“What was that?” 100 Episodes of Ghost Hunters, March 8, The Nervous Breakdown
I Don’t Want to Get Married Again, February 18, The Frisky
How Karaoke Saved My Parents’ Marriage, March 1, The Nervous Breakdwon
Congratulations! You’ve found my writing website, either through my blog, by chance, through my work at The Nervous Breakdown, or you already knew about it (in that case, welcome back).
If you’ve been keeping up with my writing, you know I just finished posting my memoir, BLACK FISH: MEMOIR OF A BLACK LUCK GIRL. For now you can still find it in its entirety, but soon I’ll be taking down parts since some writing contests require that books be unpublished, including self-publishing. Now I don’t know if posting it on my blog counts as self-publishing, but better safe than sorry.
You might wondering: what now? The answer: I don’t know.
I do have a sequel in mind to BLACK FISH, but I’m still working out the details so I don’t want to mention anything now. Plus I haven’t even written it yet!
In the meantime, what I’ll probably do is put “news” items here – my latest posts at The Nervous Breakdown and anywhere else I might have been published.
UPDATE: I will be messing with the blog theme so don’t be surprised to see it change, change again, and probably change back to its original look.
I had come to L.A. for my annual visit. That weekend we all congregated at my uncle’s house. It was also the first time he and my aunt were seeing me since my divorce, and they approached me gingerly, as though I were one of the porcelain opera masks I had brought them from China long ago.
I wanted to tell them it was okay, that I was no longer devastated nor was I broken. I wanted to say I was better off because of it, that I was lucky because not only had I known love but I had learned it doesn’t always work out, and that even if it doesn’t, I’d still come out of it in one piece. And now for next time I knew better. Embarrassed none of us said anything.
Mia wasn’t the first to be born of her generation. My cousin Richard and his wife had a baby girl the year before, Puo-puo’s first great-grandchild. Simone was beautiful, half-Chinese, part black and Brazilian. I thought of the abortion from years ago, which I thought of often now that I was in my mid-thirties and nowhere near having a boyfriend, let alone getting married. In my mind the child had grown. Eight, nine, ten – she’d have been the oldest of the little cousins. But I was better off, wasn’t I? I didn’t have to have anymore contact with Joe.
I’d have no obligations of cooking and cleaning up after a dozen people I didn’t really know. I didn’t want to see anyone, not my uncle and his family, not even Puo-puo, just my brother and Huang Lei and Shane, who had been back in the States from Ireland for three months by then.
Greg and I didn’t talk about what had happened. I was tired of talking about it and wanted to pretend, if for just a little while, that everything was okay. We went hiking in the mountains around Malibu; we ran five miles in his neighborhood. We had drinks at the Cheesecake Factory, and good Indian food in the Valley.
The day before Thanksgiving, we drove to Huang Lei and Shane’s townhouse. I was glad to see that my cousin had grown out the orangey-red she had dyed her hair in Ireland. Shane seemed a bit heavier but looked otherwise the same.
L.A. wasn’t like Ireland, Huang Lei lamented. The people weren’t as friendly. I remembered: in Cork everywhere we went we ran into people they knew – at the mall, at the pub at night, walking out of the house. It was like Changping, only without the gossip. Now as we sat in their living room, a woman walked by the window without a wave.
That afternoon we drove out to Malibu, where we had french fries and coffee on the beach, surrounded by scavenging seagulls. Afterwards we went to the mall, which was deserted, then had a steak dinner.
Huang Lei was 36 by then, and there was still no word on a baby. “If we have one,” Shane said at one point, looking at her tenderly, as though to say either way would be okay.
She and Shane had been living in Cork almost three years when I finally visited them that August. Shane had been transferred from Portland, and soon his company would be moving him again, this time to Los Angeles.
They had thought Joe would be joining me, and when they learned he wasn’t, kept mentioning him. “Joe’s going to have a high credit card bill,” Shane commented when we shopped in Galway. “Joe would have liked the whiskey tour,” he said on our drive home. “It would have been better if Joe were here too,” Huang Lei said.
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. That second morning, I told her.
Her hands rinsing the press pot stilled. “Oh, Little Gem,” she said. As she hugged me, I saw that her eyes were wet. “I’m so sorry.”
Then I told her why, and she hardened. “Forget him,” she said, and began vigorously rinsing the press pot again.
She didn’t ask me why I never told her. Instead, she said, “You know, Guochen did the same thing.”
My mouth fell open. “Guochen?” I said now, as though there must be some mistake. “Guochen?”
What my parents were most afraid of was that I’d get back together with Joe. Although we’d separated, we hadn’t yet spoken of divorce. We could only deal with one thing at a time. I had told my parents the plan was to wait a year because then the divorce would be easier.
