We ride through the mountains of her hometown, she and I. We spend the day like this—the yellow, protracted light of a frozen noon. Cattails, swaying. It’s been fifty-two days, and this is the first time I feel like I might live.
The next morning, she kneels beside her family’s tree, handing over boxes of gifts, beautiful gifts, books and scarves and blenders and stockings full of gifts. Pity gifts, I think. She keeps her arm wrapped around me as I open each one, kissing the temple of my head. It makes me sad—the degree of love I feel for her, the lifesaving power of this purity of purpose—now that I know what it feels like to lose.
Hannah’s mother hands me a box no bigger than a diary. I peel open the paper. A bright-green DNA test. You mentioned you wanted one, she says. Remember? At the funeral.
For the family tree, yes, I say. I try to smile. Thanks.
I stack the gifts in my arms and totter up the stairs to Hannah’s bedroom. I clack the blinds closed.
I am twelve years old on Christmas morning in Las Vegas. My father takes me, my mother, and the boys to Denny’s, where he asks for his eggs runny—extra rye. He slides a one-hundred-dollar-bill tip to our waitress, something he will make a tradition, and the woman thanks us, wipes her cheeks, holds the bill up to the light of the window to make sure it’s real.
Here is a Hawaiian legend once told to me:
Sometimes the dead don’t want to be dead. Sometimes souls go flitting around in the air, particles of light, drifting, until a mortal crams the soul back inside its body. The kino wailua, or spirits, can be spotted anywhere, the face of a rock, a mountainside—a Hawaiian should always look for facial features. It is the mortal’s job to perform the kāpuku, or resuscitation process. It is our duty to sneak the soul beneath the toenail of a body, let the body rise up like a newly watered plant.
WINTER–SPRING, 1972
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
In Los Angeles, Mei Mei and Al use the cash from a second mortgage to purchase a motor home. The family will drive for the rest of the school year, five months on the road, visiting every state capital, billboard attraction, the Petrified Forest, the children’s first snow. My mother and her siblings are homeschooled by Mei Mei. They visit the Grand Canyon, the gaping marble monuments of Washington, D.C., badlands of red, and Mei Mei uses the encyclopedias to tell them all about it. State bird, state fruit, state capital, state terrain—You must learn about your world. There is no plan, no exact destination. As long as they stay on the move.
Where you headed? a man at a gas station in Memphis asks one night. Moving house like that, all those kids.
Florida, says my grandfather.
Nice ’n’ sunny. Where ’bouts? asks the man.
My grandfather looks at Mei Mei as if she might have the answer, as if she’d have the perfect city in mind, a star penned to the map. He had never thought of it before this moment, no, all he knew was far away. All he knew was Florida.
What do you recommend? asks my grandfather. You have a favorite place down there?
This stranger takes a long, hard look at my grandfather. When you get there, just keep driving south, he says. Go far enough ’n’ you’ll disappear.
SUMMER, 1999
BOCA RATON, FLORIDA
I’m watching the Miss Florida pageant on television with my mother and Misty. In one week, I’ll turn eleven. We are judging the contestants—Misty and I—in our own point system of colored penciled tallies pressed into legal pads. We give each girl a score for every round of the pageant, but we also ask our own questions: Does the contestant seem smart? Does the contestant seem funny? Does the contestant seem like she would be nice to dogs? Would the contestant be our friend, or enemy? Does the contestant look like either one of us? If given the choice, would we choose to swap lives with the contestant forever?
I wouldn’t put your money against me, says my mother, because today is July 11.
My mother’s favorite number combination is 7-11. She has always played it on the roulette tables in Vegas, punched it in for alarm and banking passcodes, sworn by the magic of 7:11 on a clock. When these three numbers are arranged in this order, they become charged, lucky. Contestant number two is my favorite of the beauty queens. I have her name written at the top of my pageant chart—Marjorie, #2, Hollywood—but Misty likes a blonde flute player from Miami Lakes. We bet our allowance money on the girls—usually ten dollars.
Here’s why I’m invested: My cousin Teagan is a pageant girl. Chinese and Hawaiian, like me. She’s three years older and we look alike in the eyes, but Teagan’s hair is long, her bangs trimmed ruler straight. Her adult teeth grew in perfectly and her cheeks shine like Baoding balls on the covers of magazines. In an ad for J. C. Penney, Teagan swings on a hammock with three other kids. She is the thirteen-year-old ethnic friend, licking chocolate cake from the prongs of a big fork, and this ad is enlarged on poster board in the corner of her room. Whenever I sleep over, I fall asleep staring at her.
Contestant number two looks related to Teagan, I say.
She’s got a good walk, says my mother. Look at her go.
My mother, too, was once a model. After high school. She tells us about it right now, in this living room, how she modeled clothing through the lobbies of Waikiki beach hotels, tying and untying tropical wraps around her hips for haole men.
Now, she catwalks in her pajamas across the living room steady, open-lipped. She pushes her palms into her hips, each foot landing directly in front of the other. It looks a bit like hula—this grace, the exact point of her toes—before she gets to the kitchen counter, strikes a pose looking left, then right, and marches her way back to the couch.
Still got it?
How could you be a model when you’re a mom? asks Misty.
You’re even better than Contestant number two, I say.
We watch the contestants on television strut through several more rounds. Go, Hapa Haole, Go! I scream. I wonder if my mother once looked like Marjorie, number two, from Hollywood, if she once dreamed of being this very girl—her butter-colored bikini, her braid.
Contestant number two does not win the crown. Instead, she hugs the two contestants by her side, mouths Good luck! before smiling and waving her way offstage.
Shocker, says my mother. Imagine that. A world that chooses white girls!
I guess your number’s off, I say.
No, it’s just that Miss USA could never be a mixy mutt, says Misty. She says this sweetly. She crosses out Contestant number two on her chart.
Misty’s flute player does not win either. None of us take the cash.
The world is so unfair, I say.
More than you know, says my mother.
1973–1974
PLANTATION, FLORIDA
My mother is wearing shoes to her first day of public school. Mary Janes, to be exact, with high-ribbed socks, a pale-green baby doll dress, and a lacy beige bib tucked over her chest. The Mainland. This school is all indoors. There are no picnics outside, no bathing suits in sight. She is the malihini in these halls, new blood, and everyone takes notice. The other students wear Peanut bell-bottoms, three buttons at the crotch, their stomachs bare and oiled. Their hair shines the color of driftwood. For the first time in her life, nobody looks like my mother.
A boy wads a spitball and pushes it into a straw. He shoots it at her. My mother spins in circles, rubbing her forehead, her dress fanning out.
Fucking Chink, says the boy, though my mother does not know what this means, and her parents do not tell her.
They called me that, too, I tell her now. Growing up.
My mother laughs. Of course they did. Almost thirty years, and they can’t think of something better.