Girl Overboard (18 page)

“Now, why would you want to go to Hong Kong?”

“Hong Kong?” For a fleeting moment, I wonder if that’s where the funeral is going to be held.

“Yes, it’s the World Economic Summit. Where else would I be going?”

I think to myself,
Like, to a memorial service maybe?

As if Mama hears my question, her hand trembles, and she sets the pliers down between two Japanese larches, displayed on the tiered bench in different pots. Twins separated at birth, one grows tall and straight, the other twisted as though it has weathered nothing but storms.

Instead of answering, Mama handles a conical spruce, the size of my hand. “Do you think this pot is too big?”

“Maybe,” I say, drawing closer to Mama so that we’re standing side-by-side in front of the bonsai and its teardrop-shaped pot. I will her to tell me what’s wrong. “What do you think?”

“Hmm,” she says thoughtfully, like it’s the most important question in the world, not the one that she’s dodging, the one I’m trying to ask: who was the woman you were crying over last night? The mother I’m crying over now muses, “Perhaps something shallower. I’ll have to look for one in Hong Kong.”

I summon up my courage and say softly, “But I heard you crying last night.”

Mama shies away from me. We might as well be two negatively charged magnets; all the questions I’m trying to ask repel her. From the rack of tools on the far wall, she removes a pair of shears and clips a twig sticking up on a silver birch. Admiring the clean-cut effect, Mama wonders aloud, “Maybe this one should be brought inside.”

Inside our house is where all “perfect” bonsai go to be displayed once they’ve been pruned and trained, bound in wire for months at a time until they attain the exact appearance Mama has intended for them. The process of perfection can take years. Even generations.

“How long will you be gone?” I ask.

“Ten days, just as planned. You know that, Syrah,” says Mama, a touch reproachfully, as she snips a leaf off a gnarled hornbeam, which cascades over its pot as if storm gales have pummeled it into submission. “I left our itinerary in your inbox as usual.”

How is it that my family made its fortune in telecommunications, yet there’s so much static between us, our words and meaning are all garbled?

Mama steps to the next bonsai and adjusts the miniaturized pine tree to display it at a more appealing angle. “You better get going or you’ll be late for school. You’ll need to take the school van this morning, but I’ll arrange for someone to pick you up, OK?”

“I don’t mind taking the van home.”

Mama casts me a sidelong look, her smile beautiful and practiced and lacking all the warmth in that photo montage with those homeless kids. “Of course you should have a private driver. You’ll get home faster. And then Baba and I will be home before you know it.” She turns her back on me, already gone.

As I leave the greenhouse, I can’t help stopping at the door in case Mama is sending me a sign that she wants to talk, mother to daughter. But her placid face betrays nothing. Instead, she stands motionless in the middle of her bonsai forest. I have to wonder whether I’ve imagined it all, her uncontrollable weeping for a mother she didn’t have. Maybe it was just a dream.

If Bao-mu is right and ghosts live in trees, then the ones in the greenhouse are so stunted, they can’t possibly roam free to haunt me. Or Mama. We have nothing to worry about. So I exhale slowly, ready to follow the wisps of my breath down the garden path to the warmth of our home. Just as I relax the vigil I hadn’t known I was practicing, slowly, deliberately, Mama starts to whittle away at her perfect bonsai, the silver birch she had deemed good enough to bring inside our house. She attacks it, a branch-by-branch diet, her shears stripping it at a steady clip-clipping rhythm: mis-take, mis-take. And I wonder, as she cripples the bonsai beyond repair, whether Mama hears the same mis-take chant as I do. Or a different one. Whatever it is, Mama doesn’t stop, doesn’t miss a single beat until the tree is diminished to a mere twig.

A
ll I can think
about on the drive to school is how I need to figure out who my Jane Doe grandmother is, the one who’s been a skeleton in Mama’s couture-crammed closet. I hunch over my journal using my unzipped jacket and up-drawn knees as a makeshift study carrel so that none of the other kids in this privately chartered van for my neighborhood can see what I’m writing. As soon as the van stops at a light, I scribble the question I can’t stop thinking about, not how the hell am I getting to Wicked in Whistler, but how the hell am I going to find this lost family of mine? I don’t even know where to begin to look.

The van bumps through a pothole, making my writing as unintelligible as any logical answer for this pruned back branch in my family tree. Besides, Chelsea’s musky perfume from the seat ahead of me is making me too woozy to think straight.

