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JUST THE OTHER DAY, while my mind was on my brother, mother, and the upcoming Harvest Bash, I watched a peacock cross the road. It didn’t heed walk signs and all cars had to stop or go around. For a second I thought this peacock had, out of protest, escaped Connecticut and Fang’s imminent petting zoo. A few blocks behind the bird was a small team of people dressed in tan custodial clothes. Had any of us seen Harry? they asked calmly, Harry being the peacock that had just run out of St. John the Divine. Everyone had seen Harry, so we all pointed frantically in the same direction to help.
When I called my brother to un-RSVP from their party, he was kind of mad-sounding, kind of livid, since they had already given their final numbers to the caterers. In both Chinese and English, the phrase is the same, “to take someone to school,” “to school them in x, y, and z.”
You overwork yourself, said Fang, and let yourself be bulldozed. Why are you always covering for other people but I never hear anyone covering for you? No one should be working that much. Health is wealth and time is money.
My brother could speak only in catchphrases, or only in clichés.
Had you started a private practice here, like I’d suggested, none of this would be an issue. Doctors hire other doctors under them and essentially become managers. Managing people is a skill. In time, you won’t even need to practice, you just collect the fees.
With regard to leaving the hospital and starting a practice, my position has never changed. Oranges didn’t abandon groves to start new ones of their own, only to manage other oranges and to never become juice. But my brother fought wars of attrition and thrived against resistance, so if only to move the lecture along, I simply told him that he was right.
In addition to Fang, I was talking more to my mother since she was calling me more to chat, and before we got started, I would confirm that she was in fact, calling me to chat.
You’re a very literal person, she would say. You were not always this way. You were not a very literal child.
Here’s an idea, she said, calling in the middle of the day, like yesterday and like tomorrow, to tell me something either Tami or Fang had said earlier that day.
Your brother thinks it would be better for morale if we all lived close by, within a five-mile radius.
Your sister-in-law suggested a ten-mile radius. What did you think about that?
Me? I said. What did she think about that since in either scenario, she would have to stay.
Oh, I’m not staying, she said. That’s a ridiculous idea. Her ticket was booked for February and that’s when she would leave. But she was just relaying these pieces of information to me. Do with them what you will.
The next time she called, they had gotten her a nanny. The they being my brother and sister-in-law, and without asking or consulting her. The nanny, a Chinese woman in her forties who reminded my mother of herself, when she was that age, doing a similar kind of work. After declaring that decade for her, the last spent in America, to be a mix of confusion and unhappiness, my mother said, What could a woman in her forties know, no offense to you or Tami. Moreover, she did not need a nanny.
Aide, I said.
All Nanny does is follow me around. I see her check the stove after I’ve used it. I see her tightening the knobs to make sure that I’ve shut off the gas. She brings me blankets before I can even ask for one. She would sit with me in the bathroom if she could. Continually boils me hot water.
It’s attentive, I said.
It’s a complete waste of water and electricity, she said.
I tried to change the topic. Had my mother finally seen the entire house?
She had. Every room had been viewed and sat in from every seated position, every window looked out of, and now she was bored.
They won’t let me drive, my mother said, after what she deemed another incredibly boring day. They being Fang and Tami of course but also the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles, whom she had just finished a contentious phone call with because she had wanted to hash this situation out, once and for all, with a knowledgeable professional who would listen to her, but the professional had not. He had been as dismissive as everyone else.
They won’t let you drive, Mom, because your American license expired and you never got a Chinese one. If you really want a license, we’ll have to sign you up for classes and then have you retake the test.
She didn’t want to retake the test, especially not one that she had already passed.
That was over thirty years ago, I said. Over thirty years ago, you passed a test.
But I still know how to drive. I still know most of the rules. In Shanghai, trains get you anywhere. Trains, buses, 24/7. You can’t go anywhere here without a car. Your public transit system is a disgrace.
Is that what you told the DMV?
I didn’t tell them anything that they didn’t already know.
Then my mother remembered something. My mother remembered that she had a green card.
A green card is not a license, I said.
Why not?
Because a green card says nothing about your driving.
If this country is all about rights, then someone should make it so.
Boredom could breed curiosity and my phone buzzed all the time now, with questions that my mother had about us.
What does Fang do again? I know finance, but what kind?
PM stood for portfolio manager and the first time I heard the term hedge fund, I envisioned garden hedges and my brother pruning them with large, sharp shears. In time I learned a little more, that Fang grew other people’s money, which more or less was pruning someone else’s bushes into even green rows.
My mother seemed content with that explanation. Now, what do you do? I know medicine, but what kind?
I told her.
I hope you’re making some money at least, she pressed on. Because in China, a doctor makes the same salary as a public school teacher. There’s no difference in status or prestige between the two and work-life balance is, of course, much better for the teacher. I just hope you’re not going to be destitute, Joan-na. So many doctors in America go into debt, I hear. So many say it’s not worth it. And the malpractice. What are you going to do about that?
I said I’d just gotten a raise and tried, like most doctors, to avoid malpractice altogether.
I was pacing outside the seminar room where Reese was giving grand rounds. The talk was on how to demystify pulmonary hypertension, a condition with many possible causes or an unknown cause and one in which the arteries of your lungs are carrying blood at way too high of a pressure. Then dizziness, fatigue, chest pains ensue, sometimes blue-tinted skin. Pulmonary hypertension is said to develop gradually, to only worsen with time, but can possibly onset quickly and without warning, like when speaking to one’s mother.
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THE LAST TWO MONTHS of the year were packed with mandatory HR seminars that updated the staff on new behavioral regulations, like how to spot and report sexual harassment, like proper conference speaker etiquette. The latter seminar was yesterday. Studies showed that when men introduced male speakers, they stated full names and titles, but for female speakers, they used only first names, no titles. We were then instructed to introduce all speakers by their first and last names, with titles. We practiced with the person next to us. The room was half full, and mostly with women.