Saving Fish From Drowning

According to Sweet Ma, the relationship my father had with my mother was “very polite, as one should be toward strangers.” In fact, my father was much too kind, and my mother learned to take advantage of this. The way Sweet Ma described it: “She was a schemer. She’d put on her rose-colored dress, twirl her favorite flower hairpin, and with eyes dishonestly lowered, she would raise that simpering smile of hers toward your father. Oh, I knew what she was up to. She was always begging money to pay off the gambling debts of her nine brothers. I learned too late that her entire family was a nest of snake spawn. Don’t you grow up to be like them, or I’ll let the rats in to chew you up at night.”

According to Sweet Ma, my mother proved true to her breeding and excelled at becoming pregnant every year. “She gave birth to your eldest brother,” Sweet Ma said, counting on her fingers. “Then there was your second brother. After that, three blue babies, drowned in the womb, which was a shame but not so tragic, since they were girls.”

I came along in 1937, and Sweet Ma was there to witness my dramatic arrival. “You should have seen your mother when she was nine months pregnant with you. She looked like a melon balanced on chopsticks, teetering this way and that.… Early in the morning, that’s when her water broke, after making us wait all night. The winter sky was the color of spent coal, and so was your mother’s face.… You were too big to come out between her legs, so the midwives had to slice her nearly in two and pull you out like a fatty tapeworm. You weighed over ten pounds, and you had bloody hair down to your shoulders.”

I shivered when she said that.

“Bifang, your mother named you, though heaven knows I tried to persuade her to choose something else. ‘Good-reputation jade’ sounds like an advertisement poster, in my opinion, what pleases the ear of those who don’t know better. ‘Bifang, bifang, buy your bifang here!’ Ha, fang pi would be a better name to call you, a fart, yes indeed, that’s what you were, all right, a stinky little fart that shot out of her bottom.”

Sweet Ma held up a hairpin for me to see but not touch. “She named you Bifang because your father gave her this ugly thing to commemorate your successful birth.” It was a hairpin with a hundred tiny leaves carved out of bright imperial-green jade. Within the branches were peony blossoms made of tiny diamonds. The shining hairpin, when placed in the hair, suggested a glorious spring. Upon seeing that hairpin for the first time, I knew why she named me Bifang: I was her precious jade, her budding treasure, her glorious spring. Bifang.

Sweet Ma tried to change my school name as well. “I like the name Bibi,” I said. “Father calls me that.”

“Well, there’s nothing good about that name, either. It’s especially common. Your father had a Dutch customer whose wife was named Bibi. He asked the Dutch lady if that was an unusual name in her country. And she said, ‘Heavens, no. “Bibi” can be French, it can be German, Italian even, so really, it is found everywhere.’ And your father clapped his hands and said there was an expression that meant exactly that: bibi jie shi—can be found everywhere. If it was found everywhere, he said, to be polite, it must be popular, very much in favor. To my way of thinking, if it’s found everywhere then it must be a common nuisance, like flies and dust.” The day Sweet Ma said this, she was wearing my mother’s hairpin, the one she said was so ugly. I wanted to pull it out. And because I could not, I said in my strongest voice that I had already chosen Bibi as my school name and I would not change it. Sweet Ma then said if I was old enough to choose my name, I was old enough to know the true circumstances of my tiny mother’s death.

“She died of excess and dissatisfaction,” Sweet Ma divulged. “Too much but never enough. She knew I was your father’s first wife, the most respected, the most favored. No matter how many sons she had, he would probably one day turn her out the door and replace her with another.”

“Father said that?”

Sweet Ma did not confirm or deny. Instead she said, “You see, respect is lasting. Fondness is passing, a whim for a season or two, only to be replaced by a new fancy. All men do this. Your mother knew this, I knew this. Someday you will, too. But rather than accept her situation in life, your mother lost all control of her senses. She began to crave sweets. She couldn’t stop eating them. And she was thirsty all the time, drinking like the genie who swallowed the ocean and spit it back up. One day, a ghost saw how weak she was in spirit and entered her body through the hole in her stomach. Your mother fell to the ground, twitching and babbling, and then she was still.”

