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.
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