Grandchild, I will tell you this first. I will tell you before I tell your Grandmother, who will turn red like the kettle before the whistle, and yell in my ear for the next few days even though I am only two feet away. I do not want to tell her, but one day when you are married, you will understand it is better to suffer bombardment than silence. At least then, you know where your enemy is coming from.
Today, I lost my job. From Chang's Seafood. Yes, that restaurant. You haven't seen it in a while, not since your parents moved you all to the mainland. But when you were little, we would prop you on the dumpling crates and feed you wonton noodles and egg drop soup. You were bald then, would open your mouth big, like this. Always hungry. You were supposed to be in your high chair, but you always slipped out. So rather than chase you, Jin and I would prop you on those wooden steamer crates since you loved it there so much. I never told your Mom, but she always knew. The criss-cross on your diapers gave us away.
I don't know if you'd want to go to that restaurant now. Honolulu has changed a lot, especially by Nuuanu. Your Uncle always used to bring new girlfriends by for free food, but things aren't so safe now. Just bums and late-night ladies. The river is too muddy to fish. Before, your Uncle used to drop a line of string tied to his finger and snag small tilapia that way. They'd pop up as if he'd dropped a giant stone and the river had spit up a fish in surprise. He doesn't fish anymore. Business. I know.
I was laid off. Or fired. I don't know. Not too many years left in the place. It's old and stained with grease, like me. Old Chang's son—he owns it now—he brought me and Jin into Old Chang's office and said while we were friends of his father's and had worked there for 20 years, that things were changing, they wouldn't be able to pay as many folks, and to be honest, he said, Jin and I weren't cooking the way we used to. We weren't as fast as the new guys. I bit my tongue from telling him the new boys had only been there 10 months, and that everything they knew, Jin and I had to teach them so they wouldn't be fired. He talked to us while he typed on his computer, as if he were dictating and we weren't there. I can never imagine Old Chang having done that. Old Chang would have found a way. He never had much money, Old Chang, but he always said no man working for him would ever have hungry mouths at the table. And Jin and I never did. And it was 27 years. We were there before Old Chang's son was born.
You think I should sue?
Ah, Grandchild. School has taught you to jump first and think later. The newspapers say big money. But I have seen my friends for whom months wane into years, who wait outside the courthouse each day looking like paupers with a begging bowl. Their suits are dusty and worn now. Traffic passes by them day after day. At first people would stop and talk, hear their woes. But eventually they became like everything else—the tables, the chairs, the trees—everything you drive by and no longer think about in your car every morning.
You think I should go back to painting? Who told you about that?
I used to paint. In my village by the Yangtze, the Artist was seen as good. The Artist was best. Not the Accountant, not the Fisherman. But the Artist. So when Father saw that I could paint, that I could trace our village from my mind onto the wooden table, Father smiled. His smile stretched wide, and the next day he took me down to Wu Gao's house, in the back where all the wooden brushes sat swaddled and quiet. I remember holding my breath. If I touch one, I thought, it will fly away.
Father placed me before these lines of quivering birds, their horsehairs stiff and waiting to be dipped, and he said, Pick one. For you, Xiang. Any one.
I picked one from the middle. Not too fat. Not too frail. Like me. The most unassuming, they say, dance the most beautifully. I tucked this brush into my pocket. I kept it with me through school. I slept with it at night. I kept it with me, tucked inside the band against my thigh, when the Communists came one summer and took everything, everything we could not nail down, leaving the home bare as a ghost's room. Everything save this brush. I saved this brush and brought it out in Hawaii, at night (so humid that only licking it is enough). And I brushed. I brushed up. And up and up. Strokes up like a man stretching to the sky. Strokes up like a flower awakening to dawn. Up and up and up. If you paint up enough, you sometimes see heaven on the page before you. You do not believe me? Ah, you are young, Grandchild. When you are young, the mind is stiff. Hard to bend. Hard to believe. But Time, she stretches the mind. Stretches stretches stretches until you no longer recognize it and anything can fit inside. One day, Grandchild, if you are lucky, you shall see this. I cannot show you this. You will understand when it happens.
I don't think I could paint now if I wanted to. Perhaps Old Chang's son was right. Look at this old hand . . . curled like a snail shell.
But what use are paints and brushes in Chinatown? What use are my paintings propped up in hotels, when no one reads our language? There, they are just tourist trinkets. Chinese paintings for $25. A great deal.
But my brush carved out poetry. Of the mountains of home, the steep valleys and canyons of mist where ghosts drifted between worlds. But hotel guests only saw crosses and dots. “Oh, that's funny,” one said when I tried to paint the river where we rowed rafts as children, whose banks flooded our fields each year. “That looks like my chair.”
So I blot the paint and grease and wrap it all up in my apron—the last great artist's smock I will wear. I am an artist of the kitchen now. Doesn't that sound fun? I used to tell your Mother and your Uncle, “Dreams change. You must change to keep them alive.” The paintings? Grandma wanted to hang them up once to show the neighbors, the ones she had saved from before we married, but I told her no. You didn't even stop reading your paper to think about it, she growled. No, I said. I did not.
Tonight I think I will cook fish. Tomorrow, chicken. Prime rib on Friday. Watch me. I will show you how prime rib is done.
