Category: Family

Alto

BettyLeave a comment

The woman tried hard not to cry, though it was apparent she’d been holding all she’d wanted to say inside for a long time. I know the feeling – when you’re exhausted and filled with unhealthy thoughts, the very littlest invitation to release can send you sobbing up a storm – but the woman, extremely self-conscious, knew she couldn’t just lose it in the middle of a badminton club. She stifled her tears, steadied her voice, and began to tell a story both my mother and I have heard many times before from the lips of other women, all similar in age, all immigrants from Taiwan.

She had come Stateside some fifteen years ago with her high school aged only daughter. In Taiwan, the girl had done poorly in her freshman and sophomore years and showed neither signs nor interest in improving. School wasn’t her strong suit, she said, and her mother shook her head. She knew the system was unforgiving and except for the diligent few that could study and study, shame inducing. At the end of every term their scores were posted alongside their names in the school courtyard for everyone to see. That was the system. One learned to work within it, with it, and if not, well hopefully you were someone else’s daughter. But it was her daughter having the trouble and the woman didn’t need to see a fortuneteller to know that if they stayed in Taiwan, what lay ahead for her daughter’s academic future was a dismal dead end.

The woman herself had been somewhat of a teacher’s pet. She sang alto in her school choir and marks-wise, consistently ranked in the top five percent of her class. She was industrious and diligent, her parents’ pride and joy. Around school she was recognized as such. She attended an all girl’s high school and though she was friendly enough, had no close friends. The choir was an unlikely breeding ground for competition, but it was one of the few places the girls could exercise talents other than who could sit and study the longest. The woman didn’t realize until years later how much or why she loved to sing, not until she woke up alone in a bed her husband had shared with her only once, in a large empty house halfway around the world. But in high school and then college, singing was just one more thing she felt, and rightfully so, that she did better than others.

She was not a great beauty, but always held her head high and sat with a straight back. The other girls thought her rather uptight, but there were always a handful of such girls at every school. She never laughed loudly or spoke out of turn. Sometimes the wild way certain other girls talked and laughed, throwing their heads back and baring all their teeth, gave her shivers – where they ladies or not? She felt sorry for their mothers. When she had a spare moment from her studies and various activities, she thought about having a “career” in an abstract sense, but never sat long enough to give it shape.

Marc Chagall, Bouquet of Flowers, 1937 Oil on Canvas. Private Collection.

When the time came to prepare for her college entrance exams she doubled down on study time, shut herself away and read until the prescription of her eyes grew more and more severe. To celebrate her inevitable success – admission into Taiwan’s top colleges – her parents awarded her with a new pair of glasses. They were considered a splurge at the time, Italian frames fitted with special thin lenses that masked the severity of her prescription, but their daughter was a rose on the edge of blooming and college was where such blooms were picked.

And picked she was. Reaped, more like it. She was not a particularly romantic woman, but she met a young man who showed a hunger for success and was not afraid to work for it. He wasn’t like so many of the other girls’ boyfriends she heard about in dorm gossip. The man called often and though he had very little money to spend taking her out, often said she was good for him.

“We are partners,” he would say, “I can tell a woman like you will bring me success.”

Partners. Fifteen later it would seem like a cruel pun.

Snails

BettyLeave a comment

For the past few weekends, I was away. I was on “vacation” on those weekends, short trips to Palm Springs, Las Vegas and San Jose, but there is nothing more relaxing than waking up in your own bed on a warm weekend morning, no alcohol in your bloodstream, no loud music from the night before, no sore soles from high heeled dancing shoes. Self-inflicted torment, I know. On Sunday evenings I would arrive home, exhausted from the drive and the combination of sleeplessness compounded from both the preceding workweek and the resulting weekend. YOLO, my friend Drake likes to say.

YOLO indeed, but there are many ways to YOLO.

This weekend I was at home for the first time in a long time. A delicious, nostalgia inducing state. I was reminded of those lazy summer days of my youth (and in truth there are about to be a lot more with my impending unemployment) where my sole responsibility was to make sure I swam after 4PM, when the sun was not so scorching. And even though this weekend was similar in its simplicity, it is never the same as when you were young. But I tried. I tried.

I ate popcorn and watched a string of Tom Cruise movies (“A Few Good Men” and “Jerry Maguire” – I know he is a crazy Scientologist but man can he deliver some lines!), read magazines from June and July, and went swimming to assuage my growing likeness to a beached whale.