In my made-up memory, I saw my tiny mother rise from her bed and go over to a pot of sugared black sesame seed soup. She dipped her fingers to taste if it was sweet enough. It was not. She added more lumps of sugar, more, more, more. Then she stirred the hot, dark paste, tipped bowlful after bowlful into her mouth, filling her stomach to the level of her throat, the hollow of her mouth, until she fell to the floor, wet and drowned.

When I developed diabetes, just five years ago, I thought my mother might have died of the same thing, that her blood was either too sweet or not sweet enough. Diabetes, I found, is a constant battle of balance. Anyway, that was how I knew my mother, through the faults I inherited: the crooked lower teeth, the upward scrunch of the left eyebrow, the desire for more than could ever be satisfied in a normal person.

The night we left Shanghai forever, Sweet Ma made one more show of her endless sacrifice. She refused to go. “I would be useless over in America, unable to speak English,” she said coyly to my father. “And I don’t want to be a burden. Besides, Bifang is almost thirteen, too old now for a nursemaid.” She glanced in my direction, waiting for me to contradict her with vigorous protests.

My father said: “Don’t argue about this. Of course you’re coming.” He was in a hurry, because waiting for him was the gatekeeper, a mean man named Luo, whom we all disliked. He had made arrangements for our hasty departure before Shanghai fell completely under Communist control.

In front of my brothers, our grandfather, and the servants, Sweet Ma continued to argue, again looking for me to say the correct words. I was supposed to fling myself at her feet, knock my head on the floor, and beg her not to leave me. And because I did not do so, she became more determined to extract this plea from me. “Bifang doesn’t need me,” she said. “She already told me so.”

It was true. Only that morning, I had said similar words to her. She had been berating me for sleeping too long. She called me Rotten Soft Bones. She said I was just like my mother, and if I didn’t cure myself of these bad habits, I, too, would meet a terrible demise. I was not quite awake, and in my longing to cling to sleep, I placed my hands over my ears and thought I was shouting in my dreams: “Stop, you moaning milk-cow.” And the next thing I knew, Sweet Ma was slapping me back to my senses.

Now there I was with my family, about to flee in the middle of the night, with gold and diamonds stuffed into the soft bodies of my dolls, and there was this: my mother’s hairpin. I had stolen it from Sweet Ma’s dresser and had sewn it into my coat lining.

Gatekeeper Luo urged us to hurry, and Sweet Ma was still staging threats not to go. We were all supposed to plead for her to change her mind. My mind went in a new direction. What would happen if Sweet Ma did stay behind? How would my life change?

Pondering such thoughts made my chest ticklish and weak. I felt my knees and spine growing soft. This always happened when I anticipated anything good or bad, whenever I came close to allowing myself to feel the extremes of emotion. Since my mother had been the same way, I feared that I, too, would one day lose control and fall into a heap and die of excess. I had thus learned to push down my feelings, to force myself to not care, to do nothing and let things happen, come what may.

Silence would now decide my fate. “Speak,” Father coaxed. “Apologize.”

I waited in silence. “Hurry now!” he scolded. A minute must have passed. My legs were growing weak again. Push it down, I told myself, push down your wish.

Father finally broke in and repeated to Sweet Ma: “Of course you’re coming,” but Sweet Ma beat her chest, shouting, “It’s finished! I would rather have the Communists run a bayonet through me than be forced to go with that wicked child!” And she lurched out of the room.

When we boarded the boat to Haiphong, I reflected in terror over what I had done. I stood on the deck as the boat pulled away, the black sky clotted with stars and galaxies, and I imagined what bright life awaited us in a new land just over the horizon. We were going to America, where joy was so abundant you did not have to consider it luck.

