The Opposite of Fate (23 page)

And yet it is as close to the truth as I can imagine. It is my mother’s story in the most important of ways to me: her passion, her will, her hope, the innocence she never really lost. It is the reason why she told me, “I was not affected,” why I can finally understand what she truly meant.

• confessions •

M
y mother’s thoughts reach back like the winter tide, exposing the wreckage of a former shore. Often she’s mired in 1967, 1968, the years my older brother and my father died.

1968 was also the year she took me and my little brother—Didi—across the Atlantic to Switzerland, a place so preposterously different that she knew she had to give up grieving simply to survive. That year, she remembers, she was very, very sad. I too remember. I was sixteen then, and I recall a late-night hour when my mother and I were arguing in the chalet, that tinderbox of emotion where we lived.

She had pushed me into the small bedroom we shared, and as she slapped me about the head, I backed into a corner, by a window that looked out on the lake, the Alps, the beautiful outside world. My mother was furious because I had a boyfriend. She was shouting that he was a drug addict, a bad man who would use me for sex and throw me away like leftover garbage.

“Stop seeing him!” she ordered.

I shook my head. The more she beat me, the more implacable I became, and this in turn fueled her outrage.

“You didn’t love you daddy or Peter! When they die you not even sad.”

I kept my face to the window, unmoved. What does she know about sad?

She sobbed and beat her chest. “I rather kill myself before see you destroy you life!”

Suicide. How many times had she threatened that before?

“I wish you the one die! Not Peter, not Daddy.”

She had just confirmed what I had always suspected. Now she flew at me with her fists.

“I rather kill you! I rather see you die!”

And then, perhaps horrified by what she had just said, she fled the room. Thank God that was over. I wished I had a cigarette to smoke. Suddenly she was back. She slammed the door shut, latched it, then locked it with a key. I saw the flash of a meat cleaver just before she pushed me to the wall and brought the blade’s edge to within an inch of my throat. Her eyes were like a wild animal’s, shiny, fixated on the kill. In an excited voice she said, “First, I kill you. Then Didi and me, our whole family destroy!” She smiled, her chest heaving. “Why you don’t cry?” She pressed the blade closer and I could feel her breath gusting.

Was she bluffing? If she did kill me, so what? Who would care? While she rambled, a voice within me was whimpering, “This is sad, this is so sad.”

For ten minutes, fifteen, longer, I straddled these two thoughts—that it didn’t matter if I died, that it would be eternally sad if I did—until all at once I felt a snap, then a rush of hope into a vacuum, and I was crying, I was babbling my confession: “I want to live. I want to live.”

For twenty-five years I forgot that day, and when the
memory of what happened surfaced unexpectedly at a writers’ workshop in which we recalled our worst moments, I was shaking, wondering to myself, Did she really mean to kill me? If I had not pleaded with her, would she have pushed down on the cleaver and ended my life?

I wanted to go to my mother and ask. Yet I couldn’t, not until much later, when she became forgetful and I learned she had Alzheimer’s disease. I knew that if I didn’t ask her certain questions now, I would never know the real answers.

So I asked.

“Angry? Slap you?” she said, and laughed. “No, no,
no
. You always good girl, never even need to spank, not even one time.”

How wonderful to hear her say what was never true, yet now would be forever so.

• pretty beyond belief •

I
once asked my mother whether I was beautiful by Chinese standards. I must have been twelve at the time, and I believed that I was not attractive according to an American aesthetic based on Marilyn Monroe as the ultimate sex goddess.

I remember that my mother carefully appraised my face before concluding, “To Chinese person, you not beautiful. You plain.”

I was unable to hide my hurt and disappointment.

“Why you want be beautiful?” my mother chided. “Pretty can be bad luck, not just good.” She should know, she said. She had been born a natural beauty. When she was four, people told her they had never seen a girl so lovely. “Everyone spoil me, the servants, my grandmother, my aunts, because I was pretty beyond belief.”

By the time she was a teenager, she had the looks of a movie starlet: a peach-shaped face, a nose that was rounded but not overly broad, tilted large eyes with double lids, a smile of small and perfect teeth. Her skin bore “no spots or dots,” and she would often say to me, even into her seventies and eighties, “Feel. Still smooth and soft.”

When she was nineteen, she married. She was innocent, she said, and her husband was a bad man. The day before their wedding, he was with another woman. Later he openly brought his girlfriends home to humiliate her, to prove that her beauty and her pride were worth nothing. When she ran away with the man who would become my father, her husband had her jailed. The Shanghai tabloids covered her trial for months, and all the city girls admired her front-page photos. “They cried for me,” she avowed. “They don’t know me, but they thought I too pretty to have such bad life.”

Glam shot of me at age twelve, with my cat Fufu.

Beauty ruined her own mother as well. A rich man spotted my grandmother when she was newly widowed, strolling by a lakeside. “She was exquisite, like a fairy,” my mother reported. The man forced the widow to become his concubine, thus consigning her to a life of disgrace. After she gave birth to his baby son, my grandmother killed herself by swallowing raw opium.

Although my mother chastised my adolescent beauty, she sometimes lamented my lack of it. “Too bad you got your father’s feet,” she would say. She wondered why I had not
inherited any of the good features of her face, and pointed out that my nostrils and lips were too coarse, my skin too dark. When I was nineteen, after a car accident left my nose and mouth askew, she told me she was sorry that she could not afford the plastic surgery to fix this, as well as my misshapen left ear. By then I didn’t care that I would never meet my mother’s standards of beauty. I had a boyfriend who loved me.