Socially, I spent much needed time with family; lunching with them at a hot, crowded noodle house in Rowland Heights with slow service but enormous dumplings and then cooling off in my cousin’s airy new mansion with green carpeting and onyx vanities. We cooed over their new baby boy. In the afternoon my cousin came over to swim and we paddled and talked while my father dozed in the living room. When we came dripping inside, he gave us fresh cut watermelon. We showered and lounged on my brother’s bed, watching Jerry Maguire propose to Dorothy Boyd.

In the evening, I cut yam leaves from my mother’s garden and blanched them for dinner. It was an eyebrow raising dinner: an odd combination of tomato sauce on yam leaves, with some Parmesan sprinkled on top. My carb-free version of spaghetti. I ate before my mother came home from her line-dance class and when she returned and sat down to eat with my father, I for some reason wanted to stay and talk to them instead of retreat to my room as I normally. I ate a bowl of shaved ice while my father gnawed on leftover pork knuckles. My mother finished the fish she made two days ago.

We were very happy.

After dinner I started to write this, then stopped. I had spend enough time in front of a screen, probably enough for my entire life, though certainly there are several thousand hours ahead. I looked up across the street and saw my neighbor’s car pulling in. I imagined him giving his wife a peck on the cheek as he set his keys down on the kitchen counter. I had been in their house once as a child, and knew the layout. It was the same as ours, except with a second floor. I saw a couple walking their dog after their evening meal, most likely discussing their grown children who lived in other cities. My parents were less than a hundred feet away – we were at the same address and yet I often wondered what they were doing.

I stood up and walked to the living room. My father was asleep in the massage chair. There was a travel show playing, showcasing the gorgeous scenery of some place in Sichuan China. The back door was ajar and my mother’s house slippers at the threshold. It was getting dark and I wondered what my mother could do in the garden.

I called her name and I think she heard me better than I heard her. She was on the hill, crouched in the vegetable patch my father had built for her. The sun was gone and by what light was left I could make out a small plastic bucket in her left hand and the swift plucking motion of her right.

Dunk, dunk.

Whatever she was plucking made a small, satisfying percussion as they hit the inside of the bucket.

“Mom?”

“Hmm?” Her voice was almost singsongy, and though I couldn’t see her face I knew her expression – the slightly wan, but contented look she gets when she’s spent a few satisfying hours in the garden. Hours well spent.

“What are you plucking?”

Dunk, dunk. 

“Snails,” she said, “They come out after dark to eat my precious leaves.”

Dunk, dunk, dunk. 

“Sounds like there are a lot.”

“There are. It’s terrible.”

“What do you do with them?”

“I dump them somewhere else.”

“Don’t you think it’s disgusting to touch them?”

Dunk, dunk, dunk.

“I did,” she said, then paused to examine a particularly large one, “I used to use chopsticks. But not anymore. It’s much faster this way.”

I could hardly see my mother then, and left her to her work. Walking back into the house my father stirred.

“Where’s your mother?”

“Plucking snails in the back,” I said, “They come out at night and snack on yam leaves.”

My father shifted in the massage chair, nodding as though he knew all about snails and yam leaves, “Yam leaves are very good for everyone.” Then he noticed how dark it had become.

“Go help your mother,” he said.

I wrinkled my nose, “I don’t want to touch snails or step in the dirt. I’ve already showered.”

“It’s dark,” he said, “You could hold a flashlight for her, couldn’t you? Bring her a light.”

I guess so. I didn’t feel like writing. Not yet. I went to my father’s cabinet, where he kept random things like flashlights and radios and took out the most powerful flashlight he had. The kind that cops use when they are suspicious of someone. The kind that doubles as a weapon. It cast a cold beam, but was sufficiently bright and would illuminate a slimy snail on a clean yam leaf like a helicopter following a car on a high speed chase. Fox News with snails.

Wordlessly, I went back to my mother and clicked it on right where her hand was reaching next. She showed no surprise, as though she’d known all along I would come back with the light.

“Point it here,” she said simply. I did as I was told. I held the light for her as she seized the frozen snails. I don’t think she got them all.

“I could never get them all,” she said, “but I did get many of them.”

She told me about a friend of hers who made a funny sort of escargot with the snails she found in her garden.

“But I wouldn’t do that,” she said. The little bucket appeared to be about full and I stayed away, purposely not shining the light into the bucket. I think it would have made me squeamish. But my mother took the bucket to a withered avocado tree several feet away from the garden patch and turned the bucket over. She whacked the bucket against a branch. The snails tumbled onto the ground, a confused bunch writhing in the dark.

My mother smiled at me as she came up the cement steps.

“Don’t touch me,” I said.

She laughed. “Of course not. Thanks for your help.”

We stood for a moment and looked down into the garden. A shadowy patch of yam leaves freed from the at least one night’s onslaught of snails.

