Girl Overboard (25 page)

“Tell us about your scariest jump,” says one of The Boys, which one, I couldn’t say.

The scariest jump was the one I took to get away from Jared. But that’s not a story for innocent ears. So I tell them about the different tricks the pro snowboarders can do, the ones I used to do, the ones I want to do. I tell them about how being on top of the mountain makes everything else seem less important. And I tell them about how it feels to move faster than the wind, aimless but powerful and, above all, free.

When I finish my story, I catch Grace watching me wistfully, like she wishes she could feel aimless but powerful and, above all, free, too.

How long I talk,
I don’t know. What I talk about, I don’t remember. At last, after what feels like the five hundredth conversation with yet another relative, my brain freezes, unable to make one more mindless comment, and my cheeks rebel from smiling a moment longer. I make my way through pods of people. Not until I’m halfway to the front door does it occur to me that I’m escaping.

Looking from one side of the hall to the other, I swear, I could be back at Children’s Hospital. Instead of acrylic signs that broadcast to the world who’s made major gifts, these photographs—black and white, color, sepia—are a mosaic of family memories that I have no part of. And I realize why all this talking has been so taxing.

What strangers want from me is access to Ethan Cheng and a free pass to mine our Gold Mountain. What this family wants is access to the real Syrah, the girl who’s been wandering aimless and lost on that same mountain.

A wave of fresh
air rolls over me as soon as I open the front door, surprised that it’s still light outside. I check my watch. How can it be only five when I feel like I’ve been talking for an eternity?

“Syrah?”

I turn around to face The Boys. Beyond them, what looks like the entire Leong family has gathered to stop my flight.

One of my boy cousins says, “If you’re going snowboarding, we’re coming with you.”

“Snowboarding? Who’s going snowboarding?” asks Auntie Marnie, jostling her way to the front of her pack. I swear, this woman’s hearing is as keen as Bao-mu’s.

I don’t get a chance to answer,
No, of course I’m not going snowboarding. Just outside to sit by myself for a while.
As if my pause were the last morsel on the dining room table, The Boys pounce on it. Now I know why Jocelyn lumps her cousins together into one big noun. They talk over each other and answer as one.

“She’s got tickets to Wicked in Whistler—”

“A snowboarding competition…”

“The biggest one in Whistler…”

“Duh—of course it’s in Whistler. Wicked in Whistler…”

“Can we go?”

“It started yesterday.”

Auntie Marnie claps her hands together. “Quiet! I can’t think! All you boys do is make noise.”

I second that notion.

“No one is leaving,” announces Auntie Marnie. No wonder Jocelyn says our eldest aunt has the leadership gene, which is the polite way of saying she’s Bossy with a capital B. “You,” she says, pointing to the rest of the family, “have food to eat, and you”—she points at me—“have something to see.” She takes my arm and orders, “Come.”

A closed door down the hall could be any other in this house, but I know it’s Po-Po’s room. Auntie Marnie opens the door gently, as if she doesn’t want to wake the sleeping person inside. “Come in, come in,” she says brusquely when I hang outside the door, feeling like an intruder.

Without waiting to see if I’m obeying—proof that she’s used to everyone jumping at her every command—Auntie Marnie removes three enormous scrapbooks from the corner bookshelf. “This is what I wanted to show you.” She points me to a reading chair, switches on the lamp, and places one of the albums on my lap. Heavy and substantial, it weighs me down so I don’t float away the way I’ve felt I was going to all afternoon.

Underneath the first photograph of a chubby baby is Chinese writing that I can’t read. I look up at Marnie, knowing the answer before I can form the question.

“Your mother’s name.”

“Betty?”

“No, her Chinese name.” Auntie Marnie squats down in front of me.

I shake my head. “She doesn’t use that name.” Nor do I since mine, Zhen Zhu, meaning pearl, makes me feel more asset than beloved daughter.

“Oh.” Marnie smiles at me sadly. “It’s Yu.”

That one-syllable name sounds emphatic rather than harsh. My hand automatically touches my throat, to where Mama’s pendant always rests on her neck, and I translate, “Jade?”

Auntie Marnie nods. “Our mother wanted her to know that she was treasured. Jade is so precious in our culture, almost magical in its powers. We never forgot your mother.”

The problem is, my mother must have wanted to forget that name. Auntie Marnie cocks her head at me. “Can you read Chinese?”

I shake my head. “I can only understand it.”

