By Lily Chen
“You’re Chinese, aren’t you?”
The question stumps her, gives her a slight pause. “Well. Yes, I am.”
“Were you born there?”
“No. I was born here. My parents are from China.”
“Do you speak Chinese?”
“Um. I used to a lot more. Not so much now.” The pain of that statement feels cavernous, a pit so deep and dark that she cannot see the bottom of it.
Mei is standing like an island amid a sea of people at an Asian grocery store. It’s the day before the Lunisolar New Year, winter melting into spring thaw, and she’s never felt more lost or alone. The cold metal of the shopping basket handle sears into her palm. She’s hit by a sudden wave of fatigue at the thought of making her way through the crowd, pushing past the crush and believing that she belongs there. Everyone seems to be shopping with their families or friends, except her. She hears small children babbling to their parents in Chinese, and the emotion that rises in her is almost inexplicable. A strange combination of wistful, resentful, and confused. Too complex to unpack in the dried food section.
Trailing up and down the aisles, she picks out a few things with an uncertain hand, a pathetic selection compared to the full carts that maneuver around her. Nothing substantial. Chips, crackers, instant noodles. She remembers the taste from childhood, ghosting her tongue.
Towards the back of the store, the seafood section is crowded by people clamoring to get the freshest pick, with rows and rows of gleaming fish carcasses laid bare on beds of ice. She can’t tear her gaze from the abjectness of it all—the glassy, unseeing eyeballs and gaping mouths, snow pink underneath their frozen bodies from the slow ooze of blood—and she imagines choking on spindly bones caught lengthwise against her throat. She doesn’t know much about celebrating the New Year, the nuanced traditions and superstitions lost to her in a fog of grief, but at least she knows to eat fish—though the thought of taking home an entire fish, bones and all, causes unease to pool in her stomach.
Surrounding all the commotion are bubbling tanks filled with living lobsters, claws bound by thick rubber bands. Their armor is obsidian in the artificially lit enclosure. Though their beady eyes bulge from their exoskeletons, they are blind to what’s in front of them, rendered sightless from the bright lights inside the grocery store. They sit on their haunches and flick their wiry antennae back and forth, trying to feel something, anything, in the murky water.
There’s a small area to the side, away from the crowd, antiseptic under the fluorescent glare. Skinned, deboned, filleted portioned pieces of fish wrapped in plastic. The dirty work already done by someone else. Mei picks up a Styrofoam tray, inspecting how the connective tissue slices across the flesh in neat, white lines. Embarrassment blooms behind her ribcage, and she drops the package of halibut into her basket before she can second-guess herself any further.
She returns to her tiny, gray apartment that night and cooks herself the fish, frying it with only salt and pepper to adorn it. She’s no chef, not like her parents; her kitchen is as bare as her own skills. Sitting alone at the dinner table with a single serving of fish on a plate, she searches through her memories of celebrating with her family as a child. Nothing comes to mind. Time has wiped her clean. She might as well be a blank slate, a nothing person all alone in the world. The phone hangs silent on the wall, with no family members to call it, with nobody worth calling.
Maybe speaking the language and being part of the culture are the same thing. There are certain things that are known, intrinsically, and she doesn’t know them. Not anymore. Inside her mouth, a small fold of tissue anchors her tongue. Unmoored in that grocery store, she was mute and lifeless, her lingual frenulum, her lifeline, severed. The Chinese characters were too complex for her brain to decipher, scrawled on shiny plastic packages that threatened to cling to her yawning mouth and suffocate her. Muzzled by shame. Her eyes saw but could not understand. She couldn’t read anything, couldn’t say anything, didn’t know what to do, like a stupid child. Alone with no parent to hold her hand and teach her what she lacked.
The fish is eaten in three or four gulps, the delicate flesh macerated by her teeth and saliva. Her jaw works it into a paste, smooth and slippery on her tongue, before she swallows it. She’s much too old to be feeling these childish emotions. Instead, she busies herself with washing her single frying pan and dinner plate. Soon, all the evidence of her New Year’s meal is spiraling down the drain, her dishes sparkling clean once more. Not a fork out of place. It is as if her kitchen had never been disturbed.
This is the life she carefully constructed for herself. A quiet corner in the chaotic world, and she only had to rend the memories of family from her; she carved them out of her heart and left it lying on the table, bloody and still alive.
The sadness, years scabbed over at this point, pulses in tandem with her heartbeat. A subtle kind of pain that sneaks into her body and hides dormant in her bones.
At night, sleep overtakes her. In Mei’s dream, her mother calls to her, her voice carried towards her on a sweet spring breeze. Her lips purse together and open like a flower in bloom as she says her daughter’s name. Mei. It means plum blossom, delicate whisper-white petals fanned out around gold stamen.
“Where did you go?” Mei asks. She sounds like she’s underwater, mouth moving with no sound coming out. “Why did you leave me?” She tries to grab her mother’s wrinkled hand, but it disappears from her grasp.
