No photos of their wedding, they’d gone modestly to City Hall. The next series showed my aunt and uncle standing in front of a two-family brick house in Flushing—they’d lived there only three months before my uncle got a job with Martin Marietta in St. Pete. Uncle Richard was chunky and broad-faced and beaming, a heaviness around his chin foretelling the jowls to come. My aunt looked dazed in her heavy jewelry and unbecoming dresses.
“Ding-ah!” she called to my uncle, but he had fallen asleep on the couch across the room.
Me as a lumpy infant, a cowlick I still have springing from the left side of my head. Marty, smaller in every way, and more self-contained. The album chronicled the two of us growing up into our late teens. Between us, often, stood my mother. Seeing Ma and Marty together over and over made me note the difference in their beauty. My mother had a portrait prettiness, with her styled hair and regular features, while my sister’s face was narrower, feline, a little dangerous. It wasn’t just the generation gap—my sister was born knowing something my mother never learned.
At first Ma’s look changed dramatically from scene to scene, her hairstyle and clothing reflecting each passing fashion. You could practically pinpoint the year by looking at her. There we were at Disneyland, in front of Cinderella’s castle, my mother in a modified beehive and Bermuda shorts, me in stripes, my sister in snowflakes. In front of the White House: Ma in a boldly patterned sleeveless shift and the Twiggy crop Daddy had hated so much, Marty and I on either side of her with our arms clutching the crosspiece of the fence, pretending we were being strung up.
Then suddenly my mother’s fashion sense seemed to regress until finally it froze. The pixie haircut, the school-marm outfits, the tight mouth. She remained static, only growing older, while my sister and I blossomed.
Daddy, usually the photographer, was in few of the pictures. I watched him age, hair whitening first at the temples and then clouding through. His eyes got smaller, darker, and more brilliant. His body shrank to bones inside the endless similar sets of loose shirts and trousers that he wore year after year. The ties got more and more excessive. The rare smile become nonexistent. How bitter the lines framing his mouth, how resentful the hunch of his shoulders, how desperately his long hands groped the air by his sides.
For the first time I saw my parents’ marriage as a love story gone terribly awry.
“Your ba-ba ever tell you he want to be pilot?” Aunty Mabel reached down into her wicker workbasket, fished out a card of bright orange embroidery floss, unwound it, and licked the end into a point, which she threaded through a darning needle.
“No, really?”
“He want to join the Chinese air force. You think he’s so healthy, a tall man like that. But he failed the physical. All those childhood diseases make his constitution weak.”
“I thought he wanted to be a physicist.”
“That too. Afterward. Pilot was childhood dream.” My aunt shook her head. “Your father was a genius, you should hear him talk! So clever, all those stories. His sisters would be so proud of him. Too bad he was stuck in the United States. All the time he hopes China opens up again so he can go back. He is almost thirty years old when he comes. You come to a new country too late, you are always stranger. Your mother and me, we go to school here, we make friends. Not so your ba-ba. He is incurable Chinese.” “He did go back. To Taiwan.”
“When a Chinese returns to China, he goes to lao jia.” In the early 1970s, when it was beginning to be possible to do so, my parents had written to their respective families. Ma had received several letters back: her oldest sister had died (one of those aunts whose blurry heads Marry and I had scrutinized in Nai-nai’s ancient sepia family portraits), such and such a cousin was professor of German at the foreign language institute in Shanghai. Since it was impossible for those in China to obtain visas to the United States, would Nai-nai and Ma and Aunty Mabel please come back to visit them as soon as possible. Nai-nai had wanted to, had made plans, but the cancer had gotten to her bones by then. Her daughters had never gone.
My father had received only one letter back, on onionskin paper, the characters drawn with blue fountain pen ink in an uncertain hand. It was from a stranger, a primary school teacher in the town where he’d grown up. So sorry to have to be the one to convey such news to his illustrious American colleague, etc., etc., but Wang Pau-yu’s younger sister had passed away several years ago from the sugar sickness. Diabetes, Daddy explained. She’d been a laborer, a farmhand, unmarried. No one knew what had become of the older sister. She’d held a local government post, and then joined the Communist Party and moved to Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. She’d changed her name and was impossible to trace.
I asked my aunt: “Do you think Ma should have married someone else? Someone more her class?” I remembered Uncle Richard and hoped Aunty Mabel wouldn’t take offense.
She didn’t. “More than difference in class. Difference in character. Your father had a very bad childhood. So insecure, always afraid. Your mother—well, you know, she’s the baby. A little spoiled, like your sister. She doesn’t understand this kind of fear.”
I was flipping the pages of the album fast now, until a large group photograph made me stop. There was our whole family, La Guardia Airport, Christmas, my sophomore year of boarding school. My parents still the perfect couple for the camera: Daddy, his hair almost completely white now, my mother close beside him with her dutiful, distant smile. Uncle Richard in a Russian fur hat, which he must have kept mainly in mothballs, for who would need such a thing in Florida, his arm raised in a bon voyage salute—his other arm around my aunt, who looked caught off-guard. Me in an army jacket and ragged-hem jeans, my sister with heavy mascara and a bad layered haircut. Between the two of us my Nai-nai, wearing the long beige cashmere coat my mother and aunt had given her for Christmas. I could see in the photograph how it hung off her shoulder blades, she had gotten so thin. By that time she was wearing turtlenecks rather than high-collared blouses to hide her mole because she couldn’t manage buttons. A couple of years before, she had broken her hip, and still sported an ivory-handled cane.
“Your Nai-nai look distinguished, eh?” she said to me. “Not just like any old lady.” When I walked her to the boarding gate she leaned against me, clutching my arm, and I could feel the brittle bones of her fingers through her soft leather gloves. It was the last time I ever saw her, touched her.
My mother was fussing, asking if Nai-nai was sure she had her ticket. My grandmother ignored her. “You much taller,” she said to me. “It’s good to be tall. Tall girl stands out.”
And I remembered how I had felt comforted, although I had heard it a hundred times before.
The phone rang and my uncle started, in the middle of a snore. “Hello?” Aunty Mabel said. Then she handed the receiver to me. “For you.”
“Ma?” I asked, but my aunt shook her head.
“Sally? It’s Mel.”
“Oh my God, how are you?” His voice was like elixir, cool, filling, impossible to describe how glad it made me feel. “Where are you calling from?”
“My parents’ house.”
“Are you on pass?”
“I’m out, Sal. They sprung me.”
“That’s great! What are you up to?”
“Well, for starters, I thought I’d come down and see you.”
“I thought you said you were broke.”
“There are ways, darling, there are ways. I think I can borrow some wheels.”
“It’s a little crowded here—”
“Oh, don’t worry about that, Sal, I wouldn’t impose on your family. I have a place to stay.”