“Omigod, can you believe it?” Chelsea shrieks into her cell phone studded with pink crystals. “My parents want to drive to Whistler instead of fly!” Like always, the boom of Chelsea’s voice turns her secret confessions into public professions.

Geez, if only it were so easy to call Age and dump out my woes. But Age and I are still on the don’t-call-me-I-won’t-call-you cell phone plan.

“Yeah, so we’ll be heading to Whistler today with the masses,” whines Chelsea. She chooses that moment to unscrew the cap of her oversized water bottle. The stench of what must be a science experiment gone terribly wrong is released, momentarily camouflaging her perfume.

“What is that?” kids demand, everybody twisting around, looking for the odorous culprit that Chelsea swirls like a glass of fine wine that only needs to breathe properly before it’s enjoyed. My nose wrinkles at the smell, which I now identify as a cross between spoiled milk and old tofu.

“What? It’s Syrah’s mom’s detox diet,” Chelsea says.

I abandon my feeble attempt to manga-journal. “Excuse me?”

Recapping the bottle, Chelsea gives it a good, hard shake, as if that’ll make her mystery cocktail easier to swallow. “Aren’t you on it, too?”

“No.”

Another whiff of the Mama-Chelsea brew blows my way. God, what I need to do is detox my life, whittle away my mixed-up emotions until all that’s left is clear focus. If I want to find this long lost grandmother, I can’t randomly grab what I want. I need a plan.

Leaning back in my seat, I close my eyes and visualize my goal just the way I used to visualize the snowboarding tricks I was trying to learn, deconstructing the steps. I want to know who this mystery mother is, and more than that, why she wrings out more emotion from Mama than she’s shown me my entire life. I can’t talk to Mama, the Wonder Woman of deflecting personal questions. Besides, she’ll be on their private plane, coordinates Hong Kong, in an hour. Other than Age, who is incommunicado, the only person I truly trust is Bao-mu. Bao-mu will know what’s going on. When the van pulls into Viewridge, I’m ready, trading my manga-journal for my cell phone.

Viewridge is a cross between country club and Ivy League college, ten acres of East Coast–style brick buildings, weathered to look three hundred years old instead of thirty. Like any good country club, all digital devices are banned on the premises. Still, when the head of our school, Dr. Vandermeer, spots me on the bench with my contraband phone, I lift my shoulders apologetically and murmur, “My father.” That does the trick. All Dr. Vandermeer does is nod as if I’m on a very important business call that could make or break a healthy contribution to the school capital campaign.

The wind picks up, racing along the stairs to whip open the flaps of my jacket. The edge of the zipper hits me painfully on my cheek. The phone rings and rings. Did Bao-mu forget to turn on her phone? Another blast of wind penetrates through my sweater to my skin. With the phone tucked between my chin and my shoulder, I double my jacket around myself, kimono style.

Suddenly, I hear Bao-mu demand, “Who this?”

“Bao-mu, it’s—”

“What wrong? Something wrong with your knee? Your arm?”

In the background, I hear a woman grousing, “Is it that girl? You don’t work for her anymore.” Three guesses who that woman is. Could it be Christine, her medical doctor daughter who’s always too busy to be nice?

“No, no, I’m fine.” I hunch against the wind. Students jostle past me, but I ignore them. My automatic response of “How are you?” gets drowned out by the first bell. I ask instead, “Where are you?”

“Hospital still.
Aiya!
Pat baby, not too soft. He not silk you snag by accident,” Bao-mu says, either not bothering or not knowing to cover the mouthpiece, as she orders her daughter and granddaughter around in a way I miss. “Not too hard! Not too hard! Like that. See, he stop crying. So easy.” She makes a frustrated sound for being surrounded by incompetence. “Syrah, what you need?”

The wind wraps my hair around my face, covering my mouth. Is it a warning? Not to divulge too much of myself, even to Bao-mu? To protect the Cheng family honor and uphold a pretense that all is perfect? I pull my hair off my lips and hold it back in one fist. Then, I get to the point the way I can with Bao-mu, no fluffy chitchat required to ease the way to a hard topic. “Mama was crying last night. She kept saying that her Mama is dead, but that doesn’t make sense, does it? Didn’t Weipou die when I was little?”

Bao-mu sighs, her long breath communicating as much grief as Mama’s crying. She murmurs, “Her mama dead?” When Bao-mu makes her exasperated “aaahh” sound, at first I think she’s about to put me off. But she doesn’t. She tells the women on her side, “I need talk couple minutes. You be okay.”

