Mouth and Heart
by Jessie Li
Second Runner-Up, 2023 Fiction Contest
My father is a simple man.
When I was in high school, he came to cheer for me at a cross-country race. It was October and raining, a torrential and unforgiving downpour that turned the hills into a sludge that I climbed, with muddied hands and knees, while water soaked into my shoes and softened my toes. The course was three-point-one miles—five kilometers—and after I had passed the first mile marker, scrambling up one of those big slushy hills, my father emerged, standing on the sidewalk, under a bright yellow umbrella. He looked alien, a burst of color before the grey sky.
I broke into a smile, blinking through the rain, and gave him a big wave.
But he shook his head. “Don’t run too fast!” He shouted. “It’s okay if you can’t finish!”
I stopped waving. I pumped my arms faster and tipped my head back until the rain rippled down my throat.
That was the first and last race he watched me run.
When I was in high school, he came to cheer for me at a cross-country race. It was October and raining, a torrential and unforgiving downpour that turned the hills into a sludge that I climbed, with muddied hands and knees, while water soaked into my shoes and softened my toes. The course was three-point-one miles—five kilometers—and after I had passed the first mile marker, scrambling up one of those big slushy hills, my father emerged, standing on the sidewalk, under a bright yellow umbrella. He looked alien, a burst of color before the grey sky.
I broke into a smile, blinking through the rain, and gave him a big wave.
But he shook his head. “Don’t run too fast!” He shouted. “It’s okay if you can’t finish!”
I stopped waving. I pumped my arms faster and tipped my head back until the rain rippled down my throat.
That was the first and last race he watched me run.
*
In China, my father had studied geology, which was why we didn’t attend the Chinese Baptist church across the main road from our neighborhood, in the suburbs of Virginia. The earth was four and a half billion years old, my father said, so there was no reason we should believe in scriptures that denied that. But there was something to learn from the stories of Jesus. A poster of the Golden Rule hung on the wall of my room, its letters flecked with glitter, which fell over my pillow and left shining spots in my hair when I woke.
My mother had died when I was born, a loss which only struck me as strange when I started elementary school and realized that everyone else had two parents, and each parent had been assigned a role—the mother was the one who bought your school supplies, and the father was the one whose job you bragged about during recess.
I had no choice but to lie about my life.
“My house has a swimming pool,” I announced one day in the cafeteria.
Sophie and her best friend Violet sat across from me. I knew Violet from Chinese School, where she was regarded as cool. She wore clothing from Abercrombie & Fitch, and I coveted her teal drawstring dress, with the fuchsia moose embroidered on the chest.
Violet was eating apple sticks; the red skins glistened under the fluorescent lights.
“That’s not true,” she said.
“It is,” I insisted. “My father built it, and there are flowers growing all around—”
I paused to remember the names of flowers.
“—Daisies and pansies and hydrangeas,” I said, satisfied with the last one. “You’ll see when you come to my birthday party, it’s so big, it’s bigger than the basketball court.”
My birthday was in July, so they would never know.
Sophie leaned forward, and cast a knowing look at Violet. “What about your mom?”
“My mom’s dead.” I laughed. “She was racing a horse. She won, and then it threw her off.”
I had been reading a series about a girl who was in love with a horse. I felt sorry for the picture on the kitchen shelf, in a ceramic frame with chipped roses, where my mother, whose face was the size of my thumb, lived suspended in time. She wore a knee-length dress, puffed at the shoulders, and clutched a red bouquet. My father, wearing a suit, wrapped one arm around her waist. I had never seen him wear a suit in real life.
“My mom said your family’s poor,” Violet said. “So you can’t have a pool.”
Sophie let out a shriek. I thought she might come to my rescue, but she was laughing.
My arms turned hot. “Can too,” I said, and stuck my tongue out, and ate my chicken filet sandwich.
The truth was that nobody ever came to our house. As a result, I believed adults didn’t have friends, and only other children did. It was a reassurance that eventually I would grow old and it would be acceptable to be a loner.
My mother had died when I was born, a loss which only struck me as strange when I started elementary school and realized that everyone else had two parents, and each parent had been assigned a role—the mother was the one who bought your school supplies, and the father was the one whose job you bragged about during recess.
I had no choice but to lie about my life.
“My house has a swimming pool,” I announced one day in the cafeteria.
Sophie and her best friend Violet sat across from me. I knew Violet from Chinese School, where she was regarded as cool. She wore clothing from Abercrombie & Fitch, and I coveted her teal drawstring dress, with the fuchsia moose embroidered on the chest.
Violet was eating apple sticks; the red skins glistened under the fluorescent lights.
“That’s not true,” she said.
“It is,” I insisted. “My father built it, and there are flowers growing all around—”
I paused to remember the names of flowers.
“—Daisies and pansies and hydrangeas,” I said, satisfied with the last one. “You’ll see when you come to my birthday party, it’s so big, it’s bigger than the basketball court.”
My birthday was in July, so they would never know.
Sophie leaned forward, and cast a knowing look at Violet. “What about your mom?”
“My mom’s dead.” I laughed. “She was racing a horse. She won, and then it threw her off.”
I had been reading a series about a girl who was in love with a horse. I felt sorry for the picture on the kitchen shelf, in a ceramic frame with chipped roses, where my mother, whose face was the size of my thumb, lived suspended in time. She wore a knee-length dress, puffed at the shoulders, and clutched a red bouquet. My father, wearing a suit, wrapped one arm around her waist. I had never seen him wear a suit in real life.
