Not-Rows

I had a bit of a row with my mother today. Except she doesn't really know that. That's what typically happens when I have a row with someone. I sit there and fume in silence for a few minutes before stomping away to prevent anything more embarrassing than usual from coming out of my mouth. Technically, I suppose, we did not have a "noisy, acrimonious quarrel." It was plenty bitter on my part, though.

I buried myself in my room again this morning, determined to finish off Elyn Saks's The Center Cannot Hold, one of my assigned readings for my introductory psychology class. I'd started it a while ago, but found Saks's approach quite different from Jamison's (An Unquiet Mind) and so was rather disoriented. In my goal-oriented haze, I figured that the best way I would get the thing done would be to sit and read it straight on through. So I did. It was a fascinatingly horrifying account of Saks's struggle with schizophrenia, painfully frank and in turns humorous and frightening. I finished the book just in time for lunch, during which I told my mother about what I'd read. 

I should have known that she'd drag the incident at the Navy Yard into this and go off on her spiel about gun control and mental illnesses (we'd had an earlier not-row about Second Amendment rights that I terminated the moment she said she didn't care what any amendments anywhere said - people should just not be allowed to carry guns). I did know that hearing her ramble on about this would upset me. So I inhaled the rest of my lunch, scurried back to my room, and impetuously sent her a link of Saks doing a TED talk. I'd found it especially compelling to hear her tell her own story, and I hoped maybe it would be enough for my mother.

Well, it wasn't. My mother said Saks looked "scary," and "couldn't she at least have combed her hair?" I got quite angry then, but, as usual, I stormed off before I could say anything. It was as if the "fight" part of my autonomic response had disappeared. I fumed in my room for the rest of the afternoon, bitterly angry at my mother, who had no idea that I was sending daggers down at her from on high, but also frustrated with myself. I knew that this would have been a good opportunity to talk about my own thoughts, my own experience with mental illnesses, but I was too frightened by her callous dismissal of a subject that has grown quite dear to me. So, in a sense, I had a not-row with myself.

Maybe I feel like she could never understand. It certainly appears as if she could never want to understand. There's still this tremendous stigma associated with mental illnesses, the underlying belief that by sheer power of will, one might overcome the voices brought about by genetics and biochemistry.

It's just as what Saks said: "When you have cancer, people send flowers; when you lose your mind, they don't."


Here's the TED talk:

Boooooks

I spent a while this afternoon trying to pick out what books I would be bringing with me to school. Sadly enough, even though I own only enough books to fill one shelf, it took me quite some time to narrow it down to a manageable chunk, but... I managed.

I was in the third grade when I first read Where the Red Fern Grows. I found it awful in a wonderful way. Every time I read that last bit when the red fern grows over their graves... I turn into some sort of blubbering puddle of gloop. That book also started me on my depressing-childhood-books-about-tragically-dying-animal-companions series: Old Yeller, Sounder, and The Yearling. By the time I read that last one, I was just about done with the world. 

I got into Bradbury way too early. That's always been a problem with me - my appetite for reading was always exponentially greater than the number of age-appropriate books available to me. I read The Illustrated Man when I was in the first or second grade. It was so wonderfully written that I finished it in one afternoon - then promptly had nightmares for the rest of the week. There was something about Bradbury's writing that really drew me into  world of science fiction, though. I read Fahrenheit 451 around the same time my older brother was reading it for school. I'd always wanted to be just like him, and there was my chance. I didn't really understand it until I read 1984 a while later. Since then, it's become a bit more than the one book of Bradbury's that I actually own.

I have no idea why I read Rebecca. It wasn't required reading or anything, and I'd had (multiple) earlier false starts with other novels of the same genre ("It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young man in possession of good fortune should be in want of a wife," anyone?) For some reason, the very first words of this particular book drew me in: "Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me." The book was one long, wonderful dream, and the incredible climax chilled me to the bone the first time - and every time since.

Embarrassingly enough, Vonnegut was a recent discovery of mine. I'd never gotten into his writing until I found this book at the library's free book table. I thought I might as well read it. And I did. And I loved it. So it goes (not really).

I don't think I'll ever really know how much Lois Lowry shaped my childhood. The Giver was required reading one year - second or third grade? - and I found the story immensely sad and immensely interesting. I wondered if our memories could ever work like that - I dearly wished they would.

After my "success" with Rebecca, I found Wuthering Heights buried in an old box of donations from some family friends who knew of my love for reading. I decided to give it a try but eventually set it aside after about the first half, completely annoyed by Catherine's antics. Many years later (which goes to show how ridiculously young and idiotic I was when I first tried to read it), I dug it up again and sailed on through. It was amazing. Alternately downright creepy and wonderfully lush (sometimes, I still think I can see Catherine's face in the window on a dark night), this was another one of the classics that I absolutely enjoyed.