I pictured Sweet Ma alone in our family house on Rue Massenet, the rooms still richly furnished, but ghostly, empty of life. Soon the soldiers with bayonets would come into the house and smash its capitalist symbols, and all the while, Sweet Ma would sit in her usual chair, telling the revolutionaries she didn’t want to be a burden. Perhaps they would punish her anyway for her bourgeois life. They might slap her browless face—I could picture it so clearly—the cruel men shouting for her to use her hair and tears to mop the floor. They would kick her thighs to hurry her up, aim a boot at her bottom. As I relished this scenario, playing it over and over in my mind, I became weak-limbed with fear and exhilaration, a strange combination that made me feel truly malevolent. I sensed I would be punished in my next life. I would become a cow and she the crow who would peck my flanks. And with that image in my mind, I suddenly felt bony fingers pluck my cheek, pinching until I tasted blood.

It was Sweet Ma. Father had gone back and insisted three more times that she come. Though her dignity was shaken, she had allowed herself to be pulled from her chair and carried screaming to the waiting car that whisked them both to the wharf. Thus, Sweet Ma returned, more determined than ever to put some sense into my brain by beating the evil out of my body. How lucky was I that she continued as my dim guiding light.

Sweet Ma tried to shape my mind, pounding it like dumpling dough. And the more she tried, the more I became like my mother, so she said. I was greedy, she warned, and could not fill my heart with enough pleasure, my stomach with enough contentment, my body with enough sleep. I was like a rice basket with a rat hole at the bottom, and thus could not be satisfied and overflow, nor could I be filled. I would never know the full depth and breadth of love, beauty, or happiness. She said it like a curse.

Because of her criticism, I acted as if I were even more deficient in feeling, particularly toward her. I found that a blank face and a bland heart were the very things that made Sweet Ma’s eyebrows bulge to bursting. My reasoning was this: How could I be wounded when I didn’t care? In time, I felt I was growing stronger and stronger. My legs no longer buckled, and I learned to hide from pain. I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I had placed them.

I remember the terrible night I realized that Sweet Ma’s curse had come true. It was a year after I started university life, and I had returned home at Sweet Ma’s command to join the family celebration of the Autumn Festival, what is traditionally a time of thanksgiving. Now here we were, my father and brothers and I, at the usual gathering of distant relatives and Chinese friends, both longtime citizens and the recently immigrated. We were in the backyard of a second cousin’s house in Menlo Park, about to view the full moon rise. We carried paper lanterns with sputtering candles, and walked toward the swimming pool. And in that pool, I saw the moon appear and shimmer, a golden melon and not just a flat disc, as it had always appeared to me before. I heard people moan with happiness. I saw their mouths pop open, the rims of their eyes drip with tears.

My mouth was closed, my eyes were dry. I could see the moon as clearly as they, and I could even appreciate its special glories. But why didn’t I flood in the same way? Why was their happiness tenfold what I felt? Did I lack the proper connection between the senses and the heart?

And then I realized that this was my habit. To hold back my feelings. To keep my knees from buckling. And with that knowledge, I was ready to feel whatever I wanted, as fully as I wanted. I gazed at the moon and willed myself to feel all the emotions. I waited for joy and awe to wash over me. I was determined, I was ready, I was anticipating, expecting, hoping … but nothing happened. My legs stood strong and straight.

That night of the moon viewing I realized I would always be deficient in great feeling. It was because I never had a proper mother while I was growing up. A mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place. She teaches you the nature of happiness: what is the right amount, what is too much, and the kind that makes you want more of what is bad for you. A mother helps her baby flex her first feelings of pleasure. She teaches her when to later exercise restraint, or to take squealing joy in recognizing the fluttering leaves of the gingko tree, to sense a quieter but more profound satisfaction in chancing upon an everlasting pine. A mother enables you to realize that there are different levels of beauty, and therein lie the sources of pleasure, some of which are popular and ordinary, and thus of brief value, and others of which are difficult and rare, and hence worth pursing.