My father dozed in the light of the living room. My mother was very happy. Poor snails. All they wanted was a twilight snack.

Density (3)

BettyLeave a comment

I didn’t tell my father I had been hit by a car until my arm began to hurt. I wasn’t trying to be strong; I just didn’t want to hear him nag. 

The car came from behind. Erica and I walked on the right side of the road, the side we always walk on, I on the outside and she inside. We were talking about something – boys, jobs, my frustration with both – familiar conversation on a familiar road, when suddenly a tremendous force struck my left arm and sent me tumbling violently to the ground. I groaned and was dazed – it didn’t occur to me that I had been hit by a car until a split second later when I turned to see the car speeding down the road. I heard Erica saying, “Oh my god, oh my god,” then when she registered what had happened, screaming, “Hey! HEY! GET BACK HERE!” 
In my dazed state I remember looking up at her from the ground thinking, “I wish she would lower her voice,” as it was late and the neighborhood, being filled with elderly folk, was mostly half asleep.
 Erica bent down, her voice now quieter and more hurried, more worried, “Oh my God, Betty. Betty. Are you okay? Where does it hurt? Don’t move.”
I didn’t know. I groaned because I was confused. Everything hurt and nothing hurt. Even though it was dark, I closed my eyes because it helped me concentrate – I had read something about trauma and how adrenaline or shock can trick you into feeling fine and moving what you shouldn’t be moving. One bone at a time, the article had said. I wiggled my toes. I moved my knees. I tapped the fingers of my right hand, bent my arm at the elbow, rolled my shoulder, my neck and with my right hand, felt my head. I saved my left arm for last because I was terrified that it was shattered but that I just hadn’t registered it. I didn’t look at it. It felt numb. But slowly, very slowly, the sensation came back and I could feel the tips of my fingers – though the left tips felt noticeably duller than the right. But the fact that I could move them – it meant my bones were fine. Nothing was broken.
I got up slowly, then turned my neck left and right. All good. My legs worked fine. And finally the arm. The left arm I let stay at my side – I didn’t want to shock the liquefied muscle. Erica stood by and watched silently, shocked that I was standing.
“Betty,” she said, “maybe you should sit down.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“No. I think you hit your head.”
“I most certainly did not hit my head.”
“I think you did. You can’t always tell when you have a concussion…and then sometimes people just go to sleep and never wake up. Like Natasha Richardson.” Even in the dark, I could sense her worry, “Please sit down. I’ll get your parents.”
“Erica. I’m fine.”
We finished the walk and at the door, I assured Erica I wouldn’t die in my sleep. There were too many things I had to do. Like check my email.
An hour later, I sat at my brother’s desk, wondering how odd it was that I’d just been hit by a car. My parents had greeted me at the door and asked me how the walk went.
“Fine,” I said, “Great.”
And I went to the computer. I sat and typed something, deleted it, then as my thumb pressed the space bar a sharp pain shot up my left arm. I ignored it and continued writing, but the pain came back stronger and stronger until suddenly, I was fearful of moving any part of my left arm.
I looked at my watch. It had been exactly an hour since I’d been hit – wasn’t my response to the pain a tad too delayed? I imagined a hairline fracture splitting and splitting and the bone finally cracking in two an hour later. Is that what was happening now?
I suddenly had to know. I thought about my grandmother enduring severe constipation and stomach pains, not wanting to “bother” her children with her petty digestive issues until one day there was so much blood in her stool she was frightened. The diagnosis was a minute away from colon cancer and she ended up having a giant segment of her intestine removed.
I wasn’t going to be so stupid. A little nagging was a fair trade for having my father drive me to the hospital, as my left arm was in no condition now to turn a steering wheel.
I walked slowly into the dining room, where my mother sat typing away at her laptop. My father was in the kitchen, within view and earshot.
“Mom, dad,” I said slowly.
“Hm?”
“I have to tell you something, but please don’t freak out.”
My father stopped chopping the scarlet watermelon. My mother looked up from the laptop. Their worry thickened the air.
“I got hit by a car when I was walking.”
My mother gasped. My father put down the butcher’s knife with more force than was necessary. He walked slowly into the dining room, as though walking in too quickly would shatter me. He looked me up and down.
“What? Where? Where does it hurt? Are you bleeding? Who? Who? Did you get the license plate?”
I told them what happened, emphasizing that only my arm hurt – and on the arm, only my tricep…but the pain was increasing and I feared I had a fracture.
“We’ll go to the hospital right away,” my father said, and in the car and in the emergency room, I had to hear it: the long, drawn out “I told you so” about walking with a flashlight or a reflector vest. It was an old warning, often heard, never heeded.
“I’d rather walk in asphalt camouflage,” I’d say.
He’d shake his head, “Once is all it takes.”
And it’s true. Once is all it takes.
On the drive to the hospital I studied my father’s headlights and the area they covered – there was no way the driver did not see me. Perhaps he was inebriated and had slow reflexes. I imagined how – or how I hoped – he felt: filled with remorse. Hitting a pedestrian and driving away. Did he think I was a garbage can? I had bounced loudly off the side of his passenger side car door – a discovery I made later in the bathroom when I discovered a chunk of skin missing from my left hip. I wonder if the thud rang in his head as he tried to sleep that night, not knowing if it was a garbage can or a human. Either way, he had left something toppled over on the side of the road.  
We drove quietly with the Chinese radio playing softly in the background – my father driving jerkily, as though he couldn’t decide between speeding up or slowing down. I held my arm gingerly – trying not to think about the pain and worrying if I would have energy to go into work the next morning. My father finally spoke.
“He didn’t stop at all?”
“No.” I thought about the noise I heard, “I think he sped up.”
My father grunted. I turned to see his face glowing in the dim light of the dashboard and brightened intermittently by the pale yellow street lights we drove past. There were bags under his eyes. He seemed even more tired than I, but here he was, driving me to the ER at midnight. His expression was more disturbed than I had seen it in a while – in fact, he seemed angry.
“Look Bah,” I said, “I know I’m stupid. I should have been holding a flashlight or wearing a reflector vest. I will start walking with both.”
He snorted, “I’m going to buy you a neon reflector body suit. But you didn’t get a license plate? Nothing? Did you see him at all?”
I wondered why he was asking me – I had told him already. I didn’t see anything that could help me identify the driver – just the car from a distance as he sped down the hill and then nothing.
“No, Bah. I didn’t see anything.”
“He just drove away?”
“Yes!” exasperation crept into my voice, “He just drove away! What do you want me to do? I wasn’t exactly in a position to go and chase him down.”
My father shook his head.
“Dad, are you okay?”
 “Okay?” The car swerved slightly, “Of course I’m okay! I didn’t get hit by a car! But I didn’t just raise a perfectly good daughter for 26 years so that some….some… (and here my father said something quite shocking – a Chinese expletive I have no idea how to translate)… could run her over!”
I wonder if I had gotten a license plate or even a vague description, what my father would do. I don’t know. He is not vengeful, but I had never had occasion to see my father act protective. So charmed is my life. He is nearing his mid-sixties, which nowadays is not so old, but at that moment I sensed a strange desperate helplessness. True, HE was driving me to the hospital, not the other way around, but I felt sorry, suddenly, that I had brought this unnecessary stress upon him. How could I take care of them if I didn’t even have the sense to walk at night with a flashlight? But it was the light- the sallow, dingy yellow of the streetlamp that cast more shadows on my father’s face than necessary. It was the light and the time of night and the fact that he was driving me to the ER, something he had never done, and something he hoped he would never have to do again. 

