Bitter Melon (2 page)

We’re supposed to be poor. Why do we have all this jewelry?

Mom picks up the pink pouch, unsnaps the flap, and unzips
the zipper. She pulls out a gold bracelet. I can tell that it’s twenty-four karats, because of its garish yellow. It’s just a few inches long. The only hint that it’s a bracelet is the S clasp. But I can’t imagine anyone’s wrist being small enough for it.

Mom’s eyes are glowing. “Do you remember this?” she says.

Quickly, I nod. I don’t want to upset her by letting on that I don’t remember.

Then Mom picks up the orange pouch. She opens it and pulls out a tiny green jade O. It looks just like a normal bracelet, except it is about an inch and a half in diameter, again too small for any normal wrist.

Mom holds up my wrist next to the jade
O
. “Look how much you’ve grown,” she says. Only then do I realize that this is baby jewelry, my baby jewelry.

“I want you to see this, to remember your origin,” she says. “Your Yeh Yeh, he refused to have a red egg party for you because you were a girl.” “Yeh Yeh” falls from her lips like bitter poison. My paternal grandfather is a relative on my mother’s blacklist, along with my father. “He looked down on us because of my family situation,” Mom says. “But still, I made sure that everyone knew that you were important. Everywhere you went, you wore the gold bracelet on one wrist and the jade on the other. Both hands full of riches. No hand left naked, empty, grasping. Unfortunately, your skin was too delicate for gold. So every day I switched your gold and jade bracelets, before a rash had a chance to develop.”

Then Mom pulls out another silk pouch, which reveals
another jade bracelet, only this one is large enough to fit a five-year-old. Jade comes in different colors, but I usually see it in jewelry stores in shades of marbled green, white, and purple. The most expensive color is green, the greener the better. They say that if you’re healthy, the longer you wear it, the greener it gets. This bracelet is a brilliant green, the greenest shade I’ve ever seen, with some streaks of white.

This one I remember. I wore that one when I was six. Because I wore my Mickey Mouse watch on my left wrist, Mom put the bracelet on my right wrist, so it wouldn’t scratch the watch. But I was right-handed. It pressed mercilessly against my wrist as I wrote or drew. When I brushed my arm against any surface—a desk, a dining table, or a monkey bar—it inevitably struck the surface, making a hard knocking sound. When Mom was nearby, I always got hit. “How many times do I have to tell you to be careful?” she screamed. “This is valuable. If you break it, I’ll make you eat it.”

Soon I was afraid to write, draw, or play, fearful that I would break it and have to swallow the jagged pieces. When my first-grade teacher said, “What a beautiful bracelet!” I was sure she agreed with Mom that I was careless and disobedient to threaten such a treasure. I was afraid she would tell on me every time I knocked it against my desk. I began writing with my left hand to avoid trouble. When Mom caught me using my left hand, however, she hit me again. She watched me carefully from that day on, making sure that I did things only with my right hand. I had a difficult time that year, unable to reach for
things with my left hand yet unable to make noise with my right.

This sudden flood of memories makes my ears burn, as if Mom were still pinching and twisting them as she did years ago.

“You wore this until you were seven,” Mom continues. “I knew I had to remove it before you got too big, but it looked so pretty on you that I delayed taking it off. Then, one day, it was too late.”

We were in the kitchen. She held my arm down on the cutting board. The other hand held a hammer hovering just a foot over my wrist. The hammer was shaking. I was so scared that I forgot to cry. At the last moment, she put the hammer away and dragged me to the bathroom.

“I got your hand and wrist all soapy, and then, finally, I was able to slide it off!”

That was when I remembered to cry. I screamed in agony as she made several attempts to force it over my hand. It must’ve taken a half hour. Afterwards, I couldn’t move my throbbing hand for several minutes. I thought she had broken every bone in it.

“Thank goodness!” Mom says. “At least we didn’t have to break the bracelet!”

