The sky in Taipei is the kind of purple that makes it hard to tell whether the sun just came or went. Dad says it’s evening.
My face is melting; sweat trickles down every inch of me. In a quiet alley between residential buildings, Dad scrolls through his phone trying to find the exact apartment number. The streetlamp stretches its long neck high above, casting down a harsh fluorescent light. The building doors are sheets of scratched-up metal. The windows, to their sides, are caged in by bars. It’s so very different from our neighborhood back home. There are no brightly painted doors and windows with decorative shutters here. No yards or driveways or front porches.
Long red banners are glued above some of the doors, bearing Chinese characters in shiny gold foil, each word the size of my hand. And outside, sitting in the alley itself: a cluster of mopeds and bicycles, clothes clinging to drying racks made of bamboo poles, a dusty sedan. Smells drift around the corner to meet us—a combination of incense smoke and garlicky oil.
The few people who walk past turn their heads to stare. Now Dad’s fumbling through his pockets, his hands noisy with his frustration.
“They know we’re here, right?” Suddenly I’m questioning the decision to fly to Taiwan. I think of the way my mother’s face darkened every time I mentioned my grandparents—is there a reason it was a bad idea to come?
The air is so thick I’m convinced a giant tarp covers the city, trapping the wet heat of our collective breaths. A breeze swims past, but it brings no relief, only brushes the hairs on my arms in the wrong direction. I rub my elbows nervously. Beneath the lamplight, I see my father’s hands shaking. “Dad? Are you okay?”
“Just hang on a sec,” he says tensely. He swings his backpack around to the front and paws through it.
I look out into the empty road and listen to the sound of his riffling. Papers fall to the concrete with a smack and a gasp, fanning out in a mess. Just as I stoop to help gather them, the next door over creaks open, pouring gauzy light everywhere.
A hunched little woman stands on the threshold, squinting out at us.
“Baineng,” she says.
It takes me a minute to realize the woman is trying to say Dad’s name. I stand up fast, but Dad rises out of his crouch more slowly.
The woman hesitates, then says, “Leigh.”
I swallow a gulp of air, letting that one syllable tie a knot in my throat. The voice is both my mother’s and not.
“Name wan cai dao. Chiguole mei?”
This woman clearly does not speak English.
“Leigh!” she says again, stepping forward.
Well, and what was I expecting? That after all these years, my grandparents had bought a copy of Rosetta Stone? Weren’t all those letters from my grandparents written in Chinese? In some corner of my mind, I had imagined my mother’s language skills passing up to them in a sort of backward inheritance.
Dad turns to me expectantly as if to say, Don’t you remember the manners I taught you?
“Ni hao.” I can tell my tones are off as I slide up and down the words. It’s been too long since I last uttered those syllables out loud.
“Waipo hao,” Dad corrects.
Waipo. Right. Grandmother. I figured out that much, but I’m still not quite ready for it. Too many extra beats are spent searching for Mom’s features in that wrinkled face. “Waipo hao,” I finally say. My voice has never sounded so pink.
She says my name again, and a string of words I can’t process. And then, miraculously, something I understand: Very pretty. She smiles at me. Her fingers gently follow a strand of my hair down my shoulder.
Pretty. Piaoliang. With my wide hips and tree-trunk thighs? My face, so much rounder than my mother’s? The shape of my body not at all delicate the way I’d always wished it to be, and my hair brown instead of black?
Waipo ushers us in and the door squeals shut. Dad and I drag our suitcases into the small elevator. On the second floor, my grandmother stops and gestures for us to remove our shoes. She offers us foam sandals to wear inside.
We round the bend into a small living room. The man who must be my grandfather is perched on the couch with a wooden cane next to him. He shuffles across the room in a pair of faded blue slippers.
“Waigong hao.” My voice cracks.
He nods for a beat too long, then twists his head down to cough into his arm. When he straightens, he’s smiling.
If only I could remember how to say, It’s nice to meet you.
I try really hard to dig the knowledge out from my memory, but suddenly all I can think of is Axel at the funeral asking me, What color? and me answering, White.
White, like a blank page. White, like my teeth. I try to smile back.
14
I sip from my tiny cup of tea, grateful I have something to busy my hands and mouth with. The taste of the oolong is colored by the smell of smoke—salty wisps bending toward me from the altar.
Not an hour ago, we stood there before the bodhisattva statues, touching flame to incense and pricking the bottoms of the spaghetti-thin sticks into a bowl of rice and ash. Dad closed his eyes, and I tried to follow his lead, but I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be praying, or taking a moment of silence, or maybe listening for some distant sound.
In my head the words that circled were the ones crossed out at the bottom of that note.
I want you to remember
The bird wanted me to come, and here I am. I inhaled the salty smoke and tried to make up a prayer. Please tell me what it is I need to do here. Please tell me what I need to remember.
No answer arrived. Well, and what was I expecting?
Now we’re all sitting in the living room. Dad and me in brocade armchairs, Waipo and Waigong on a couch made of wood and cushions. Beneath bright halogen lights I study their faces. My grandmother’s thin lips are stretched in a perpetual smile, her cheeks lightly mottled, nose small and flat. She wears simple gold hoops in the lobes of her ears, her white hair pulled back in a loose bun. My grandfather nods as we speak, his gray hair military-short, teeth slightly crooked, skin freckled with little brown constellations.
I try to find my mother’s face in each of theirs. How different did they look the last time she saw them? What caused there to be such a chasm between them?
Dad and Waipo carry most of the conversation. I catch a few words I understand. Airplane. America. Eat. Weather.
How strange this is. To sit here and talk like this, hold polite conversation over tea, when it’s a tragedy that has brought us together.
Dad passes things back to me in English like a game of telephone: This is a new home; they moved here two years ago. Waigong hasn’t spoken a word since he had a stroke. They’ve had decent weather the last few weeks, not as hot as usual, thanks to a typhoon out in the ocean that’s carried in some rain. The sugar-apples and dragon fruits have been particularly good this season. The guavas, too, which Waipo makes into smoothies.
Who the hell cares about guavas when my mother is a bird? My knee jiggles fast and hard.
Dad tips his suitcase on its side and unzips it, the contents gleaming like the innards of a treasure chest. He pulls out packages of candy: Hershey’s Kisses. Godiva chocolates. Tootsie Rolls.
Waipo’s eyes light up, but then she shakes her head.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“She’s saying it’s too much,” Dad explains. “But I wanted to bring all her favorites.”
The words sting oxide brown, the unfairness slicing at something deep inside me. Why is it that he knows what my grandmother loves, and I don’t?
Now, at last, we’ve run out of things to say, and a paralyzing silence fills the air. No one speaks. No one moves, except Waigong, who sucks on a Tootsie Roll and nods vaguely to himself.
My body tautens with every passing second. I’m wound up, ready to burst.
Waipo reaches for the television remote, and in a panic I spit out a word in English: “Wait!” The words spiral up out of my memory: “Deng yixia.”