Girl Overboard (11 page)

“Not possible,” says Grace.

Mama tries again. “She could go shopping while you’re at meetings.”

The Princess of Passive-Aggressiveness, I lash out at my convenient whipping girl, “I’m not going to Tokyo with Grace.”

Even as I say it, I’m half-hoping that Grace will answer, “Sure, you should come with me!” That she’ll tell me she’s wanted to get to know me better and this is a perfect opportunity for some sister-bonding time. One look at Grace’s tight lips, and I know the chances of that happening are equal to the odds of a miracle taking place right here.

Grace spouts off one of her PR sound bites, a simple tagline that her intended audience of one will remember forever: “Find your own solution.”

“Grace, can’t you change your plans?” Mama’s wheedling tone makes me cringe. “Syrah would have such a good time with you. You know all the right places to go.”

If Grace still hates us after sixteen years, buttering her up isn’t going to soften her any. We’re still her home wrecker. Even so, I’m not sure if it hurts to see Mama trying so hard because it makes her seem so pathetic or if it’s because I don’t rate half the effort.

Grace breathes in. Her black eyes go so cold, I swear I feel crud frosting my entire body.

“Some of us have to work. Besides,” she says, delivering the ultimate coup de Grace, “Syrah’s not my problem.”

The fact is, I’m not even Bao-mu’s problem anymore. I bite the insides of my cheeks. Shakily, I lift a mound of rice to my mouth with chopsticks.

“No rice,” Mama snaps, glowering at her enemy, simple carbohydrates. “Hong Kong girls are so skinny.”

My hand jerks, scalded, and the rice ball drops onto my plate. We must keep Syrah on a strict low-carb, non-fat, no-food diet so that her hips and stomach don’t balloon into obese American-sized proportions.

Baba ends all further discussion with his decision. “Then Syrah will stay home for winter break. She can help Bao-mu pack. Now everyone, take a look at the P and L.…”

Cheeks flaming, I keep my eyes on the
chuun hup,
the teak tray of togetherness, untouched on the long conference table. Not one morsel has been eaten. Not the chocolate gold coins for more wealth or the dragon eye for sweetness. Not the coconut for good relationships.

T
he Chengs are nothing
if not efficient. Our meeting ends a full hour early. Scant minutes after the last agenda item is checked off, everyone evacuates as though the end-of-trading bell has rung, Wayne and Grace for their private debrief of the meeting, and my parents for their private jet awaiting them at Boeing Field.

On my way back to the main house, I can’t help but replay my impromptu plea, horrified. Even to my untrained business ears, I sound inane. A girl who deserves Wayne’s condescension. I wouldn’t invest in myself. The life path my parents want me to follow is as set in stone as these Chinese poems etched on the walls and on rocks to point out vignettes visitors might otherwise miss in our garden. As I stop to trace one of those poems, I realize that my forehead might as well be tattooed:

Now it just seems so stupid, so naïve, to think I stood a chance of impressing my parents, Wayne, Grace, all the kids at school who ridicule me behind my back. That all of them would watch me ride, awestruck at my skill, my style, my daring.

Frustrated, I stomp back to the house, head for the kitchen. Show me a carb I won’t eat right now. Fury overtakes me when I pass all the museum-quality antiques inside this shrine to Mama’s style. Oh, no, there will be no reproductions in this house. Ironic, yes, when not a single person in The House of Cheng feels real. Least of all me.

The kitchen is dark, just the way I want for my solo pig-out.

“Done already?” Bao-mu asks.

So startled, I drop my CD, which clatters out of its safe case and onto the cherry wood floor. Quickly, I bend down to scoop my résumé up. How can I possibly still care?

As soon as Bao-mu sees my face, she sets down her tiny teacup, her eyebrows knitted together into an accent mark of concern. “How go?”

I wish I were little again so I could nestle against her warm body and inhale her strength and believe her when she told me that I was special. That I was destined to do great things, whatever I wanted.

“Everybody had to leave early.” A surge of misplaced anger rises inside me and I glare at her. “Just like you’re going to. How come you didn’t tell me you were leaving?”

Bao-mu abandons her bowl of hot and sour soup at the kitchen table and turns on the light. She bustles to the refrigerator, removing saran-wrapped platters, a feast I no longer feel like eating because
she
wants me to. Irrational, immature, I know.