I can imagine Christine protesting, hands on her hips, that her mother is no longer a servant, how she aches to wrench the phone away and tell me off the way she did the one time I met her and called Bao-mu my
po-po
: “She’s not your grandmother; she’s your nanny.” And how I wanted to cry because all I wanted was one person to call my own.

“Bao-mu, you have to tell me, please.” The tears welling in my eyes have nothing to do with being wind-lashed. “You don’t work for us anymore.”

There’s a moment of silence when I don’t hear anything, not the wind, not Bao-mu. And then Bao-mu says slowly, like she’s making a deal with herself, “No. I not work for your mama anymore.”

“So you’ll tell me?”

The way Bao-mu says,
“Wo jiang, ni ting,”
she could be patting the empty space beside her, clearing time for me.

“Your mama, she given away when baby,” says Bao-mu simply.

“She was?” My voice is so sharp, kids bounding up the steps look at me curiously. I turn away from them and lower my voice. “Mama was adopted?”

“Something like that. Your po-po—your
real
grandmother—have hard time in Cultural Revolution. Your
gong-gong
was famous calligrapher, always writing, just like you. When Red Guard find some papers your grandpa tried bury in backyard, they kick him so hard, he not wake up. Coma.”

According to the sanitized version of Mama’s life, it was one Great Leap from her wealthy family in Hong Kong to London boarding school when she was twelve. Her happily-ever-after came when she was attending university in Cambridge, and Baba was guest-lecturing. I clench the phone tightly to my ear, afraid to miss a single word that could unlock the mystery of my mother.

“He die three day later. Red Guard going take away your
po-po. Put her in labor camp,” Bao-mu continues. “She have five kids, no food. When I leave for Hong Kong, your po-po beg me take Betty. Betty just baby, easy to bring on train, not need buy another ticket. She tell me, give Betty to her rich brother in Hong Kong.” Bao-mu’s voice drops, her dislike palpable: “And his wife.”

His wife. My Weipou—the grandmother with the lips pursed permanently into a never-good-enough line—whose funeral I attended a long, long time ago.

As soon as one question forms on my lips, another ten queue in my brain. Did Mama ever reunite with her real mother or her siblings, and if she did, why didn’t I ever meet them? And where is everyone now? And how come Bao-mu never told me?

A baby wails in the background, and I know that my time with Bao-mu is about to end. Quickly, I ask the most important question, the one that might answer why Mama wanted to leave this morning: “So Po-Po’s been in Hong Kong all this time?”

“No, no, she left when Hong Kong given back to China. She move to Vancouver,” says Bao-mu.

“Vancouver? When?”

“1997.”

Vancouver, British Columbia. Three short hours up north, my grandmother, my real grandmother, was there for over ten years, and I never knew. Across the campus, the tops of the tall fir trees arch in the wind, these giant, unbound cousins of bonsai. I wonder if Mama knew.

“Bao-mu,” I say suddenly, as the thought occurs to me, “how do you know?”

“Aiya!”
exclaims Bao-mu, so loudly I ease the phone off my ear. “Let me do before you drown baby. Two women, one man, and still cannot give baby bath?” Bao-mu returns to our conversation. “I talk you later.”

“Bye, Bao-mu,” I say, but the line is already disconnected.

After the final bell rings, I stay outside, wishing the wind could strip the candy coating off Mama’s history as easily as it does the deadwood from the trees. Leaves and twigs circle around my feet. Across the field, a fir tree releases a branch as if it’s been lopped off by giant shears.

A car pulls into the bus circle. As soon as Lillian closes the passenger door, she races for the stairs at the same time her mother speeds out of the parking lot. If I hadn’t moved out of her way, Lillian would have crashed into me in her rush to get up the stairs, into class, and back to her good-girl-always-on-top-of-everything public persona.

“Syrah! Oh, sorry,” she says, surprise erasing the hurt on her face before turning into worry. “The bell didn’t ring, did it?” she asks hopefully, despite all evidence otherwise—no cars or kids.

I nod.

“Oh.” By the second step, a veneer of calm covers her anxiety. I know that placid mask. It’s my signature look. Even though Lillian and I spent all yesterday afternoon at Children’s, hung out with her sick little sister, ate dinner together, there’s a discomfort between us, bred from becoming too intimate too fast with each other. We both feel vulnerable from over-exposure.