Tiger Babies Strike Back (18 page)

Speaking of which, three days before we moved from San Francisco, my husband was standing on a ladder. He was painting the outside trim of the windows of our old house, and he turned around when he heard a low, humming noise. He didn't see anything at first, as it took a moment for his brain to make sense of what his eyes were looking at. A section of the sky was vibrating, moving like a dim, shivering spotlight. A thick, buzzing noise became louder. It was an electric sound.

It was a swarm of bees headed right for him. He was standing on the highest rung of a twelve-foot ladder with nowhere to go. Right before the swarm might have enveloped him, it careened to the left and crashed into the windows of the house next door. He climbed down and stood in the driveway catching his breath.

Later that day we were telling this story to a passerby who casually commented, “That's what happens when the old hive gets too crowded. The queen leaves to find a new home.”

“What happens to the old hive?”

“Before she goes, the queen leaves behind eggs that will become new queens. She takes half the hive with her to the new home, and the other half stays. The swarm splits in two.”

I thought about the bee incident and this conversation. Our hive had gotten too crowded with others' needs and wants that displaced our own. We were overburdened with our families' expectations and dependencies. Newcomers could and would always build their hives in San Francisco, and I had left to make room for them, and to make room for myself somewhere else, too. I didn't need to worry about my old town being taken care of. There would always be new artists, new inhabitants, and native sons and daughters born every day. I could go find a new home.

Two days later, I was collecting the last remnants of our belongings in the house and giving the floor a final sweep. I heard a familiar squawking noise, but it was a cacophony that seemed out of place. It was a North Beach sound out in the Sunset District. I shuffled to the window and looked up. Perched there on the electrical wire directly in front of me were the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill. For my whole life I had never once seen them this far west in the city. And there they were, those cheery green conures with the red heads and bright white circles around their eyes. Maybe it wasn't the whole flock, but thirty or so parrots were balancing on the wire, flipping like trapeze artists, and shouting out a hello, or a good-bye.

I watched them for a long time, their bird antics both charming and saddening me. “What are you doing out here, fellas?” I asked them out loud. They squawked and squeaked as I watched them play and fight, groom and preen. I didn't know how they found me, or why I felt the need to pretend their flight and visit had anything to do with me personally. When they suddenly and abruptly flew off in a haphazard tussle through the air, they were so clumsy and comical that I laughed out loud.

“Bye, guys,” I said, watching their bright green bodies blend like a group of dots into the blue of the sky until they were gone. Rather, they blended so effortlessly into the background that I thought they were gone, but they were still there, of course, just continuing their adventures elsewhere, less sentimental than this San Franciscan.

I had been living in San Francisco with a husband, home, and new baby. Both sides of my Chinese family had a C-clamp on my soul, and the stress of city living was squeezing an ever-tightening grip around my shoulders. My nerves were frayed like electrical lines that had been blown down in a thunderstorm, live and exposed, ready to ignite at the slightest provocation.

I felt the gathering storm clouds although I could not see them. I was sure that something bad could be just around the corner. Was it just paranoia? Perhaps. But I didn't want to find out the hard way.

Each day I feared that I might get squished in the street. Even if I was between the two painted lines of the crosswalk, I could very likely become Pedestrian #17 to get annihilated that year in the Cool, Grey City of Love. A truck could flatten me or a cyclist might knock me over as it flew through a red light. Perhaps I would never seen it coming.

Maybe I felt so vulnerable because my C-section had changed me. After all, my body had been taken apart and put back together again, and in the process a new human was born. My hometown suddenly felt menacing to me. I was overwhelmed with an impending sense of doom, as if everything that had once felt assuring and familiar could now potentially kill me.

And like that swarm of bees, I felt split in two.

One morning I woke up in Nevada City and looked out the window to find snow melting in the sunlight. It took a while for my pupils to adjust. After my warm slumber behind dark curtains, I was temporarily blinded by the sun-slicked leaves of the trees outside. Droplets of clear slush dripped from the branches like crystals hanging from a chandelier. The night sky had burned away. I continued to watch the melting snow slide from the trees to the ground in slow-motion free fall, half between snowflakes and rain. Steam was rising everywhere, and the natural world transformed right before my eyes.

Where else was frost melting? Somewhere inside me.

Caught between two worlds, we are all in our own version of the Middle Kingdom. There's who we're expected to be, who we'd like to be, and where we live, the in-between. We all inhabit that secret cave where we've been spelunking. Beneath the rocks, the cave opens up to a spacious wellspring where fresh water gurgles up, and the sunlight from above reflects and glimmers, casting wavy light into the shadows.

Asian Americans, we hide ourselves too well. No one is going to crawl under a rock to get us. We have to come out into the light.

