Feng Shui Feng ShuiEndorphins and adrenaline pump me up so much after buildering that I could run a marathon even after I reach Auntie Lu’s. No one’s home when I let myself in, which is a good thing since I probably would have blurted out that I rock—literally. Then, Mama would have asked a million questions, all the while worrying about liability and insurance while insisting that Auntie Lu MapQuest the closest hospital even though I’m perfectly fine.
More than fine, actually.
Just as I’m about to get a drink of water, I hear laughter from the patio. Curious, I look out the window. Mama’s back from her seminar after all. But she’s not multitasking, checking her voice mail while deadheading flowers, writing lists and logging onto her Blackberry. She’s just sitting with Auntie Lu. To be perfectly accurate, she’s lounging on the teak chair, looking more relaxed than I remember seeing her. The bistro table is set with a stainless steel, aerodynamic carafe that looks centuries out of place next to the tiny, matte black teapot. In front of each sister are two teacups, one squat and the other tall.
Some of the ladies in the potluck group used to get together a couple of times a year for the Taiwanese tea ceremony, but Mama never had the time. It’s a leisurely ceremony, not as formal as its Japanese cousin but with more meaning than an English afternoon tea. The last time Mama performed the tea ceremony with me, I was too sick to go to third grade. She sniffed impatiently when I complained that we didn’t have star-shaped peanut-butter-and-strawberry-jelly sandwiches like Janie’s tea parties always had.
I could close my eyes and still see Mama’s hands preparing the tea. First, she poured hot water into the smaller teacups to warm them. Then, she topped the loose tea leaves in the teapot with water. I sniff the air now and catch the aroma of the rich, dark dragon well tea that Mama splurges on once a year or so. The kind that’s harvested in Taiwan, not China.
Out on the patio, Auntie Lu pours the first cups of tea. Immediately, she and Mama dump them out, splashing the tea on the limestone slabs under their feet. That initial cup just washes the leaves. After a minute of steeping, Auntie Lu fills the taller scenting cups, covering them with the tiny teacups. When the tea steeps long enough, both sisters raise the teacup lids and dip their heads like black swans to smell the steam. Only then do they pour the tea from the scenting cups into their drinking cups.
Looking at the two sisters, sipping, sniffing and chatting, no one would believe that only four years separate them. With her graying hair and tired eyes, Mama looks old enough to be Auntie Lu’s mother. I can’t hear Auntie Lu’s toast. What ever she says makes Mama chuckle so hard she starts to cry.
Maybe what Mama needed was a change in scenery and circumstances, not to reinvent herself, but to reclaim her real self. Just like me.
My heart steams with guilt. As I watch Mama wipe away her tears, I wonder if I’m the one who’s aged her. I step quietly away from the window, unable to look at this China Doll Club any longer.
I retreat to Auntie Lu’s office, but working on my problem set or my Truth Statement is next to impossible. Even more of a fantasy is any thought of relaxing in the middle of this mess. I can handle the six piles of papers on the floor. And the boxes of photographs crammed into the bookshelves. And even the randomly placed logos, business cards and letterhead that Auntie Lu designs for clients when she isn’t making her own art. But the five sticky coffee mugs, two water bottles, eight notepads, eleven pens, stray napkins and a snow drift of sticky pads on her desk? We’re talking major skin-crawling anxiety here.
There is no way in feng shui hell that I can sleep another night surrounded with this mind-vomit. I hadn’t expected to start space-clearing so soon, but diving into another person’s problem is a great cure for guilt.
The whole point of space-clearing is to get rid of clutter so that good luck can ooze into every available nook and cranny. With all the chaos in Auntie Lu’s office, luck will need to be clutching a feng shui master in one hand and a sheaf of four-leaf clovers in the other just to find its way in here.
I grab as many cups and half-crumpled napkins as I can carry and nearly drop them all when Auntie Lu speeds around the corner. She stares at my garbage collection and smiles sheepishly. “You’re just like your mom.”
Now, that’s one I don’t hear every day.
“She can’t stand a messy desk either.” Auntie Lu slips into the office and grabs a plate with cookie crumbs. “I sent her out on a walk. She works too hard.” Auntie Lu sighs, a small wisp of sadness that curls around us. “So, I take it, you’re ready to space-clear my office?”
“It’d be easier to take every thing out and start all over.”
I interpret Auntie Lu’s stricken expression as a no.
Before long, we’ve got three boxes in front of us. One for things to throw away (a battle because Auntie Lu thinks every thing can be recycled into material for her art). One to give away (ditto). And one to keep (bulging at the seams).
“What is this?” I demand, peering inside a moss green bucket. It contains a feng shui master’s nightmare: dead flowers. That’s the symbol of every thing old, decaying and rotten. No dried floral arrangements or withering wreaths are allowed in a feng shui–friendly home. “Mama would freak out if she saw this.”
Auntie Lu’s face softens. “They’re all the flowers Victor sent to me when we were first dating.” She places them carefully in the Keep pile.
“Wait a second…”
“I thought I’d make paper out of them. Letterpress our names for stationery.”
In concept, it’s romantic. In reality, it’s a concept. The kind you fantasize about, flirt with, but never actually do anything about. “You’ve been with him for how long?”
I’ve always known that living with Victor is why Auntie Lu is only a phone-call-a-year presence in my life. Mama is so hung up on them living together, unmarried, that she claims they’re a bad moral influence on me and Abe. As if we’ve never seen a TV show or read a book or know people who are shacking up without the benefit of a ring.
“Where is he right now?” I ask.
“Africa.” Auntie Lu grows animated with pride and hands me a sheaf of photographs off the top of a stack of books. “He’s part of a special team of photographers who’ve been handpicked to put a face on the AIDS crisis there.”
