"Arrivals"

When I arrived in my father's embrace that night, it was to the familiar scent of gasoline and soap. Gasoline, from all those hours he spent elbows-deep in car engines. Soap, from all the hours he spent trying to scrub the smell off. He had located me, almost immediately, among a stream of haggard travelers, bulky suitcases. At the time, it seemed an insignificant thing, but now I could stay in that moment, reliving the way his eyes lit up with recognition, lips forming, as if second nature, the words neoi neoi. Daughter, in Cantonese. I had hated the way the title sounded back then—maybe it was the nasalness of the tone, or the way the repetition of syllables sounded somewhat patronizing—but after my father began forgetting things, forgetting important things, I grasped for anything that might bind us together, even a language I only barely knew. Daughter, I thought, was better than Stranger. My father smiled when we parted. I remember he had laughed, and said, very simply, “I’ve been driving in circles for the last hour. Forgot to check for last delay when I left home.” It wasn’t a complaint, just a fact. He went to open the trunk. As he moved underneath the grainy airport light, I began to study him. There were things that hadn’t changed, but then there were differences, and these were everywhere, appearing all at once. I remember noticing he had shrunk an inch; I was taller than him, even wearing flat shoes, although for the longest time we had been the same height. I recalled all the times my father penciled my height into the doorframe, and with horror, saw myself doing the same to him. It was involuntary. "Big snowstorm. You weren't cold?" "It wasn't too bad," I answered. "Twenty-eight degrees when I left New York." "Okay. Exams went good?" Well. Exams went well. I hated the way my mind corrected him, a red pen scribbling on his English in the space between us. It had been even worse when I was a kid: during my spelling bee days, I used to perpetually make fun of his inability to spell camouflage. He always forgot the u, and if he remembered the u, he always forgot something else; and somehow I had found this terribly funny. In his ear, I would sing: Come on, Dad, it's easy: c-a-m-o-u-f-l-a-g-e! He always replied, exasperated, Okay, Marie, good for you. I'll get it next time. A part of me hoped he did the same to me when I spoke strangled Cantonese—that in his headspace, he laughed and rallied back and scored his own petty victories—but I knew there was no red pen, no sing-song patronization. He was too gentle for that. Besides, good English meant I was a true American, he joked. Losing Cantonese had been the price for that; I knew only the basics now. Titles, swear words, names of food and drinks. A beautiful mother tongue, reduced to a language of appetite and relations. “I should be fine, but I won’t know for a few weeks.” “I’m sure you did good. You always do good.” —Well. I pinched myself. My father let out a short chuckle, proud and well-meaning, and heaved the last of my luggage into the trunk. I climbed into the passenger seat, fumbling for a radio channel to fill the silence, and tried to recall when my father had been a younger man. When his arms had been full and muscular, and he raised me onto his shoulders with ease. “Have you seen my glasses?” he asked suddenly. He fumbled around a bit before realizing they were pushed up onto his head. At the time, we both found this terribly amusing. Later, of course, it wasn’t so funny. I watched him put on his glasses, the frames catching and refracting the light from the street lamps. "Did you sleep? You look tired," he said. "Sleep, I'll wake you when we get home." I leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes briefly, but sleep was the furthest thing from my mind. Car rides, no matter how long or how short, always reminded me of the time I shared with my father growing up. As he maneuvered the steering wheel with one hand, I thought of all the other times we were in these same exact positions—my father in the driver’s seat, me beside him. During tournament season, we would spend hours upon hours like that, driving to the tennis clubs, driving to practice court locations, driving home. My flight had arrived in San Francisco at 1 am, but even then the freeway seemed oddly quiet. It reminded me of those early-morning drives up to Sacramento, where most tennis tournaments were held; to get there, you drove through this terribly lonely strip of highway, which wound through desolate marshes in wine country, scorched hills. I always knew it was an ugly trek, though it wasn’t until college, when during my school breaks I’d come home and accompany my father to Terry's matches, that I realized how alienating that drive could be. When you were awake, alone, watching light touch the earth and then fill it, the car became a vacuum—a prison of your own thoughts. You could hear your own secrets whispered back to you. On those early mornings, my father would share with me his secrets. He admitted he was a delinquent in high school—that he used to joyride around Oakland until one night, he pretzeled his car around an oak tree and nearly killed himself and his cousin. He told me how people had looked down on him when he started his car shop—how my