Mom then opens more pouches, revealing saltwater and freshwater pearl necklaces, more twenty-four-karat gold necklaces and bracelets, gold and jade pendants, and two giant gold bangles with the double happiness character and the dragon and phoenix, the symbols of marriage. The yellowness of the
gold brands itself onto my eyeballs. They are so yellow that they look fake, like the gold paint that lines many a Chinese banquet hall.

“I think you are old enough to see this now,” Mom says. “I know when you look at me, you see this haggard woman who wears outdated fashions.”

I bow my head in shame. I cannot face her, afraid she will see confirmation of her statement in my eyes.

“But that is not who I was supposed to be,” Mom says. “And that’s not who you are supposed to be either. If your Gong Gong hadn’t abandoned us, we would be wealthy.” Gong Gong is my mother’s father. He left my mother’s family for another woman. “If your rich father hadn’t abandoned us, we would be even wealthier,” she adds.

Suddenly, we are no longer paupers subsisting in a dingy apartment. We are royalty, exiled from our homeland, waiting to reclaim our birthright.

“I deserve better because I work hard and I am good,” Mom says. “You deserve better because you are my daughter. I hate God for abandoning us, for letting life be so unfair. They all make me sick, sick!”

Mom’s eyes are bulging. She flares her teeth as she says
“beng, beng,”
the word for
sick
. She looks like a wolf defending against attack or pouncing on her prey. Yet underneath her wolf exterior, I see her shrimplike spine curled up on the sofa, her stomach a balloon filled with air, ready to burst. I see all the bad people in our family making her sick, the injustice
eating away at the lining of her stomach so that no drug can cure her.

“God won’t help us, so we must help ourselves,” my mother says. “Together we can change our lives. That’s why I work all the overtime. Overtime is one hundred fifty percent pay. Also, I have to show those devil managers that I can work harder than everyone else. That’s why every time there’s a merger, others get laid off but never me. Because I am the best! I know my health would be better if I worked less, but it’s worth the sacrifice so that you can get the best education.

“But you have to sacrifice too. You have to work harder. This is your most important year. You must improve your grades. You only got an A-minus in chemistry and math. This year, you have a chance to redeem yourself in physics and calculus. You must ace those classes and pass the AP physics and calculus exams with at least a four. You must improve your SAT and get at least twelve hundred.”

I took my SAT last year and got 1050. When Mom found out that Theresa Fong got 1350, she flipped and is now on a mission to make me keep up with her.

Mom continues, “Ms. Costello said that because of aff—affirmation—”

“Affirmative action,” I say.

“—affirmation action, it’s much harder for Chinese to get into Berkeley these days. Competition is tough. Even one A-minus can cost you when hundreds of other Chinese students can get perfect As.”

I tried telling her that so she wouldn’t be too hard on me if I didn’t get into UC Berkeley, but she never believed me until she spoke with Ms. Costello, my academic counselor. But instead of being easier on me, she’s even harder on me now than before, expecting me to jump over the ever-rising bar. Every Chinese family thinks that Berkeley is the only good college besides Harvard, Stanford, and Yale.

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since Popo died,” Mom says. “Your second uncle, the one who took care of Popo, had planned to be a doctor. I paid for his schooling. But he ended up becoming a businessman. He said that he liked business better than medicine. Perhaps, had he stuck with medicine, he would have seen the early signs of her illness and provided her with better care. Maybe Popo would still be alive today.” Mom stares past me as she contemplates this possibility. Her eyes grow dark, then light again as she refocuses on me.

Mom suddenly grabs hold of my arms, as if drowning and holding on to me for life. “You know what separates the strong from the weak?” she says.

I wait for her answer to this question, but she shakes me.

“Do you?” she says.

Nervously, I shake my head.

“The strong can eat bitterness, stomach the suffering,” Mom says. “But even the strong will grow weak and sick and die. I know you think I will live forever. That’s how I felt before Popo died. But now I see the truth, that life is fragile, short, and brutal.

“We must help each other to survive. You must get into
Berkeley and get straight As. That way, you can get into medical school and become a doctor. You will make lots of money and buy us a nice house so I can quit my job and tell your father’s family to go to hell. With your medical skills, you can even cure the illness I have now. You can only accomplish this if you are focused. No distractions. No sports or other after-school activities. No socializing or running around with boys.”