In the last years of my mother’s life, when she had developed Alzheimer’s disease, she never forgot that she was a beauty. I could always make her giggle by telling her how pretty she was, how I wished I had been born with her good looks. She whispered back that some of the other women in the assisted-living residence were jealous of her for the same reason. But as she lost her ability to reason and remember, she also came to believe that my face had changed.

“You look like me,” she said. I was moved to tears to hear her say this. Time and age had allowed us to come closer. Now we had the same lines formed by cautious half-smiles. We had the same loss of fat above the innocent eye, the same crimped chin holding back what we really felt. My psyche had molded itself into my mother’s face.

Since my mother died, I find myself looking in the mirror more often than I did when I was twelve. How else is my face changing? If beauty is bad luck, why do I still want it? Why do I wish for reasons to be vain? Why do I long to look like my mother?

• the most hateful words •

T
he most hateful words I have ever said to another human being were to my mother. I was sixteen at the time. They rose from the storm in my chest and I let them fall in a fury of hailstones: “I hate you. I wish I were dead. . . .”

I waited for her to collapse, stricken by what I had just said. She was still standing upright, her chin tilted, her lips stretched in a crazy smile. “Okay, maybe I die too,” she said between huffs. “Then I no longer be your mother!” We had many similar exchanges. Sometimes she actually tried to kill herself by running into the street, holding a knife to her throat. She too had storms in her chest. And what she aimed at me was as fast and deadly as a lightning bolt.

For days after our arguments, she would not speak to me. She tormented me, acted as if she had no feelings for me whatsoever. I was lost to her. And because of that, I lost, battle after battle, all of them: the times she criticized me, humiliated me in front of others, forbade me to do this or that without even listening to one good reason why it should be the other way. I swore to myself I would never forget these injustices. I would store them, harden my heart, make myself as impenetrable as she was.

I remember this now, because I am also remembering another time, just a few years ago. I was forty-seven, had become a different person by then, had become a fiction writer, someone who uses memory and imagination. In fact, I was writing a story about a girl and her mother, when the phone rang.

It was my mother, and this surprised me. Had someone helped her make the call? For a few years now, she had been losing her mind through Alzheimer’s disease. Early on, she forgot to lock her door. Then she forgot where she lived. She forgot who many people were and what they had meant to her. Lately, she could no longer remember many of her worries and sorrows.

“Amy-ah,” she said, and she began to speak quickly in Chinese. “Something is wrong with my mind. I think I’m going crazy.”

I caught my breath. Usually she could barely speak more than two words at a time. “Don’t worry,” I started to say.

“It’s true,” she went on. “I feel like I can’t remember many things. I can’t remember what I did yesterday. I can’t remember what happened a long time ago, what I did to you. . . .” She spoke as a drowning person might if she had bobbed to the surface with the force of will to live, only to see how far she had already drifted, how impossibly far she was from the shore.

She spoke frantically: “I know I did something to hurt you.”

“You didn’t,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

“I did terrible things. But now I can’t remember what. . . . And I just want to tell you . . . I hope you can forget, just as I’ve forgotten.”

I tried to laugh so she would not notice the cracks in my voice. “Really, don’t worry.”

“Okay, I just wanted you to know.”

After we hung up, I cried, both happy and sad. I was again that sixteen-year-old, but the storm in my chest was gone.

My mother died six months later. By then she had bequeathed to me her most healing words, as open and eternal as a clear blue sky. Together we knew in our hearts what we should remember, what we can forget.

• my love affair with vladimir nabokov •

A
fter years of being asked in public, “What’s your all-time favorite book?” I should have a definitive sound bite by now, you’d think. But for me, having to choose a best book conjures terrible visions of school days when I waited to be chosen as someone’s friend. Because my family moved almost yearly, books became my comfort, and I wanted to embrace them all.

Certainly
Jane Eyre
fits in there with the bests. Its setting of gloom and chill matched my emotional interior. I identified with Jane’s alienation, her meager hopes. Moreover, I loved her spunkiness; she was confined by circumstances, yet subtly rebellious and spiritually subversive. From
Jane Eyre
, I acquired a literary preference for gothic atmosphere and dark emotional resonance.

I also want to say the dictionary, any unabridged dictionary, is a best. I read lists of words as though they were stories. Within their nuances, I see possibilities. Like many writers, I am passionate about words. To this day, I love reading dictionaries, including lexicons of dead languages. I love the sounds and shapes
of words, the way certain consonant blends can evoke related images:
glow, glisten, glimmer, glen,
along with
flabby, flap, flop, flotsam, flatter, flatulence.
I am fascinated with the origins of words, when they came into being, how they were first used. Within their histories are stories. The dictionary for me is my Scheherazade. Plus it can spell Scheherazade.

There’s also
Love Medicine
by Louise Erdrich and
Annie John
by Jamaica Kincaid. I have reread both those books many times. And every time, I am inspired to think about the narrative qualities I cherish in stories.
Love Medicine
is the book that made me want to find my own voice. It influenced my early attempts at writing fiction.

Finally, we get to the clichéd litmus test of literature: I am often asked, If stranded on a desert island, what book, other than
How to Get off a Desert Island,
would you want? To provide me with endless entertainment and literary puzzles, I would choose
Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov. I often reread passages of it for language, for “aesthetic bliss,” as Nabokov called his own literary pursuit. I am infatuated with its imagery, its wit, its bonanza of allusions and arcana, as well as its parody and the prosody in perfect rhythm to its stylistic bent. The parenthetical phrase “(picnic, lightning)” is one of the most tragic, grand, and comic images in all literature. It is a miniature marvel. For me, reading
Lolita
means conducting a torrid love affair with the English language, and nearly every writer I know has been besotted with its prose.