I was still conscious and in one piece, still healthy, but we both knew it had been a close call. An inch closer to the left and I’d have been paralyzed, my spine the central point of impact. Now behind the wheel, he was in control. But there were times during which his daughter, under her own simple volition, would climb too high and out of his reach or step into a darkness into which he (and a others) could not see. 

The Gargoyle

Betty1 Comment

The times, they are a changin’.

It is no surprise – at least I hope not – that my brother is now an engaged man, ‘engaged’ pronounced how I imagine old British men pronounce it, with the ‘ed’ pulled out. It happened some two weeks ago in Paris, and though my brother has yet to tell me the details, in my minds eye it happened along the Seine.

There is a rule: it is not a postcard from Paris unless there are at least 2 of the following:

1. The Eiffel Tower
2. The Seine
3. A barren tree along the Seine
4. A bridge.
5. A Baguette
6. A typical Parisian apartment building with the slanted roof and long, narrow windows.
7. A cloud in the sky (contrary to popular belief, photographers dislike the saying, “There wasn’t a cloud in the sky,” because clouds, like villains in a good story, create drama.)
8. A gargoyle – the starved, angry, muscular kind.

You doubt me? Go on, go through your shoe boxes of postcards from Paris and examine them. Oh, no one has ever sent you a postcard from Paris? My darling, I am sorry.