“Learn now, learn later,” Bao-mu says, pulling a clean plate out of a drawer. “Doesn’t change anything.” She heaps so much steaming rice on the plate that Mama would have gone into diabetic shock if she saw. “You need eat.”

“I’m not hungry,” I tell her obstinately. My stomach growls in disagreement.

Naturally, Bao-mu has ears only for my stomach. She uncovers every single platter to scoop tofu, Chinese broccoli, and sautéed green beans until there are more calories on that one plate than Mama eats in two days. Maybe even three. Just looking at Bao-mu’s lumpy knuckles that I used to trace like roller coasters makes me feel guilty, guilty that I’ve been abrupt with her, even more guilty that she, a little old lady of over seventy, is serving me. Over her loud
aiya
protests, I recover the platters with saran wrap and carry them to the refrigerator.

As I do, half of me wants to tell Bao-mu,
Yes, it’s time for you to retire, to stop taking care of me.
The other half wishes she’d never leave.

“Sit,” orders Bao-mu, placing my trough of a plate on the table.

I sit because four feet eleven inches of female power are glowering at me. For all I get embarrassed about people finding out that I still have a nanny when I’m nearly sixteen, I love Bao-mu.

“I was hoping you would move to Hong Kong with us,” I admit because it’s easier to hide the truth from myself than from Bao-mu. “Remember how you used to tell me you were taking the next plane back to China?”

Bao-mu laughs. “That only when you so naughty. China was just talk.” She pauses from wiping down the counter. “And it work. Sometime, you too good girl.”

“What do you mean?”

“You always stop when someone tell you to. Right away.” She sighs, a creaky breath of regret. “You never tell them stop.”

Every tear I’ve dammed up for seven months presses on my eyelids. I want to deny it, tell her she’s wrong, but how can I when I know that she’s right? I don’t stop Wayne from harshing on me. I didn’t stop Jared.

Bao-mu says, “I so old now.”

“You look so young for sixty.”

Usually, Bao-mu has a good laugh when I say that, but tonight she sits heavily next to me. “I too old to move to China now. I used to America. You not need me anymore. You such big girl.”

What I want to say is that I still need her. But I don’t want to sound like a baby when God knows, I’m not pure and innocent like one. Instead, I nod my head as though I’m agreeing; because Bao-mu looks so severe, I know she’s on the verge of crying, too.

“You need eat dinner,” insists Bao-mu, nudging my plate even closer to me, food-medicine for my breaking heart. “You want disappear like your mama?”

As a matter of fact, I do.

My stomach rumbles with a hunger I don’t want to feel, my mouth bitter with aftertaste from my first family meeting.

“This so delicious,” says Bao-mu, tantalizing me with a crisp green bean between her chopsticks, not in that weird way that Mama’s friends push fattening food on each other because they want each other to gain weight, to feel superior since they’ve got stronger willpower and the fat-free body to prove it. But Bao-mu offers food out of love. “Taste.”

So I take a small bite. And it tastes hot and sour, salty and just a tiny bit sweet.

“My cooking the best,” says Bao-mu, who has never forgiven my parents for hiring Lena, our professional chef, a few years ago.

“Yes, it is,” I tell Bao-mu, who’s been more of a mother substitute than her nickname could ever have promised. I take another bite. “You are the best.”

Upstairs, lying on my
full belly in front of my bookcase, I flip through my manga-journal to the last half-drawn image of Shiraz. As usual, my snowboard girl is flying down some amazingly steep run, living my dream. I sit up, and close the book on Shiraz, unable to finish her. My dream is as far away as Hong Kong.

God, I can’t believe that we’re moving eight time zones away from Age. All at once, I need to talk to him, need the reassurance that we’re still friends, best friends, here in Pacific Standard Time. Without thinking, I spring to my feet, wincing when my knee buckles from the sudden movement.

As I wait for Age to answer his phone, I massage my knee on my chair, and spot the new
Snowboarder
in my in-box, still embalmed in shrink-wrap just as all the other issues are since my accident.

“Hey,” says Age, his voice surprising me because, I guess, I’d been expecting his voicemail.

I sit up and dispense with any greetings. “So what’s a chiru?”