“Mei. Mei. Mei,” her mother says, staring off into the distance. Unable to recognize her own beloved daughter or hear her voice. Chanting her name in salvation. Her tears spill over the hollows of her orbital bones, her mottled cheeks glistening. “Where did you go?” Her eyes are all black, pupil and iris and sclera dyed with ink, wetness shining with a glare from some unseen sun.
When Mei wakes, eyes open to her stark white ceiling, it’s another day. Sunlight streams into her bedroom from an east-facing window, painting her walls a buttery yellow. With the new year comes spring. She combs her long black hair smooth until it falls in a sheet down her back. Splashing her face with water, she scrubs until the sleep cobwebs are cleared out.
Her apartment is small, maybe even worn-down, but it’s hers. Every inch of it sticks close to her and engulfs her in its embrace, and she relishes in its familiar touch.
She remembers to find something red to wear, for good luck. A ratty blouse unearthed from the back of her closet. Though it should be spring now, the air still carries with it a persistent chill. Bundled in her scarf and coat, her key sticks in the car door until she can jimmy it open with force. The rusty hinges whine in indignation. Her old beater rumbles to life with first a sputter, then a low growl. The radio, tuned to her last station, turns on, tinny speakers pulsating with disco music. She never liked disco, but she keeps it on to have some company during her morning drive.
When she arrives at work, she sees the day has already started for the bed-and-breakfast, a historic Victorian-style mansion tucked behind the local country club. Tourists arrive in droves for a taste of quaint yet luxurious living. The dining room is full, the outside quiet consumed by breakfast chatter and utensils scraping on plates. With massive chandeliers dripping with crystals and gilded crown molding soaring across the sky-high ceiling, stepping inside feels like opening a door to another life in another time, where the rich expect to dine in elegance at any hour. A relic that lives on.
There’s no time to do anything but jump in headfirst. She pours countless refills of coffee, juice, and tea, a sunny smile affixed to her face. Pleasant small talk with the out-of-towners flows freely. Plates of steaming food hoisted atop her shoulder on a sturdy black tray, she flits from table to table with the practiced precision of a ballet dancer.
“Dear, won’t you bring me another order of bacon?” a grandfatherly man asks with a coy wink. He pats his stomach, already bulging out of his tight dress shirt.
His wife gasps in horror. “Darling, your cholesterol!” She frowns at Mei, a hand heavy with diamond bracelets resting on her husband’s arm. “Won’t you at least pat the grease dry with a napkin or something?”
Mei brings the bacon, two pieces crisped up to a toasty brown. In the shape of a perfect eleven bisecting the plate, the bacon’s excess fat glistens under the crystal chandeliers.
On her break, she huddles out back by the dumpsters, her breath exhaling warm steam. Her right hand clutches a mug of coffee, which she chugs in between bites of the stale baguette held in her left. The only sustenance she managed to scavenge in her haste to leave the stuffy dining room.
“So, anyone do anything fun last night?” a line cook asks. He’s older than Mei, exposed forearms decorated in swirls of dark tattoos. He flicks ash from his burning cigarette onto the wet asphalt. It glows red-hot before fading into nothing, a firefly dying.
“It was Tuesday yesterday, Jon,” the hostess replies, rolling her heavily lined eyes. A matching cigarette dangles from her fingers. “Does anyone do anything fun on a Tuesday night?”
Jon shrugs. “Sorry for wanting to incite a little conversation, Deb.”
Mei manages a small smile. A real one breaking through her porcelain face. “I made dinner for myself,” she offers. “Fish. It was okay.”
He raises an eyebrow at her, face contorted as he blows a plume of smoke from his sideways mouth. “Mei? Cooking? I never thought I’d see the day.”
Her smile morphs into a laugh, gently coaxed from her throat. “Well, it was a special occasion.”
In the quiet lull between breakfast and lunch rush, she rolls silverware into cloth napkins by the dozens. Under the chandelier’s glow, every scratch on the forks and knives catches her eye, their scars glimmering. The completed stack beside her grows taller and taller until she has no more utensils left to enrobe. When the conversation swells around her, she falls into the familiar embrace of silence.
“My parents are asking when I’m going to get a real job,” a waiter says. He’s polishing water spots from wine glasses, weapons brandished in his hands—a soft cloth and a teapot filled with hot water. “Like, give me a break. I’m only thirty-one.”
A fellow waitress snorts, reaching past Mei to grab another bespeckled glass. The edges of her blonde ponytail tickle Mei’s nose. “Only thirty-one? Is that supposed to be young?”
“Ha ha, you’re so funny, Reena.” His sarcastic laugh is reminiscent of a squawking rooster at the break of dawn. “Mei, come on, back me up here.” He shoots a pleading glance Mei’s way. “Thirty-one isn’t that old, is it?”
His dark, sad eyes pull at her heartstrings. “Of course not!” Mei replies, voice straining under the effort of trying to appear cheerful. “Everyone says thirties are the new twenties, Simon.”
“Told you, Reena.” His polishing becomes more aggressive, cloth squeaking against glass. “Your parents don’t care that you’re waiting tables, right?” he asks, looking sideways at Mei.