When I went to watch Finding Nemo with my mother, I told her that Pixar had plagiarized Jules Verne. A few years later, I ended up writing a very long, confusing story about being stuck on an alien spaceship that had many similar qualities to the Nautilus. I'm only just beginning to realize that perhaps my Star Trek obsession isn't completely unfounded.

Mick Harte was Here. But now he's gone. This book meant a lot to me when I first read it. That was before I'd even learned to bike. It was the book that introduced me to death. I still read it a lot, mostly to keep myself grounded.

Leo Lionni and Eric Carle were my favorite authors when I was picture-book-little. The Hungry Caterpillar. Swimmy. Frederick. That was the art of my childhood. Sadly enough, I've never owned an Eric Carle book, so I'm taking Swimmy with me.

Everything came down to a tough choice between my complete The Lord of the Rings trilogy with all the appendices and footnotes and a battered old Sherlock Holmes anthology filled with Sidney Paget's original illustrations from The Strand Magazine. I could only bribe my father into letting me lug one huge non-academic book off to school with me. The Lord of the Rings was my childhood. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis created amazing worlds for me that I would later find mirrored in the Redwall of Brian Jacques. One year, I even memorized The Tale of Tinuviel. If you know what that is, then you know how crazy I was. If not... just pretend that I never said anything about memorizing a poem about a fantasy land. Because of all this, I decided that I'd take my Holmes with me. Consider it a melodramatic, metaphorical discarding of childhood. 

But it's not as if I regret my decision. One summer, I went to the library and checked out this true monster of a book - it was well over a thousand pages strong, each page covered in tiny font. It contained anything Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had ever written about the man Sherlock Holmes. From A Study in Scarlet to The Hound of the Baskervilles, everything was in there - the Adventures, the Memoirs, the Return, His Last Bow, the Case-book, everything. And I devoured it. I fell in love more with John Watson than I did the aquiline, ratty-dressing-gowned hero. I loved the idea of living with a brilliant man making notes by day and clattering down cobblestone streets by night, to write all of it down and tell the wonderful stories that would come of our adventures. I envied John Watson. Sherlock Holmes could keep his intellect for all I cared. All I wanted were stories. 

And I've got them all.

On Friendship and My Mother

I went shopping with my mother today. Thankfully, no groceries were involved. Most of the trip consisted of my mother trying to persuade me to buy a pair of boots. I wondered why she was so adamant about me buying a pair of shoes that made me bulge in all the wrong places.

When we got home, she told me a long, rambling story over our lunch of yesterday's leftovers.

"When I was freshman in college," she began slowly in English, eyeing the wad of spinach trapped between her chopsticks, "My friends and I went on a trip," she paused and gave me the Mother Glare, "Let me just say now that I have no idea what my parents were thinking, letting me go - I mean, I wouldn't give you permission to go," she stuck the spinach in her mouth and chewed contemplatively, switching into Chinese, "In October or November of my freshman year, we went on a trip to Dansui. There were about twenty of us, and one night,  we decided to walk from Taipei to Dansui."

I gagged on my rice.

"You walked to from where to where!?" I choked in English. I remembered that Dansui was at least a good half-hour train ride from Taipei.

"We walked to Dansui," my mother repeated, "And it was already in the middle of the night. Past midnight, I think, and we were all so tired by the time we got there that we didn't have the energy to walk to the bus stop to catch a ride back. So we just sat there like a bunch of homeless people. By the time I got home, the sun had come up." She shook her head. "We were crazy," she half-laughed, "I'd just bought this pair of boots. Good thing I didn't wear them all the way to Dansui."

I nodded absently, and we continued eating in silence for a while.

"You know," she continued suddenly, "in the two weeks before that trip, your grandfather woke me up every morning, sometimes even before six in the morning, so we could play badminton together." She smiled at my look of bewilderment, "I think he wanted to make sure I was in good enough shape."

I tried and failed to reconcile the image of my absent-minded, ninety-something-year-old grandfather with my mother's description of an active, badminton-playing young man.

"Was he any good?" I asked.

"Oh, yes," my mother replied, "He's the one that taught me how to play badminton in the first place. After that, though..." she shrugged and smirked, "I became the master of aces and beat him so badly he didn't want to play with me anymore."

In Chinese, the word "ace" is a homophone of the word "kill." 

I laughed, picturing my vengeful mother pelting my grandfather with white-feathered birdies as he ran around absently, waving his racket over his head.