You want to cook for your boyfriend? You want me to tell you about boys, about men? Where is your Mother when you need her?
Your Mother used to ride around on motorcycles with boys. Every boy then had a motorcycle. She would ride motorcycles and go to discos at night. She didn't tell you that? They never do.
One day I found a book on the table and I picked it up. Curious. It looked like a children's book. Inside were funny drawings, with a little boy and a sheep and a box. Inside the cover someone had written, “To Joy, who is my rose.”
My rose.
It is bad to compare love to a rose. A rose is fickle. It cannot survive in many climates, its defenses are few. (You remember the ones you can see from the bridge, just past the monastery, on our walks? They do not do well here. The bolder flowers thrive.) And after a short bloom, the rose drifts away, looking brown and bedraggled, reminding one how quickly seasons pass. Never. Never compare your love for anyone to a rose.
When I met Li, I told her my love was like the seasons: always changing. I was not as romantic as the other men. They had instruments to strum and sports to play. I had only my brush. So I drew for her: four seasons. Each dying, each a leaf turned anew. Li was not my first love, and I knew the initial beauty of spring would fade. My father had taught me too much heat could strain a love, grow long over summer, the initial prick eventually becoming as annoying and inflamed as a mosquito bite, with a man and a woman scratching at each other for relief. A man would begin to look more wizened and thinning, a woman's bloom would fade. Days would seem shorter, nights too long.
Why? Li would cry, her pale hands fluttering inside mine like a nervous bird. Why must you say your love will fade?
Everything fades, Li, I told her. If spring is forever, one begins to lose appreciation for the flower. I cupped her face with my hands and she smiled, her cheeks puffing like a child's.
It is this image I keep with me, year after year. When she grows fatter and fatter like a dumpling, I think of her in the courtyard before her house. And when her crinkled brown paws lift the faded black-and-white before my smudged glasses and she cries, “Look, Xiang! Look how beautiful I was!” I say, “Yes, Li. Yes. You were very beautiful.”
Li. Li likes to save. Your Grandmother keeps tins, fills them with coins. Lots of them. Five hide under my bed. Three under hers. One in the hallway, until Janet Honda's son stole it. He didn't admit it, no, and we don't speak. He is nothing like his mother. But I saw the can the next week in the trash bag outside their place.
Your Grandmother, she thinks these coins will make us rich. But you count and count and there are only enough for a few dinners, a few nights for the children.
We are rich, Xiang, your Grandmother always says. We are rich.
We are broke. The landlord stopped by last week, you remember, but luckily your Grandmother was out. No, don't tell your Mother. We are fine. This is nothing compared to when she was a child. Back then, no money for rent. I worked hard, I worked overtime, all kinds of extra jobs downtown, but not enough. Two kids, one wife and a hole always in the pocket. Save, my mother always said. Live, my father always said. And I say, we are broke.
I once thought about leaving her. Your Grandmother. Why do I tell you this? Because you are the eldest, and I think you will understand. My mind wanders. And I am tired.
When I first arrived here, before I had enough money to bring your Grandmother and your Mother and your Uncle, I met a woman. Her husband had died young. She was lonely, like me. She had a son, and I would play catch with him and take him to McDonald's and buy him a hamburger for 10 cents. Sometimes sit at the airfield and watch planes. Like a family, yes.
And one day, while we sat in the park and he ran chasing birds and shrieking, she asked me to live with her. To leave my family and live with them. Her husband had left her with money, she could afford her own house. She did not look at me while she said all this. She kept watching her son. Her voice was calm, as if she were simply suggesting a new place for lunch.
I don't remember what I said, but she quietly nodded. She called later and said while we could not be together, if she could have one of my paintings. I made her one. And then I put the brush away. I stopped painting. Told your Grandmother my hands were cramped from tossing the wok all those hours.
The painting? What did I paint? Oh, Grandchild. I no longer remember.
I don't know if I wanted to leave. It could have been so easy. But after a certain point, no one can leave anyone. You grow together and roots grow entwined, until tearing apart would destroy you.
Once, when we were both still young, Grandmother became very angry and demanded to know her name. Some old gossip in town had told her. She pleaded, she cried, she said she would never be angry, she knew I had stayed. But Grandchild, sometimes anger makes you weak. She was enraged, your Grandmother was. Ready to tear me apart. But I looked at her face turned up toward mine, and I thought of those leaves in autumn when I was a child. Red and perfect and so easy to crush. We all hope we are the only one. I knew I could never say it. To say the name would break her.
When I first stepped off the plane here, into the blue skies and windswept palms and turquoise shells breaking in the distance, I threw up. My first step in America, and I threw up. The man whom I laid my breakfast out before looked at me. “What is your name?” he asked. He wore the usual official's cap and collared shirt, held the usual clipboard. Sweat stains were spreading under his armpits from the past few hours. “Xiang,” I said. He looked at me, looked at my rumpled pants and lack of pockets. He wrote down “Jack.”
“Here you go,” he said. “Welcome to your new life.”
Now let me sleep, Grandchild. Your Grandmother Li will be home soon, and there will be a great storm, which you can watch or not. Grandfather needs his rest.
—IRENE NOGUCHI, '02, works in public radio in Seattle.