mother’s mother had spurned him, called him a poor boy with nothing going on in his life. Now she licked his feet, always cooing at family gatherings about how great a businessman and father he was. His peers at Oakland High had laughed at him, called him a Chinaman, bet on how long he’d last. To prove them wrong he had worked thirteen-hour days in the beginning. He scored big, until he didn't; the stock markets crashed, and with it, every penny he had worked so hard for. Sometimes, while he told me these stories, I looked backward and watched Terry as he slept in the back seat like I had, all those years. Naive, wrapped up in his little world. When was the next match? What if he choked match point? Would recruiters be watching? On those excursions, I felt firsthand the exhaustion that came with shepherding and watching someone else play tennis: boredom between matches, embarrassment when Terry acted out on court, pride when he executed a good play. I went to bed with heavy limbs, woke with cricks in my neck and back from sitting on hard bleachers. How my father did this, on repeat, and with that happy smile pasted on his face half the time, I could never know. I had been a terrible competitor, too. I remember I used to get angry at my father for being too quiet on the sidelines, for sitting there and eating his cashews and bananas with that same benign smile. Once, he had tried to cheer me on, copying the phrases of the other girls’ parents—Right back, Marie; Next point, next point—but I had gotten angry again. This time he had disrupted my quiet; he had cheered at a time when I did not want cheering. He hadn’t cheered the right way. Whatever that meant. Still, he watched every one of my matches, endured my berating, pulled out his blue fold-up chair and ate his cashews and watched me play on days when it was one hundred degrees and on days when it was thirty. A large pothole jostled the car, pulling me back. We were in downtown San Francisco now, although it seemed much dimmer than I remembered it. Every storefront was dark, something I couldn’t fathom happening in New York; above, I could even make out stars. It’d been a while since I could see Orion’s belt. My gaze fell eventually on my father’s hands, these maps of his life. Without looking, I could find the mole between his third and fourth fingers, the deep crack on the back of his thumb, which sometimes bled in the winter when the air was dry. He still had that yellow callous on the heel of his palm—a blemish we had shared when I played tennis, though in the four years since I’d quit the sport and gone off to university, mine had disappeared, the skin becoming soft and feminine again. I watched the sweet fantasy fall—the one where we think our parents will be with us until the very end. I started thinking of all the strange ways the world robs us of that dream. For instance, you step off an airport terminal and look at your father. You look at him and notice all the new wrinkles and sunspots, veins on his hands. Slowed gait, achy joints. It hits you at once, all these little things you never bothered to notice before, and suddenly you become aware of that line in the distance, the empty space beyond it. My father stepped on the gas again, drew us back onto the freeway. Looking out the window, I tried to ground my eyes on the green road signs. US-101 North. Junipero Serra Boulevard. San Jose. A graffiti tag that I couldn’t quite place; I swore I had seen it before. Take me back, I remember thinking. But it was too late: the gears had turned, irreparably.

I'd been thinking a lot about home that semester—what it meant for me, what it meant for my parents. I was taking a seminar on Vietnam and it induced all these questions I had for them. Why hadn't they gone back? Why did they so rarely bring it up, except for the occasional lesson on sacrifice and resilience? For twenty-one years, I'd been clinging to half-descriptions of things I'd never seen before, people I'd never met. As we made our way, my father's glasses continued refracting the light of oncoming cars, and it made me remember a poem I'd written in the eighth grade. I'd said the ocean had winked like a sliver of metal in the sun when my father fled Vietnam; and quietly, after reading the draft, he had said, This is wrong, neoi neoi. No moon. It was pitch dark when they left, covering their departure, and at one point, it had rained. I told him I would fix it, but by the next morning, I had completely forgotten; the poem appeared in the school newspaper a month later. My mother read it aloud at the dinner table. It had won a small school-wide competition; I received a pizza coupon. I'd distorted my family history for a ten dollar pepperoni: a true American deal. My father just smiled and said, Good for you, Marie. A summer ago, when my father and I were sitting on the back porch, swatting yellow jackets away from our food, he turned to me and said, "You know, Marie, I think I'll retire when you graduate from medical school." He was on his second beer, an impish grin spread across his face, as if he could already imagine those lazy mornings. "Study hard, okay? Dad is proud of you." This was in late July, when I had given up on sitting for the MCAT that summer but was still pretending to be on track. I felt