“My mom said your family’s poor,” Violet said. “So you can’t have a pool.”
Sophie let out a shriek. I thought she might come to my rescue, but she was laughing.
My arms turned hot. “Can too,” I said, and stuck my tongue out, and ate my chicken filet sandwich.
The truth was that nobody ever came to our house. As a result, I believed adults didn’t have friends, and only other children did. It was a reassurance that eventually I would grow old and it would be acceptable to be a loner.
*
My father liked to teach me Chinese sayings. He didn’t do this intentionally, out of any desire to educate me, but they were always bubbling up when he spoke. Inevitably, something he said would remind him of a particular proverb.
One of his favorites was a story about Kong Rong and the pears. I had a picture book that illustrated Kong Rong—a cheerful boy with a squashed face and two rounded pigtails. He and his brothers darted around a table with a bowl of sunny green pears. Kong Rong always let his brothers have the larger pears, taking the smaller ones for himself. This demonstrated humility and kindness, but I found it pathetic that he always yielded to someone else.
I rarely remembered my father’s sayings unless he had repeated them many times. Often, I even tuned them out, because they were not useful to me, in the way that most things I learned in school were not useful. For instance, my father didn’t know about the history of Jamestown, which we had spent nearly a month studying, yet it didn’t seem to pose problems for him.
One day, when my father picked me up from school, he was listening to a game show on the radio. This round involved guessing the original languages of famous proverbs. Most of them ended up being from Arabic, French, or Chinese, but my father had never heard of any of them.
Then the announcer said, “To have a heart’s eye.”
My father muttered the words, translating them back into Chinese: 有心眼.
“This is from Chinese!” He exclaimed.
It meant to be clever—wily. Like a third eye in Buddhism, or Hinduism.
“Like the other day, in the lab,” he said excitedly, gesturing out the window.
“Betty was crying.”
Betty was another postdoctoral fellow in his lab, but she was much younger than him. He had been a postdoctoral fellow for my entire life.
They were writing up an article on landslides. “I’ve been leading the project for a year,” my father said. “But Betty said she won’t be able to get a job next year if she doesn’t get first author this time.”
The show ended and he turned the volume down.
I knew that if my father didn’t lead this project, he might not have his fellowship renewed. And then we would have to move.
“Why would you let her do that?” I lurched forward from the back seat, but the seat belt snapped me back.
Through the rearview mirror, I watched him smile as we turned into our neighborhood. The houses shrunk as we drove down the street.
I realized that my father might be stupid.
I thought of the boarders at home. My father had started renting out rooms to graduate students from China who were seeking a cheap place to stay. I thought of the two men, Little Wang and Samuel, who often cooked. They used so many peppercorns that the smoke scalded my eyes; the black bean sauce cast dunglike stains on the wallpaper. I thought of the woman, Cherry, and how she always left her underwear to dry on the towel rack, where the water dripped over my toothbrush. Brown stains crept along the lace trim and the sight made me want to vomit. This was how my father wanted us to live?
My father turned the volume up as we approached the house. A Beethoven sonata played, one of his happier ones.
“It’s not fair!” I cried.
“Life is not fair,” he said. “But that’s an American saying.”
When I was in college, I discovered a saying opposite from the one on the radio show: 缺 心眼. To lack a heart’s eye. It meant someone unsophisticated, simple. It meant my father.
One of his favorites was a story about Kong Rong and the pears. I had a picture book that illustrated Kong Rong—a cheerful boy with a squashed face and two rounded pigtails. He and his brothers darted around a table with a bowl of sunny green pears. Kong Rong always let his brothers have the larger pears, taking the smaller ones for himself. This demonstrated humility and kindness, but I found it pathetic that he always yielded to someone else.
I rarely remembered my father’s sayings unless he had repeated them many times. Often, I even tuned them out, because they were not useful to me, in the way that most things I learned in school were not useful. For instance, my father didn’t know about the history of Jamestown, which we had spent nearly a month studying, yet it didn’t seem to pose problems for him.
One day, when my father picked me up from school, he was listening to a game show on the radio. This round involved guessing the original languages of famous proverbs. Most of them ended up being from Arabic, French, or Chinese, but my father had never heard of any of them.
Then the announcer said, “To have a heart’s eye.”
My father muttered the words, translating them back into Chinese: 有心眼.
“This is from Chinese!” He exclaimed.
It meant to be clever—wily. Like a third eye in Buddhism, or Hinduism.
“Like the other day, in the lab,” he said excitedly, gesturing out the window.
“Betty was crying.”
Betty was another postdoctoral fellow in his lab, but she was much younger than him. He had been a postdoctoral fellow for my entire life.
They were writing up an article on landslides. “I’ve been leading the project for a year,” my father said. “But Betty said she won’t be able to get a job next year if she doesn’t get first author this time.”
The show ended and he turned the volume down.
I knew that if my father didn’t lead this project, he might not have his fellowship renewed. And then we would have to move.
“Why would you let her do that?” I lurched forward from the back seat, but the seat belt snapped me back.
Through the rearview mirror, I watched him smile as we turned into our neighborhood. The houses shrunk as we drove down the street.
I realized that my father might be stupid.
I thought of the boarders at home. My father had started renting out rooms to graduate students from China who were seeking a cheap place to stay. I thought of the two men, Little Wang and Samuel, who often cooked. They used so many peppercorns that the smoke scalded my eyes; the black bean sauce cast dunglike stains on the wallpaper. I thought of the woman, Cherry, and how she always left her underwear to dry on the towel rack, where the water dripped over my toothbrush. Brown stains crept along the lace trim and the sight made me want to vomit. This was how my father wanted us to live?
