44

Translation

I NOW KNEW what Mom was capable of. What she could do, to me.

I thought about what Ms. Vivian had said, about how we were raised by one culture but living in another. If I took my situation and examined it in American light, the answer would have been clear: love is not conditional, and it should be freely given and expressed. Things that infringed on your personal autonomy were not to be tolerated. This was not love, in America. She did not love me.

But for my mom and her friends, love was more complicated. My mom had always taught us to uphold our family and our name. Parents saw it as their duty to fix their kids, to pressure them to be the best they could be. That, to them, was love.

I don’t know if it was this way with all Asian families or even with all Taiwanese ones. But it was true of my parents and their friends, so it was therefore true for us, too. They told us the sky was pink, and even though we saw blue, there was always a tiny part of us that would forever be looking for the shades of rose.

What would my father say? Love is keeping our family together.

My mom would say, I will cut you off if you don’t do as I ask. Love is keeping you safe from what I judge to be bad decisions, no matter what.

My American friends would say, That’s manipulation.

My mom’s friends would say, How do you show love to your parents? You respect their wisdom.

Bella would say, You can’t control me.

But what would I say?

In the olden days, they used to torture people by tying a horse to each appendage and then sending the four off in different directions. At some point, the body can’t keep itself together; the pressure was too much.

Bella had sliced off her own limbs, left them behind so the rest of her could survive. I could do the same but for our family: I could abandon Old Taipei and what I knew was right.

But what if there were things—people—I couldn’t give up? At what age can you stop saying, It was because my parents told me so, and take responsibility for your actions? When do you have to finally admit that your choices are who you are?

I didn’t think there was a set timeline, but I had the sinking feeling it was right around this moment. Now.

I pounded on Hattie’s door.

She opened it immediately and pulled me in.

“What’s going on?” she asked. “Mom never yells at you.”

I sat on the edge of her bed, staring at the little crooked seams of the tent, the mismatched and worn fabric. I thought of this little toy Hattie used to have, a sphere made of different pieces. If you pulled out one, the whole structure separated and you were left with a handful of crooked pieces that had to be fitted together again. My heart felt like that, with the parts all scattered, each with a different name: Garrett, Mom, Dad, Bella.

But now I had an ally. My sister.

I told her about what Mom had said, what she wanted me to do. About my visit with James Lee and what he had said about Old Taipei and the arena. And then about Dad’s patent. I still couldn’t make sense of it. That had been the constant undercurrent, discordant. When I got to the last part, about how Dad had picked IBM over his friends, Hattie rolled her eyes.

“How did you not know that?” she said. “Haven’t you been in his office?”

“Were you snooping in his stuff?”

“Weren’t you snooping?”

Fine. Fair point.

“But you missed one huge piece,” Hattie said. “Didn’t you see the date? When he first started trying to finalize the patent and sell it to IBM?”

I shook my head.

“It was in January 2018.”

What? Dad had died that December. January was when he had first gone to the doctor. When he was first diagnosed.

When he knew he would no longer be around to take care of us.

Everything was whirling. “So, did he . . . did he sell his patent to IBM because of us?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But doesn’t it make sense? Why else would he do it? Remember how sick he was? But he kept working all those late nights?”

I had blocked all that. It was too painful.

How could a daughter not know her own father? Shouldn’t I understand, at a cellular level, who he was? What he wanted and why he did what he did?

But the truth was empty, and silent.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said.

In Hattie’s face, I saw her six-year-old one, small and young.

“I can’t continue the competition, Hattie,” I said. “I know that now. But if I don’t—”

“—she’ll cut you off.” She stared at me, her eyes huge. “Are you asking me for advice, Juju? Me?”

I nodded.

“She’s not going to change,” she said finally. “It’s like we don’t even see the world with the same colors. All the things that she thinks are important . . . aren’t. Not to me.”

“So I should finish the competition?”

Hattie gazed at the ceiling, as if asking for a ray of patience to be beamed at her from the skies. “No. It’s your life. Mom is trying to control you, like she controls everything. But be honest: you don’t want to help the Lee Corporation. I can tell. You just don’t want to disappoint Mom.”