Her cheeks fill with blood. Discomfort buzzes across every inch of her skin like a live wire. “Um, no. Not really.” Although it has been years since her parents passed away, every time she talks about them feels like the first time. That waver in her voice, the tears that threaten to overflow. Her weakness on full display. If she had it her way, she would never speak about them again so she’d never have to bear this terrible feeling.
Simon huffs a sigh. “Ah. You’re lucky then.”
Mei stares straight ahead at a smudged handprint on an otherwise pristine beige wall, her eyes straining so hard that it begins to mutate into something else. She makes a noncommittal noise in response, and he moves on to other, more interesting topics of conversation. Inside her, a strange storm is brewing. Lucky… she supposes she is lucky that her parents aren’t alive to weigh her down with their expectations.
For the first time in a long time, a memory rises to the surface of the tempest inside her mind, white foam gathering atop a wine-dark sea. Her parents, operating the small Chinese restaurant they called their own. Her father in the back of the kitchen, her mother waiting tables. Not unlike her. Their faces are cloudy, sorrow’s fingers swirled in wet oil paint. Her nose pressed up against cold glass, she can’t reach past the threshold to untangle reality from her disjointed memory.
It was not something she allowed herself to remember, until now, with the floodgates overrun. The sudden emergence of a forgotten past, even in its fractured form, leaves her reeling, bones rattling with breathless gasps. The warmth of ignorance, stolen from her.
During the lunchtime rush, Mei runs on autopilot, her mind numb to everything. She steps with ease into her role of friendly local waitress, and lets her thoughts wander elsewhere. Her parents, lying in their cold and lonely grave, and their only daughter too cowardly to visit them. Her stomach churns, her tongue awash with the sour taste of guilt.
In the kitchen, cooks shout at each other in what sounds like a dozen different languages. Pots and pans bang together, hot oil sizzling as it makes contact with anything they throw in there. Standing by the back door, hovering around the border of the fierce aliveness inside and the quiet dread outside, Mei watches as the chefs work in their individual stations to fulfill every request from their persnickety clientele. Her eye catches on the still-moving lobster lying on a plastic cutting board. Though its claws are rubber-banded shut, its legs scuttle with the barest hint of life. Someone must’ve ordered the poached lobster, and this poor guy got the short end of the stick. Its deep black eyes stare right through Mei, so dark that they reflect the sheen of the kitchen lights in their unknowable depths. It seems to peer right into the core of everything Mei wanted to hide away with its X-ray vision, unraveling the threads with its insistent gaze, unflinching even in the face of death.
When Jon drops it into a pot of water on the stove, she has to look away.
After dinner service, she counts her tips and says goodbye to her coworkers. Night has fallen now. She emerges from the great double doors with a box of leftover food tucked under her arm. Her vision swims in front of her, starbursts dancing across her tired eyes, as she fumbles with her car keys. With an ache in her chest and lead in her limbs, she drives to the looming wrought iron gates encircling the cemetery before she loses her nerve.
Out in the damp cold, the darkness around Mei is all-consuming, clinging to her like a second skin. Her heavy boots leave imprints in the sand as she navigates the curving paths, passing row after row of glowing headstones. When she finally arrives where her family lies, she drops to her knees. An act of piety. A soundless cry. The wet grass bites into her skin, its bitter scrape felt even through her thick jeans. Her hair falls around her face like a funeral shroud.
“Mom. Dad,” Mei whispers. The words tumble from her lips in Chinese, awkward and unwieldy. “It’s the New Year now. I tried to remember how to celebrate. For the both of you. I miss you. I’m sorry I haven’t been back since . . . everything happened. It’s been . . . difficult for me.” She tries to say everything in her forgotten language, her voice stuttering in a haze of uncertainty. Her tongue feels like it’s drawn tight in her mouth. “I’m sorry I tried to forget you. Please forgive me.”
It’s too dark for her to discern what’s inscribed on the tombstone, but she looks at it regardless. Characters she cannot read, so what does it matter? She wills her eyes to pierce through the night and see what she wishes would appear instead—their faces amid ghostly figures, untainted by fallible memory. With every passing year, she forgets more and more—her parents, her past life, her culture slipping away from her.
She touches the smooth granite of her parents’ tombstone. The cold burns into her like a brand. In the foolishness and arrogance that came astride youth, she thought she didn’t need to remember. She thought overcoming grief was to amputate it from herself, so she could be infallible. As impenetrable as the rock beneath her fingers.
If she cracks open her skull, what would spill out of it? Without memory, without history, then who is she?
Mei gazes straight ahead, into the unseeing black of night. She cannot tell where she ends and the rest of the world begins. Delineations blur in the wet mist. Tears begin to flow down her cheeks, icy rivers falling from the heavens. High above her, the moon is the barest sliver of itself. A plum blossom blooms even in winter. Piece by fragmented piece, she stitches her memory back together, reeling it in from the ether. She looks through the stone, through the pain, through the past and into the future. She remembers the lobster’s eyes, the piercing strength in its stare, and holds it close. She won’t look away this time.
Lily Chen lives in San Diego, California, where she writes for a living during the day and tries to write for personal endeavors at night. She studied literature and writing at UC San Diego.
