I’m not adverse to paying strangers to touch me. My limbs have been “polished” with lavender infused sea salt. My pores have been squeezed into oblivion. I’ve been subjected to the powerful knees and elbows of a deceptively tiny Thai woman. But none prepared me for the Imperial Day Spa.
What I’ve Learned About External Validation, March 22, The Nervous Breakdown
I’m Glad My Husband Cheated, March 17, The Frisky
“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can still find it in its entirety, but soon I’ll be taking down parts since some writing contests require that books be unpublished, including self-publishing.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.
The three years I lived in Boston, my parents didn’t think I was seeing anyone. When my mother asked about my weekend plans, I mentioned only my girlfriends. “Always with the girls,” she liked to say.
I don’t know what she told people when they asked, or what her friends thought. “Oh, that Ai Li’s daughter. She’s so shy, like her father.” My parents worried that I’d become like my father’s eldest neice, 35 years old and never married.
Because my parents didn’t know I was dating Joe, they also didn’t know when we broke up and that I got pregnant afterwards. For those six weeks I had cried easily. When I rode the T in Boston, I wept, thinking this was my grandmother’s first great-grandchild, my parents’ first grandchild, that I’d be getting rid of. After the abortion I’d be relieved, but before, and now, 10 years later at 35, I grieved.
At first I thought it was something I had done, that he had read my diary and discovered the crush I had on a consultant at work. I wrested from Joe the exact day (only once, he said, and though I had no reason to, I believed him): April 16, 2004. I remembered it clearly. He had traveled to Boston and returned early, and on his way to our apartment. Kimiko called.
“I’ll come by now,” he said.
Oh no, Kimiko protested. He didn’t have to, though really she was delighted. He liked her, didn’t he? Otherwise why would he have gone all the way to Japan to help her? Why would he have sounded so happy answering her call, and why now was he so eager to come over?
And he was, eager and happy, which he hadn’t been in a long time. If it had been someone else, his parents, his brother, or me, he’d have gotten that sinking feeling. Everyone always wanted something from him; no one was on his side.
It was past 10 and I was already in bed. I wasn’t really tired, but it was Sunday night and had work the next morning.
Joe stood silhoutted in the doorway. “Kimiko needs someone to take her to the hospital,” he told me. “She’s having some internal bleeding.”
I sat up, blinking and incredulous. Internal bleeding, what did that mean? “Doesn’t she know anybody else?” I asked. “Can’t she call an ambulance?”
“She needs someone to look after Patty,” he said.
“But. . .” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Was this really happening? Was he really taking off late at night to help this woman?
“Who is that?” I asked. I glanced at the clock. Three AM.
“I’ll get it,” Joe said, and grabbed the receiver.
It was his father. His mother was having trouble breathing, and his own heart was beating very fast and wouldn’t slow down.
“I’ll be right there,” Joe told them.
I sat up. It was the call we always thought we’d get, the reason we left the ringer on after we went to bed. “Should I go with you?” I asked.
“No, you don’t have to.” He was throwing on his clothes. A University of Chicago sweatshirt, jeans, socks. He was strangely calm. “We’ll just go by tomorrow.”
I nodded, relieved.
What Joe feared most was having a stroke like his mother. Sometimes he talked about it as though it were inevitable and so did little to prevent it. He didn’t like taking blood pressure medicine; he continued to eat badly and didn’t exercise. But for some reason it was me my mother-in-law worried about, although I was healthy and there was no history of stroke in my family.
“Don’t work too hard,” she’d plead with me. By then she was mostly confined to her bed, or the chair beside her bed, or the chair at the kitchen table. “You should rest more often.”
“When?” I snapped. Joe and I both worked full-time, and were at his parents’ early every Saturday morning. He was there Sundays too; I was both guilty and relieved I didn’t have to go. I dreamed of having my own apartment in the city, of being able to see my friends when I wanted. Being able to write all day, every day.
Joe wanted to have a stroke, I knew, not just have one but never recover.