Onyx Grace

Written by Priscilla Wong

I Doctor Mammy Betty

From the age of 3, I was raised by a retired African American attorney who gave back to her community.

She opened a preschool for underserved children in a quiet pocket of San Francisco, where she employed my mother and taught her how to speak. Afterwards, she taught me how to speak. For some strange reason, she became attached to me, an asthmatic child, born to Chinese immigrant parents - naturalised. She made me feel more special than all the other children regardless of ethnicity. I noticed from an early age how she spoke differently from everyone else. She liked to play music to lull me to sleep - piano, classical and Motown. She fed me Southern peasant food. She was Southern Baptist. The African American community never associated with the Chinese community otherwise. We were eventually separated by racial tensions. The accidental bond led me to imprint onto her face at an early age, leading me to forsaken my family on an individualized path.

She came down on me that morning, Dr. Betty Hellborn did, when I was no more than five years old, pressing me into that cot like you might press a wildflower between Bible pages. The wool blanket scratched against my skin while her voice rolled out deep and terrible as thunder over the Bay. "Calm down," she said, and it was no request but a command from on high.

She was a sight to freeze the blood of any full-grown man, let alone a little scrap like myself. Her eyes bore into mine, eyes that fought the morning same as mine did, only hers always won the fight. That great hand of hers, shaped like an eagle's claw, searched out my rabbit-heart through my chest, and though it drummed wild as a wasp in a jar, I dare not turn away.

Eyes of hers were deep as wells in drought time, vast as the night sky. The sweet smell of shea butter hung about her like perfume in a church. The fire-flecks in the dark brown eyes spoke of ancient things, whispering secrets while her pupils drew tight as a purse string. She had painted them up fancy with mascara that spread like daddy-long-legs across her lids, and her lips were the color of crushed blackberries in August heat. She was like the mother spider who guards their babies fierce and terrible, her teeth white as cotton behind skin the color of rich soil.

Never have I seen a sight in this world quite like that black woman, who was nothing like the golden-haired girls smiling from the magazine stands.

She wanted me to act proper, better than the other colored children who were wild as spring hares and sweet as honey in the comb. A mother knows the unchanging nature of a child's heart. How was I supposed to know that I would search for her eyes for the rest of my life?

II Twins of a Valley

The bleachers groaned under the weight of the Sunday afternoon, metal hot enough to brand flesh through denim, while parents fanned themselves with paper programs gone limp in the valley heat. I sat among them, a stranger in their midst, though they didn't know it. These valley folk, with their pressed shorts and smartphone cameras at the ready, lived in a world as far from mine as the moon, yet here I was, watching their story unfold on a diamond of dusty earth.

The ex-wife stood near third base, a woman who wore motherhood like an ill-fitting dress. She hollered encouragement in that particular way of divorced parents, too loud, too eager, as if volume could make up for lost time. The other families clustered in their assigned spaces, content in their simple pleasures - their drive-through dinners, their tablets and gaming consoles that kept the children quiet, their air-conditioned trucks that waited in the parking lot like faithful dogs.

And there was Sawyer, smallest of them all, a sparrow among pigeons. When he connected with the ball, the crack echoed across the field like a gunshot, and for a moment, the whole world held its breath. His legs, thin as saplings, carried him to second base while the crowd erupted. A beautiful child, untouched by the sordid circumstances of his creation, unaware that the woman who bore him had bartered her dignity for fleeting pleasures.

In the shadows of the dugout, Sadie slouched against the wall, all adolescent angles and carefully curated silence. I recognized in her the ghost of my former self, that girl who once held her feelings close like precious stones, before I learned that running was its own kind of freedom.

For the first time since I'd fled my old life, I felt the ground solid beneath my feet. These suburban souls, with their orderly lives and scheduled joys, had given me the perfect hiding place - not in shadows, but in plain sight, where no one thought to look. The timing of happiness, I realized, was like catching a pitch - to know when to swing and when to let it pass.

A man could breathe out here in the valley, where the air moved sweet and clean across the ranch land, nothing like the bitter wind that scoured San Francisco's streets.

Away from the glittering lights on the Golden Gate, around the bay, the city wind was a living thing, malevolent and hungry, howling through the concrete canyons of Hunter's Point where young toughs lurked in doorways with danger in their eyes and steel in their pockets. The wind drove before it all manner of urban debris - paper cups, dead leaves, broken dreams - past the industrial wasteland of Dog Patch where juvenile delinquents gathered like crows, their laughter sharp as broken glass.