As a photographer you can choose to compose the shot however you like, but the photographer of this postcard, which my brother lovingly sent me, included all the aforementioned elements (even the baguette – c’est juste tres tres petite) yet chose to place the gargoyle in the forefront. He made a stylistic decision to dwarf La Tour Eiffel, the people, the river, the bridge, and the buildings, and yes, even the thin barren branches of the Linden trees that line the Seine. It is as though the gargoyle is scowling at Paris and saying, in thick, gravelly French: “Poo poo, Paris! Poo poo!” 

Lest you think I am a pessimist reading the glass half empty, let me share something else with you:


Before I received the postcard, I did indeed feel like a gargoyle. The City of Lights, my brother, his fiancee (and my future sister-in-law), all felt very, very far away, not just geographically, but spiritually, metaphorically, and however else things and people can feel far away. People have the odd ability to do so both tangibly and intangibly. (I know there are too many adverbs in this paragraph). 

I have a bad habit of taking analogies too far, but the postcard, the longer I studied it, seemed like a small paper mirror with some sort of cryptic solution on the back. My brother is no sage, and certainly he did not intend to see it this way – just like a writer’s voice I know my brother’s tastes – but kindly, unknowingly, my brother sent me a photograph of myself. Albeit less lean and muscular…

He has always been there for me. Having a younger sister like me and having seen me at my most unstable and tyrannical nadir (2004-2008, essentially) was as trying for him as it was for my parents. But he heard me out many times, for hours at a time until the sun was nearly up and through it all, listening to me while I wavered in and out of this and that, wailing to him about my future, my legacy, my long stalled writing career. And when he finally met the love of his life I repaid him with more whining and wailing, telling him that he could do better and calling my future sister in law a crazy. 

Well.

Looking back I think my brother knows crazy because for years I gave him a bona-fide grade-A example of crazy. It didn’t matter whom you met first – when people found out we were siblings it was always, “I can’t believe you’re related.” My brother knows better than anyone just how deeply Jackie Chan and Spielberg’s ET run through my veins and how both inform my facial expressions and aspirations. Jackie Chan is an entertainer. E.T. just wants to go home. And, at the same time, there is another half of me my brother doesn’t understand at all. And there is more than half of him I don’t understand. If he were a poet I would compare him to Carlos William Carlos and be constantly asking him: “What is your motivation?” But some things are meant to remain mysterious. Both he and I are completely OK with it. 

So maybe it’s crazy and a little desperate that I’m reading so much into a simple postcard. Maybe it’s crazy that I’m pretty much set on this decision – prepared to sail away from rough waters into calmer waves – at least for the time being before those waters again, turn rough, but a different kind of roughness. A roughness that I, a lonely sailor with a masochistic but ultimately rewarding relationship with Karma, asked for. The oceans are all connected on our round earth. Things, events, life – all are cyclical. I know how it goes, but I am trying something new.

In a few months’ time (or perhaps that is too generous an estimate… perhaps it could take years! Years!) when I return to the postcard, I will see the gargoyle but look at it fondly, like an ornery old friend I have since lost touch with but remember very very well. I’ll identify more with the birds in the air or with the small figures on the street along the Seine, the figures representing couples like my brother and his fiancee, holding hands, taking photographs, smiling, eating baguettes that are too small for the holder of the postcard or even the gargoyle to see, but the presence of which even the most cynical specimens of man would find difficult to deny. The baguettes are there. It is Paris, after all.

Monday Musing: Frustration…

BettyLeave a comment

…is when you spend the better part of Saturday morning writing “Density part 3” despite not having slept well, finding yourself quite satisfied with the product, then upon clicking “publish,” discover that the internet connection has dropped off and Blogger is unable to publish the damn thing.

Then, because you haven’t slept well, you forget the wonderful thing that is cut and paste – the very last thing I think about when figuring out how to save my work but is probably the most obvious. Microsoft Word has its flaws but is still ten thousand times more reliable than the internet because you’re not relying on some connection outside the computer. That is probably not an educated way to discuss software or cyberspace, but it is what I feel.

Sometimes I think about getting a computer without internet. Is that even possible? I once typed at an old computer – or was it one of those electronic typewriters?- at my father’s office (they are not too eager to upgrade their technology…when I first started at this company my father asked if I was going to learn notation and shorthand. I gave him a blank stare.) I sat at this desk that was straight out of the seventies and typed away:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Hello my name is Betty. My. Name. Is. Betty. There once was a boy named Otto. He jumped over the lazy dog and called the Fox a liar.  