Nodding, she points to the single Chinese character that makes up Mama’s name. “See,” she says and covers the tiny dot that lies like a pearl at the corner of the character. “That means ‘
wong.
’ You know
wong
?”

“King?” I ask.

“Not king. More like the family clan leader. Jade is that, the chief, plus this dot.” Auntie Marnie gets heavily to her feet as though the weight of the past is almost too much to bear. With one finger, she circles Mama’s name, a tender caress before leaving me alone with Po-Po’s memories. “Maybe one day, you can give these scrapbooks to your mommy.”

Aside from the one baby picture, there are very few photographs of Mama’s childhood, three or four of her as a toddler and no more until she’s six, maybe seven. I recognize Weipou’s stern face that matches her upright posture in a hardback chair, Weigong standing at her side, looking more servant than partner. Two plump boys are positioned in front of them, and standing to the back by herself is Mama, so tiny she’s just two eyes peering uneasily over Weipou’s shoulder, an interloper in this family portrait. In another picture of just Mama and her two brothers, her expression is more browbeaten than any homeless child in the Evergreen Fund slideshow.

“Oh, Mama,” I murmur, running my finger across her pinched face, wishing I could smudge the not-good-enough expression away.

The next page skips forward a few years to Mama at boarding school, standing next to other girls who are all white. Even without the cheongsam, Mama looks every bit the outsider, with her arms hanging awkwardly at her side. But there’s a luminosity in her eyes that wasn’t there in her Hong Kong pictures and relief in her smile, as if she knows she’s in control. And free. By the time she enters Cambridge, she looks almost like the Mama I know: gorgeous, confident, perfectly put together, not a wrinkle on her skirt, nor a blemish on her blouse.

As I skim through this first scrapbook, I could be watching one of those time-stop documentaries where plants burst from seed to full bloom on the count of three. The next scrapbook begins with Mama’s wedding announcement in the
New York Times,
articles about Baba’s company, photographs of my parents at various functions, and then there’s me, me, and more me. I recognize every photograph: they’re copies of pictures that Bao-mu took. I always thought it was so weird how she was never without a camera. My first successful foray on the potty:
CLICK!
My first dance recital with all of three shuffle-steps:
CLICK!

I may not have been known, but I was loved. And so was Mama. Without having to study every page, I know it. And I know it because the third book, more empty than full, is waiting for Mama’s life and mine to fill it.

If Mama had any inkling of how much she was cherished, would that change anything? Randomly, I flip from page to page, picture after picture of bone-thin Mama. Then as now, she’s emaciated, like she’s not worthy of food.

Suddenly, I’m so tired, my eyes go out-of-focus. It’s as if hands lead me to the bed where Po-Po had slept since she moved to Vancouver. Considering that I normally sleep in a bed used by four hundred years’ worth of people—doing who knows what and please don’t tell me—I have no problem lying down and closing my eyes. I keep one hand on the scrapbook I’ve carried to bed, as if I could soak up the love that went into clipping every one of those articles and gluing each picture down in this ultimate brag book about two little treasures, one Jade and the other Pearl.

I
wake to The
Boys thudding around their indoor track of a living room.

“Shhh!” I hear one of the aunties shushing them. “You’ll wake up Syrah.”

I smile then, thinking how great it is to wake up in a house full of noisy life. As soon as I pull my hair back into a messy ponytail and wipe the sleep out of my eyes, I head downstairs toward the scent of potstickers frying in the kitchen. Suddenly, I’m homesick for Bao-mu, who always foisted a container of the fresh dumplings onto Age whenever he came over to visit, telling him, “You not cook tonight. You study!”

“Syrah’s finally up!” yells one of The Boys, zooming around me. I swear, there’s got to be an easy way to remember which one is which. Give me enough time, and I’ll figure it out. “Is this how fast you go on your snowboard?”

“You’re way faster,” I assure him.

“I’m faster than Syrah!” he bellows more victoriously than a first place winner at Wicked in Whistler.

Laughing, I follow my nose to where the Leong sisters are seated around the kitchen table, a well-oiled potsticker production line.

By way of greeting me, Auntie Marnie looks up from the long strips of dough that she’s slicing into one-inch segments and asks,
“Chi bao le ma?”
Funny, isn’t it, that her greeting—a standard Chinese one,
have you eaten yet
—is a question I’d never hear out of my own mother’s mouth, so concerned is she that I don’t gain an unnecessary ounce?

