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MY PARENTS ARRIVED for a three-night visit. We ate ribs and cornbread. They attended the silent auction my friends had organized for the Boys & Girls Club and bought an expensive drawing of a duck that we knew would end up in the basement. After each performance they clapped genuinely, and my father swayed during the gospel singing. My mother and I shared a look of surprise.
On the last full day of their trip, they came with me to school. I steered them toward the students’ poems on the walls. My dad read one halfway through, then walked away. My mother made herself popular by handing out mechanical pencils that she’d brought from Indiana, where my parents had recently moved. But it was the after-school math class that lit my parents up. Patrick, Miles, Aaron, and others were at the front board, working on their own problems, and my father was unable to stand still. “No, no, this way is faster,” he said, charging to the front. He took my dry-erase marker. My mother laughed to herself, recognizing him.
The students giggled; his style was the opposite of mine—blunt, direct, easy. Now he handed the marker back to Miles. Miles solved it my dad’s way and then turned back to see if I was watching.
“See?” my dad said triumphantly. “Faster.” Maybe I didn’t know my parents at all.
The students towered over my father, so that he looked like a bespectacled Asian elf. He started to do another problem, a tricky one involving subtracting fractions. Explaining it, he got so animated that his glasses nearly fell off.
Later that evening, we drank iced tea on the porch. I was feeling hopeful and my heart was beating very fast. Just tell them, I thought.
“So I’ve been thinking,” I began. “I’ve been thinking I might stay for a couple more years. There’s this thing you can do, it’s called deferring; a lot of—”
“Here?” they said in unison.
My father’s face contorted. My mother put her hands over her face.
“Here?” my dad repeated, shocked.
They had already started telling people that I was headed to law school, they said. What was I trying to do? Make liars out of them? If I wasn’t really planning to go, why did I bother applying?
“You’re so much smarter than this—” my dad continued, waving his hands, gesturing to the street. When he said smarter, his voice hit a strange pitch. I could see the pulse in his neck.
“Are you happy?” my mother interrupted. “Look at you,” she said in Mandarin. “Look at your body.” She was referring to my weight gain. “Do you know how you sound? You don’t know. You sound old. You sound so serious. When I talk to you, I think, my daughter’s forgotten she’s young. You don’t care about how you look; you don’t care that you don’t have a boyfriend. It’s like you don’t want to be happy. It’s just school, kids, school, kids. They’re not your own kids. Do you even want to have kids? All your friends here are couples. They don’t care that you’re lonely. It’s not their fault; it’s just how couples are. I care, only your mom and daddy care.” She took a breath. “You’re not normal. Your cousins, they’re normal. They get married, study science, become happy. It’s so easy for them. They’re so easy. They listen to their parents. Why can’t you be normal? What happened to you? You know, nobody wants to marry Mother Teresa.”
I was stunned. I hadn’t realized how much they hated that I was here.
She kept going. “You’ve changed since you went to college. We shouldn’t have sent you to Harvard; everybody there thinks they can change the world. You think you can? Look at the newspaper; nothing changes. You think you’re so special? You think you’re better than your mom and dad? Because you read all those books, because you like to help people?” She laughed derisively. “You think your mom and dad don’t help people? We help you. We help you go to school. We help you go to college. We give you a house to sleep in and we work every day.”
My father gripped his chest as if it hurt. “You look down on your parents,” he concluded.
Then he stood up and walked away, not waiting for my mom.
She followed him, worried.
Early the next morning I drove them to the airport in Memphis. We stopped for breakfast along the way, but we spoke little.
“We’re a happy family, aren’t we?” asked my father finally. Then he answered himself decisively. “We’re happy.”
After I’d left them at the airport, I found that I did not want to go home. Instead, I drove up and down Highway 61 between Memphis and Helena, my neck in knots, thinking about my parents.
Once, at a car wash in Kalamazoo, when I was around ten years old, my dad pulled up behind another car and we heard a high-pitched scream: “Hey!” A woman leaned out and shouted at us from behind. “You chink and your chink daughter cut in line.” Had we in fact cut in line? This is the question that preoccupied me, as I didn’t know what a chink was. My dad bolted out of our car and yelled right back at her: “You motherfucking bitch.” I shrank back; everybody in the lot would hear him say bad words. But, to my shock, the woman shrank back, too; she hadn’t expected that he would talk back. His cursing was fluent. His temper was wild. I was scared he might punch her right there. But he didn’t. He returned. Now he was yelling at me, as if I, too, had done something wrong. “Remember you’re American. You’re an American citizen. You were born here. Do you understand? Do you?”
When my parents introduced me to neighbors, I sometimes detected surprise on their faces when I spoke, as if they had momentarily forgotten I lacked an accent and the presence of outsiders had reminded them. My person, and specifically my English, was at once a peace offering, a riposte, a battle cry. Listen to her, my parents seemed to say; she has no accent, she is one of you. To my parents my brother and I were American—not Asian American, not Chinese American, just American. Maybe it was the times. But it was also a sign of what they were willing to give up.