I don’t know why I thought this. Maybe I misread it somewhere, or maybe, in the back of my mind, I hoped for reconciliation, or at least the possibility of it. Instead of getting rid of the dining room set that wouldn’t fit in my tiny place, I put it in storage. I imagined a possible future in which Joe and I had reconciled, and would need that dining room set again. But after I moved into the city, and as the hot summer weeks went by, this possibility seemed less and less likely. It was less and less what I wanted.
In the meantime my parents panicked. Why did I want to wait a year? I didn’t want to get back together with Joe, did I? Was he preventing the divorce? My father emailed me at my job. Joe’s had us all fooled, he wrote. He’s probably been with this woman for some time. I should begin divorce proceedings immediately.
I started shaking and couldn’t stop. I wrote back a cold reply: “Please don’t send me such messages at work. I’m busy enough as it is and receiving emails like this makes it impossible for me to concentrate on everything I have to do.” My father didn’t answer.
My mother called to scream at me. Why hadn’t I seen any signs? What hadn’t I left sooner? Why hadn’t I told them?
Joe and I separated in April 2005, a year after his affair, four months after his child was born. He moved out bit by bit. One day he found in a drawer an envelope I had marked “Single Asian Female,” and that was filled with personals ads I had clipped out, all from white men in search of Asian women.
Grinning, he held it up. “What’s this?” he asked.
The clippings were so old they were yellowing. “It was for a book idea,” I said.
He kept smiling. “Sure.”
“It was.” I didn’t know why he didn’t believe me, or why he was amused rather than upset.
The next thing I knew he was grabbing me around the waist, pressing against me from behind. Horrified I shoved him away.
“You can’t do that anymore,” I told him. “It’s not like that anymore.”
He looked stricken, but I was tired of trying to make him feel better.
It was nearing mid-April, a year since Joe’s affair. He was even getting ready to take the same business trip to Boston. As I washed the dishes, my mind whirled, remembering and reliving everything, as I couldn’t seem to stop doing. I felt myself getting angrier and angrier till finally I thought I might explode. Hands still soapy, I marched into the study.
“It’s almost your first year aniversary,” I announced from the doorway of the study, where Joe always was, at the computer, playing fantasy football or browsing through eBay. “How will you and the Whore celebrate?”
In the past he’d have hung his head. Now he seemed annoyed.
“Do you want me to move out?” he asked.
For a moment I was taken aback. My power seemed to be waning. Trying to recover, I returned to the kitchen sink.
“No,” I said, turning on the water. “Because I’m going to.”
Regina was there teaching English to corporate executives, and we thought we’d take the opportunity to visit.
I assumed Joe wouldn’t go with me. He didn’t like the trips that I did, full of aimless walking, hours in museums, and eating strange food. He liked to play golf and to gamble. But what had he done in Japan? What else was there to do but walk and eat and drink? It wasn’t about the trip but being alone, and being with, I realized then, with Kimiko.
Right before I left, I found out Joe had brought the baby to his parents’ house.
“Your parents haven’t seen Aiden, have they?” I asked out of nowhere. The thought had occurred to me suddenly, as when you suddenly remember where you’ve left your keys.
He looked at me guiltily. “They just wanted to make sure he was okay,” he said. Then, seeing my despair: “They didn’t hold him. They just looked at him. My mother didn’t even smile.”
That didn’t make me feel better. I was picturing it: Joe pulling up in our car and opening the back door, emerging with a tiny bundle in his arms, cradling him against his chest. Then the thing in his parents’ house, my house too, I was told over and over.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked. “You have to tell me everything.”
“You were really mad at me that weekend,” he said. “I mean really mad.”
I remembered: calling from my parents’ house, hissing on the phone, “I’m the only one who’s suffering in this. You and Kimiko did this bad thing and you have a kid. I did nothing and I have nothing.” But it didn’t matter, it was an excuse, and would always be. And suddenly it occurred to me that he had waited till I went to my parents’ house, for that specific opportunity, and something in me broke then, which turned out to be the last thing, the last withered bone holding together a damaged leg.
I was still shaky, but I needed to get away. I couldn’t be alone in the apartment while Joe went off to tend to his newborn son.
At first everything seemed okay. I arrived Friday night and had a late dinner. Together we watched Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. Then I went to bed early, taking two Unisom (Joe didn’t know I still had the Unisom). The next morning things seemed even better, as they always did. After lunch we went shopping. I still had a Nordstrom’s gift card from Greg for Christmas, but I didn’t know what to buy. I stood at the makeup counter staring at the jars and tubes and bottles. Nothing I’d buy would make me feel better.
That evening my parents had a mah-jongg party to go to. They always seemed to be going out, whether to the mall, or mah-jongg, or karaoke. After they left, the phone rang. I shouldn’t have answered it. It wouldn’t have been for me.
