Dinner was always an assortment of reheated odds and ends from the university kitchen—the gritty last bowl of a bone broth; a splattering of tofu about to turn, the stink of spoilage masked by a coat of garlicky spice; dozens of overboiled dumplings, their pale skin split, their insides spilling out. After eating, Barbra and her mother would push the table and chairs against the wall and swab the floor clean before pulling out their flowered bedrolls and spreading them on either end of the room. Then it was an idle evening hour in the courtyard with a score of children underfoot, her parents chatting with the other university employees as she leafed through movie magazines and waved away the scent of the mosquito coil.
On Friday nights, when she received an envelope with her week’s pay, always less than she thought it might be, she would meet up with friends and walk through the crowded streets, stopping sometimes to buy a cone of roasted peanuts or watch the noodle man kneading and pulling at a mass of dough until it became a cascade of slippery threads that he snipped into a boiling vat of soup. There would be a purse, maybe, that she wanted to buy, or a scarf, and then three weeks of envelopes would be gone in a single sweep.
It was a life, but Barbra could see no end to it. Even if she saved every yuan she earned, it would never accumulate so that it became a sturdy pile upon which a person might stand.
It felt like she would always be sleeping in the same room as her parents, listening as the walls thundered with her father’s snores, rubbing her mother’s back and helping her take the rollers out of her hair. Her two sisters had escaped into unhappy marriages years ago, one in New Zealand and the other in Singapore, and rarely wrote. There was no money to call. Barbra had tried to do the same, but her own marriage had been even unhappier. It had been three long years during which she remembered anew each morning that there was nothing lonelier than spending your days with a man you did not respect. In the end, she’d left carrying her five best dresses in a cardboard box under her arm and moved back in with her uncomplaining parents.
So when she heard about May Lee’s strange fate, it felt like a summons, like an escape. Barbra knew exactly what she had to do.
She opened the cupboard above the heater and took out the small steel lockbox that lived there. It was powder coated in an army green and felt warm and vaguely alive in her hands. She dug its key out of the drawer where it always rattled around with their jumbled collection of chopsticks and spoons—her parents were so trusting!—and popped open the lid.
Even now, she remembered her dismay at how little there was inside that box. Both her mother and father worked, all day, every day. She worked. The three of them lived in a single room, which her parents saw as a vast improvement on the hovels in which they were born, and yet their accumulated life savings weren’t enough to fill a box the size of a brick of radish cake. She could grab up all the money—the loose New Taiwan dollar bills and a few pointless coins—in one try, so she did. She’d taken it, all of it, then locked and replaced the now-cold box, slipped the key under the biggest wooden spatula, and run out to the China Airlines office she passed twice a day on her way to and from the stationery shop. Together with her last week of pay and a loan begged from old Lao by actually kneeling on the ground in front of him and bowing three times at his feet, Barbra had purchased a ticket and, three days later, taken leave of her parents with nothing more than a note.
Months later, after she’d done what she came to America to do, Barbra had wired fifty times the money back to her parents, along with another note saying that they should invite a table full of friends to a banquet in celebration of her marriage. They didn’t respond. She tried again and again, seven attempts in all, until she received an undersize envelope addressed only to Mrs. Wang that contained a scrap of paper on which was written “Wo mei yo nu er.” I have no daughter.
That was that, then.
In the end, nobody but a clerk at city hall had ever congratulated her and Charles on their nuptials. No banquets had been thrown, no special qipao made, no pieces of motherly advice given.
Not much later, Tie Shan, the university’s head groundskeeper and their longtime neighbor, wrote to say that both of her parents had died, one right after the other, of swift and merciless cancers—her mother of the lung, her father, somewhat embarrassingly, of the breast. When Barbra got the letter, she had a terrible thought. It was right that she took the money. Better. Her parents would have died anyway. Even if their metal box had remained inviolate, they would not have lived long enough to touch the savings inside. If Barbra had allowed some misplaced morality to keep her in Taiwan, her parents would have died just in time for Charles to marry someone else. And even if they had lived, they wouldn’t have possessed the imagination to spend their savings on anything beyond a trip to their own parents’ graves.