My father turned the volume up as we approached the house. A Beethoven sonata played, one of his happier ones.
“It’s not fair!” I cried.
“Life is not fair,” he said. “But that’s an American saying.”
When I was in college, I discovered a saying opposite from the one on the radio show: 缺 心眼. To lack a heart’s eye. It meant someone unsophisticated, simple. It meant my father.
*
We lived in harmony for many years.
My father continued to pick me up, even when I was in high school. It was easier for him now that I had joined the track and cross-country team. Practice lasted until the sun set, and he no longer had to go back to work after fetching me.
One afternoon, I was waiting for him by the curb in front of the school, with my teammate Ashley. It was late March. The dogwoods bloomed, lining the sidewalks with white puckered leaves and forging a canopy over the trails. By being fast, I had made friends with the other girls on the varsity team. At first I had lingered around them, to their suspicion, but Ashley had quickly pulled me into the circle. Now I was invited to their pasta dinners, held at houses with double ovens and pink marble floors and two-story foyers with Roman columns.
“You’re so funny,” Ashley liked to say, when I hadn’t done anything funny at all. She had an easy laugh, and liked to talk about how I was different from the other Asians.
“Con-nie,” she said. “Let’s beat that Adams girl next week.”
The other girls and I often rotated between the top five at races, but usually the girl from Adams High—a tall, greenishly pale girl who looked like a praying mantis—outran us all.
A honk. My father’s signal. I waved goodbye to Ashley and jogged to the car.
“Good news,” my father said, as I ducked in and dropped my backpack on the carpet. He had been gazing at the sunset, but turned back to greet me.
The university would renew his postdoctoral fellowship again, so we wouldn’t have to move. It had been renewed twice already. But this time, he promised, he would publish something good—something groundbreaking. His supervisor had hinted that a full-time lecturer position might open soon, and he would recommend him for that.
“You really should be a professor by now,” I said sulkily, “but this is great, congrats.”
I felt sorry for qualifying my enthusiasm.
“We should celebrate.”
He drove us to the creamery, where I ordered a peach-flavored ice cream. It instantly agitated my empty, post-practice stomach. He asked for a scoop of chocolate in a cone.
“My treat,” I hollered at the register. I paid with cash I had earned from babysitting.
We sat outside on metal chairs, where I told him my plan for college applications in the fall. Every week, I had been receiving brochures in the mail, glossy trifold images of leaf-spangled campuses, gleeful students, gleaming bookstacks in classrooms. They all enticed me in some way; they signaled an elsewhere I lusted after. From my research, I had chosen a slate of schools that provided scholarships—primarily on the East Coast, but some distance from our home.
My father wanted to know why I wouldn’t apply to the university where he worked.
“You could live at home,” he said, as we returned to the car. “You could save money.”
The new boarders were three men, sloppy in the bathroom and out. I cleaned the toilet on weekends, scraping dried excrement off the back of the seat with an old toothbrush, while my father tidied the kitchen. Smells suffused the house—fish, meat, piss, sweat—and my fear of stinking at school had led me to store my clothes in knotted trash bags. In the morning, before I dressed, I held the clothes to my face and sniffed deeply, hoping I wouldn’t detect anything.
“I just want to see something new,” I said.
“But as a backup, at least.”
I turned toward the window. The streetlights flickered past.
At home, my father jammed the key into the lock and lifted the handle before pushing it back down. The bolt often got stuck, you had to jiggle it a certain way for it to give.
“I’m not like you,” I said, as we entered, leaving our shoes in a pile by the door and changing into slippers. “I actually want to do something with my life.”
His briefcase dropped to the ground, where the buckle fell with a clang.
I thought perhaps he hadn’t heard me, when he said, “What do you think I’ve done with my life?” He said this sharply, loudly.
“Wasted it,” I said, feeling a surge of boldness from those familiar words I had heard—admonishments from teachers at school, warnings from inspirational posters. But my voice had grown soft as I delivered the line. I regretted it already.
“What?” He shuffled over, his slippers flapping against the hardwood. “Say it again.”
I met his eyes. “Wasted. It.” I said the two words slowly and clearly, and with each syllable I gained power; an electricity pulsed up my arms and danced in my chest.
I waited for him to respond, and the moment seemed to expand into minutes, until a ray of light slashed into the room. A car’s headlights, one of the boarders pulling into the driveway.
“If I have,” he said simply, finally, “it’s because of you.”
My father continued to pick me up, even when I was in high school. It was easier for him now that I had joined the track and cross-country team. Practice lasted until the sun set, and he no longer had to go back to work after fetching me.
One afternoon, I was waiting for him by the curb in front of the school, with my teammate Ashley. It was late March. The dogwoods bloomed, lining the sidewalks with white puckered leaves and forging a canopy over the trails. By being fast, I had made friends with the other girls on the varsity team. At first I had lingered around them, to their suspicion, but Ashley had quickly pulled me into the circle. Now I was invited to their pasta dinners, held at houses with double ovens and pink marble floors and two-story foyers with Roman columns.
“You’re so funny,” Ashley liked to say, when I hadn’t done anything funny at all. She had an easy laugh, and liked to talk about how I was different from the other Asians.
“Con-nie,” she said. “Let’s beat that Adams girl next week.”
