I’m in such deep shit. But my feet don’t seem to register how much trouble I’m in. Because I’m running as hard as I can to where my mother is standing at the foot of a stone bridge. When I reach her, I burrow right into her warmth. “How did you know I was here?” My mouth is as dry as dust.
“I know my daughter. I knew something was wrong.” Mom sounds mad as all hell, but her arms come around me to hold me tightly, and that’s all I care about. “And your agent finally coughed up the information that you were in Beijing for a movie.” She takes a deep breath. “Daughter, you lied to me.” Then she bites out each word again in Chinese. “Nu er, ni pian wo.” All in English and then repeated in Chinese.
No doubt about it. Mom is definitely at DEFCON 1.
“I’m sorry, Ma.” My chest rises and falls with a deep, fortifying breath. “I’m sorry I lied to you.”
“But why?” she asks. “Why did you lie? Was it really because of the movie?”
“At first, it was the movie,” I admit. “But then it was because I was finding out so many confusing things. And I still don’t know what it was that you did. Why you had to leave your family and China.”
“We’ll talk about it later.” Her body tense as a wire, she’s already turning away from me and toward her estranged family. They’re too far away for me to see their expressions, but they must be freaking out about my mom’s sudden appearance.
From force of habit, I’m about to let my mom evade my questions yet again. But then resolve crystallizes like ice in my stomach. I’ve fought too hard to know her past to wait any longer. I need to know why my mother was banished from her homeland—which was my banishment too, though I never realized it. No matter how painful it is, my family’s past is my inheritance. “Ma, tell me what happened. Please. Tell me your story.”
My mom turns back to me. Gently, she cups my face in her hand. “My past is so painful, and I made so many mistakes. I don’t want to burden you with it.”
“Ma, all my life I’ve wanted to come here—to China. To know where I come from and feel like I belong somewhere. But that’s not what happened when I first came here. Not until I met my relatives.” The rest of the family is still watching us from a distance, but I ignore them. This moment should be just for me and my mother a while longer. “Even then, there was something missing. Not knowing my past makes me feel . . . nanguo.” “Nanguo” is a Chinese word that means sad and uncomfortable all at once—like your skin is bursting from grief—and it’s exactly how I feel. “I won’t know where I come from and where I belong until I know your past.”
“I see.” Tears sparkle in my mother’s eyes. “You have to understand—I grew up rich and spoiled in a place like this.” Her hand drops from my face, and she makes a sweeping gesture that encompasses the rooftop pleasure garden. “I never thought of anyone but myself. The Tiananmen Square protests changed all that.”
My body seizes up with astonishment. “You . . . you were there in Tiananmen Square? During the massacre too?”
Her face empties of emotion. “Yes. I lost friends that day.” The thought of my mother fleeing from bullets and tanks in that bloody massacre sends chills through my body. Somberly, she says, “I was afraid I would lose your father that day.”
“Dad?” My voice goes thready. “He was there too?”
“It was how I met him—at the Tiananmen Square protests.”
My mother being a revolutionary is one thing. But my kind, gentle father? There’s only one explanation. I’m dreaming all this, and any minute now I’ll wake up in a cold sweat in my hotel room bed. Surreptitiously, I pinch myself. Any minute now. “But,” I say as I fail to wake up, “you told me you weren’t there!”
“I never said that.”
No, what she’d said was that it was forbidden. Forbidden by my grandfather. And like an idiot, I assumed that meant she hadn’t been there. I remember what Eric told me. Your grandfather is a high-ranking Communist Party official. No daughter of his would have taken part in those protests. “Is that why you were kicked out of the family—because my grandfather didn’t want you at the protests?”
“That was only part of it.” Her gaze narrows on the patio, where my grandfather watches us, and her voice drops, even though he can’t hear us at this distance. “My father—your grandfather—was a proud, powerful man, and Delun was nobody, a poor student.”
“My grandfather didn’t approve of my father?” Anger sparks in me, even though my aunt had already told me this. But how could anyone not approve of my father?
“It was worse than that.” My mom grips her hands tightly together. “Thousands were arrested after the massacre, and your dad was one of them. Your grandfather had him sent to a labor camp.” Just a moment—my dad in prison?! “Then your grandfather lied and told me that he’d had Delun executed as a counterrevolutionary. All to keep your father away from me.”
