Aunt and uncle promise you many things, have said many things to you. So you wait for them to pick you up at the airport, black hair braided and skin polished brass. Palm trees are wilted but propulsive in the wind and cast hunchback shadows on the open asphalt. The sun vanishes slowly, bathing you in a divine light. It has not been so long but also too long. You are ten years old and alone. You run your swollen tongue over the shy mounds of bone beginning to protrude from your gums, these objects that cut and grind and tear, these things called–inexplicably–teeth.
In Florida, you get two shades darker, two pounds heavier. Over the course of a week, you become wide and dark as your shadow; you harden in the sun like the first humans, who were supposedly made from clay. You imagine mā sitting next to you, berating you for tanning. Like a peasant. You can practically see her eyebrows arch with disdain. But it is spring break, and you wave her away and let her presence dissipate. You sit out on the screened-in porch at aunt and uncle’s and take an interest in the brief sightings of scurrying lizard, salamander, and frog. Until today, you thought frog was a creature of Chinese fable, only to be found in the stories of Zhuāng Zǐ. There are no frogs on Mott Street. All you can think about is your next cherry-flavored popsicle, your next hour in the hot sun.
When you unpack your clothes in the guest room closet, it is already bursting with plastic bags. The white, starchy kind you get at the corner bodega in the city with a yellow smiley face printed on the front. There are newspapers stacked high and too many canned foods to count–canned peaches and canned lychees and canned bamboo shoots. Uncle is eating kimchi and rice in front of the television. He swallows before answering your question: “Ā yí cannot bear to throw anything away, guāi guāi. She is stubborn as an ox, āi yà!” Your clothes never do get hung up. They lie crumpled on the floor like shed skin.
Aunt is seventy three years old on her American passport, seventy four years old according to the lunar calendar. Her shoulders sag like heavy bags of jasmine rice and she is stuck in a constant bend of the body, her back in a slight kowtow towards anyone–the bus driver, grocery store bagger, public library attendant, pimpled teen at the McDonald’s drive-thru–so that it looks as if she is saying, sorry excuse me pardon me without uttering a word. Aunt smooths the whitening cream across your forehead with her calloused, red hands–in this way, she anoints you a woman. You concentrate so intently on her hands, they seem to disconnect from her arms, shoulders, chest, and torso. They have been severed from her body. The whitening cream gives you a light searing sensation, like a sunburn. “No more sitting on porch,” she tells you. You listen to her, because in her voice, you detect a hunt of jealousy. She is scrutinizing your body for traces, glimpses, of her own girlhood. While uncles, cousins, and grandfathers were dragged off in the hot Taiwanese night, aunt attended university and worked as a nurse’s aid in a western-style hospital. She washed her hands so frequently in the antiseptic metal sinks, she washed the color right out of them. Uncles had hung from mountain trees by their thumbs, grandfathers trapped in underground pits like amphibians and starved to death, joining the buried underground; to be greeted again in the hazy smoke of a cigarette, the bottom of a glass, in half spun dreams.
At night, a genesis. Aunt does not dream of the lost; she dreams of an enveloping and total blackness. When she awakens, she realizes the blackness was the flesh of her body crawling over her eyes and suffocating her, trapping her with dead grandfathers. Only in America did aunt regain her color; first, she regained the rigidity of her hands. Then the delicacy of her neck muscles burning, followed by the tender rest of her body. She worked long hours as a bank teller, telling the fortunes of those richer and more fortunate than herself. You admire yourself in aunt’s plastic bathroom mirror. The white mask of cream may make you more beautiful, but does it also turn you into a ghost?
On your last full day with aunt and uncle, they suddenly remember the promises they made and take you for the early bird special at Applebee’s followed by a trip to the shopping mall. In the restaurant, one of your baby teeth pops loose. You show the adults. “If I put it under my pillow,” you explain, “The tooth fairy will exchange it for a dollar.” Aunt and uncle are baffled by this American tradition of giving money to children who do not deserve it. They cannot understand your pleasure. In the Applebee’s parking lot, the sky flashes gray and green as if a great pressure swells inside the chest of the Jade Emperor. A flash thunderstorm is coming, typical of the peninsula. This is when Yù Huáng will cleanse you with the tears of his tantrum, for the Monkey King must have escaped and wreaked havoc in heaven again.
That night, you dream of a shredded, disemboweled darkness. Into the shadows you fall, sacrificial and yoked to yourself. You are beginning to understand that the incident with the whitening cream was an unofficial baptism. Aunt eagerly recounts her stories to you now, in the gasping, free way she does with the Mahjong ladies. This darkness is different from the one that aunt described to you, whirling and porous like charcoal rubbings. It has movement; it is alive. The decibels, sounds swelling out. Leaking. You dream of plastic bags over your face, lodging themselves in your throat. Writhing for air, you bolt upright in bed, cotton sheets slick with perspiration. There is starlight falling here–you listen for your heartbeat as it gradually, slows, down. Time, like hours. Each one a wound. Finally, as if it only took an exhale, daybreak filters through the thin shades and casts bars across the wall opposite your bed. The window is open and cools your rash of fever, salt in the mouth. Crickets sounding sweetly in the bush unseen. Aunt is hanging laundry on the wire outside and the merciful, bright clothes blow out to full staff, ready for sailing. For taking away, for bringing back. You recall that there is an offering waiting beneath your pillow. You feel around for the dollar bill, but instead grasp something tiny, fragile, and wet. You remove your pillow and, to your intense surprise, uncover a frog.
