How many other songs would I recognize if we listened to this whole CD?
Waipo fills the table with dishes full of toppings for the congee. There are the sugary black pickles and silky slivers of bamboo shoots dripping with oil—I used to love those. I can’t remember the last time I had them. There are also sautéed greens I don’t recognize, red sausage slices, and ruddy blocks of either a paste or tofu. In the last bowl, there are little knots of something brown and squishy soaking in a syrup, with cooked peanuts crowding the edges.
I follow Waigong’s example, reaching with chopsticks to help myself to a little bit of everything.
“Waipo, ni zai nali—” I start out with my voice strong and firm. Where were you… I struggle to find the words in Mandarin. I want to ask her myself, to see her face as the question registers.
“Just say it in English,” says Feng, watching us eat. “I’ll translate for you.”
I’m barely able to bite back the harsh response boiling up into my throat. I want to snap at her that I don’t need a translator—but that’s a lie. I do. I need her if I’m going to get the answers to my questions.
“I want to know where she was born, and where she grew up,” I say reluctantly, dragging the words out of my mouth, hating the sound of them in English. “What it was like, with her—with her family.”
Feng spins it into Taiwanese. I wish she would stick to Mandarin so I can hear how things are said.
Waipo looks directly at me as she answers. I’m grateful for her gaze.
“She says she was born just outside the Alibung Mountain district. Her parents had no money, and they already had a son. She was just a girl. So they sold her to another family.”
I shake my head. “But you”—I turn toward Feng—“she was their daughter.”
“Once she came of age and married into another family, she’d be that family’s daughter. So it wasn’t economical for her parents to keep her, to have to feed and raise someone who would leave. It made sense to sell her off.”
My grandmother nods matter-of-factly.
I think of the woman in the memory. The balding man carrying the baby. “Was this a… commonplace thing?”
“It was,” says Feng. “In fact, Popo’s adoptive parents sold their own daughter to have the money to purchase your grandmother. It was a good deal for them—Popo would grow up to be the wife of their son.”
“Even though she was growing up with him? Even though that made him her brother?”
“Living with them, Popo would learn all the habits and preferences of their family,” Feng explains. “They could raise her to be the perfect daughter-in-law. And then when she married their son, there would be no need for a dowry.”
“So Waigong—” I begin to ask.
Waipo smiles and jumps to say more, the words tumbling from her mouth fast.
“The betrothal didn’t exactly go as planned. Her adoptive father died, and Popo was just a child then, but she quit school and started working, picking tea leaves so they would have the money to survive. She became their main source of income.”
“What about her brother?” I ask.
Waipo shrugs.
“He didn’t know how to shoulder any kind of responsibility. He wasn’t bad at heart… just a wild boy who lost his father too young. When Popo came of age… her mother pulled her aside and said, ‘Yuanyang, you don’t have to marry him. You’ve been such a good daughter. You have such a good heart. Do what you want. Live your life and be happy.’ So their betrothal was broken.”
I try to imagine a provincial life spent on the mountains, picking tea, not going to school. If I were my grandmother, I think I would have run away. “Did she leave?”
Waipo shakes her head.
Feng translates, “She stayed. Popo’s mother taught her to cook and sew. She taught her how to coax the chickens back after they’d had a scare, how to bind up strands of firecrackers to sell for Lunar New Year. They understood each other. They were each other’s true family. So your grandmother stayed with her, in the same house where they’d always lived… until the day a young man came and knocked on their door. A man who Popo had never seen before.”
“Waigong,” I say, glancing to my left. He smiles at me and shakes his head slightly.
“No,” Feng continues. “Not your grandfather—this was before he moved from China to Taiwan. When your mother opened the door, the man said, ‘Eighteen years ago I lost my sister. She was only a baby when my parents sold her to a family on the mountain. I’m trying to find her.’”
I blink in disbelief. “Was it really her brother?”
Waipo’s face pulls into a faraway smile.
“It was. After years of struggling, her biological family had claimed a plot of land and built their own hotel. They were thriving.”
“So then what?”
Waipo’s expression changes. Her voice grows quiet.
Feng explains, “Her mother told her to go with her brother, back to the family who birthed her. And your grandmother listened. She did exactly as she was told. So Popo went down the mountain with her brother. She started working in her family’s hotel. At first she went to visit her mother every week, but then she was too busy. A month passed, and then two. Your waigong came to stay at the hotel, and they met and fell in love, and time disappeared. And when Popo went back to visit again, her mother had grown terribly ill.”
My lungs tighten; I don’t move. If I hold myself still, I won’t feel the pain in my grandmother’s expression.
“It was clear that life wasn’t the same in that cottage on the mountain. Popo thinks that when she left, she took something away with her, something invisible but necessary. Her adoptive mother fell into rapid decline. Popo brought her medicines and herbs. She offered to move back in, but her mother didn’t want that. She said, ‘Your new life is down in the city. Go live it, and be happy. I’ll be fine.’ And in that moment her mother looked almost normal, healthy again. Popo visited her just one more time after that.”
I let the air back in. My eyes are aching.
Waipo’s voice drops low.
Feng hesitates. She sucks in a breath between her teeth. “Your grandmother knew she’d died when her son—as in Popo’s adoptive brother—came to the hotel searching for her. She knew it the moment she saw him. She opened her arms and he fell into them and cried. It’s the only time she can remember ever touching him. She tried to get him a job at the hotel, but he didn’t want it. Together they burned their mother’s body and paid their respects, and that was the last time Popo ever saw him.”
My grandmother gathers up our empty bowls and dishes. I watch her make her way to the kitchen. When she thinks no one is looking, she reaches a quick finger up to dab at the corner of her eye.
47
The afternoon sun divides my room into lines and triangles, patches of light and geometric shadows. I’m sitting on my bed, trying to think through everything I’ve seen. Everything I know.
My mind is reeling. If I close my eyes, there’s a strong sense of vertigo, like I’m free-falling through a huge, dark chasm. A deep gorge that marks where my family’s world split, where the foundations tore apart. It’s the breakage in the lines of my family’s history. The breakage widened by my mother turning into a bird.
My eyes hurt. A pressure has wrapped itself around my skull, like hard chains coiling and tightening against my temples.
I try to ignore the headache, fight it away via sheer force of will. My fingers gather the T-shirt strands together and begin to weave my net. It starts sort of like a braid, the material moving over and under like waves on a sea. I’m worried I won’t have enough fabric to make the net as big as I need it to be, but that just means I’ll have to be strategic about how I use it.
My phone chimes. There are new emails waiting for me.
One from my father, because I never responded to his first message.
FROM: [email protected] TO: [email protected] SUBJECT: RE: Check in