The other girls and I often rotated between the top five at races, but usually the girl from Adams High—a tall, greenishly pale girl who looked like a praying mantis—outran us all.
A honk. My father’s signal. I waved goodbye to Ashley and jogged to the car.
“Good news,” my father said, as I ducked in and dropped my backpack on the carpet. He had been gazing at the sunset, but turned back to greet me.
The university would renew his postdoctoral fellowship again, so we wouldn’t have to move. It had been renewed twice already. But this time, he promised, he would publish something good—something groundbreaking. His supervisor had hinted that a full-time lecturer position might open soon, and he would recommend him for that.
“You really should be a professor by now,” I said sulkily, “but this is great, congrats.”
I felt sorry for qualifying my enthusiasm.
“We should celebrate.”
He drove us to the creamery, where I ordered a peach-flavored ice cream. It instantly agitated my empty, post-practice stomach. He asked for a scoop of chocolate in a cone.
“My treat,” I hollered at the register. I paid with cash I had earned from babysitting.
We sat outside on metal chairs, where I told him my plan for college applications in the fall. Every week, I had been receiving brochures in the mail, glossy trifold images of leaf-spangled campuses, gleeful students, gleaming bookstacks in classrooms. They all enticed me in some way; they signaled an elsewhere I lusted after. From my research, I had chosen a slate of schools that provided scholarships—primarily on the East Coast, but some distance from our home.
My father wanted to know why I wouldn’t apply to the university where he worked.
“You could live at home,” he said, as we returned to the car. “You could save money.”
The new boarders were three men, sloppy in the bathroom and out. I cleaned the toilet on weekends, scraping dried excrement off the back of the seat with an old toothbrush, while my father tidied the kitchen. Smells suffused the house—fish, meat, piss, sweat—and my fear of stinking at school had led me to store my clothes in knotted trash bags. In the morning, before I dressed, I held the clothes to my face and sniffed deeply, hoping I wouldn’t detect anything.
“I just want to see something new,” I said.
“But as a backup, at least.”
I turned toward the window. The streetlights flickered past.
At home, my father jammed the key into the lock and lifted the handle before pushing it back down. The bolt often got stuck, you had to jiggle it a certain way for it to give.
“I’m not like you,” I said, as we entered, leaving our shoes in a pile by the door and changing into slippers. “I actually want to do something with my life.”
His briefcase dropped to the ground, where the buckle fell with a clang.
I thought perhaps he hadn’t heard me, when he said, “What do you think I’ve done with my life?” He said this sharply, loudly.
“Wasted it,” I said, feeling a surge of boldness from those familiar words I had heard—admonishments from teachers at school, warnings from inspirational posters. But my voice had grown soft as I delivered the line. I regretted it already.
“What?” He shuffled over, his slippers flapping against the hardwood. “Say it again.”
I met his eyes. “Wasted. It.” I said the two words slowly and clearly, and with each syllable I gained power; an electricity pulsed up my arms and danced in my chest.
I waited for him to respond, and the moment seemed to expand into minutes, until a ray of light slashed into the room. A car’s headlights, one of the boarders pulling into the driveway.
“If I have,” he said simply, finally, “it’s because of you.”
*
Before I left for college, I cleaned out my room. My father wanted to put it up for rent. He stated this plainly, after I made the decision to attend a school six hours from home. We were going to hold a yard sale for the things I didn’t need, so I could have some spending money. Everything else would be covered by my scholarship.
All the books in the house had been moved to my room years ago, when we started accepting boarders. I tossed most of the books into crates—Shakespeare plays from school, an earth science textbook I had forgotten to return, a dozen Chinese books, with the binding on the right side, the pages scalloped with bug bites. I assumed they were my father’s, from another time. Each set of books unearthed other dreary treasures from the back of the shelves: hairpins and plastic rings, sticky, melted batteries, silverfish dashing into corners.
I had finished emptying one shelf when I noticed a slip of yellowed paper on the carpet. It looked like it had fallen from one of the Chinese books. The paper was thin, almost translucent, the folded lines crisp from years pressed between pages. When I opened it, I saw that it was written in Chinese, in a neat, careful script. The handwriting wasn’t my father’s; I knew his scrawl, a looping, hypnotic cursive I could never decipher.
It was a poem with eight lines of text. Each line contained seven characters, and I recognized a few: cloud, woman, wind, empty, dream, moon. But I couldn’t form a meaning.
I rushed outside, where my father was rolling the lawn mower from the garage.
“Wait!” I called from the kitchen door. The grass pricked my feet as I ran to him.
“I found this.” I waved the paper.
He wiped his fingers on his shorts before taking the note.
“It’s your mother’s writing,” he said, smiling.
“But what does it say?” Sweat fell from his eyebrows to his fingers, which he flicked away. He muttered the lines in a soft, singsong voice. It was midday, and other summer sounds crowded the air—dogs yapping, children shrieking on trampolines, lawn mowers purring from the adjoining yards.
When he finished, he said, “It’s a poem by Qiu Jin.”
I shook my head. I had never heard of her.
“She was a revolutionary. She fought against the Qing dynasty. And she was—how do you say it? A feminist. A talented poet. An idol for your mother.”
“What’s the poem about?”
“It’s written for a Japanese friend,” he said.
He tilted his face to the sun, as though searching it for an answer.
“It’s a beautiful poem, if you can try to understand it.”
I retrieved the note. He leaned toward the mower once more, and yanked the cord.
Back inside the house, I watched as my father zigzagged down the lawn with his body hunched, his arms extended straight out in front of him.
