Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from the novel Monkey King by Patricia Chao(©1997 by Patricia Chao).

It’s my tenth birthday. Ma doesn’t get a cake or presents because we are busy getting ready to visit our Nai-nai in San Diego. That is, my sister, Marty, and I are going while Ma and Daddy spend the summer in Taiwan, where my father have a teaching job. In the front of the tunnel to the plane Ma hands us over to the stewardess, who wears white gloves. Marty cries but I don’t.

During the flight the stewardess keeps coming over with children’s magazines, coloring books, magnetic tic-tac-toe. Not that we need distractions; we sit quietly, buckling our seat belts when the sign says to. Most of the way I read Eight Cousins, feeling my sister’s hot skull press against my shoulder as she sleeps.

My Nai-nai is so glad to see us, she has tears in her eyes. “Ni Kan!” she says to her cousin Su-yi, who has come to the airport too because our grandma doesn’t drive. Nai-nai used to live with Su-yi, but now she has a separate house on the same street.

Ma has warned us not to tire Nai-nai out. But my grandmother is inexhaustible. Morning, when she comes to wake us, she’s already dressed, hair up, face powdered, lipstick on. The first night when she tucks us in Marty’s ask, “When do you go to bed?” and Nai-nai answers: ”Very, very late. Old lady doesn’t need much sleep.”

Over grandmother’s shoulder I am watching the curtains, patterned with cobalt and fuchsia primroses, dancing over the open window. I have brought Piggy, although I am way too old. Marty left her doll on her pillow at home. Nai-nai doesn’t make fun of me. “Poor old man,” she says, when she notices Piggy’s tattered chest. She looks in her drawers and finds a baby T-shirt I can dress him in.

Marty and I play softball and kickball with the kids on our street. Sometimes we go to the beach, along with a lot of other kids in bathing suit, crowded into the back of a station wagon that smell like hot rubber and coconut lotion. It is the most beautiful ocean I have ever seen, with all different kinds of blue in it, rolling like fluted glass toward us.

I tell the other kids about the Gulf of Mexico, where Aunty Mable and Uncle Richard live. There were things waiting there in that warm flat water, crabs who’d clamp your toes no matter how carefully you stepped. Then I tell them about the beach in Monterey, where I was born, with all the wildflowers in the spring, and of course the seals.

Marty and I get very tan, and Nai-nai scolds us. But she softens when she sees how hungry we are after our days at the beach, how we wolf everything down, no matter how strange. When we first got there we were picky, polite. Nai-nai corrected the way Marty hold her chopsticks and made her cry. Our grandmother serves the meals in courses, unlike Ma, who sets everything down on the table at once.

Now we compromise. Marty is allowed to use a fork, and Nai-nai sometimes gives in to our pleas at the grocery store. One night she even makes hamburgers, following the recipe from Joy of Cooking, although we forget to get buns so we have to have them on toast.

On the first rainy day, Nai-nai climbs the stepladder and takes out boxes from the top shelf of her bedroom closet. They are filled with presents from her admirers, back in her youth when she was a lieder singer. She kept everything: dried sprays of orchids, brittle and black-edged; a collection of music boxes from Switzerland; perfume, never opened, the bottoms of the crystal flasks coated brown. I imagine the perfume to be like orange juice concentrate: if you added water it would be as good as fresh.

She shows us photographs of our parents’ wedding. “Handsome couple,” she says. My mother doesn’t look too different, except for more makeup and wavy hair, but my father is unrecognizable. The man in the picture has dark, thick hair and a smooth, confident face, as if nothing bad had ever happened to him.

My hair is long but I am not allowed to wear it loose except at night. Nai-nai washes it for me in the kitchen sink. I force myself to stand very still, although I get a crick in my nick and the water from the spray nozzle tickles.

Once, after my hair had dried enough to brush out, Nai-nai puts it up into a bun like hers. I watch her in the dresser mirror, trying to memorize the motions, but my grandmother is too fast. When she has done she gives me the hand mirror so I can examine the back of my head. I see that she has anchored the bun with a single pale green hairpin, like an arrow though a valentine.

"It's jade," my grandmother says, patting my shoulder. "You keep."