’s husband is, if he’s gone the way my father is gone.
Mama likes to compare Waigong with my father. She says that despite his other shortcomings, at least Waigong never deserted us. But the way I see it, Waigong shackled himself to us and hated us for it. He called me spoiled, Mama lazy. Once, I threw out an expired jar of applesauce, and Waigong grabbed me by the arm so tightly that he left bruises. He looked me in the eye and said in a low growl, “In China, weeks went by where I only had rice to eat. Never do that again.”
I complained to Mama that people in every country starved at some point; Chinese people weren’t special. There were people starving in America, too, and why did she think the French Revolution happened?
“No one else matters,” she said slowly, “when you’re the one starving.” She was angry at me for being so flippant. But she didn’t yell; she never yelled. She never hit. That wasn’t her style. Instead, she cried in front of me, leaving me helpless, not knowing where to look. I’d come home from school and she’d be sitting on the couch with the blinds drawn, her breath heavy, her head buried in her hands.
Beside me, the woman begins sobbing again. Why isn’t she even trying to pull herself together? Why do I have to pick up the pieces?
I tap her on the shoulder. No one if not me. “Don’t cry,” I say. “You can play pretend until it’s all over.”
She doesn’t understand, so I demonstrate: I march to the middle of the waiting room, face the audience, and do my best act—a famous soulful singer, like Edith Piaf. I clutch the mic and thrust my other hand through my hair, crooning about heartbreak, and the hospital fades away. I’m standing on stage, grinning at my fans, throwing kisses and curtsying to great applause.
I first started pretending at Waigong’s funeral. I was only six years old, but I remember the funeral in photographic detail. They’d dressed his body in a suit and tie, as if in death he was more than he had been in life. When I peered into the casket, I imagined my own body in my own casket, with the blood siphoned out of me and replaced with chemicals.
Only Mama and I went to the funeral. Mama said she had no idea how to notify the family. They were still in China, and Mama had lost contact with them decades ago. So we two played the part of a crowd. We sat in front of the casket in fold-up chairs for what felt like hours, folding joss paper to burn until my fingertips went numb. Mama cried, and I pretended I was far away. I closed my eyes and imagined I was in a still meadow of eternal spring, sprawled over the flowers.
“Stop,” the woman says. I don’t hear her until she says it more loudly, over and over, and I remember I’m standing in the middle of the waiting room, now slack. I’ve dropped my microphone. “Stop, stop.”
“What?”
“This isn’t a game. I can’t just pretend all this away.” Her Chinese, furious. She wipes her face with her sleeve, heaving a breath. “My daughter is in there, and she’s in danger. And so is your Mama. And you…you’re acting like you’re at a party.”
“I’m not—”
“You’re acting like you don’t care. You’re smiling, and dancing. I hope my daughter would never be so disrespectful. Don’t you understand how serious this is?”
“They’re going to be okay,” I say, and it registers true, an obvious statement. “That’s how it goes. The most important people never die.” The thought almost makes me laugh. Imagine what it would be like to live without Mama. All I can conjure is a void, the earth collapsed in on itself. In other words: nonsense, impossibility. The only way the world makes sense is if it has Mama and me—half asleep in front of the television or baking our own croissants or trudging through the garbage-smeared streets or dressed up in our best and swanning around in a cloud of glamour.
Honestly, Mama is made for glamour. I learned how to do makeup by practicing on her, and she has the perfect face for it—high cheekbones, full lips, wide eyes. When I touched the charcoal pencil to her eyelid for the first time, she blinked, jerking the pencil up. “Hold still,” I commanded. She braced herself and stared straight ahead with unflinching focus, even when I got close enough to be her reflection. Not her actual reflection, because according to Mama I’m the spitting image of my father. My cheeks are too fat and my eyes are baggy and stretched out and my skin is yellowish and dull.
I gave Mama a complete makeover—thick eyeshadow, foundation for ivory skin, and the reddest lipstick I could find for a seductress’s lips––a Marion Cotillard look. When she looked in the mirror, her eyebrows shot up in shock. The colors were clownish, but they were bright and bold, lending life to Mama’s placid face.
I huffed and wiped the sweat from my forehead when I was done. I expected applause. Instead, Mama shook her head. “It’s too much,” she said, her voice frightened. “I don’t recognize myself.”
“You’re not supposed to,” I said, rolling my eyes. “It’s about becoming a different person.” I ran to my room and ripped down my poster of Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose to show her. “Look! You’re as beautiful as her now.” Mama made me wipe the makeup off her face, but she kept letting me practice on her without a fight.
Despite only understanding pieces of my English, the woman sees the rest of it in my eyes. She rises and steps over to stand in front of me.
“Little girl,” she says, kinder now, almost whispering. “No one is immortal.” Even though we are, I think, in this timeless room. “My father died in a car crash. He expected to live another forty years. If there was any mercy in this world, my daughter and your Mama would live, even if it was just for our sakes. But nothing is guaranteed. Please. Sit with me.”