like a fraud. Six months had passed since then, and I was scheduled to take the exam in just three weeks. "Seriously, you'll do fine," said George, my premed friend, on the way to the airport. "And look, the gap year—everyone's doing it nowadays. In fact, it's something like a soft requirement at some places. Besides, it's your life, you know. That's what I told my Dad, too, and you know how he is." George was fourth-generation, his father a neurosurgeon at some big hospital in Austin, Texas. It came with its own high expectations and problems, of course, but I didn’t know how to tell George that it was just different. It wasn't just my life; from the womb, that life had been tangled with my mother's, my father's. I inherited their insecurities and desires, all the dreams they'd wished for themselves but couldn't achieve. In the bottom of that boat leaving Vietnam, my father had dreamed of being more than a car mechanic, and I carried that with me. My mother had wanted to be a pianist, but couldn't afford lessons, and I carried that every time I sat down to play, until at sixteen I couldn't carry that dream any longer. Hours of practice and the pressure of competition turned music into a chore; I fought with my mother every morning at the piano bench, hated piano so vehemently that even the prettiest nocturne sounded terrible. Years later, I could still remember the way my mother's eyes misted over when I told her I wanted to quit—how she'd tucked her chin and turned away, as if I had chosen to abandon her instead. My entire childhood was a supercut of these interactions, years spent pulling from my parent’s words, the little quiet gestures they made, watching what brought light into their eyes. What diminished them. Many years later, I would realize that all this agonizing was rather one-sided, and that Georgie was right. At the time, though, it was all I could comprehend: the weight of this intangible thing—this chimeric, inherited dream, half my own and half not. We passed through the Golden Gate Bridge, where a thick fog had rolled through the crimson slats, obscuring the hills around us. I wondered if that fog carried weight, too, and tried to push away the thought of George, of chimeras, of boats, exams. My father asked, “Well, Marie, do you know your plans for next year?” The answer was no. I hadn’t decided what to do yet. The practical decision was to work; but another part of me wanted simply to explore. To float from place to place, just observing, taking in the world. “Not sure, we'll see," I said nonchalantly. “At home?” The end of the word was lifted, hopeful. Home. My father’s favorite word. For the first time, though, there was an uncertainty when he spoke it, as if he knew inherently that home, to me, meant more things than it meant for him. My mother had picked up on it the prior Christmas: small shifts in the way I spoke, how I stopped returning to the Bay Area for the shorter breaks, how I began to shrug dismissively when a relative said, East coast is too cold, right? There was no longer a yearning for yellow sun and easy winters. I looked forward to the first snow, and even the terrible snows afterward. Even the prospect of a dingy, small apartment didn't deter me; there was something almost warm about that, about having my own shithole to return to. I still remember how my mother sighed, told me to do whatever I wanted, that my father would come around. We were at the grocery store, and even though neither of us had moved from the persimmon stand, I could feel the distance between us growing. I wanted to ask her if this was how she felt watching Vietnam shrink into a line, then into a memory. No shimmering ocean, no sky full of constellations leading you onward—just a feeling of absence, deep and aching. This must be what it’s like, I thought, to leave behind the land you knew and loved like no other—that imperfect but impossibly tender place. Home. But just as I gathered the courage to speak, my mother reached across the fruit, touched my shoulder, and said, Your name, Wan Ming. Means birds singing in cherry trees, you know? That’s why you flew so far away. The car lurched suddenly. In his fatigue, my father had accelerated the gas pedal too quickly. His question—the lilt in it, buoyant with faith—still hung in the air. I wished he would just command it of me. Stay, just come home, you have to; it'd be so much easier. I could get angry. I could also agree. At home? “Maybe, Dad. I don’t know yet,” I said. “We’ll have to see.” I had pulled two consecutive all-nighters for two final exams, everything was spinning out of control, I was exhausted from the flight, and I was maybe even a little delirious with fever—this is what I liked to tell myself afterwards, at least. I'm not even sure what prompted it. My father mentioned something about my exam, and then about how I needed to take care of my brothers when he was gone, that this was the role of the eldest. Family was family; family should stick together. He had asked if I liked Marin, if I might also raise my children there—he was thinking of investing in a property, but I'd probably have to finish paying the mortgage. The implication was clear: that I'd come back, to this impossibly flat place with the deep-red terracotta rooftops, that I would