Horror chokes my breath. Even after all I’ve learned about him, I still can’t believe that my grandfather would do something so awful. My stomach sickens sourly at the thought of my father in a labor camp—and my mother thinking he was dead. It makes sense now. My aunt’s refusal to see me when I first came to Beijing. My po po fainting from shock when Alyssa asked to go look for me.
But it wasn’t because of what my mother had done. It was their own guilt. “My aunt and grandmother knew. They knew Dad was still alive in a labor camp. And they let you believe he was dead.”
“Yes.” Just one terrible word. But it explains everything.
Oh, my heart. My mother wasn’t cut off from her family. She’d left them. Because they’d betrayed her.
“I got Delun out,” Mom says grimly. How in the world did my upright, law-abiding mother spring my father from prison? “But your grandfather had already sentenced him as an enemy of the people—so we fled to Hong Kong. Then we had to leave Hong Kong for the U.S. before it reverted back to China’s control in 1997. If we hadn’t, your father would have been arrested and imprisoned again.”
Again, the thought of my father in prison makes me ill. Dad could have ended up like Eric’s grandfather, with his bent bones and ill health. But that’s not what happened to my dad. My mother saved him, and she lost her family and home because of it. “Ma,” I say, “it’s time to come home.”
“They don’t want me.” Her voice is cold.
“They do—at least Yi Ma and Po Po do. They’ll be on your side this time. But it’s your fight.” That was what Eilene had been trying to tell me—that she would be on my side, but it was my fight.
Surprise flashes in my mother’s eyes. “What do you mean, Gemma?”
I look at the small, distant figures on the patio. Po Po. Yi Ma. Alyssa. My aunt and grandmother stood up for Alyssa. They’ll stand up for my mother now. Eilene might have been right about me, but that doesn’t mean she was entirely right. It’s not always about learning to stand up for yourself. Sometimes, it’s not just one person’s fight. Sometimes it’s sisters and mothers and daughters together. Thousands of students facing down a tank in the shadow of the red Gate of Heavenly Peace.
“I guess it’s my fight too, Mom. I came to Beijing against your wishes. The least I can do is fight for you to reclaim it as your home. Our home.” It’s my home too—lost before I was even born. “Thirty years ago, you lost your home. Don’t let my grandfather take it from you again.”
My mom’s face opens in wonder. “When did you get so wise? So strong?”
“That’s easy—I have you as a mom,” I say. “Now, are we going to kick ass or what?”
My mother straightens her shoulders, and there’s a light in her eyes I’ve never seen before. I can totally see her as a revolutionary activist. “Yes, let’s go.”
Together, we walk to the table, where the others wait for us.
My aunt, ghost pale, rises from her chair at our approach. “Mei Mei.”
Alyssa clasps her hand to her mouth.
My grandmother stands too, like she’s in a trance. “Nu er, ni hui lai la.” Daughter, you’ve returned.
My grandfather stays seated, his face emotionless.
My mother stops in front of the family she hasn’t seen in thirty years. Her body is trembling at my side. “Ma, Jie Jie.” She swallows. “Ni men zhi dao.” You both knew. That my father was alive. “Ni pian wo.” You lied to me. Because they’d let her believe my father was dead.
Pale as death, Po Po sinks to her chair, and Alyssa casts a worried look in her direction. I remember what my cousin said about our Po Po’s bad heart, and anxiety worms into my stomach. Then Po Po stands up again. Tears pour down her wrinkled cheeks without her seeming to notice. “Nu er, wo dui bu qi ni.” Daughter, I’ve wronged you. “Qing ni hui jia.” Please come home.
Now Mom is the one who seems like she’s about to collapse. Though I’m trembling with emotion myself, I hold her steady, my arm around her shoulders. “Ma, wo hui jia la,” she says shakily. Ma, I’ve come home.
As if to herself, Po Po whispers, “Wo de nu er hui jia la.” My daughter has come home.
Blinking away tears, my mother looks at my aunt, who gazes fearfully back at her. “Jie Jie.” My mom’s voice breaks. “Did you even try to find me?”
“Mei Mei,” my aunt says in a voice so full of desperate love that my chest knots painfully, “please forgive me. I was so ashamed—that’s why I didn’t try to find you. But I always hoped you would come home. I’ve never forgotten you.”