It’s a variation of what I type when testing out keyboards. Once, at Best Buy and on a different occasion at Costco, I left that little nugget on all the laptops. Anyway, at my father’s office on this antiquated behemoth of a word processor, I experienced a strange quiet. Firstly, it was quiet. My garrulous aunt was out of the office  and my father was readying some things before preparing to leave. I sat and clicked away, wondering if this was what it was like to be a secretary some decades back. I sat up straight and imagined my hair to be in a neat little bun. Horn rimmed glasses. Nylons and sensible heels. Polished nails. A memory that clicked just like the keys on the typewriter.Then my father came out wearing his faded Costco polo shirt and his beaten up briefcase, saying he was ready to go. He broke the quiet which I never quite forgot.

Later in the car, I fantasized about that machine. Just it and me in a small studio apartment high up in the city somewhere, overlooking half a park and half a city block – a writer’s window. No internet. Just a landline, disconnected and a refrigerator filled with iced tea and granny smith apples (I am trying to quit coffee and food in general). I remembered a story about Victor Hugo locking himself in a tower and not coming out until he’d written something like 1,000 pages. He emerged alright, emaciated but euphoric because he’d produced. Good stuff, the fruit of labor unadulterated by internet and text messages and other people’s noise.

I can’t imagine it now. Before, I had some semblance of being disconnected. I didn’t text or call much, and though I discovered chat rooms at an early age, didn’t use the internet for nearly as much as I do now. My blog grows. Hopefully my readership expands, but my diary and the solitude necessary to populate its pages in a meaningful way has all but disappeared from my life. They have taken a back seat to noise, to media, to my damn iPhone. A few weekends ago I bent down to the low cabinet in which I keep all my diaries dating back to when I was sixteen. Sixteen! A decade ago! Crouching there near my desk chair, peering into the belly of this low cabinet, I could make out the high and low shapes of the various notebooks I’d kept. Some were fat, some were thing, most had a few blank pages at the end when I became tired of the actual material of the notebook, like its pages were the interior of an old office I had seen one too many times. I squinted, almost hesitant to touch those notebooks but when I finally did couldn’t stop rereading them. Though really, was there a need to reread? What is that paradox? The words, the words. They ALWAYS come at me with that damned paradox. Familiar yet strange. Strange yet familiar. 16, 18, 20, 24, 25, and now 26. Have I always been at odds with myself. Have I changed at all?

But it’s not all in my diary. There are huge chunks of my younger self floating out in cyberspace. I’ve referred to them before – these aliases created on a whim but now alone can represent an entire era of my life. Dharris. Citizenneb (a failed attempt at sound French, which is dumb because the French word for ‘citizen’ is ‘citoyen.’ People kept asking me, “What’s Neb?” I still didn’t learn after the four or five years I spent on AIM as GeeLFocker because GLFocker was taken. (Seriously, when I was sixteen, I thought Gaylord Focker in “Meet the Parents” was the funniest thing. My friends asked, “What’s a Geel?” God what was wrong with me.) And finally, after much hemming and hawing in college, a clean slate – I cast away the Xanga so that people would stop saying, “You have a Xanga?” In the same tone you’d say, “You used to be a stripper?” 

I wonder if this plateau I detect in my supposed intellectual growth can be attributed to the internet. On one end it’s a goldmine of information, all of it (I hate to say it but there is no better way to say it but with this pedestrian cliche): seriously, ridiculously, literally right at my fingertips. On the other hand it’s a landmine of wasted minutes which together form hours which turn into days. Landmines because if you don’t watch your step, you end up blasting to bits hours of your life. If I add up all the hours I’ve spent surfing Facebook (mostly of strangers, because I know all I need to know about my friends), fashion, food and travel blogs, and dicking-around blogs (if you’re looking to dick around, these two are la creme de la creme: 1. 2. Okay, okay, and a third.)

Anyway. I didn’t mean to write such a long winded musing. Or even about frustration.

I had wanted merely to record the fact that I had wandered into my mother’s room in search of a qtip and on her vanity found a notebook on which she’d written: “Travel Diary,” in her light pencil. My mother is the queen of impermanence when it comes to writing. She prefers pencil to pen and doesn’t press down very hard, making her words seem faint and almost insincere. Were they meant to be written? Does she even really want to record this? I suppose. I never took my mother for a diarist, but there it was – a simple diary. Nothing so bloated and self-indulgent as her daughter’s tucked away tomes or blog – my mother, when I really think about it, can be quite laconic. I had early on, when I became aware of this attributed it to her aging, but when I think back to my childhood and when I can remember her castigating me for one thing or other, it wasn’t that she was wordy, but she spoke very sharply certain words. Like, “NEVER.” or “I DARE YOU.” or “BETTY.” Words that on their own are neither sharp nor round but out of her enraged throat could have been wrapped in broken glass. My father is a talker. My mother…it depends. Between us the tables have turned – she doesn’t live vicariously through me – her life is much richer than mine now that she has found her groove both as a teacher and wife, and as a mother, she has learned that her daughter and son,  26 and 31, respectively, are finding their own ways in the world and this path, this particular walk involves talking things through.

