He tells me that when my mother met my father, she was already married, in the process of getting a divorce. And she had a two-year-old daughter. She didn’t tell my father about her child until right before their wedding. He loved her, so he offered to adopt the child as his own. “No, that’s okay,” she said. “We’ll leave her with her father’s family.”
Years later, I tried searching for my sister. I imagined that when I found her, I’d tell her, “I know that it must have been awful for you to lose your mother as a baby. And I know it’s awful that she left you to have me. But I want to tell you that you are the lucky one. You didn’t want her as a mother. You were better without her, and hopefully this knowledge can heal some of the trauma of your abandonment.” And then we’d both hug and talk about the things we had in common and maybe be the family that neither of us got to have. But I was never able to live out this fantasy. I couldn’t find my sister. It was too difficult because nobody on either side of our family remembered her name.
* * *
—
I am twenty-seven on a trip to Singapore with my father. We are here for a few days before we travel to Malaysia for my cousin’s wedding. Every morning after I wake up, I make my way to my Tai Koo Ma’s narrow apartment balcony, where we eat breakfast beside a copy of The Straits Times. No matter how early it is, my aunt is ready with her big Tai Koo Ma energy: She asks if I’ve turned off the air conditioner, says I look skinny today, brings out a large jug of water kefir and tells me I should make it at home because it is very good for regular bowel movements. She sets out the char bee hoon she made last night and calls the maid to bring out kaya toast for everyone. My father sleepily enters, plops down on a chair, and starts chowing down.
“Wah, you like this?” Tai Koo Ma asks. “Doesn’t your wife ever make this for you?”
His wife? He has a wife?
“When did you get married?” I ask.
“Haiyo! It’s been so long!” my father says, casually oblivious.
“You got married, what, eight years ago already?” Tai Koo Ma laughs.
Eight years ago. I was nineteen. I had not known. Nobody told me. I wasn’t invited. Whenever my dad mentions her to me, he still calls her “my friend.”
I am a good little Chinese girl for the rest of breakfast. I swallow my anger as we pack, as I set up Tai Koo Ma’s Netflix account. Through otak-otak and carrot cake. I hold it behind my teeth for the whole taxi ride to the airport. I bite it back as we go through security and find our gate.
Then we sit down on the black-leather-and-chrome airport chairs. A man in a suit sits across from us and starts typing on his laptop. I ask it quietly at first, as if I don’t care: “Why did you lie to me for ten years? Saying that you had a girlfriend, when all this time you were married?”
“What? I never lied to you.”
“This entire time you talked about your friend. And she’s actually your wife? You got married to her when I was in college? When I lived forty-five minutes away from you?”
He flies into defensive mode. “It was just a small thing! What else would you expect me to do? You never liked her. You never even met her. You still have never met her because you’re…you. You would have gotten angry and pissed and freaked out if I told you. You’re always like that. So what was I supposed to do?”
“You don’t know how I would have acted. And that isn’t an excuse.” My voice rises a few decibels. “And—oh my God, dude, go to therapy, this is so fucking transparent—you are obviously attacking me to conceal your own shame. With you, there’s never any fucking accountability!”
Without looking up, the man in the suit quietly packs up his laptop and moves to the far end of the gate to extricate himself from this situation. I don’t care. Let the world see. Let the world hear. Say it. Say it out-fucking-loud. Say the truth, however hurtful it may be.
But my father just gives me the same rant he always does. “You always look into the past. And what’s the point? I can’t go back in time just to make you happy and make your life perfect. And you can never see the future because your head is stuck on backward. The past. Is. The. Past!!”
Except it isn’t, of course. The past is always here, haunting our homes, standing over us at night. They say you don’t get rid of a ghost by pretending it isn’t there. The legends tell us to address the ghost directly. Declare that this is our home and it isn’t welcome here anymore. But I’m the only one yelling, screaming at spirits in the living room while everyone else averts their eyes, pretending there’s nothing wrong.
CHAPTER 30
It couldn’t be a coincidence that nobody in my family, none of the parents of the Asian kids I interviewed, and almost none of the Asians at my school wanted to talk about our foundational traumas. I wanted to know why our community was so good at hiding our pasts. So I moved toward our culture in search of answers. Did it have something to do with Buddhism? Confucianism? The Tao?
My family had largely converted to Christianity by the time I was born, so I had minimal interactions with Chinese religion. But they had been lightly Taoist for generations—though their adherence manifested itself more through tradition and practice than any sort of deistic belief system.
Taoists adhere to the concept of wu wei, which means “success through non-effort.” This idea acknowledges that there are forces in nature beyond us. The world is an immense and intricately organized system, perfected over millions of years. There is no point in pushing against this system. Effort only causes disruption. Instead, we must simply flow like water. Accept and adapt. Let the currents carry you where you need to go.
Growing up, one of Auntie and my grandmother’s favorite sayings was, “What to do?” It was never a question, just a statement of resignation. “What to do? It is what it is.” Neither of them spent much time hollering at their children, either. They instead spouted Taoist-tinted sayings like “If my child has any sense, I don’t have to yell at them. If he has no sense, even if I yell a million words, it won’t change anything. You can never spoil a good child. And you can’t teach a bad child any sense.” My father would repeat this as an affirmation when I was older. “It’s true! Look at you! I made mistakes, but you turned out so successful! You were just born with sense!” I rolled my eyes at this. It was just another way for him to avoid taking responsibility for his neglect, to let himself off the hook.