Mama passed away in December. We held the funeral on a Wednesday because her life left no beginning or end, only a hollow middle like the bellies of her ceramic cooking pots or the concert hall before an empty recital.
Of the forty-four years she lived, Mama sheltered dark brilliance inside her voice, the unwavering lilt of it fierce against the soft storm of Chopin’s Nocturnes. She was blurred photographs in our living room and the warm thrum of laundry spinning to a ceaseless sonata. A resonance of ylang-ylang and jasmine when she hugged me and rhapsodies from her childhood as a piano prodigy when she wanted to spoil me. But to everyone else, she was a medical oncologist by training. This is why, all her life, she has insisted we eat our long-life noodles.
I could never tell her that a short, honest life is better than a long, deceitful one. She longed for a daughter who would follow her fugues with their right counterpoints, which is to say, she wanted an imitation of herself. In her eyes, I fell short; while she had graced Carnegie Hall’s esteemed Perelman Stage at age six, I was not invited to play there until age sixteen. When she was sixteen, she worked at a Stanford lab conducting immunotherapy research for rare cancers while playing sold-out concerts worldwide; at sixteen, I was stuck in AP Biology, scribbling eighth notes at the margins of my cell division notes. When I open my mouth to point out that some noodles are meant to be staccato in length, my silence sings for itself.
—
I am not old enough to forget my mother yet. I am not very old at all. On our last trip overseas, Mama’s relatives pinched and prodded at my thin arrow frame. They tell me that my middle name, Guiying, the middle name they chose for me long before Mama’s stomach housed me in its soundless womb, meant immortality, meaning I will live a long life. Then they serve me noodles. I don’t remember much else except noise, not quite discord but the harmony of their uneven chatter.
—
By the time goodbye stained the hospital sheets daffodil yellow, she had paled against a sterile purity we had no choice but to cradle. If I held her then, the long-limbed sighs of her ECG would impale me like a kiss, a forgiving curse. I count her last breaths in beats: andante, lento, adagio, grave. The distances between my voice and hers are silences, pulsing rests. Still, I try to fill their echo.
I do not think in the past tense until my father asks me to change into my qipao, to dress out of respect for Mama’s last words. In the fourth-floor bathroom, I brush my fingers along the electric blue brocade, the color of the last sky before Mama’s diagnosis. The dragonflies and chrysanthemums dance in threads of gold, their embroidered stitches longer than the life she would live. It falls short of my feet.
When I return, pinched into a woman I do not recognize, I catch my father’s last words to her: She is so much like you. I see it in the way she moves through the world.
My father lets go of her hand so that she can hold mine. But Mama did not believe in goodbyes, only insurance policies for a love neither of us could understand. There is no more jasmine or ylang-ylang to cling to, only the brief crescendo of isopropyl alcohol and citrus bitters. She is without jade bangles; her slender pianist’s fingers reach for my bone-thin ones.
“Bǎobèi, I don’t want to be like your Ah Ma, always running out of time. My life is cut short. Please listen to me. Study hard. Be a good girl. Don’t let the boys steal kisses like they used to steal your good toys. Don’t toy with your hair like that; it’s bad fortune. Stretch out your earlobes once a day for good fortune and long life, not like me.” She chuckles, the string of laughter dying on her bluing tongue. “Eat your long-life noodles.” She swallows, the cartography of her chest shifting trajectory. The monitors cease symphony.
“I’m very proud of you.” These, the last words I remember, are how I knew we were approaching the end.
—
Mama never had grand celebrations, so she made me promise I would let her leave in a bold, beaming cadenza. So, we hold the funeral on the last day of the old year so that her entrance into the afterlife will be welcomed with bubbly champagne and bursts of confetti. My father and I flood the concert hall with bouquets blossoming in fistfuls, all the flowers from a wedding reception she never had. The crowds flock in waves, then seas. We are handed condolences on the back of every Hallmark card and requiem rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon in D. From the piano, I watch the incense reach her in death. Our clothes carry the memory of jasmine and ylang-ylang for days.
After the funeral, I fold our echo chamber histories with last notes—the ones before the diagnosis, before Nocturnes followed her footsteps everywhere except home. The blue-belled jazz she strung into summer-sung evenings, buoyant concertos and sonatinas that glittered with laughter, their sun-slick expositions and velvet codas reverberating long after dark. Even without practice, my fingers fall freely on the ivory keys.
—
In the evenings, when I miss her the most, I play all the songs she will never hear. Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman’s Air and Simple Gifts for the brief moments of peace when the faint echoes of her smile are all I can imagine. Yuja Wang’s Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini for the ruptured storms of tears. Mitsuko Uchida’s Debussy: 12 Études for the haunted stretches of the night when I need to remember the dexterity of her piano hands. I play arrangements written for violin and cello, for all the music she would never be able to learn. I play until the numbness forces me to forget.
—
For months after her death, we only eat noodles. Mama used to swear she would teach me how to make her family recipe before she died. What use is a middle name like Guiying if you don’t know how to make long-life noodles? She’d joke solemnly for my father’s benefit.
She would never know it, but my middle name and her noodles would move me through the world. It would move cities and countries. In the five years following her coda, I would scale through my certifications, first with RCM and then through Columbia-Julliard. The year after graduating from Columbia and Julliard, I would debut at Musikverein with the Vienna Philharmonic, and my father would be too grief-stricken to toss me carnations in the encore. That same year, I will be asked by a panel of white men in white coats: Discuss your decision to pursue medicine. When did you decide to become an MD, and why? and not know how to answer in the past tense, how to speak of her sudden weight loss, or how she was so weak in her final months she could not even bring herself to eat her long-life noodles. Even after they accept my answers, there will be no Mama to record me in oncologist white reciting the Hippocratic Oath against the broken record of Pomp and Circumstance.
But what she never knows will never hurt her either, so for now, I slice scallions and marinate the beef, counting the passing minutes until the hand-pulled egg noodles have finished their bath in her double-enamel broiler. I drizzle sesame oil for fragrance and soy sauce for flavor—ginger for health, and garlic to ward off the ghosts. I spoon the broth last, savoring its heat.
My father has not left their bedroom since the funeral. The snow has passed, replaced by the unfurling of spring, Mama’s favorite season. The bowls burn to the touch when I nest them in my palms. They slosh just before reaching the bed, but he says nothing. He brings the chopsticks to his mouth like a crucifix. Outside, the March magnolias open in greeting. The soup scalds our throats. It warms us like a soothing song.