From the crates, I fished out an old Chinese-English dictionary, with a shiny red cover. Long ago, I had learned how to look up characters. But it was a complicated process that involved recognizing the radical and the number of strokes of each component of a character. I spent the afternoon writing down definitions, before struggling to construct each line.
Do not say that women are not heroes,
As I ride eastward for thousands of miles alone.
This poem’s thoughts swell like a sail in the empty ocean,
My dream takes me around the three islands under the glittering moon.
In sorrow I remember the copper camels already fallen,
Though hard working, I am ashamed to have accomplished nothing.
So I regret and grieve over my family and country,
Is it better to enjoy the spring wind as a guest?
Some of my translations didn’t make sense. For instance, what was the importance of the copper camels? And why had my mother written down this poem? She had been a scientist, like my father. What use would poetry have been to her?
All the books in the house had been moved to my room years ago, when we started accepting boarders. I tossed most of the books into crates—Shakespeare plays from school, an earth science textbook I had forgotten to return, a dozen Chinese books, with the binding on the right side, the pages scalloped with bug bites. I assumed they were my father’s, from another time. Each set of books unearthed other dreary treasures from the back of the shelves: hairpins and plastic rings, sticky, melted batteries, silverfish dashing into corners.
I had finished emptying one shelf when I noticed a slip of yellowed paper on the carpet. It looked like it had fallen from one of the Chinese books. The paper was thin, almost translucent, the folded lines crisp from years pressed between pages. When I opened it, I saw that it was written in Chinese, in a neat, careful script. The handwriting wasn’t my father’s; I knew his scrawl, a looping, hypnotic cursive I could never decipher.
It was a poem with eight lines of text. Each line contained seven characters, and I recognized a few: cloud, woman, wind, empty, dream, moon. But I couldn’t form a meaning.
I rushed outside, where my father was rolling the lawn mower from the garage.
“Wait!” I called from the kitchen door. The grass pricked my feet as I ran to him.
“I found this.” I waved the paper.
He wiped his fingers on his shorts before taking the note.
“It’s your mother’s writing,” he said, smiling.
“But what does it say?” Sweat fell from his eyebrows to his fingers, which he flicked away. He muttered the lines in a soft, singsong voice. It was midday, and other summer sounds crowded the air—dogs yapping, children shrieking on trampolines, lawn mowers purring from the adjoining yards.
When he finished, he said, “It’s a poem by Qiu Jin.”
I shook my head. I had never heard of her.
“She was a revolutionary. She fought against the Qing dynasty. And she was—how do you say it? A feminist. A talented poet. An idol for your mother.”
“What’s the poem about?”
“It’s written for a Japanese friend,” he said.
He tilted his face to the sun, as though searching it for an answer.
“It’s a beautiful poem, if you can try to understand it.”
I retrieved the note. He leaned toward the mower once more, and yanked the cord.
Back inside the house, I watched as my father zigzagged down the lawn with his body hunched, his arms extended straight out in front of him.
From the crates, I fished out an old Chinese-English dictionary, with a shiny red cover. Long ago, I had learned how to look up characters. But it was a complicated process that involved recognizing the radical and the number of strokes of each component of a character. I spent the afternoon writing down definitions, before struggling to construct each line.
Do not say that women are not heroes,
As I ride eastward for thousands of miles alone.
This poem’s thoughts swell like a sail in the empty ocean,
My dream takes me around the three islands under the glittering moon.
In sorrow I remember the copper camels already fallen,
Though hard working, I am ashamed to have accomplished nothing.
So I regret and grieve over my family and country,
Is it better to enjoy the spring wind as a guest?
Some of my translations didn’t make sense. For instance, what was the importance of the copper camels? And why had my mother written down this poem? She had been a scientist, like my father. What use would poetry have been to her?
*
I enrolled in Chinese when I started my first semester. I had chosen a class for advanced students, because I could read some Chinese. But the professor taught traditional Chinese, rather than the simplified characters I had learned in Chinese School. In the library, I spent hours poring over complex pictographs. Sometimes, in the midst of one of these fevered sessions, I would remember a saying of my father’s, and it would follow me through the day like music. I still carried my mother’s poem with me, in my wallet, but I had given up on translating it.
The professor had a regimented approach to the language that involved hours of memorization and repetition. In class, instead of attempting to speak freely, we acted in roleplaying games, with printed scripts. I began to doubt my tones, to question my pronunciations. For months, I felt as though I was learning an entirely different language, divorced from the one I spoke at home.
The professor had a regimented approach to the language that involved hours of memorization and repetition. In class, instead of attempting to speak freely, we acted in roleplaying games, with printed scripts. I began to doubt my tones, to question my pronunciations. For months, I felt as though I was learning an entirely different language, divorced from the one I spoke at home.
*
I had wanted to pursue something useful, but in the end, I majored in Chinese. After finishing college, I worked for several years, in aimless and tiring jobs at foreign policy thinktanks in Washington, D.C., until I started a doctoral degree in comparative literature, studying feminist poetics in twentieth-century China.
My father had accepted a lecturer position when I was in college, which paid more and allowed him to teach. He called often to tell stories about his students and how they lavished him with gifts—a glazed mug from the paint-your-own-pottery store, a small lamp made of a geode.
But he began to suffer while teaching classes. He became dizzy and leaned against the walls for support; his ankles became puffy as grapes. He would feel energetic and then suddenly tired. One afternoon, his body became cold, he started shivering, standing at the lectern, and a student rushed up to him to tell him he had sweated through his dress shirt.