With a dough-caked hand, Auntie Marnie motions me over to the empty chair, unaware of the drifts of flour flaking with her every movement. Quickly, she bustles to the stove, where she wipes her hands on a kitchen towel and lifts the cover off the frying pan, sizzling with potstickers. “Almost done.”

As I sit in the one remaining empty spot at the table, I wonder where Grace is, since she’s not in here with the rest of the women. Auntie Marnie reclaims her seat across from me. Next to her, Auntie Yvonne rolls the cut-up dough in her palms before flattening the balls with a tiny rolling pin into pancakes. Jocelyn drops a mound of pork and cabbage filling in the center of each skin before folding the edges over into fat crescent moons.

That’s where the production line hiccups. Jocelyn nods at the growing stack of pancake skins in front of her. She whispers to me, “They’re way too fast.”

“No,” teases Auntie Yvonne. “Your young hands are too slow.”

While the conversation rolls ahead in rapid Mandarin, I take my place in the production line as Jocelyn’s backup helper. Just as I did with Bao-mu countless times over the years, I pick up a doughy skin, dollop some of the meat into the center, dip one flour-dusted finger into the bowl of cloudy water, and wet the edges of a skin. I fold over the dumpling, and the way Bao-mu taught me, I crimp the edges.

“Just like Pi-Lan!” cries Auntie Yvonne, delighted. “She is such a good cook.”

Surprised, I ask, “You know my Bao-mu?”

“Of course.” Auntie Marnie pops up to check on the potstickers, moving them around with long chopsticks in some order only she understands. “She was your po-po’s best friend. Pi-Lan was so sad that she couldn’t make it to the memorial. But the baby came home from the hospital yesterday, and she had to be there to help.”

Then it comes to me. Bao-mu was the one who brought Mama to her new parents. That’s why her photos were in Po-Po’s scrapbooks. So why did she come back to take care of me for all these years?

As I pick up another pancake skin, I notice Grace hovering by the kitchen door, as if she wants to join us but doesn’t know how. It’s the way I feel around the girls at school who seem to speak another language. In this case, we do. Grace doesn’t speak Mandarin.

“Grace, hurry, we need reinforcements,” I tell her in English, then dust the flour off my hands and grab the extra chair tucked under the telephone nook.

Pretty soon, Grace is shaping The Son of Blob in her hand. “What’s the trick?” she asks me quietly, embarrassed at the miscreant in her hands.

“It’s all about putting the right amount of meat on the skin,” I tell her. “Too much, and it oozes out. Too little, and you’re eating the Pillsbury Doughboy.”

Auntie Yvonne squashes another ball into a large medallion-sized pancake and looks at me in the same way Bao-mu does when she embarks on a fact-finding mission. As if she’s merely relaying information, Auntie Yvonne says casually, “Pi-Lan said your mommy bought her a big house in California.”

It’s hard to say who’s more surprised, me or Grace. On Bao-mu’s last day at The House of Cheng, I had visions of Winston Churchill sending his allowance to his nanny after she’d been cut off penniless despite years of service, and I worried out loud to Bao-mu about her retirement. She had brushed off my concern: “You not worry. I be lots okay.”

“Pi-Lan told Po-Po that your mommy took three trips to find her the perfect house. Three thousand square feet, four bedrooms, and a housekeeper,” says Auntie Marnie proudly, as if she were the one who’d arranged it. She carries a platter from the stove to the island, steaming with dumplings. “All furnished.”

Three trips to San Francisco? When had Mama found the time? Suddenly I remember the emergency shopping expedition tacked on to her last D.C. trip. Only Mama wasn’t shopping for the newest “it” shoes or the season’s “must-have” pieces, but for Bao-mu’s future. There is a whole life that Bao-mu and my mother have kept secret.

As if we’re all preschoolers, Auntie Marnie orders us, “Go wash your hands, and then we’ll eat.”

Soon, Auntie Yvonne is scooting the platter that we’re sharing family-style closer to me. “Eat,” she urges. “Eat.”

Under the doting eyes of my aunties, I choose one, which gets a fast rejection from Auntie Marnie: “No, no, that one is too skinny. You take this one,” and she hands me the plumpest, choicest dumpling. I take a careful bite, and close my eyes. Hot, savory juices flood my mouth. When I open my eyes, Auntie Marnie is watching me closely, weighing my love for her in my response.