carry on where he'd left off. His tone was so hopeful, so achingly full of love. That night it struck me: that my father regarded me in the way most traditional Asian men regard their sons—as their legacy in this world, the culmination of every sacrifice and triumph. The bridge between him and this land he had given up everything for. Then it happened. A gentle arrival, like a canoe easing onto a shoreline and wedging itself in rock. I couldn’t see myself coming back to this place. This small town where everything was quiet after 6. This small town where he was waiting. It was such a simple sentence, and yet it reoriented everything. What was up, what was down? I could see the words form in my head, and they stared back at me as my father kept talking. He would teach my kids tennis at the same club I learned the sport at, bring them to tournaments. We’d make a great team, he said; the other kids wouldn’t stand a chance. I nodded and laughed. All my life I’d been deceptively good at saying what I knew my father wanted to hear, and it wasn’t any different that night. If we have a girl, for sure we’ll get her to Stanford on a full scholarship, I said. He chuckled, beaming. Maybe there was truth to this; I was the test-run, and we'd gotten pretty far, all things considered. But how could I tell him I didn’t want comfort; that I wanted something else, something I couldn’t even quite describe yet? How did I tell him I loved the small life I’d carved for myself in New York? How did I tell him I had another home? An image, startling in clarity, wrestled its way to the front of my conscience. A painting we'd studied in my art history class—Bruegel's Landscape of the Fall of Icarus.

I remembered the first time I saw the painting during lecture, how I hadn’t even noticed poor Icarus flailing in the sea, fighting to stay above the water line. He had been near seconds from drowning, and yet I was more interested in the bright red of the plowman’s shirt as he headed down the slope; the pale whitish patch of sea in the center of the painting, and the warped nature of the foreground, which gave the effect of looking through a fish lens. Even the flock of sheep, I noticed before the legs. What if all this time I was too busy looking at the plowman, the colors of the sea—and then one day I found myself looking down and realizing I had snatched that bridge beneath his feet and left him to drown? I felt both empty and painfully full. And there it was, the most difficult realization: that, for as much as I loved my father, I could not bring myself to return to him. I loved him so much that Love itself—the kind Plato had written about, the truest form of it—swelled in my ribcage and pressed against my other organs. He had built the foundation for the thing that would pull me away; and it tempted in all of its seduction, hissing and drawing me further away. In the car that night, it won. As I sat there in the dark, photographing his hands and taking in his tiredness, his devotion, I could feel the full weight of my betrayal. I blinked hard. There was a dampness in my eye that I refused to let show. I wanted to scrub my mind clean, take back those words, those images. White ankles kicking in that dark shimmering ocean. But some thoughts are impossible to rein back: once let loose, they scatter immediately. A dandelion crushed in the wind. I imagined my father’s sadness, how he might feign a smile. There was a pressure on my shoulder; it was my mother again, whispering across the persimmons. Your name, Wan Ming. Means birds singing in cherry trees, you know? That’s why you flew so far away. When we turned into our driveway, it was nearly one. All the lights were off, the neighborhood block quiet except for an ensemble of crickets chirping. Wordlessly, my father helped unload the suitcase and shuffled to his room; I heard the mattress coils groaning under his weight, the rustling of blankets. In my room, everything was just as I’d left it. There was the small bookshelf in the corner, class day photographs lovingly framed and arranged on the wall. I sank into my bed and inhaled and had to pause. Everything was as I’d left it, yes, but my mother had washed the sheets in preparation for my arrival, so that when I breathed in I smelled detergent and something floral. The same detergent I'd grown up with, bought in bulk from our local supermarket. As if it could undo my earlier thoughts, I drifted to sleep with a promise: that I’d wake up before my father in a few hours, make him coffee. Apologize for my mistake, for my great betrayal. I had only gotten sidetracked; I would make it home. With a sleepy smile, I thought: Send him off. Send him off with a kiss and coffee and tell him, Five years, just wait five more years. You can retire, and I’ll come home. It was a good plan at the time. I forgot to set the alarm. The next morning, my father awoke in a quiet house. He brushed his teeth, put on his work uniform, and departed with a mug of instant coffee in his hands. I forgot to set the alarm—how stupid was I? In my dream, I put that coffee in his palms. I brewed it, added two creams, two sugars. It was perfect. But when I opened my eyes, it was well past noon and my face was warm with sunlight. I looked out the window, and the driveway was empty.