Every weekend, he went to a Chinese restaurant called Jumbo Buffet, where he managed to charm his way into paying only a lunch fee while spending the entire day there. I joined him once. He had eaten an entire plate of shrimp for the first course, six skewers of chicken satay for the second, and was beginning the third—a tangle of crab legs.
“Don’t eat so much rice,” he said, eyeing my plate. “It’s not worth the money.”
I had been spending my days studying and writing. I no longer ran, and rarely even walked outside anymore, so my appetite had become small. Sometimes I only ate a meal a day.
“Okay,” I said. “How’s the teaching?”
He cracked open a leg. The shell splintered and scattered onto the table.
“You’re looking pale. Don’t work so hard,” he said sympathetically.
“You too.”
“You know,” my father ventured. “When your mother died, the doctor said something to me. He said your mother had worked too hard in life.” He placed the crab leg on the plate, the flesh uneaten. “She was twenty-five. Her hair had turned white. Of course, she was still beautiful. We met at the university, you know. You look like me, but you’re like her. Not so straight. Not so clear-minded.”
I nodded, but my breath caught in my throat, I couldn’t speak.
“She had seizures.” He leaned forward, rubbed his fingers vigorously on a napkin. “We didn’t know the name for it. But it’s something doctors look for now. She said she was fine. She said not to call the doctor. It’s my fault. I should have told the doctor how many seizures she had.”
He paused. “When she was pregnant with you.” He looked down at his plate and back up.
My fingers were trembling. I clenched a napkin with one hand, dug my nails into my thigh with the other. The pain felt good, as though all of my being was concentrated there, and the person at the table was someone else, someone charged with answering for me.
We sat there for a long time, not speaking. I felt an unmooring in my chest, and then, for the first time, hunger. I saw at once how separate I was from my father, and as if in response to this new knowledge, a furious energy was building in my stomach, which was rising up my chest and throat, which confirmed a zeal I hadn’t known in myself, some shuddering, euphoric, blasphemous thing.
My father rose to get a cup of tea, which he placed shakily on the table.
I said, “I hate you.”
And then the energy was gone. We were quiet after that.
“There’s a saying in Chinese,” he said, after the silence.
He uttered an old idiom: 刀子嘴豆腐心. “Do you know the meaning?”
He had said this one so often that I recited the translation without thinking.
“Knife of a mouth, tofu of a heart.”
“Yes,” he said. “You are like that, all attitude. But inside, it’s soft. I know.”
He reached across the table and placed his hand awkwardly on top of mine. I didn’t move. The napkin inside my hand had become damp.
Later, I would remember how his hand had been pink and hot, and how similarly our hands were shaped—small with long and slender fingers. But then I saw only his desperation, his desire to make me love him, a desire I had always known that made me not want to yield. We have only these few chances in life to surprise ourselves—to make a change, to be different from what we imagine.
But I didn’t change. I removed my hand. I paid the bill, and left the restaurant.
In the car, I fumbled with my overstuffed wallet, which stored my I.D. and credit cards, old movie tickets, parking receipts. I dug everything out, emptying the slots onto the passenger seat. Nested within this was the note from my mother, where she had transcribed the poem by Qiu Jin. The corners were rounded and worn, but inside, her handwriting remained perfect.
I read the poem with ease. I recalled my difficulty, a decade ago, translating the “copper camels,” but now I saw how obviously they represented the country the speaker had abandoned. And I realized what my mother had given up: she had moved to America for my father’s job, she had relinquished her own work as a scientist, and I had lived instead of her.
I returned to school and began writing my dissertation with a kind of religious fervor.
My father had accepted a lecturer position when I was in college, which paid more and allowed him to teach. He called often to tell stories about his students and how they lavished him with gifts—a glazed mug from the paint-your-own-pottery store, a small lamp made of a geode.
But he began to suffer while teaching classes. He became dizzy and leaned against the walls for support; his ankles became puffy as grapes. He would feel energetic and then suddenly tired. One afternoon, his body became cold, he started shivering, standing at the lectern, and a student rushed up to him to tell him he had sweated through his dress shirt.
Every weekend, he went to a Chinese restaurant called Jumbo Buffet, where he managed to charm his way into paying only a lunch fee while spending the entire day there. I joined him once. He had eaten an entire plate of shrimp for the first course, six skewers of chicken satay for the second, and was beginning the third—a tangle of crab legs.
“Don’t eat so much rice,” he said, eyeing my plate. “It’s not worth the money.”
I had been spending my days studying and writing. I no longer ran, and rarely even walked outside anymore, so my appetite had become small. Sometimes I only ate a meal a day.
“Okay,” I said. “How’s the teaching?”
He cracked open a leg. The shell splintered and scattered onto the table.
“You’re looking pale. Don’t work so hard,” he said sympathetically.
“You too.”
“You know,” my father ventured. “When your mother died, the doctor said something to me. He said your mother had worked too hard in life.” He placed the crab leg on the plate, the flesh uneaten. “She was twenty-five. Her hair had turned white. Of course, she was still beautiful. We met at the university, you know. You look like me, but you’re like her. Not so straight. Not so clear-minded.”
I nodded, but my breath caught in my throat, I couldn’t speak.
“She had seizures.” He leaned forward, rubbed his fingers vigorously on a napkin. “We didn’t know the name for it. But it’s something doctors look for now. She said she was fine. She said not to call the doctor. It’s my fault. I should have told the doctor how many seizures she had.”