And there it was: what no one else—not even I—had dared to say. But it wasn’t the Lee Corporation. It wasn’t Yale. It was that the competition was Dad’s. It was something of his, and if I could get it, if I could reach it, I could—

—I could bring him back.

That’s what this—what all of this—had been about, really. Every late night, every grade, every step I took toward business school and his alma mater and winning this competition. I was trying to resurrect all the pieces of him and put him back together.

I was crying, and Hattie looked at me, panicked.

“It’s his,” I said, and Hattie understood immediately. “How can I quit?”

“It was his,” Hattie said. She suddenly hugged me, her arms tight. She was almost my height now. “But it’s not him, Juju.”

So much had fallen in the past few weeks. My beliefs about what was important, how things were valued, how I was valued. But this last bit of truth was the last block supporting the entire structure, the keystone. And now everything was tumbling.

“So, what do I do?” My voice was small.

“Say no, Juju,” Hattie said. “For the first time in your life, say no.”

I didn’t know she had been watching me so closely, but of course she had. The same way I had been analyzing my mom, the way I had always longed to study my dad. Maybe that’s also what family was.

I didn’t have to win the competition. I laid this sentence out like a ribbon on a frozen lake and then stepped on it, carefully.

I didn’t have to go to Yale. Another step.

I could make my own choices. I waited. I didn’t fall in the water.

I could ask for what I want.

I could ask for what I want.

Everything was in rubble at my feet, but I could still stand. Pick up a board and try to put it up again. Nail it to another and another until I could, perhaps, create something new.

But there was one thing I had to do first: I had to repair our family. Repair all of us.

I said, “I’m sorry I kept trying to do everything for you.”

Hattie used to wear my old clothes, would sneak into my room to steal my earrings and necklaces. My mom used to take pictures of us in the same clothes in the same parts of the house and then hang them side by side. But now Hattie was wearing entirely unfamiliar sweaters and dangly earrings that I would have only worn in a dire emergency. She had put some temporary hair dye on the tips of her hair and wore chipped, sparkly blue nail polish.

I had heard about how helpful she had been at the cultural center, how she was always the first to volunteer. Chef Auntie herself had come to rely on her. And at Auntie Beth’s bookstore? Hattie had come up with an idea to pair romance books with the #LocalLove blogs and advertise them in the front.

“I’m trying to be better.” I squeezed her hand.

“Really?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m going to let you do things on your own from now on. To make mistakes.”

Hattie smiled. “Let’s not be absurd.”

“I said ‘try.’”

“Okay. I have a quiz tomorrow and haven’t studied at all. What are you going to do? This is a test.”

I twitched.

“It’s the last grade before the midterm, Juju.”

I could almost feel the hives blooming.

“And I left my textbook at school.”

Oh my God.

Hattie smiled angelically.

“Good . . . luck . . . ,” I managed to say. “It’s . . . your . . . test. . . .”

She beamed. “It wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“You have no idea,” I said.

“I do,” she said. “That’s why I love you.”

I couldn’t help but think of next year, when I wouldn’t see her every day. No more breakfasts in the morning, chats while we brushed our teeth. “I’m going to miss you when I’m at college.”

Hattie stared at the ground. “I’ll be fine. Really. It’s time for you, Juju.”

Another thing I couldn’t fix. No matter what happened, our family would still be in pieces. Me at some unknown university, Hattie at home but probably mostly with friends, and Mom even more alone than she was now.

“Hattie?” I said. “Even if Mom is mad at me—don’t leave her by herself after I go, okay?”

She crossed her arms. “I’m not going to stop helping Old Taipei. And the protest. If she cuts you off, she cuts me off, too.”

“I don’t think that’s what Dad would have wanted.” He had given up his last lucid days working feverishly on the patent, on its sale. So we could survive without him. “Family was important to him.” That much, at least, I knew.

Hattie said, “Tell Mom. She’s the one making everything difficult.”

“Just . . . try. For me. Okay?”

Hattie had an identical jade key chain hanging from her purse, only hers was in the shape of a mouse, since she was born in the Year of the Rat. She did the same thing I did; she held it in her palm, as if it could give her answers.

She looked me in the eye. “You do what you want with the internship—and Garrett—and I’ll consider it.”

It wasn’t a guarantee, but it was a chance. I was learning, slowly, that might be enough.