“What?” he says, and I’m relieved to hear the laugh back in his voice, the way he sounded before Natalia’s grand re-entry into his life. So I tell Age about going to the hospital with Lillian and The Six-Pack.

“If you really want to know,” he says, “a chiru is an antelope. Endangered. In Tibet.”

“God, Encyclopedia Zorrito, I’d ask how you know.”

“Except you don’t have to.”

“Because you’ve got the world’s weirdest brain.”

“One man’s trivia, another one’s treasure.”

“Who said that?” I demand.

“Me.”

“Quoting yourself.” I shake my head, wishing he were next to me so I could poke him in the shoulder. “Some people would say that’s kind of, I don’t know, egotistical.”

“What can I say? I’m great.”

I laugh and lean back in my chair. “Okay, Exalted One, so what do you think? Instead of being a Cheng business-bot, I could be the first sidewalk manga artist in Seattle.”

“Oh, yeah, I can really see you sitting out on Broadway with a can for donations by your side.”

“Don’t forget my sign that says, ‘Let me show you your inner animal.’ You think my parents will be cool with that?”

“About as cool with you flipping burgers all day.”

“Or going pro.” As soon as I say it, I wish I hadn’t, because snowboarding reminds me of Natalia, which reminds me that Age has been an absentee friend for the last couple of days, which reminds me of moving.

As if we’re operating on different planes, Age says as excitedly as the kids at the hospital, “So the new Mack Dawg movie came into the store today.”

“Come on over,” I tell him, willing to break my ban on all things professional snowboarding if it means hanging out with Age. “We can watch it in my studio.”

“I can’t,” he says.

I know the girl behind his can’t: Natalia.

“What time is it?” Then Age swears, making me tense, because I know what’s coming. Sure enough, he sounds like Wayne, who has a million things on his agenda more important than me: “I’m fifteen minutes late. Natalia’s going to freak.”

“Just because you’re a little late?”

Age coughs, and I translate that to mean,
No, because talking to you made me late.
He says, “I’ll call you later.”

In a moment, I’m listening to a
click
as Age hangs up. Breathing out in disbelief, I place my phone on my desk, shove back in my chair, but then stop. Recklessly, I rip open the plastic covering the snowboarding magazine. What do I see on the first page that I open to? Naturally, it’s a full-body shot of Sonora Bremen, blond and thin, two years older than I am, and the girl who hooked up with Jared right after snowboarding camp. She didn’t last long, either.

What would it be like to be her, or any of the snowboard girls who’ve made it, are under contract with some big-time companies, and are traveling the world? Girls who get to design their own line of boards and clothes and goggles. Girls who everyone aspires to be.

I open my desk drawer, rummage for a pen to manga-journal, and instead feel the framed photograph of me in my snowboarding gear where the housekeeper or my mother or her interior decorator must have stashed it, placing it in solitary confinement for having clashed with the décor. I can barely remember how I used to picture myself in a snowboarding movie, amped up music in the background. How I’d ride the skies into history. How people would breathe my first name in awe—not my last. How I would be Age’s first-string-pick riding partner forever.

The antique mirror hanging above my desk, the one that Bao-mu gave to me to ward away evil, is supposed to reflect ghosts. But in the mottled glass I catch my reflection and gasp. That’s what I’ve become: a barely-there girl. God, when did I disappear? I peer more closely into the mirror and wish I hadn’t. My cheeks look rounder than ever, my eyes smaller than they are. I’m bloated from overdosing on the Wayne Cheng Kool-Aid, the kind that brainwashes me into thinking that I can’t do anything right.

Oh, Syrah Cheng? She could have been great if she didn’t chicken out. If she hadn’t screwed up and let herself get screwed over big-time by Jared Johanson.

I rear back from the mirror and head to my bookshelf, where I shelved a box with all my ribbons. Standing on my tiptoes, I reach for it, but as I do, a book falls from the shelf like snow sloughing off a cliff. I wince as it smacks the crown of my head.

“Ow,” I moan, my hand rubbing my skull.

I bend down to hurl the book, vent all my frustration on it. If I ever doubted Bao-mu that ghosts fly in breezes and topple otherwise stable glasses from shelves and wipe out hard drives, my skepticism vanishes the moment my eyes land on Baba’s book,
The Ethan Cheng Way: From Rags to Richest.

A sign,
Bao-mu would say.
You suppose learn from this.