"Badminton was really popular in Taiwan," my mother said musingly, nearly done with lunch now, "So, from time to time, we'd have competitions."

I nodded, figuring badminton was to Taiwan as basketball was to the U.S.

My mother set her chopsticks down and sat back in her chair, "There was this boy in my year who was the top of the class every semester except for the last one, when your mother was number one."

My apple juice went down the wrong pipe.

"You?" I spluttered, "You were first in your class?"

My mother laughed, "Yes. I was. And I felt so bad - I didn't know how it happened!" she smiled fondly again, "So one day, we were having some sort of badminton tournament, and all my friends were telling me that I should go play against him. Of course I said no, and I watched as another girl went up to him and started their match. He was good. He'd serve, and - pheeew," she traced her finger through the air, "The birdie would be on the ground before you'd even see it. My friends and I were watching, and one of them grumbled, 'If this guy is so good, if he's always number one, why didn't he go to TaiDa?' That was the school your father's father went to. The number one college in Taiwan. Someone walked by and, hearing them, said, 'He's here so he can be number one!'"

I smiled. Chinese logic at its best.

"Anyways, he went to America for graduate school and got something..." my mother paused to think, switching back again to English, "A masters of something. Probably M.B.A." she stopped again and said slowly, "He went to go work in New York. In the World Trade Center."

I stiffened in my seat, not daring to ask.

"When 9/11 happened," my mother continued, "I remembered he was there. Working in a bank or something. I check his address and his address was in the World Trade Center. So I called him. I think we were both surprised when he picked up the phone. He said that out of all his college classmates, I was the only one who called him. It turns out that he'd moved to New Jersey."

I sat back in my chair, fiddling with my fork.

"Well, you know that not long after 9/11, there was a plane crash in New Jersey."

Is there no sense in the world? I thought.

"I call him again, and he said again that I was the only one from his college days who had called him. He said he was fine," my mother hesitated again, "I have no idea where he is now," she stood, gathering her dishes, and I scooted my chair back too, moving the remains of our lunch off the kitchen table as my mother continued in Chinese, "The last I'd heard, he'd gone back to Taiwan because his wife was ill."

I set the plates and bowls and chopsticks in the sink and turned on the faucet.

"Make good friends in college," my mother said, "Make good friends."

I grunted my typical long-suffering, "Yes, mom," but thought that perhaps this was the first time my mother's advice actually made sense. I couldn't help but think back twelve years to that terrifying morning when my brother's teacher ran out hysterically into the parking lot, telling everyone to go home because there had been an attack and that we were all going to die. I remember the silence in the car, broken only by the crackling of the newscaster as he struggled to relate the horror of what had happened. I remember my mother smiling and reassuring me as she left me in the capable hands of my first grade teacher. She didn't let me watch the news that night, but I heard the rumbling and the screaming from my room. 

For the child whose parents grew up in war-torn China, I can only imagine what was going through her mind. All I remember was the uncertainty. Who had done this? Why had they done this? 

My parents talked quietly about getting Taiwanese passports for my brother and me. They told us to work hard on our Chinese. I didn't understand any of this. All of it was too strange, too unfamiliar, and I resented the sudden insecurity. It took me years to realize that my mother was as frightened as she had ever been. I'd just never realized why. All those stories she'd told me - those of her mother walking across China during the Japanese occupation to find her father, those of her father in his days as a government agent. All her fears were multiplied exponentially because of what she knew could happen. What she knew had happened.

It is difficult for us to get along sometimes. I like to sit in my room and read, maybe putter about with my guitar, a pen, and a piece of paper. She's always in a flurry of motion - preparing meat for the freezer, researching stocks, catching up with Chinese news. She's always prepared for the worst, and I typically fail to realize that her nagging, her never-ending cautions against going running at night or in the morning or in the evening are all just a part of how she was raised. Sometimes, we go at it as only mothers and daughters can, and sometimes, we're the best of friends. 

I find that all the stories she's told me are ways for me to understand where she's from, not just geographically, but culturally and personally as well. Her stories are fascinating, telling of a world long gone, when Taiwan was covered in rice paddies and a farm brushed shoulders with the airport. There's a longing in her that's somehow become a part of me. I miss what I've never had, and that's what draws us together - a longing for the past that none but the two us can ever understand. 

I guess that's why she's always telling me to "make friends." Maybe a friend is someone that's unlike you just enough to balance out the stuff you could get lost in. Someone who doesn't know you as well and can keep you grounded when you're in danger of floating away. Like a good pair of boots.

Drinking Buddies

Today, I was confronted by a baffling mystery: the disappearance of all my underwear. After digging through my mother's drawers, thinking that perhaps my brother had done the laundry this time, I was still many pairs short. I don't believe this bodes well for my continued existence in college.

