Talking to You

Fiction by Jessica Zhu

Flame
1980 — Tongchuan, China

Beneath the baking sun, dried grains blanket the stone of the courtyard. Summer means harvest time, and I can see you hunched among the wheat fields, your braids swinging beneath your chin. Just because you’ve gone off to college doesn’t mean you don’t need to help. It wasn’t books that fed your grandparents in the famine.

When the sun mercifully sets, you’ll take the cassette player you bought from all of the money you saved last year and sit atop the roof where your little brothers won’t bother you. Even without hearing them, I can tell you’re listening to English tapes from the way you’re mouthing the words, silently, teaching yourself to mimic the sounds so foreign around your tongue.

Here, you are still more flame than girl. This is all yours, the wheat fields and corn stalks and apricot trees dripping with sugar. But you’re thinking about the city. Or Hong Kong, with its streets flooded with cabs and vendors hawking fish balls and teenagers playing cantopop in their Walkmans. Or even America.

It’s late by the time you return. Everyone else is already asleep, so you duck beneath the mosquito net and lay quietly beside your mother on the kang. When it’s winter, your father and three brothers also share the long stone bed-stove, but tonight they’ve scattered bamboo mats around the room. When the sun rises, you’ll all return to the harvest.

I watch you, here where you were born, for a few weeks. I see when you accidentally burn the mantou trying to read and tend to the fire at the same time. I see when you pull apricots off the trees and watch their branches ricochet back and forth like swings, breaking the fruits open with your hands and handing halves to your brothers. I see your father brag about you to the neighbors. My daughter’s the only student who got into college in this whole village. No one leaves this place, these northern Chinese hills where families can trace their ancestors back for centuries and people can only afford to buy meat twice a year. But you did.

When it’s time to go back to school, all of your things fit into a single duffel bag. I trail behind as your parents walk you to the edge of town, miles away from the train station you’ll have to get to on your own. You’re only sixteen, but you walk with your shoulders back and chin lifted, like a woman. I want to tell you that I’m proud of you. Here, you are not yet my mother.

Funeral
2012 — San José, California

I am ten, too young to sit in the front so I’m slouched in the back, watching a volley of raindrops hit the glass by my face like arrows. You’re silent, seething, filling the car with a fog of your anger.

“I told you to practice,” you say, and I don’t have to look to know that your fists are clenched tightly around the steering wheel.

There’s nothing for me to say because you’re right. You always are. I stare at the sheet music in my hands, the annotated arpeggios and crescendos and rest notes that my fingers haven’t learned well enough.

“Why don’t you ever listen to me?” you ask, and I don’t know how to reply. Because you’re suffocating. Because I’m a bad daughter. Because I don’t want to play the piano.

I know what you’re going to say next, and by now I can’t tell if it’s true or if you only say it every time because you know it’ll hurt me most. “I gave up everything for you and it was all for nothing. How did I even give birth to a daughter like you?”

Now you’re screaming, and the rain beating against the roof sounds like the drumline to my funeral march. We’re speeding down the highway like death would be salvation, like slamming head-first into the median would grant absolution to both of us. “Say something! Why aren’t you speaking?”

But this is always how it goes. I don’t know how to cross this emptiness between us, this space that spans continents and oceans and decades of loss. So I am silent.

Fortune
1980 — Xi’An, China

Light filters into the room, a breeze peppering shadows onto the carpet through thin white curtains. I’m looking through your window, watching you laugh with the five other girls you share a room with as you unpack your things, some creasing books and a yellowed photo of your family.

You’re trying to hide your northern accent, speaking standard Mandarin the way your professors have taught you to, but your tones are clumsy after a summer at home. The way your family speaks is warmer, fuller. This language feels cold, artificially pristine, so distant from the fields and summer heat.

“Look at this sweater my dad got me in Beijing,” one girl crows, and everyone crowds around her to feel how soft the fabric is between their fingertips. You’re smiling but I can tell from the way your arms cross over your chest you’re self-conscious about the clothes you’re wearing now, the ones your mother sewed you last winter.

The fabric, red for good fortune, had cost a month of her skipping meals. But you’re beginning to learn that sacrificing your body isn’t always enough for women to bargain for dignity in this world.

I follow the six of you to the cafeteria, watch as you say you’re getting the vegetarian baozi, the ones that are 25 cents cheaper because there’s no pork. “I’m just dieting, I’ve gotten fat at home.”

“But you’re so skinny!” one girl gasps. You’re sixteen and you haven’t started your period yet because your body never had enough food to feed a baby too. But thinness is easier for your friends to understand than poverty.

The cafeteria is alive with the laughter of friends reuniting after a summer, and you’re gossiping as you eat, giggling about the boys writing you letters and asking you sheepishly if you’d ever want to see a movie with them after class. It’s fun, sometimes, being the only six girls in the aerospace engineering department.