He paused. “When she was pregnant with you.” He looked down at his plate and back up.
My fingers were trembling. I clenched a napkin with one hand, dug my nails into my thigh with the other. The pain felt good, as though all of my being was concentrated there, and the person at the table was someone else, someone charged with answering for me.
We sat there for a long time, not speaking. I felt an unmooring in my chest, and then, for the first time, hunger. I saw at once how separate I was from my father, and as if in response to this new knowledge, a furious energy was building in my stomach, which was rising up my chest and throat, which confirmed a zeal I hadn’t known in myself, some shuddering, euphoric, blasphemous thing.
My father rose to get a cup of tea, which he placed shakily on the table.
I said, “I hate you.”
And then the energy was gone. We were quiet after that.
“There’s a saying in Chinese,” he said, after the silence.
He uttered an old idiom: 刀子嘴豆腐心. “Do you know the meaning?”
He had said this one so often that I recited the translation without thinking.
“Knife of a mouth, tofu of a heart.”
“Yes,” he said. “You are like that, all attitude. But inside, it’s soft. I know.”
He reached across the table and placed his hand awkwardly on top of mine. I didn’t move. The napkin inside my hand had become damp.
Later, I would remember how his hand had been pink and hot, and how similarly our hands were shaped—small with long and slender fingers. But then I saw only his desperation, his desire to make me love him, a desire I had always known that made me not want to yield. We have only these few chances in life to surprise ourselves—to make a change, to be different from what we imagine.
But I didn’t change. I removed my hand. I paid the bill, and left the restaurant.
In the car, I fumbled with my overstuffed wallet, which stored my I.D. and credit cards, old movie tickets, parking receipts. I dug everything out, emptying the slots onto the passenger seat. Nested within this was the note from my mother, where she had transcribed the poem by Qiu Jin. The corners were rounded and worn, but inside, her handwriting remained perfect.
I read the poem with ease. I recalled my difficulty, a decade ago, translating the “copper camels,” but now I saw how obviously they represented the country the speaker had abandoned. And I realized what my mother had given up: she had moved to America for my father’s job, she had relinquished her own work as a scientist, and I had lived instead of her.
I returned to school and began writing my dissertation with a kind of religious fervor.
*
When I answered the call from the doctor’s office, they had already been calling me for days.
I had turned thirty, and was finishing my doctoral degree. I was determined to win the department’s dissertation award. I seldom visited home anymore. The man I was dating at the time didn’t know about my background. Because my apartment was so small, we mostly stayed at his place, where he received long letters and care packages from his mother every few weeks.
“It’s a miracle he’s still alive,” the nurse said.
They had been dialing the wrong number—my old number—and I wondered if it was the mistake of paperwork, or if I really hadn’t given my father the new one.
I drove several hours to our old town in Virginia. Along the way I listened to public radio, but they didn’t play any game shows like the one we had listened to years ago. Mostly, I heard the news—updates from a school shooting, an interview with a refugee about her bestselling book on escaping her home country by boat—interspersed with classical music. Beethoven, Liszt, Grieg. In my father’s car, we had listened like this, barely speaking. Sometimes, when he liked a piece, I would later catch him humming the tune in the shower.
At the hospital, I found out my father had suffered from cardiac arrest after a heart attack. He had been intubated, and placed on a ventilator, but hadn’t woken up.
My father shared a room with another patient, separated by a blue curtain. I drew the curtain to find my father missing from the bed. In his place was another man—small, pale, wrinkled, dressed in a striped hospital gown. My father still had traces of black hair, but this man’s hair was long and white, a mop of rough plastic filaments. The blanket had been pulled up to his armpits, and one of his arms lay outside of it, pocked and dotted with violet marks. A sense of relief flooded over me. Perhaps this wasn’t my father after all.
The man’s wrist seemed bound by the hospital band—as if in removing it, his arm and hand would detach. On it, I caught the name: my father’s. His birth date. The date he was admitted: seven days ago.
He appeared to be sleeping, and if only I shook his hand—scared him awake, as I had as a child—he would open his eyes again.
I touched his hand. His fingers were cold, but the inside of his palm was warm, almost wet. As I held his hand, his breath quickened. On the heart monitor, the graph spiked, its red line suddenly alive again, before it flattened.
I had turned thirty, and was finishing my doctoral degree. I was determined to win the department’s dissertation award. I seldom visited home anymore. The man I was dating at the time didn’t know about my background. Because my apartment was so small, we mostly stayed at his place, where he received long letters and care packages from his mother every few weeks.
“It’s a miracle he’s still alive,” the nurse said.
They had been dialing the wrong number—my old number—and I wondered if it was the mistake of paperwork, or if I really hadn’t given my father the new one.
I drove several hours to our old town in Virginia. Along the way I listened to public radio, but they didn’t play any game shows like the one we had listened to years ago. Mostly, I heard the news—updates from a school shooting, an interview with a refugee about her bestselling book on escaping her home country by boat—interspersed with classical music. Beethoven, Liszt, Grieg. In my father’s car, we had listened like this, barely speaking. Sometimes, when he liked a piece, I would later catch him humming the tune in the shower.
At the hospital, I found out my father had suffered from cardiac arrest after a heart attack. He had been intubated, and placed on a ventilator, but hadn’t woken up.