“I can see why,” I say, riffling through the photos. “His work is amazing.”
“He’s an amazing man.” Auntie Lu looks down at the bucket cradled in her lap and places her hand protectively on its rim. “I’ll make paper out of it someday. Really.” She glances around the room, overwhelmed since half of the stuff is on the ground and the other half, we haven’t even touched. “Maybe we shouldn’t space-clear today.”
I spot an empty picture frame on the top shelf in her closet and think quickly. “We’ll frame one petal, and you can write something mushy about him. But the rest we toss. And then you’ll have lots of room for new flowers.” In answer to her dubious expression, I say, “It’s the feng shui way.” I stretch up for the picture frame, which is drowning in dust. “When exactly was the last time you space-cleared?”
Auntie Lu grimaces.
“Let me guess. Never.” My hand brushes against something hidden behind the frame, but I can’t reach it. So I pull a chair over and climb up. Tucked way in the back, pushed against the wall, is an antique Chinese document box. “What’s this?” I ask, hopping off the chair.
“I don’t know,” says Auntie Lu. Clearly, this is a woman who is in dire need of some serious space-clearing. I shudder to think of what all is lurking in the rest of her closets.
Auntie Lu reaches to the side table for a napkin to wipe off the red, chipped lid. “See?” she says, “there’s a use for every thing.”
I groan and toss the now-gray napkin in the Throw Away box. Carefully, Auntie Lu opens the antique box, which smells vaguely like Belly-button Grandmother’s office, old with a hint of pepper, cloves and star of anise. Inside the box are photographs that look tea-stained with age. Letters written on light blue airmail paper, all in Chinese. Postcards. An embroidered handkerchief. Tiny seashells. A jade bracelet.
“Look, your mom.” Auntie Lu taps a chubby-cheeked girl, grinning mischievously at the camera. I cozy up to Auntie Lu on the sofa bed for a better look. “She used to get in so much trouble all the time.” That is hard to imagine, but Auntie Lu sifts through the pictures and tells me stories that don’t sound remotely like the Mama I know and live with. How Mama climbed trees instead of doing her homework after school. How she practiced piano by banging out the notes.
And then I stop listening because I see a photograph of Mama, smiling up at a tall white guy with thick brown hair. My father. Ever since I can remember, I always thought Abe looked like a boy version of Mama. In reality, he looks like an Asian-ized version of our dad, with the same unruly hair and the same quirk to his eyebrows like he’s forever puzzling over something.
Auntie Lu studies the picture silently over my shoulder. “Your mother was disowned for being with him. I don’t think our parents have talked to her once since she got married to him.”
“They’re alive?” Mama doesn’t talk about my grandparents either. Like she’s cut off her entire childhood. And ours. So we live in a bubble with breathing room for only us three.
“Yes.” Auntie Lu places the pictures she’s holding back in the box. “Your mama told me about your boyfriend. I think she feels bad about how she handled it. It reminded her of our parents. But she was very worried about you. She hadn’t talked to you since you started camp, and you know how she worries.”
“Well, she basically disowned me in front of everyone.”
“Don’t say that,” says Auntie Lu, sharply.
I glance at her, surprised and hurt by her harsh tone. My eyes drop to the box and the Mama I never knew.
“Being disowned is like not ever being born. All your history is erased. It’s a terrible thing, especially since…” Her voice trails off.
“Since what?”
Auntie Lu presses her lips together, looking eerily like Mama when she doesn’t want a conversation to go any further.
I guess out loud, “Since she did the same thing to you?”
“What? Patty,” she says, her voice coated with disappointment, “how can you say that?”
I bite my lower lip, not intending to have spoken my thought aloud… even if it is true. Or at least, I think it’s true. My gaze falls from Auntie Lu’s disapproving eyes down to the photographs I’m holding. Shuffling through the pictures, I stop on one of my parents holding Abe in between them on a rust-colored sofa. No one looks remotely happy in the picture, not the shrieking baby Abe, and certainly not my grim father or my mother, who looks like a kid playing dress-up in her loud purple blouse with enormous shoulder pads.
“Patty,” says Auntie Lu gently, “I wish your mama would give Vic a chance, but…” Her voice trails off and she eyes the photograph I’m holding. “But I have to cut her some slack. She thinks she’s protecting me.”
“From what? Being loved? Being happy?” Again, the words spring out of me like they’ve been tamped down in a tight coil for too long.
“From being hurt.”
I release my breath, a hunh of my own, and roll my eyes in disbelief.
“She just thinks it would be… easier… to be with a man from our own culture. Someone who would understand how we think. How we do things.” Auntie Lu shakes her head. “America, with all our choices and diversity, can be bewildering. And there are some people who don’t welcome differences.”
I think about Steve Kosanko and how impossible it was for him to accept me, a girl born in America just like him. What was it like to be Mama? To know no one in a foreign land? As I consider this, I rustle through the pictures still in the antique box. And gasp at the same time Auntie Lu does.
Auntie Lu tries to wrestle the picture out of my hand. But I have it gripped tightly like I’m never going to let it go. It’s Mama, but not. Her face is raw and puffy. Bruises swell her eyes shut. Her nose is bloated, broken on the bridge. I can’t help but picture the tiny bump on Mama’s nose, right where her glasses sit.
“You remember?” asks Auntie Lu.
Another sigh is my answer. Then, the front door opens. Mama’s footsteps go directly into the kitchen, not into the bathroom, not into the office to check on us. But straight to work on dinner.
Auntie Lu, looking every bit as old as Mama, squeezes my hand tight. She murmurs, “You need to talk to your mother.”