As she talks, she squeezes harder, her nails digging deeper into my skin. “This is our pact,” Mom says. “You understand?”

I nod.

“Answer me!”

“Yes,” I say, my voice barely a squeak.

“Yes who?”

“Yes, Mommy.”

Finally, she lets go of me. She leaves four white ovals on each arm where her fingertips were. Gradually, they fade, leaving behind four crescent indentations from her fingernails.

“No one can love you like your mother,” Mom says. “Just remember that.” Then she holds one of the boxes to my face. “I know you won’t fail me. And when I die, all this will be yours!”

The sparkle of the jewels, like the sound of Mom’s voice, is dizzying. I look around at all the safe-deposit boxes lining the walls like the ash containers in Chinese cemeteries. What treasures from the past lie hidden in all those little boxes? What hopes and dreams for the future?

As we exit the bank, I open the door for Mom. The harsh wind makes it heavy, almost impossible to open. The wind cuts
right through my jacket and turns my cheeks and fingertips to ice. Silver rays of light peek out from behind the clouds as the sun melts the thick layer of white-gray overcast that blankets the city most days of the year. When the East Bay finally cools down, leaving a little summer for us, it will be late September or October. We’ll have our long-awaited Indian summer, a week of azure blue sky and golden sunshine, temperatures in the eighties or above. But we’ll be back in school by then, buried under books and deadlines, no time to see the blueness of the sky or feel the warm rays bake our cold skin. And by the time school is over and we run out to the beach in shorts, we’ll be met with the bitter fog, a big white dragon pulled in from the ocean by the ninety-degree heat of the inland cities of Oakland, Concord, and Walnut Creek.

“Could you spare some change, ma’am?”

I am not prepared for this voice beside me. It is almost inaudible, easily brushed off as imagined. It comes from a homeless man sitting on the ground against a building, bundled in a knit mustard-colored hat and a green ski jacket. His curly hair looks knotted and matted. There is dirt in his clothes, on his face, and under his fingernails. As the wind whips the other way, it brings with it his smell, that familiar homeless smell, a combination of cigarette smoke, booze, and pee. His stench repels me, yet I am held captive by the contrast between him and us. We have a treasure hidden in the bank. We have each other. He has nothing. As night falls, we will be safe in our cozy apartment. Where will he retreat: in a shop doorway,
under a graffitied bus stop facility, or under a tree in Golden Gate Park?

Slowly, I reach into my pocket. But Mom grabs my hand and pulls me away.

“His mother should have helped him more. And he should help her more,” Mom says. That’s the problem with this country. No family loyalty. At work, you should hear what my coworkers say. When kids turn eighteen, their parents want them to leave home. When parents get old, their kids just dump them in a nursing home,
ka-chunk
, like a greasy, half-eaten Big Mac into the trash.

“You are surrounded by all these bad influences. I try to protect you from their contamination. Your papers say American, but your blood is Chinese. You inherit my genes. You eat my rice. You will mold to my shape, walk down the right path.”

She doesn’t mention that my father is Chinese too, but that once he brought us here, he was infected by these bad influences and left. She doesn’t mention that half of my genes are his. As we make our way to the bus stop, I imagine the relentless sheet of wind sweeping me off my feet and carrying me away. Mom tries to hold on, but her brittle fingers break off. I see the look of horror in her eyes, her mouth forming a big ghastly O, her fingerless hand still reaching out to me. I see her disembodied fingers still digging into my arm, nails embedded in my flesh.

I then wrap my fingers around Mom’s. Fortunately, they are still intact, though icy and purple from the cold. She and I both
have chronically cold hands and feet. She hates having cold hands and never lets them leave her pockets when she goes out. She only took them out to hold on to me. Though my hands are cold too, I rub hers to warm them up. We rub each other’s hands furiously, cold hands warming cold hands, as we wait for the Clement Street bus.