23

What kind of idiot
leaves
San Francisco? I left my house, my family, my city of riveting, bright ocean light and foggy, romantic skies. I knew all the shortcuts in SF, the one-way alleys, secret parking spots, and clean bathrooms downtown. I knew which magnolia tree bloomed earliest in Golden Gate Park and could identify the sandy stretch of beach where the plentiful, perfect, unbroken sand dollars washed up after a storm.

How could I leave that complicated nest, my place of knowledge, my beating heart where the blood rushed through my veins, thumping loudly like the Pacific Ocean crashing against Seal Rock?

I immediately missed walking by the Flood Building that used to be Woolworth's that used to be the Baldwin Hotel. I longed to eat a cheeseburger in a dark-paneled room with Maxfield Parrish's
Pied Piper
glowing golden on the wall behind glass and crystal decanters. I wanted to touch my fingertips to the red velvet and silver wallpaper at C. Bobby's Owl Tree.

The memories and ghosts I thought I was fleeing instead just took up residence in a kaleidoscopic corner of my brain, and I still could see the faraway images like from a coin-slotted pay telescope at Playland-at-the-Beach. I could place a dime in the slot on the side of my head and here's what would unfurl:

My brother's wedding at the Empress of China, afterward sitting in the Palace Hotel's Garden Court in an inky-black gown, my husband in a tuxedo and my baby daughter still just a twinkle in her daddy's eye. And Café Europa on Columbus Avenue, El Tapatio on Francisco Street, the old U.S. Restaurant, Pronto Pup, Uncle's Café, Joe Jung's, and everywhere snacks, pastries, chow fun, ice cream, and those fancy Parisian macaroons that, for two, cost more than I was paid per hour at my first job at Pier 39.

San Francisco was where my mom worked in a curio shop as a kid in Chinatown, where my grandparents raised seven kids and ran a travel agency. It's where my dad's father died at Kaiser in 1962 the day he was supposed to go home after a routine operation. My dad worked in the Transamerica Pyramid, that pointed dunce cap on the paper cutout skyline, and we all went to school, worked, had piano lessons, Chinese school, and basketball practice while joyous and tragic things happened all around us, like one moment going to the Ice Follies at Winterland, and then getting a phone call and finding out that a friend's dad was stabbed to death on Van Ness Avenue by a guy who'd just robbed the Crocker Bank.

That was my city, or just a twenty-second silent film of it. A snapshot, really. But, hey, I'm not the only one to feel longing and love and pride in San Francisco. I'm the one who left, after all. But all those images are what roll around in your head, everyone's head, I suppose, all in a jumble when you're from a place.

Now that I'd left my hometown, had it left me? I refrained from buying a
SAN FRANCISCO
sweatshirt and wearing it around my new town. That would've drawn exactly the kind of attention I didn't want. My heartbroken mopiness was already a big scab on my face. Wearing a hoodie with an SF logo would have been advertising the ache that still woke me in the night.

What had I done? In the following months, I opened many bottles of champagne and assured myself it would be okay. I baked dozens of chocolate chip cookies, cheesecakes, and blueberry pies to keep my hands from shaking. I told myself that a lot of formidable people had loved both my old town and my new town: Lotta Crabtree, Lola Montez, and all those old-timey writers we all claim to love but have never actually read. Nevada City is as old as San Francisco, with similar sights and sounds of bygone rowdiness. In my head I saw the gold bullion, the veins of silver in the mines, the gilt wallpaper, and murdered Chinamen.

I left so I could find out something new about myself, to see what lay beyond my childhood playground.

However. There was nowhere to hide now. There was no ocean air to soothe me, no fog to enshroud me. I looked for the old familiar sights—snowy plovers, bottlebrush trees, eucalyptus, and miles of concrete sidewalk. But now there would be no grid to follow, no straight shot up Market Street, no waterfront or end of the earth scattered with broken bits of shells and nineteenth-century brick. I touched my hand to the ground and searched unsuccessfully. Now all I felt was new dirt beneath my flip-flops, with not even one jewel of green sea glass to remind me of what came before. Unmoored and unprotected, I might've stayed safe if I had remained in San Francisco. She would've watched over me, my city. She would've made sure I didn't do anything stupid.

And by leaving San Francisco, I figuratively and literally left my mother.

Mom, bring me a Popsicle kept cold by fog, a glass of milk frosted with Ocean Beach air. Out there the orange crabs are Dungeness, but the basement crawl spaces crammed with my childhood memories were
dungeon-esque
. But now, I had sold off my baggage and all my treasures. I gave them up for a few dollars at the Alemany Flea Market, and the rest of my stuff I dragged to the corner of Twenty-Second Avenue and Ortega where, in mere minutes, San Franciscans who'd chosen to stay stopped their cars and picked clean my former belongings—CP Shades cotton culottes, Fisher-Price wooden people,
Star Wars
action figures, and satin pillows with Chinese brocade.