But through my formative years, I had only Sweet Ma. That woman with her parched innards tried to push upon me her notion of good things—telling me to be glad I was not as bare-dressed as a tree in winter, to be grateful that the little skeleton of a girl lying in a gutter was not me, to recognize that the shade of a willow tree in unbearable heat was a happy sacrifice I could make to those who were either older or younger than I was, which was everybody, as it always turned out. I followed Sweet Ma’s instructions so that eventually I could feel not naturally, but only carefully.

When my father died, I felt loss and sadness, to be sure, but not the turmoil or devastation that my brothers and stepmother showed. With romance, I felt pangs of love, yet never the passion that overcame my friends.

But then I discovered art. I saw for the first time nature and pure feelings expressed in a form I could understand. A painting was a translation of the language of my heart. My emotions were all there—but in a painting, a sculpture. I went to museum after museum, into the labyrinths of rooms and that of my own soul. And there they were—my feelings, and all of them natural, spontaneous, truthful, and free. My heart cavorted within shapes and shadows and splashes, in patterns, repetitions, and abruptly ending lines. My soul shivered in tiny feathered strokes, one eyelash at a time.

And so I began to collect art. In this way, I was able to surround myself with the inexpressible, to exult in the souls of others. What a lifelong debt I owe to art!

As for Sweet Ma, she remained her bitter, complaining self. When my father died, I put her in an apartment in my building and hired a housekeeper who could keep things tidy and cook Chinese food for her. Sweet Ma never lifted a finger, except to scold me or anyone else who was unlucky enough to cross her path. When she became infirm, I put her in the best of senior residences, at great expense to myself. She was not grateful. She called it Death’s Waiting Room. For years, I told myself to be patient, knowing she would soon die. Surely her explosive anger might cause a similar effect on the blood vessels or her brain or heart. She was nearly ninety-one and I only sixty-three when I passed her by and flew out of this world.

Oh, how she wept. She recalled our past together as such a rosy relationship that I wondered if she was more senile than I thought. Or could it be that she had actually had a change of heart? When I discerned the answer, I changed my mind about her as well. Whereas I once looked forward to her end, I now wish her a long, long life. Let her not leave Death’s Waiting Room and join me as her companion in the afterlife.

WHEN THE FIRST PART of my funeral ended, the crowd drifted down the steps of the de Young Museum and onto Tea Garden Drive. My casket was sealed with wax, placed on dollies, and quickly wheeled to a delivery bay, where a hearse was waiting. The hearse drove out of the parking lot, just as giggly children from the Chinese American International School—to which I had always been a generous benefactor—left the bandshell in the Music Concourse with their sweet-sounding instruments and filed behind the hearse. From the green wooden benches rose another two dozen students wearing white sackcloth—loose jackets, pants, and caps, costumes left over from the previous year’s spring pageant. They fell in behind the band. Two sturdy boys on stilts held up a poster-mounted photo of me in my Himalayan hairdo. A wreath of flowers framed my blown-up face and its too-broad smile. Dear me, it looked as if I were campaigning to become Mayor of the Underworld!

In a short while, the mourners, as well as a dozen or so tourists on rented Rollerblades and a few dozen more who had been expelled from the gates of the Japanese Tea Garden, gathered behind the band, following the busy hand signals of the museum staff. The flutes trilled, the cymbals tinkled, the drums rumbled, and a flock of fat pigeons flew up with a windy flapping of wings, and that was how we began our walk to pay tribute to “a great lady lost.”

Though it was December, the weather was sunny and without wind, which made everyone feel enlivened, unable to grieve with true despair. Those who had signed up for the ill-fated Burma Road trip were ambling in a cluster toward the rear. They were the ones I decided to join, listening at the back of their minds. As we were circling the concourse, Harry Bailley brought up the subject of canceling. “What fun would it be without our Bibi?” he said in that rich baritone I have always loved listening to on his television show. “Who would tell us what to savor, what to see?” All very touching questions.