My father shared a room with another patient, separated by a blue curtain. I drew the curtain to find my father missing from the bed. In his place was another man—small, pale, wrinkled, dressed in a striped hospital gown. My father still had traces of black hair, but this man’s hair was long and white, a mop of rough plastic filaments. The blanket had been pulled up to his armpits, and one of his arms lay outside of it, pocked and dotted with violet marks. A sense of relief flooded over me. Perhaps this wasn’t my father after all.
The man’s wrist seemed bound by the hospital band—as if in removing it, his arm and hand would detach. On it, I caught the name: my father’s. His birth date. The date he was admitted: seven days ago.
He appeared to be sleeping, and if only I shook his hand—scared him awake, as I had as a child—he would open his eyes again.
I touched his hand. His fingers were cold, but the inside of his palm was warm, almost wet. As I held his hand, his breath quickened. On the heart monitor, the graph spiked, its red line suddenly alive again, before it flattened.
*
That day in the autumn storm, when my father watched me race, I missed winning by two seconds.
The girl I often competed with at our rival high school hadn’t shown up, and the rain had slowed the others down. I was far ahead of everyone, turning the final curve of the course when I thought of my father standing in the rain, wearing a tan peacoat with dark buttons, an ill-fitting purchase from Goodwill, made for someone several sizes larger than him.
I thought of him and his simple life, his simple habits. In the morning, drinking a cup of milky coffee, then packing a sandwich with deli ham and Kraft cheese for lunch. In the afternoon, listening to public radio as he picked me up from practice. In the evening, boiling frozen dumplings with bok choy when we arrived home. And how he had never become anything great, how he kept applying for new positions every few years because he could never secure a tenure-track offer, he could never publish research good enough to merit it.
It was a girl from my own team who had seized the moment. I was just steps from the finish line when a slip of skin swept my arm—her arm, her elbow, her body flashing past mine, vaulting over the red webbed strip.
My father was waiting for me under a tent that had been set up for parents at the end of the course. He hovered near the edge, not speaking with the others—mostly women, mothers guarding coolers filled with Gatorade and waving homemade signs from their camping chairs, the markered letters of my teammates’ names gruesomely waterstreaked.
“It’s your fault!”
Those were the first words I sputtered. The pain of losing ricocheted in my stomach—the shock of placing second yet again, of failing to grasp this chance at becoming something more than ordinary for once. The anger made me cruel.
“I could have won,” I cried bitterly, pushing him away as he moved forward to embrace me. It was important for me to stand apart from him, outside the tent, still under the rain.
“You’re pathetic,” I said, quietly, because the mothers were watching now, they held their children in their arms. I was aware, even then, of how wrong I was to say such a thing. My heart hammered in my ears from my defiance.
“What kind of parent tells their kid to slow down? In a race?”
He reached out and thumbed my arm, pinched my skin lightly, where my teammate had touched me when she sprinted past. He was smiling. He launched the yellow umbrella at the sky and coaxed me under it, throwing an arm over my shoulder, even though I was soaked and would get his clothes wet too. He guided us toward the parking lot, where the Corolla waited. His breath was warm against my cheek as he turned to me, his voice so close it crawled under my skin.
“Remember, there’s a saying in Chinese,” he said.
“Knife mouth, tofu heart.”
I forgave him then, as he would forgive me, for all my life.
The girl I often competed with at our rival high school hadn’t shown up, and the rain had slowed the others down. I was far ahead of everyone, turning the final curve of the course when I thought of my father standing in the rain, wearing a tan peacoat with dark buttons, an ill-fitting purchase from Goodwill, made for someone several sizes larger than him.
I thought of him and his simple life, his simple habits. In the morning, drinking a cup of milky coffee, then packing a sandwich with deli ham and Kraft cheese for lunch. In the afternoon, listening to public radio as he picked me up from practice. In the evening, boiling frozen dumplings with bok choy when we arrived home. And how he had never become anything great, how he kept applying for new positions every few years because he could never secure a tenure-track offer, he could never publish research good enough to merit it.
It was a girl from my own team who had seized the moment. I was just steps from the finish line when a slip of skin swept my arm—her arm, her elbow, her body flashing past mine, vaulting over the red webbed strip.
My father was waiting for me under a tent that had been set up for parents at the end of the course. He hovered near the edge, not speaking with the others—mostly women, mothers guarding coolers filled with Gatorade and waving homemade signs from their camping chairs, the markered letters of my teammates’ names gruesomely waterstreaked.
“It’s your fault!”
Those were the first words I sputtered. The pain of losing ricocheted in my stomach—the shock of placing second yet again, of failing to grasp this chance at becoming something more than ordinary for once. The anger made me cruel.
“I could have won,” I cried bitterly, pushing him away as he moved forward to embrace me. It was important for me to stand apart from him, outside the tent, still under the rain.
“You’re pathetic,” I said, quietly, because the mothers were watching now, they held their children in their arms. I was aware, even then, of how wrong I was to say such a thing. My heart hammered in my ears from my defiance.
“What kind of parent tells their kid to slow down? In a race?”
He reached out and thumbed my arm, pinched my skin lightly, where my teammate had touched me when she sprinted past. He was smiling. He launched the yellow umbrella at the sky and coaxed me under it, throwing an arm over my shoulder, even though I was soaked and would get his clothes wet too. He guided us toward the parking lot, where the Corolla waited. His breath was warm against my cheek as he turned to me, his voice so close it crawled under my skin.
“Remember, there’s a saying in Chinese,” he said.
“Knife mouth, tofu heart.”
I forgave him then, as he would forgive me, for all my life.