Heart weighted with pain, I touch the jade pendant at my throat. The pendant my aunt wanted to send to me at my birth—to honor a long-ago promise between two sisters. Do not forget. That was what my mother wrote on the back of the photograph she sent to my aunt. If only my aunt had looked for us then. If only she had found us. But she didn’t because she thought my mother would never forgive her. The jade burns like a coal against my clammy skin.
A sob shudders through my mother’s body. “There’s nothing to forgive, Jie Jie.” All this time, my mother meant that she didn’t want to be forgotten. A single burning tear blazes down my cheek.
Then my mother turns to my grandfather, and my lungs collapse with dread. Will he welcome her back as he promised? And will she forgive him the way she forgave my po po and yi ma? But he’s done so much worse. He threw my dad into a labor camp.
My grandfather looks up at his daughter, saying nothing, his mouth set into a stubborn line.
My mother’s anger emanates from her in a palpable wave of scorching heat. “Ba, thirty years ago, you branded Delun an enemy of the state and imprisoned him to keep him from me. You failed. And now I am back—here with my granddaughter to demand justice.”
My grandfather’s knuckles whiten as he grips the arms of his chair. “I did what I had to do to protect my family. And that includes you. I lived through the Cultural Revolution. I know how dangerous young fanatics are. Delun was the same kind of revolutionary. The same kind of danger.”
“I married him anyway,” she says defiantly, and for a dizzying moment, I can see the rebellious teenager my mother once was. “I told him our family secret, and I’ve never had reason to regret it. Delun is faithful, kind . . . and a better father than you ever were.”
At this, my grandfather hunches over as if she had hit him in the gut. It surprises me that he even cares about my mother’s opinion of him.
It seems to surprise Mom too. Her breath catches before she continues. “In fact, he almost risked arrest to come with me to Beijing. He was that worried about our daughter—your granddaughter. That’s the man you think is such a danger to our family.” My chest tightens. It would have been my fault if Dad were arrested because he came to Beijing out of worry for me.
My grandfather’s mouth loosens, and a shadow crosses his face.
More doubt about my grandfather creeps into my heart. In the time I’ve been in Beijing, rumors about my dangerous grandfather have swirled around me like a poisonous fog. His power. His ruthlessness. I’ve been afraid of him. But now I’ve seen him back down under pressure from his family. I’ve seen him pained by my mother’s accusation that he wasn’t a good father.
Maybe he’s not the monster I’ve built up in my head. Maybe he’s just a man with deep regrets. A man who doesn’t know how to come back from his mistakes. “You can fix this,” I say to my grandfather, the palms of my hands moist with nerves. “You can get my dad a pardon.”
Everyone turns to me in surprise.
My grandfather barks a laugh out, but it sounds forced. “What makes you think I have that power?”
“Searches for your name are blocked by the Great Firewall of China. That tells me you’re pretty high up in the Communist Party.” When he doesn’t react, I take a deep breath. “I know about the things you’ve done.” Eric’s grandfather. My father. “But this is a chance to do something good with your power. Pardon my dad.”
He’s silent at that.
“Lao Gong, ni da ying wo,” my po po says. That’s what she said before. Husband, you promised me. I thought she had been referring to a promise made recently. But maybe I was mistaken. Maybe it was a promise he made thirty years ago. And maybe what he promised was that my mother could come home. My heart rises in hope.
“Ba,” my aunt says, “thirty years ago, you told me that if Lei didn’t give up Delun and her revolutionary activism, it would get her killed. You said she would quit the revolutionary cause only if she believed that Delun was dead. So I let you lie to her. I was wrong. We were wrong. Give Delun the pardon. It is the only way Mei Mei will come home.” Her face is tense, but her voice is strong. “And you promised us that she could come home.”
He gazes at my po po, aunt, and mother for a long moment. “Wo da ying ni.” I promise you.
My mother turns to her mother and sister, her face crumpling in tears. My own eyes sting as I step back to make room for my aunt and grandmother to embrace my mother. They huddle together, speaking rapid Chinese, making plans. My dad will get his pardon. The women in my family will make sure of it.
My grandfather looks on with his craggy eyebrows furrowed over watery eyes. He looks defeated but oddly . . . not angry. Maybe I was right. Maybe he’s relieved to have a chance to fix his mistakes.
Alyssa comes over to me and hugs me. “Hey, are you OK?”
Reminded that I’ve found my own jie jie, I brush the tears from my cheeks and hug her back. “Yes, I’m OK.”
It will all be OK now. We all get to come home.