I learned young the futility of fighting that city wind.

It would catch you square, like a fighter's jab, sending you staggering. The trick was to surrender, to let it move through you like water through a sieve, to dance with it like a drunk with his shadow. Only then could you make it home with your dignity, if not your hair, intact.

But here in the valley, here on the ranch, the wind is a different creature entirely.

It doesn't beat at you with brass knuckles - it embraces you. The oak trees stand straight and proud, their leaves dancing in the light, casting shadows that cool rather than threaten. This is what peace looks like, what safety feels like. This valley holds none of the city's scars, or bitter memories. Here in the valley, the land remembers what it was meant to be, and a person can remember too.

The children's laughter - Sawyer's deep as a well, Sadie's bright as new pennies - carried across the valley floor like church bells on Sunday morning, and a body couldn't help but feel cleansed by it, same as the fierce valley sun burned away the morning fog till everything stood sharp and new in the light.

III Cooper Woman

The first one is always the one that marks you deepest, like a chisel to stone. Mine was the Cooper woman, proud as a cathedral, with fine-boned hands and a tongue that could slice through mediocrity like a scalpel. The other students whispered Nazi behind her back, their voices thick with hatred, but I knew better. If she was a Nazi, then she was a Nazi who saw something in a small Chinese girl when no one else bothered to look twice. Strange how salvation sometimes comes wearing a stern face and speaking in clipped tones about a faraway art school in New York City.

The liberal arts school rose like an island of misfit toys above the wasteland of my Catholic school past and the concrete jungle of inner-city middle school. Here walked the tribes of youth – hippies with their patchouli dreams, punk rockers wearing rebellion like armor, dealers who knew the price of everything, dancers who moved like smoke, musicians who carried rhythm in their presence, and us silent ones who spoke through pencil and paint. The art room became my monastery, where shy children could take their vows of observation.

I watched them all from behind my easel – the rich kids crying about their split-up families, the girlfriend who thought forty wasn't too old at sixteen, the beautiful lesbian with the deliberate ugliness of her faux hawk who taught me about desire with stolen kisses and rough games of blind man's bluff. Even the Italian model who shouldn't have given me the time of day but made me her confidant.

They were all mysteries to me then.

Some of us tried drugs like tourists visiting a foreign country, while others fell into that country and never found their way back home. I couldn't understand any of it, but I watched and remembered, because that's what artists do. We take the world's strange pieces and try to make them fit together on paper.

My own home was a place of shadows and sharp edges, where hope went to die. But pain can be a teacher too, maybe the best kind. It taught me a stubbornness my family had never seen before, a determination that grew like weeds through concrete.

And through it all was the Cooper woman, who had taken her fine arts degree from that holy place in New York and landed in our public high school like a displaced aristocrat. Her snobbery about Cooper Union became my North Star, leading me toward a life of creation despite my parents' wails of protest, despite the odds stacked like corpses against me. Years later, I still remember her hands moving across student work, elegant as a surgeon's, cruel as mercy, kind as truth. The Cooper woman, who saw past race and class to possibility, who taught me that art could be a ladder climbing out of darkness. This story I give back to her, these words arranged just so, like flowers on the grave of childhood.

IV Children of the Fog

Old hiding places die slow deaths in towns fading like photographs left too long in shop windows.

Wandering through the store Patagonia to imagine one as an explorer is sometimes better than actually getting on a plane, lumbering through with the tiresome ordeal of world travel. The worldly plunders, I leave to hungrier people.

It was driving through Monterey that did it, where the cypress trees still hunch against the wind like old men at a bar. Trees remember things that people forget. They remember all the lost children who played beneath their branches, back when the world was bigger and each neighborhood was its own universe.

A boy who lived across the bay, probably just as lonely, sat listening to the classic hits radio and soul jams, while watching the same fog roll in.

While I was in the city, running wild with the children of war refugees, my old classmates had drifted back to the valley, seeking comfort within walnut paneled walls, layered in between timber, mistletoe and mist. Funny how you never know the weight others carry. Those kids in their fine houses, shuttling between divorced parents' homes that smelled of pine and ocean salt – they had their own kind of sorrow.