But if I sit, then it will all return. My argument with Mama, the things I said. I fight the urge to run through the exit doors, disappear into the night. Disappear without Mama. Perhaps outside of this hospital, the world has already folded. I follow the woman back to the seats, dazed, and the waiting room returns to its earlier state. The distant sound of sirens, the static of the television in the corner, turned to cable news.
The woman begins to sing softly, so that only I can hear. It takes me a moment, but I recognize the melody: a Chinese lullaby Mama used to sing to get me to fall asleep. Mama said Waigong used to sing it to her too, in his rough baritone. The woman’s voice is strong, and for a few seconds, I am a child getting tucked into bed at night. She needs me to join in, I can tell. I still remember the words—they are like jewels so dusty and old they’re hard to recognize, but still there, still shining. All I have to do to find out is open my mouth.
Instead I turn away, wishing I were anywhere but here. I can already feel the déjà vu. She tapers off into silence, and we sit staring straight ahead, two strangers.
I’ve let her down again. Mama will never forgive me. It was supposed to be a perfect day—Central Park and the Met. Dressing up. We were even lucky enough to run into Izzy and her parents in the park. They were so chic and elegant that they gave me pangs of hunger. Her parents greeted us warmly, saying how proper and unlike ourselves we looked today. I preened, thrilled to get such praise for my makeup skills.
Izzy put an arm around me as our parents chatted. “Your daughter has impeccable manners,” Izzy’s mother said. Izzy rolled her eyes and I beamed.
“Yes,” my mother said, her voice soft. “I’m proud of her.”
The words from her mouth practically disfigured next to Izzy’s family’s crisp consonants. Izzy withdrew her arm and stepped back to stand next to her parents. Their pity, palpable. “Sorry,” I said, enunciating. “My mom’s still learning English.”
“It’s a difficult language,” Izzy’s mother said. Izzy’s father nodded. All three of them nodding as if their heads were threaded with a single string.
I nodded with them—difficult, impossible even—when Mama put her hand on my arm and pulled me away without another word. I looked back and Izzy’s parents stared after us, taken aback.
I tugged at her to no avail. “What are you doing?”
“You’re ashamed,” she said. This time she answered in Chinese even though I’d told her a million times to talk to me in English. “I don’t like their influence on you.”
“What do you mean?” My jaw dropped in disbelief. “I have friends because of Izzy. I have a life. I enjoy school now.” I looked back again. They were walking away. “We have to go to apologize to them.”
Mama shook her head. I did well with her makeup today, and I even tried out a curler on her hair, which still retained its waves. Her eyes were luminous with worry, her soft pink lips tight with frustration. “I won’t apologize.”
“Please,” I begged. “You were so rude. Izzy will hate me for it.”
Mama stopped walking in a quiet area of the park. We stood under a young oak tree that spread its branches with the eagerness of a bird in first flight. The grass was damp with last night’s rain. “Look at me.” I obeyed unwillingly. “You need to have pride. Waigong and I sacrificed our family and way of life leaving China. You’re not showing any respect.”
“I have plenty of respect.”
“You act like the West is everything. I’ve humored you, but it’s gone on long enough.”
I rubbed my arms, which were damp with sweat. “If China is so great, why did you leave?”
“Not everything there is perfect. But China is our home.”
“I’ve never even been there. Not once. How can you call it my home? All of this—” I gestured to the park around us, to the shrubbery and beyond it, skyscrapers shooting into distant points, “—is reality. And China is like…a figment of my imagination, a dream that you tell me about.”
“You think you know what reality is?” Mama shouted. I felt cold, up and down my spine. Mama never shouted. “You’ve spent the past year living in your own fantasy world. And you’ve brought me into it, too.”
“You’re the one who lives in a fantasy world,” I shouted back. “China this and China that. I mean, open your eyes. We live in America now. At least I’m getting by. At least I’m fitting in. You don’t know how hard it is.”
“I don’t know how hard it is?” She was louder than I had ever heard her be. “I haven’t been home in thirty years. The only reason I’m still here is to give you a better life. Don’t tell me I don’t know how hard it is.”
“I didn’t ask for this. It’s not my fault you’re here.” Tears spilled down my face despite my best efforts. “I hate it too. I hate our creaky old apartment, and I hate the way I look, and I hate never having enough, and I hate that none of it will ever change. I wish you and Waigong had never left China and I wish—” it was too late to stop— “I wish I was Izzy’s sister and lived in her apartment with her parents and had nice clothes and food and furniture, and I wish I looked right, the way I’m supposed to look, and I wish I could be—” I swallowed. More. I wanted to be more, the way Izzy was more, the way her friends and everyone at school and Edith and Marion and Audrey were more, simply by knowing that they belonged in the world they moved so easily through.