She lets me ramble. This may have something to do with my writing less. She lets me ramble, like a good mother should.

Anyway, I forgot about the Qtip and zeroed in on this notebook. I think nothing of reading other people’s diaries. Stories are meant to be read. If you write it down, you want it to be read. Perhaps not by me, but that’s not really in your control when you’re not in the room, is it?

She had written down her activities in the past week: a baby shower here, a birthday party there, a line dancing class here, here and there. Perhaps she had always kept something like this, but I’m a snoop: how did I miss it before? And it seemed like a recent endeavor, as the notebook was fairly new and…she was still  in the first few pages. There were no thoughts or elaborations, just a simple line or two for each day. What cities they’d visited on a recent trip to Taiwan, what relatives they ate with and where. It was interesting, but as the dates went on I gathered that she was gaining steam. I couldn’t read all the Chinese but felt the passages growing. Or were they? Who knows. It is never too late to start a diary. Never too late to dip ones toes into that wonderful white white space between lines on paper. That space! I call it optimism.

I wonder how long she will keep it up. Is it for the fond memories, or just for memory alone, the bare bones of why we write things down: fear of forgetting?

Many many walks ago I said to Courage, I am nothing if I do not write. Or something along those lines. I wonder if all along, it was a genetic thing.

“We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”   –  Henry James  The Middle Years 

Density (2)

Betty1 Comment

In the ER waiting room I sat opposite a four year old Mexican girl with down syndrome and a bad haircut. She looked at me lazily from her mother’s lap, a piece of white gauze taped hastily to her forehead. Her father wore a dingy white t-shirt and worn baggy jeans that draped over workman’s boots. He seemed exhausted and furious, alternating between sitting down, tapping his foot impatiently and jumping up to pace about the room, causing the sliding doors to open whenever he got too close to the sensor. His wife was young. Probably younger than I. She seemed tired too, despite having on full makeup. They talked lowly, hurriedly in Spanish as their daughter drooled and wondered why her head hurt, if she could remember at all. Perhaps she just wanted to go back to bed. I watched as she tried to find a comfortable position on her mother’s lap.

I stared at her and she stared back. The father talked impatiently to the nurse.

“We’ve been waiting for over forty minutes. My daughter fell out of bed and hit her head. She was bleeding so badly.”

The nurse didn’t even bother to look past her window to the daughter, who was no longer bleeding. The little girl appeared fine to me too, except for her genetic disability. Her pajamas were stained. There was something sticky in her hair. I wanted to give her a bath. I wanted to give myself a bath, but I had gone to the bathroom and winced, noticing the skin missing from my left thigh and the brilliant red gash on my arm. Those parts wouldn’t be so fun to wash.

We were both injured, the little girl and I, but not seriously so. We would go home eventually, wake up very close to our parents, she perhaps in the same room as her mother, who was likely two or three years younger than I, and I just a hallway away from my parents, who were nearing their mid sixties. Well, my father at least. The father returned to his seat and resumed tapping his foot impatiently. I yawned and stared at my watch, then looked at my father. I had not noticed until now: how white his hair had become! How much looser his jowls seemed! It was late and no doubt I looked haggard as well – the car had knocked my ponytail loose and I couldn’t raise my arm to retie my hair.

The little girl stiffened her body and slid awkwardly out of her mother’s arms and her mother bent down with some difficulty to gather her again. For a minute my father’s and my reflection stared back at us from the sliding glass doors – I saw a gentleman on the cusp of being elderly – not quite there, but just a few years away, and a young woman who could, age wise at least, very easily have been hugging an injured child of her own and tapping her foot impatiently as the doctors and nurses tended to more serious injuries in the back. Instead I was twenty-six and my father sixty-three. I did not have much in common with the little girl’s mother who was fretting like a good mother should, despite the fact that the little girl would be fine. Perfectly. I did not have much in common with her at all.

The little girl and I, however, we weren’t so different.

Density

Betty2 Comments

When I was nine or so, I fell out of a tree. It wasn’t the highest branch, but it was quite high. Halfway up the tree, my father had appeared at the window with his arms cross over his chest. He rarely monitored my outdoor activities and it was a rarity. Emboldened by an audience of one, I went higher than I normally did, to a branch more tender (or given that it snapped so suddenly, just dead) than the rest and plummeted several feet to the ground below. In the millisecond that I glimpsed my father’s face as I fell, I saw him lurch towards the glass. Even in a millisecond, I could sense his panic.