After dinner you carry your books to the library, walking with a friend because it’s too dangerous to go alone after it gets dark. I want to approach you two, introduce myself as a physics student, maybe, but my Mandarin isn’t good enough to pass as a local. I learned academic Chinese, memorized the classical poetry you plastered on scrolls on our walls. But I don’t know how to speak the Chinese that belongs to teenagers, the one that vendors yell on the streets, the one that’s louder and warmer and rolls off your tongue like honey.

You study until the librarian comes and kicks you out, and then you pack up your worksheets and calculator and rub the sleep from your eyes. I slip out the door before you do. For months, this is the routine you’ll keep every night. It’s less discipline than desperation — you know this is the only way you’ll make it out of your hometown.

Fire
2015 — San José, California

I am thirteen, sobbing on the bathroom floor because you’ve read the lines in my journal I wrote after our last fight: I wish I had a different mom. I wish I’d never been born.

“If you think your friends’ moms are better, why don’t you just go live with them?” you scream. “I can be like them if you want, I can not care about you at all and let you do whatever you feel like doing. That’s easier, isn’t it? Why do I stay home and cook for you and drive you to all of your classes? Why don’t I get my own job instead of relying on your father for money? Why do I work like a maid in this house when no one has ever thanked me for it? Not you, not your brother, not your father. I have a master’s degree! Why am I wasting it on you?”

I don’t know how to tell you that I just want to be free. I feel stuck, choking on the noose of all of the hopes and all of the expectations you’ve passed on to me by blood.

You’re starting to cry too, and your tears are rare but I know they mean your sadness has drowned out your anger like a deluge of resignation and forlorn hope. I’m sorry, I start to say but the words catch in my throat. We don’t know how to apologize to each other.

Flower
2006 — Cupertino, California

I am four, swaying with you on the swing Dad set by the tomato plants because we don’t have a porch. Here, we’re still in the apartment you bought when the two of you first came to America. Split between us and my sixteen-year-old brother, its two bedrooms are small to me but not you.

We’re reading a book together, Peter Rabbit, and you’re happy I’ll never understand the way you still have to concentrate to pronounce the words correctly. English is my first language, and you know this means I may never speak to your mother the way your brothers’ children can, but that’s okay. It’s better to be here, in America, where my birthright is a suburban home and an Ivy League degree and a passport that’ll let me go anywhere.

It’s been years since you’ve been home. And is it really still home? You’re forty now and it’s getting harder to remember how your mother’s yopo mian tasted, how your brothers’ laughs sounded as they chased each other down dusty dirt roads. But this strange new part of the world, somewhere in northern California, doesn’t feel like your own either. The other Chinese people are masquerading as white, showing off their English like the American teenagers won’t still snicker at their accents, bragging about the elite universities they went to back home like their degrees would matter here. This is a country of Costcos and white picket fences and politicians on TV who warn your neighbors about how you’ve come to steal their jobs. Maybe I’ll call it home. But you still feel lost sometimes, unmoored, unsure about what you’re even looking for.

When Dad comes home from work, you’ll carry me inside and start the rice cooker for dinner while he checks my brother’s math homework for errors. He has to get 100 percent on it so that he keeps his grades high enough to get into a good college, so that it’s all worth it, so that you can say that you’ve come here for something.

At the dining table you give me the first bowl of soup, a light broth you’ve made from pork bones and pumpkin flowers. I’ll never know what it’s like to eat the same cold vegetables tossed in chili oil every night, to save the meat for special occasions and to ration it among your parents and siblings and aunts and uncles. You’ve made sure of that, but it’s strange to you too — how quickly things have changed.

In Chinese, your name is Xiaomei— little flower. The one you introduce yourself with now, the Anglicized version, makes you feel like you’ve been uprooted. And you sort of have, since migrating West. But when you look up this new name to see who you are now, you find that it means girl from the bright meadow. You’re still there. You’re still her.

Faith
1984 — Xi’An, China

The lanterns strung along the ceiling of the dive bar are dim, and you duck your head to avoid hitting them as you slide into a booth beside your friends. A Liu Jie vinyl crackles on a record player in the corner, and a tired-looking man is polishing glasses with a dirty cloth behind the bar. The energy is heady, exhilarating. Your exams have just finished and you’re graduates now, your names printed on crisp new certificates bearing the university’s blue seal.

“I can’t believe we’re done,” one man says, raising his pint of beer in a toast. “We did it.”

Your cheeks are flushed, from pride more than alcohol. You won’t say it but the glint in your eyes tells me you’re thinking about your hometown, the way the wheat fields look like waves when the wind rushes through, the webbed shadows of mosquito nets on your mother’s face as she sleeps, the books that your neighbors used to whisper about behind your back. Who does she think she is? Always reading, never working. So useless.

When your glass clinks against your friends’, the booth erupting in a symphony of Gan bei! cheers and laughter, I’ve never seen you look happier. Here, you are the brightest you’ve ever been. I want to freeze time, trap you here, stop you from ever being extinguished.

I catch your eye as I pass your table, smiling at everyone but looking only at you. “Gong xi,” I say. Congratulations. I want to say I know how hard it was for you, how impossible it is that you’re here in this booth with all these other spoiled twenty-somethings. I want to tell you I understand.