My neighborhood had been all concrete and chain link, but every night the city lights blazed like signal fires, promising something better just over the next hill. The lights still burn, but now they seem to speak in a language, a hair closer to my native tongue, as the planet shrinks ever more within the expansive cosmos.

V Water to Wine

Funny thing about Western stories - they opened themselves to me like a flower, but now I see the thorns.

All those books and songs and paintings, they were love letters written to someone else's children, to those with European blood singing in their veins, according to medieval scholars. Here I was, this Eastern soul, pressing my face against their windows all these years. What kind of fool was I, trying to squeeze myself into their heroes' shoes? At best they'd let me be the wise servant, at worst the yellow peril slinking through their nightmares.

And Samara - she broke their unwritten law, didn't she?

She must've set the old guard's teeth on edge.

Then came that day I learned about the Eastern army, how it had grown stronger than the West. Something shifted in me, like a key turning in a lock. Over there, I am the blood. No matter how American my tongue has grown, my cells remember ten thousand years of Middle Kingdom.

It makes me laugh sometimes, remembering my old roommate - that round-faced Korean girl - dancing in LA clubs, believing those pop songs were singing to her. But isn't that the cruelest joke? Those lyrics were meant for blue-eyed girls, not her. Me, I learned to keep my distance, to love the music without trying to live inside it. But Samara - she does what I never dared. In her mind's eye, those songs are about me, when I never once saw myself in those verses. How could I, with all these generations of immigrant ghosts riding my shoulders?

You should see her haughty angel face twist into a demonic frown, when she realizes I'm standing outside those stories, just barely touching their edges. But she's a stubborn one. By sheer force of her wanting, I feel myself changing, becoming the man she sees in those songs.

Like watching water turn to wine.

When I write, it's not just my voice anymore. It's the voice of all those silent ancestors, their words bubbling up through my tongue like spring water through stone. To my ears, their fathers and forefathers sound just like men from the other side of the world. They don't know it yet, but when you dig deep enough, all blood runs the same color.

VI One Fine Suit

A study of three men from different walks of life whose paths run parallel to one another, revealing the connections in their shared humanity despite their diverse backgrounds.

Every respectable man ought to own one fine suit, it seems. There was my neighbor, the Architect, from Rhode Island, who swore by Christian Dior. Was it the specific shade of navy in the iconic Dior silhouette that made him ascend as a superstar? Masculine with a touch of feminine. He tried his best to be part Madonna, part Gatsby.

My favorite uncle owned just one fine suit. One fine watch and one fine pair of shoes. Italian and Swiss. He made the purchase shortly after he swam a short distance across the Pacific, to escape a communist labor camp. He could hardly believe his luck, to set foot into Hong Kong. The neon lights and the high rises in 80's pastel, British rule. He was one of the few men who could rock a suit and look like a Chinese Beatle.

That was one way to carry himself, until of course, he was forced to marry a woman he did not love. Forced to give up his bachelor life to support a family.

Embarrassed, he hid his old photos and fine possessions in the closet. He put on a different hat to sell newspapers and drive a cab. Work wherever he was needed. Never would he dare to presume to be of a higher social class, no matter how fine he looked when he donned his most prized possessions, almost magical, transformative. His peers would knock him down just for looking too much like a gentleman, although his moral character was that of a prince, among peasants.

As he grew older, the cigarette smoke that hung in the air, no longer cast a spell of sex appeal, and instead, poison. No matter how much he aged, his voice held its beauty, melodic and effortlessly baritone, as sweet as his highest moment, pictured newly freed from China, next to a cafe racer, in his one fine suit.

There stood the elegant shopping center in Simi Valley offering a welcome escape, standing in contrast to its more modest surroundings. Fashion displays, featuring models in Versace and Balenciaga, spark the imagination of the locals, who do not resemble their picture perfect counterparts. Of all the Simians, I chanced to meet a plumber who stole of the heart of every native he met. There was no suit in his possession, and in the place of finer robes, was his complete belief in the scent of Versace that seemed to drive his confidence.

Wasn't it confidence, that gave him the strength to beat cancer? Forging on to set himself apart from other plumbers, who cared not for hygiene or the finer things in life. I startle myself to say that it must have been the trick of Versace, that compelled him ascend as a king among plumbers.

Onyx Grace

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