Mama looked at me as if she were seeing me for the first time. “No more dress up,” Mama said. “No more makeup. No more pretend.”
I stared at her, speechless. I could tell how deadly serious she was. And I looked at her hard face, her carefully applied mascara already beginning to flake, and I turned on my heel and ran as fast as I could away from her.
I didn’t stop when I heard the thud, only when I heard the scream of a passerby. She’d slipped and hit her head against a rock. The ambulance arrived in minutes. I still don’t know why she said what she said. Her words echoed in my head, even as they strapped her into a gurney and wheeled her away. It turned out we had never understood each other.
On the way to the hospital, the muffled blare of the ambulance sounding, I was too scared to look at Mama, so instead I stared up, straight into the harsh fluorescence, and blocked it all out by thinking about Izzy’s birthday party, how it was a lifelong memory I would treasure.
There was another part to the sleepover I didn’t tell Mama about. It was after the movie, after the board games, after the gossip session, when all the girls were lying in their sleeping bags, and we spoke our hearts into the darkness, and it felt safe because you couldn’t see anyone else, so it felt like you could say anything and it would only disappear, without consequence. I said that I wanted to be beautiful, that I never wanted to think of people starving ever again, that I wanted to live my own life, that I wanted to forget the slurs, forget the not belonging, forget this feeling that I was betraying some inner part of myself. I let these words go into the darkness, I urged them forward, and waited with held breath for a response, but none came. The other girls had fallen asleep.
I wonder if I tell this secret to the woman in the waiting room if it would count as amends. It must count for something, the way it resurfaces every night, the way it keeps me awake. I tap the heels of my flats together. Enough times, and I can return home by magic, away from this waiting room. If I just close my eyes and make it so. But instead, the image comes to me, without my conjuring it, without my wanting it, without my being able to bear it, of Mama’s funeral, in the same terrible windowless room as Waigong’s, and me, in the front row, all in black, folding joss paper on my own.
I don’t know what kind of death Mama wants. I think she mentioned once that she wants to be buried next to Waigong, because for a long time, he was the only family she had.
The woman cries, and I cry with her.
The doctor appears in the doorway and we jump to attention. The woman touches my fingers and I am grateful. He calls my name across the room in a sleepless voice. I wipe my eyes, getting blush all over my hands, and walk over, taking care not to betray how small and singular I feel walking up on my own.
The doctor tells me my mother is still recovering. “Do you have family to take you home?”
Family. Whatever I have left of family is behind those doors. “Yes,” I say. I hesitate. “Can I see her? Please?” I hear it in my voice—a hairline crack, a fault line.
A nurse leads me through the disinfected halls until we reach a room with the lights dimmed. Mama is wound round with blankets and bandages, seeming small against a bed already small and crammed. This hospital: all white and clean, yet still claustrophobic.
She’s awake and the nurse leaves me alone in the room. I have nowhere else to go. I sit in the chair by the bed.
“Hi,” I say. I wonder if she wants me to apologize. “How was the surgery? I guess you weren’t awake. The waiting room was boring. No one very interesting was there. I always thought if I spent long enough in a hospital, I’d be able to see a celebrity. They can’t all have their own private doctors. How cool would it have been, to see someone like Keira Knightley in the waiting room? But then you would have missed it.”
Mama stares straight ahead at the wall. She hasn’t looked at me yet.
“I don’t really know where to go after I’m done visiting you. I guess I should go home, but it’ll be dark and empty and I don’t want to be there alone.” I look down at my lap, think about the woman in the waiting room. “After waiting a while I started thinking about what I would do if I didn’t have you anymore. I could pretend for a while. I could take the subway by myself and keep going to school. But—” I swallow. “I don’t think I could pretend forever.”
Why isn’t she saying anything?
“Mama, it’s me,” I say louder. “I’m your daughter. Your daughter.” I lean over, interrupt her line of vision, and finally she turns toward me but doesn’t see me, as if she’s not here. I resist the urge to shake her, to force her back into her body. Instead I start to yell, not caring who can hear me. “I’m here. You’re my mother. Today is Sunday. Today we were going to the Met, and we were all dressed up and beautiful, and…and then you hit your head.” I bring my knees to my chest and bury my face in them, curl up until I am invisible.
It’s hard finding the words given how reluctant I am to speak them, when all I want to do is pretend I don’t know them and instead hide in the familiar folds of a language that has never wronged me. But there they are, right at the surface, waiting patiently for air, and they are all I have. “你知道我吗？Do you know me?”
Mama looks at me fully, finally, and I see her, Mama, down to the depths of her she looks like Mama, her face wiped clean and her hair relaxed into thin strands. She reaches over and touches my knees, and I lower them and sit up straight. She takes the hand in my lap and laces her fingers through mine, and for a moment we don’t need to say anything.