Fight
2019 — San José, California

I am seventeen, staring at the ceiling with my earbuds at full volume because I can’t bear the sound of you two fighting. We’ve moved neighborhoods by now, to a wealthy suburb where our backyard is big enough to get a dog and our house has enough rooms for Dad and I to both have a study.

I hear you knocking on my door. I’ve locked it because I hate it when you make me pick sides, but I get up to let you in.

“I just don’t understand,” you say, and I study your eyes to see if you’ve cried but of course you haven’t, you don’t in front of him. “It’s like he doesn’t even respect me. It’s like I can’t even recognize the man I married anymore.”

I am quiet, but I know you want me to say that you’re right. “If it wasn’t for you and your brother, I would’ve divorced him by now,” you continue.

If it wasn’t for me, you would’ve done so many things by now. I think about all of your degrees, tucked away in some drawer where they’ll never be used again. I think about all of the nights you stayed awake studying by candlelight, all of the miles you traveled and oceans you crossed that only you could have survived.

What was it all for? Would it be enough if the answer was me?

Forgiveness
2022 — Paris, France

I am twenty, and a kaleidoscope of lights blurs the streets around me, criss-crossing from window to window above milling crowds, blinking at traffic stops in my periphery, glowing in the warmth of restaurants open past closing.

Parisian evenings are still warm this time of year, and I’m walking home from a dinner with new friends. It’s been three months and I can find my way back from any metro stop now, look comfortable enough on these streets that a couple stops me for directions as I pass the Sorbonne.

There’s a lightness pulsing in my chest, a feeling of freedom and finality. An eleven-hour flight separates us, the farthest I’ve ever been from you, and I’m grateful for the distance.

I love this city, the cobblestone streets and couples stargazing along the Seine and cafes where calico cats sunbathe beneath your legs. But the novelty is starting to wear off too, and the adrenaline is being replaced with something that stinks of loneliness.

The language is foreign in my mouth here, the words clumsy and unnatural. Ordering coffee and reading street signs and buying sandwiches at the boulangerie beneath my apartment are teaching me how exhausting simplicity can be, and in every cashier’s polite smile I see a tacit accusation that I’m somewhere I don’t belong.

I would never tell you, but sometimes I cry at night, when I feel so lonely I can’t breathe. All of the people I love are in California and I don’t know anyone in this entire continent and yet, if you asked me to come home to you, I’m not sure that I would.

I want to tell you that I understand, now, what it was like to uproot your life. I want to tell you I understand how painful it must have been to move to a new country where you only kind-of speak the language, where you’re all alone and your family is oceans and continents away. I want to say that you must have thought, when you had a daughter, that you’d finally be understood. I want to apologize for it taking so long.

But I’ve been avoiding your calls, blaming it on the time difference. I still don’t know how to talk to you.

Fate
1988 — Guangzhou, China

You’re sitting at a desk beneath fluorescent lights, tapping a pencil absentmindedly against the table and frowning at a sheet of half-done aircraft blueprints. Everyone’s gone home, so the office is empty but you’re still here, a habit you haven’t broken from college.

I hear him before you do, the soft footsteps I’ve learned to recognize by heart from years of living beside the stairs. You smile politely when he walks in and your eyes catch for a moment, but it’s too fleeting to know what you’re thinking.

“Late night?”

You look up at him again, like you’re trying to decide whether to be irritated or not that this stranger is distracting you from your work. “Just finishing up some designs.”

I can tell he wants to keep talking but you’re looking down at your desk again, restarting your pencil’s rhythmic tapping, so he says a quiet goodbye and leaves you alone.

I’ve watched you for years now, trying to decipher your secrets, hoping to know the kind of woman you were when “woman” still meant woman and not mother. But I can’t help myself — I lurch forward, forgetting I’m not supposed to talk to you, that’s not how this works — and find myself gripping the edge of your desk when it’s already too late.

“Don’t marry him,” I beg, but if you hear the desperation in my voice it doesn’t show. “He’ll smother you one day. Stay here, please, don’t go to America. You can’t give yourself up. You can’t trade your life for mine.”

I want to tell you about the conversations we’ll have, later, when you’ve learned that older really does mean wiser. When you’ll tell me that my dreams are too much for my boyfriends to handle. When you’ll warn me that I’ll need to make myself shrink one day if I’m not careful. I want to tell you all of the things you’ll tell me when, really, you’ll be talking to your older self.

You look at me like I’m crazy, and I shouldn’t be surprised, because that’s the whole point, isn’t it? The inevitability of womanhood, the inescapability of our miscommunication, the insurmountability of this ravine between us that I can’t find the bridge to cross, that we scored into the center console, into the bathroom tiles, into the 6,000 miles I flew away from you. This ravine you first carved when you flew 6,000 miles away from your mother too.

There’s too much lost in translation, too much we’ll never know how to say.

Jessica Zhu is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. She is currently a senior at Stanford University, where she studies international relations, human rights law and French literature and is the executive editor of The Stanford Daily. She has been writing stories and poetry for over a decade.