My mother ran into an old family friend while out shopping today. She told me all about it when she got back, and I was surprised to feel a pang of envy. These are old, old, old family friends. We used to go to the same stuffy old church for what felt like a million years when I was younger. Every week - a Friday or Saturday night, I can't remember - several families from church would gather at their house in Downey, and the parents would do a bible study while we, the kids, ran wild through the sprawling house. There were five of us little ones. My brother, being five years older than me, was the outlier. The rest of us were relatively close in age. I was the closest to the boy my age - our mothers went way back, talked for hours on the phone with each other, and were virtually peas in a pod. We were raised almost side by side. There's a picture of us as babies in our little chairs next to each other, milk bottles in hand. We became known as "drinking buddies." 

Together, we dreamed up brilliant journeys, fighting our ways through dungeons dark and deep, monsters both hideous and marvelous. Our last stand would always be at his parents' minibar located right smack in the family room. We'd snap the swinging door shut and crouch down, breathing heavily as we imagined the room shake, the walls tremble as our greatest foe approached us in the dark. 

With a roar, we'd rise up together, cap guns in hand, shooting madly at the furious monster as it reared far above us. We'd stand triumphant on top of the bar, shouting in victory until our parents came to snatch us down from our dizzying heights and remind us not to split our heads open.

We'd laugh, and the moment they left, the lights dimmed again, and we could feel the cold walls of the sewer closing in around us, an eerie drip of water the tell-tale sign of a monster that lurked in the shadows.

When I was in the second grade, an immense scandal erupted at our church, and our little family of families scattered. I was thrust into a completely alien world of Hawaiian-shirted, flip-flop-wearing church-goers. The familiarity of these strangers was frightening, and I missed the constant presence of my best friend, who called me his honorary cousin. 

We grew older and apart, seeing each other only at Christmas and maybe once or twice during the summer. We'd greet each other shyly after these long absences, but then the moment I jabbed him in the ribs, he'd giggle back, and I knew that we'd be on our way to more adventures.

Things started to change, though. I sailed by in school, effortlessly reading several years beyond my grade level while he struggled with his dyslexia in a school that treated him as if he were an alien. He became more withdrawn, and I overcompensated, becoming loud and boisterous to fill the silence that suddenly vanquished the monsters and turned on the lights, all the adventure dead and gone.

One Christmas, divorce tore apart our little family of families, and from then on, the visits grew fewer and fewer, and less reason there was to make the half-hour drive. 

And so it went.

There was a massive six-year gap in communication between the two of us. We entered middle school. We finished middle school. We started high school. I hardly remembered who he was.

Some news still trickled through the cracks in the brick wall time had built, and I learned that he had become an incredible tennis player, shooting up several feet to rival his father's six-foot-plus frame. He'd won numerous awards in the sciences. He'd even written his own computer program. He bought his first car, a battered, old stick-shift, with his own money. We still got Christmas letters from all the families, little laminated photographs with red and green backdrops. My mother still put them up on the mantelpiece. 

During my sophomore year, I was just finishing up a night race with my cross country team when, impossibly, I heard a familiar voice calling me from the stands. Turns out my little drinking buddy had joined his school's cross country team to pile on some conditioning for tennis season. I hardly reached his shoulder now as he bent over to receive my awkward, sweaty hug. I caught up with his mother, who was vaguely disappointed that my mother wasn't in attendance, and we talked for a while across the chain link fence about what had happened in our lives. It was so odd. Of all the places we should meet again, it would be on a dimly-lit track hours from either of our homes in the middle of the night. I didn't realize how much I actually missed them up until that point.

We saw each other again sporadically at other large meets. I'd always slip away from my team to go look for the maroon and gold of his school's canopy, and I'd always be disappointed if I didn't see it. When I did find him, I realized that time had made us cautious, too cautious, of falling back together into the familiar rhythm our childhood, and our exchanges were short and stilted.

I haven't seen them for over a year now, but my mother's chance encounter with them (at a Kohl's of all places) just reminded me of how close we used to be. He's going off to college next week to study computer engineering and won't be coming home for several months at a time. We're all growing up, grown up, growing away.

But he will always be the boy that helped me conquer my fear of water in his parents' pool, diving up and down the deep end, splashing me impishly as I sat shivering on the edge. He will always be the boy that taught me what a shish kabob was, during those long, hot barbecues we had together. He will always be the boy that introduced me to Star Wars and the power of The Force. He will always be the boy that I'd tickle to the point of tears - both his and mine. 

Those were the days of Nerf wars and magnetic darts and living room handball with yoga balls. They're over now, but they'll never be gone.