My internal body clock wakes me the next morning at 6:29. Why do I have to wake up now, be tantalized with the unrequited hope that Age will call and tell me he finally understands why I pushed him away? I wait another minute. No such call. If my letter couldn’t convince him that our friendship was worth resuscitating, nothing will. Crushed and defeated after waiting another full thirty minutes for a call I’m not getting—I’m a slow learner, what can I say?—I head downstairs to find Baba reading the Wall Street Journal, and Mama nibbling tiny bites of cottage cheese out of a bowl while poring over a Sotheby’s auction catalog. Odd because at this time of the morning, Baba’s usually working and Mama working out.
“So your sixteenth birthday is coming up,” Baba says while I fix a bowl of oatmeal in the kitchen. Over his newspaper, he’s watching me so intently I think he’s about to interrogate me about my goals and objectives for the next year. Instead he asks, “What’s on your wish list?”
“Nothing,” I tell them as I carry my hot bowl to the table and sit next to Mama. Last year, I had so many birthday wishes: a snowboard championship, a trip with Mama and Baba, a détente with Grace and Wayne, a girlfriend. More or less, I’ve gotten them all. What I never thought I’d have to wish for was Age.
“Then how about this?” With a secret smile, Mama slides a piece of paper across the table to me. There’s a number written on it, and it’s followed by a lot of zeros. Six to be precise.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“The Cheng Family Foundation matching fund for Ride for Our Lives,” says Mama, whose smile blooms full on her face.
“You’re kidding.” When I finally look up from the paper commitment, I catch my parents exchanging pleased looks. But when they start laughing like they’re the ones who won the financial aid lottery, I realize it’s not pride but pleasure I’m witnessing. Just as I’m about to jump up and down and thank them, Baba holds up one finger.
“There’s a catch,” he says.
There always is with Ethan Cheng. But I know that I’m about to learn an important business lesson. I’m game.
“You need to solicit the same amount from other donors,” says Baba as he flips the page in his newspaper.
How am I supposed to drum up another million dollars? I slump to the back of my chair, but then I know. The answer is staring me straight in the face. Betty Yu Leong Cheng, the woman at Baba’s side. Raising a mere million dollars is nothing for my mother, who has been known to raise a heck of a lot more than that for the Evergreen Fund in just three phone calls.
“According to The Ethan Cheng Way, always learn from the best,” I tell Mama now. “Can you help me with the pitch? You are the rainmaker.”
Mama swallows another dainty bite and points her spoon at me. “You mean, a snowmaker.”
“What?”
“Excuse me,” she corrects me automatically. “I secured a few snowmakers. At no cost.”
“Mama, you’re amazing!”
The way Mama claps her hands together, grinning, she looks like a little girl who has just been told that she’s a beloved treasure. Maybe that’s all we need. Not fame and fortune for endorsing products, whether it’s a cell phone or a snowboard. But to be endorsed unconditionally by the ones we love most in the world.
“So, if I were you,” begins Mama, pausing for another bite, “I would start with the Dillingers. They’re good for at least a hundred thousand.”
“Mama!” I’m shocked that she’s talking about fundraising in such a crass un-Betty-Cheng like way. But this isn’t business; it isn’t even pleasure. It’s about Amanda and all the other kids who are waiting for a donor to give them their chance to live. So I ask, “Who else do you think I should hit up?”
“You two are dangerous together. I can just see it,” says Baba, shaking his head fondly at us. “This is going to be the most effective fundraising campaign the National Bone Marrow Registry has ever had.”
“How can you say that?” I ask.
“Your great-grandfather was part of the group who came to the Gold Mountain to build the railroad,” says Baba, lowering the business section to the table. “A few years after those men built the railroad, which radically changed commerce and transportation, they were excluded from America.” His voice may sound even-keeled, but I sense the outrage behind his words. “You just never know when your luck will change. So you don’t have to be the best or the smartest or the richest person in the room, but you have to be the hardest worker. Never giving up is how you make your own luck.”
“Surviving,” I say.
“Survival,” corrects Baba. That word rings with the same steel as the railroad tracks that my great-grandfather must have hammered. Survival—I wonder if that’s what propelled Baba through his career. That need to work himself to the top. Or was it to prove that he was more than the grandson of a manual laborer? “It’s why we named you Syrah.”
“What? I don’t get it.”
“The syrah grape grows in France’s Rhone River valley, where it has to endure intense summers and then the winter wind, the mistral,” explains Baba.
“It’s a survivor,” says Mama.
A survivor like my mother, who thrived despite Weipou’s best efforts to starve her spirit, and like my father, who eked a legacy out of nothing to honor his own manual-laboring grandfather.
“Remind me to tell Lena that the guest quarters need to be prepared for the Leongs.” Mama raises her eyebrows when I drop my spoon and Baba coughs. She demands, “What?”
“Excuse me,” I correct her with a smile, “but since when are the Leongs visiting?”
“Since I invited them to Ride for Our Lives.” Unconsciously, Mama runs her jade pendant back and forth on the gold chain, so that the crane runs amok, uncertain which way to fly. “It’s just one night.”
“Thank you,” I tell Mama, swinging around to their side of the table to hug her first, and then Baba. “These are the best birthday presents ever.”
When I settle down in my seat again to finish my now-cold oatmeal, Baba shakes out his newspaper, Mama goes back to reading about the next Tang horse on her acquisitions list, and me? I savor the traces of their loving smiles as they glance at me when they think I’m not looking.