Gustave Caillebotte A Young Man at the Window 1875  

I hit the ground with a thud, muted by the soft dirt and fertilizer my mother kept beneath the tree for her flowers. Had my mother a penchant for small picket fences or cacti, I would have been a nine-year old human kebab. But I suppose that is what mothers think about, when they plant things underneath their daughter’s favorite climbing trees. Feeling slightly dazed but fine, I sat myself up and slowly turned to my father, still at the window. I waved and immediately his posture softened. Fear can freeze you – my father is a man of action, but for the seconds I traveled from branch to ground, he had become a statue.

For years that was the story he and I both told when discussing our bones. Genes are a source of pride in our family, not because any of us are particularly beautiful or talented, but because we are built, for lack of a better word, like fortresses. My father will invariably begin with slapping me on the back as though I were a football player, and say proudly, “She’s so thick! Look at this meat on her back! Look at these arms!” Then he will bend down and measure his knees with his forefinger and thumb, then move the fingers to my knees, adjusting them slightly so that they appear to be the same size.

“Her knees!” He will crow, “Look at her knees! The same width as mine!”

I have a strange relationship with this comparison. On one hand, I am glad to be healthy and athletic (looking) – on the other, it is hard to act or want to act like a lady when your father is constantly comparing you, physically, to himself, a man.

Beyond this, my father is not the type to spoil or coddle. Growing up neither he nor my mother were very generous with praise. I became very good at praising myself and my brother quite adept at changing his report card D’s and F’s to B’s and A’s. Athletically we were never pushed, but I had a hunch that if someone beat us up at school, we’d be shamed if we didn’t fight back. Luckily, no one ever challenged us on that front, though I did once kick a helpless classmate in the stomach when she had already been on the ground. Wisely, I kept this behavior from my parents.

Basically, my father is a straightforward man who only in his older age, is beginning to show his softer side. And even it is not so soft. My father is a critic of the most annoying kind: he zeroes in on your weaknesses and oversights and will loudly point them out at family parties, much to the embarrassment of both his immediate family and those being critiqued. He is very much, the kind of person to say, “I told you so!” And say it again and again and again until your knuckles have turned white from clenching your fists too hard and your teeth on the verge of being ground to dust. You are welcome to jab right back at him, but just know his skin is as thick as his ego is grand. Perhaps it should follow that empathy and emotional intelligence should also be lost on him, and while I’d like to think he is not nearly as attuned to these as I am, he has startling moments of insight into characters and situations, perhaps the product of the only fictions he has ever deemed worthy of reading: the breathtaking sagas of Classical Chinese Literature.

Smart, detail-oriented, excellent at cutting through bullshit and zooming in on mistakes that most people would overlook, my father would make a very good assistant, but for some reason, those that would make very good assistants are usually not assistants. Most curiously, despite being a man’s man, my father can also be a vicious gossip. I see very much of myself in him – but that just makes me a bitch.

But he is aging. As I’d written before about my mother, old age either hardens or softens. In a select few, it does both and in such a way that the person becomes more balanced. More well-rounded.

I don’t know yet what age has done to my father. I am under the impression it is a slow and ongoing process. But on Tuesday night, I saw my father up close for the first time in a long time, only because someone failed to see me at all.

On Tuesday night, I was struck by a car.

(…to be continued, obviously).

The Depths of (my) Laziness…

Betty2 Comments

…entails posting photographs your brother takes of Paris because you are:

a. too lazy to write a substantive post

b. not in Paris.

c.  thinking about moving to that other city, close to Paris but vastly different in temperament (gloomier, but no less romantic).

d. All of the above.

*à mon frère chéri,

Cela frise le plagiat, mais je suis ta sœur. Ainsi, je ne m’inquiète pas.

Betty

Every tourist is required to take a photograph of this tower. But not every tourist does it well. My brother is not every tourist.

A view from the Seine. La Vie en Antique Filter.

*To my darling brother,

This borders on plagiarism, but I am your sister. I do not care.

Betty

The Wave

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The Great Wave off Kanagawa, Hokusai 1830-33
The Great Wave off Kanagawa, Hokusai 1830-33

In the afternoon I swam and did a second load of laundry: the darks. It was a pitifully small load, devoid of my father’s thick navy polos purchased in bulk at Costco and my mother’s nylon badminton shirts. This is laundry when you live alone: just your dirty clothes in a small, limp pile. Small because you’re not the type of person to let the clothes pile up. I used half the detergent I normally use and closed the lid, suddenly unaccustomed to the silence.  Continue reading “The Wave” →