Marlena Chu was quick to agree. “It just wouldn’t be the same,” she said in an elegant voice, tinged with an accent shaped by her Shanghainese birth, her childhood in São Paulo, her British teachers, and her studies at the Sorbonne. She came from a family of former vast wealth and power, who were reduced on their exodus to South America to becoming merely comfortably well-off. Marlena bought fine art as a professional curator for private collections and commissioned sculptural installations for corporations setting up their international headquarters in far-flung places. I also happened to know that she had a potential new client in Milan. She would have been relieved to have a legitimate reason to cancel the Burma trip. However, her twelve-year-old daughter, Esme, who dreamed of helping Burmese orphans and had bragged to her teacher and classmates of this noble cause, would have protested unceasingly had she been told they were now going to fashionable Italy instead.

How I knew all this, I had no notion at first, didn’t even wonder how I knew. But I sensed others as clearly as I sensed myself; their feelings became mine. I was privy to their secret thoughts: their motives and desires, guilt feelings and regrets, joys and fears, as well as the shades of truth within what they said, and what they refrained from saying. The thoughts swam about me like schools of colorful fish, and as people spoke, their true feelings dove through me in a flash. It was that shocking and effortless. The Mind of Others—that’s what the Buddha would have called it.

Whatever the case, with this enlarged consciousness, I eavesdropped on my friends as they discussed the upcoming Burma trip. “To tell the truth,” I heard Roxanne Scarangello say, “I’ve been asking myself why I even agreed to go to Burma.” This was a small jab at her husband, Dwight Massey, who had booked them on the trip without gaining her full enthusiasm. It could be argued that she had never said no, not absolutely. While she was busy with a critical part of her research, she told him to make the arrangements but said she wouldn’t mind another trip to the Galápagos, so she could further document ecological changes and their effects on the endemic species of the islands. That was the topic of her forthcoming book. She was an evolutionary biologist, a Darwin scholar, and a MacArthur fellow.

Her husband was a behavioral psychologist who had once been her student; he was thirty-one, twelve years her junior. His specialization was the neurological differences between males and females, “often erroneously referred to as differences in mean IQ,” Dwight would say, “rather than different fluencies in regional areas of the brain.” He was now assisting with the research project of another scientist, investigating the means by which squirrels were able to bury nuts in a hundred-some places, without any discernible pattern except a roughly circular one, and then months later find the nuts again. What strategies did females use to bury and find the nuts? What strategies did the males use? Were they different? Which were more efficient? It was an interesting project, but it was not Dwight’s. He was an underling. His career thus far had been determined more by the universities where Roxanne was sought.

Dwight had worshipped Roxanne unquestioningly when they first paired up—this was ten years back, shortly after she appeared in Esquire’s “Women We Love” issue. He was twenty-one, her brightest student. In recent times he more frequently competed with her intellectually, as well as physically. Both Roxanne and Dwight were appallingly athletic and loved very much to perspire. So they had much in common. But if you were to meet them for the first time, you might think, as I did, that they were an unlikely couple. She was muscular and stocky, round-faced and ruddy-complexioned, with a demeanor that was at once smart and friendly. He was lanky, had sharp-angled facial features that made him look roguish, and his manner seemed combative and arrogant. She evinced confidence, and he acted like the nippy underdog.

“It’s the ethics that bother me,” Roxanne now said. “If you go to Burma, it’s in some ways a financial collusion with a corrupt regime.”

Marlena stepped in: “Roxanne makes a very good point. When we signed up, it seemed that the regime was improving matters. They were on the verge of some kind of rapprochement with that woman, the Nobel Peace Prize winner—”

“Aung San Suu Kyi,” said Dwight.

“—and to go,” Marlena continued, “when many are honoring the boycott, well, it’s similar to crossing a picket line, I think—”