But once, I missed the signs. I messed up somehow. She made a bona fide attempt and swallowed a bottleful of pills.
I don’t know exactly when she made her big attempt, because there were so many little incidents. I think maybe it was the time she disappeared for a couple of days and my dad told me she went to a Holiday Inn for a mini staycation. Later, her friend told me my mother had actually spent the night in a psych ward. Or maybe she really tried to kill herself the night she took some pills, chased them with a case of Heineken, and slept for eighteen hours. My father and I stood at her bedside the next day. “She’ll sleep it off. It’s called a hangover. Go watch TV or something,” he said eventually and stalked off. But I kept watch for a long time before tiptoeing away.
There was some lasting damage, though. Taking Excedrin in those massive quantities gave her stomach ulcers that never quite went away. Every time her stomach twisted after that, she told me it was my fault.
How did I feel about the fact that my mother blamed her suicide attempts on me? I couldn’t tell you. Those would be some very big feelings for a very little girl. But I do know this—that every night before bed, I kneeled and said the same prayer over and over like a mantra. “Please, God—let me not be such a bad girl. Please let me be able to make Mommy and Daddy happy. Please make me into a good girl.”
CHAPTER 2
In middle school, I stopped sleeping.
I had tennis lessons three times a week, Chinese twice, piano practice, and Girl Scouts. With all of these activities, plus school and homework, I usually worked twelve-hour days. And then there was the other activity that took up the remainder of my waking hours: being my parents’ mediator.
The ambitious father I’d heard so much about—the one who pulled himself and his family out of poverty, who worked his way to a hopeful American future—was not the father I grew up with. I got a shell of that man.
My father worked for eight hours a day, then escaped to the golf course. When he was home, he was a half-present phantom, decaying in front of the television for as long as he could before being roused with the annoyance of familial obligation. Sometimes I wondered if his passions were stolen from him by America’s glass ceiling—its insistence that an Asian man like him could not rise above an unexceptional middle-management position. But if you asked him, he’d say his soul was flattened by my mother.
I was not the only one my mother took her moods out on. She lashed out at him for chewing with his mouth open, for sweating too much, for talking too much or not enough. For his part, he could be thoughtlessly blunt and could not comprehend her intense unhappiness (“All you do is watch TV and play tennis; what is there to complain about?”). They fought about money: She wanted a Lexus; he said we couldn’t afford it. They fought over the fact that he moved us to America, with all of these clueless gweilos and their rude children who called her by her first name. Then the fights would escalate, a soap dish would get thrown across the room, horrific threats would be made, and someone would drive off. I’d sit in the garage, shivering in the dark, praying for them to come home.
I took it upon myself to keep everything in a tenuous kind of order. When my parents wanted to sleep in on Sundays, I’d force them to go to church so God could know how serious we were about maintaining the peace in our household. I’d remind them of things to be grateful for. I’d pick my father’s clothing up off the floor before my mother could find it and scream at him. If my mother was angry for no reason, I’d lie and tell my father I’d misbehaved egregiously that day so he’d forgive her fury. Then I’d feed him ideas for consolation presents he could buy her. “It’s not her fault. It’s just that I’m bad, I’m awful, I’m evil,” I told him, and he believed me. “Why do you have to be like this?” he’d ask. “Why can’t you just be better?”
Eventually, even I began to believe the stories I constructed. So I did try to be better, less of a burden in school and everywhere else. I pushed myself until I had faster mile times and flawless performances and As all down my report card.
But I was still a child. I could not survive in a world where I simply fought, negotiated, and worked toward perfection. I needed play. I needed release. So I handled that like I handled everything else. I made the time for it. All it required was popping Sudafed before I went to bed—baby meth, to keep me awake. After I heard my parents go to bed, I snuck down to the family computer and lurked on the internet until four a.m. most nights. I read copious amounts of fan fiction, trolled AOL chat rooms, and talked to my real friends on Star Wars message boards. Yes, I fell asleep every time a teacher put a movie on. Yes, I had a really difficult time remembering any Chinese vocabulary words, and sometimes I got dizzy when I stood up and kind of fell over a little bit. But I could handle it all. This is what needed to be done.
One night after I logged on, I happened to look to the right at our printer. There was a picture of a girl there, pixelated and streaked from cheap toner. She was sitting on a beach, blond and bronzed and very naked, except for two flawless circles of sand strategically applied to her boobs to cover her…well, her nips. I snatched the photo out of the tray. My eyes did a quick scan—my mother would find it if I placed it in the trash can, and she often checked my backpack, so that wouldn’t work. But we did have some enormous, seven-foot-tall, solid wood bookshelves in the office. They had not moved for as long as I could remember. I slipped the printout behind them.
I was furious. I spent my whole life being vigilant, trying to preserve my mother’s tenuous sanity and hold together their marriage. So this felt almost insulting. How could my father be so careless? Still, I had this under control. I made myself the primary account holder on AOL and changed his parental controls. Now he could only look at content appropriate for a thirteen-year-old boy.
A couple of days later, my mother came storming into my room. “What happened to all of our money?” she screamed. She slapped me across the face. Why couldn’t my father access his online bank account? What had I done? Had I lost all of our money? How were we going to pay bills? Pay the mortgage? What the fuck did I do? Oops. I hadn’t accounted for this. Had I really erased all of our money? My breath grew frantic. But I couldn’t tell her why I’d done what I’d done.