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​Written by Priscilla Wong

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I Alma

 

​​​Waiting for something sweet around the corner. Oh, it's already in my cup. Something in the water. It used to come from the kitchen downstairs, where my mother spent all her time micromanaging steaming pots, the treatment of herbs and sauces for heritage dishes. The scent of sugar cane, sesame ginger and garlic always wafted into my study. There was always fresh seafood and poultry. The rice was perfect. Spices simple and clean. Never once a microwaved meal. For some time, the nourishment came from a little cafeteria far from gourmet, but maybe nostalgia made the peasant food taste better than it really was. Afterwards, trunks full of German sweets. I later found out only grandparents liked Marzipan in the form of large teddybears. There were the Black hands that carefully deciphered the Michelin Star experiences to pin point the specific ingredients that pleased my senses most, mixed with the best possible version of the American South. Don't forget the freshly dripped black coffee brewed from specialty roasters. It was always ready on the kitchen counter, courtesy of a cohabitation agreement. Some would say that slavery causes insouciance, although I might advocate that it makes a person weak.

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One day, someone decided to bake onion pie served with chilly chicken and soggy rice. It was the worst meal I have ever had in my life. She was the most important person I ever came to know and I wouldn't have found my place at the table without her. The pie was not supposed to matter but it did. It was a gastronomical disaster, an indication that she may have been a terrible mother. She was not loving like a woman was supposed to be. Instead, she reveled in sadomasochism. She was an Amazon who made an excellent Harpy. Her mind worked in wonderful ways. She had binocular eyesight to focus on flaws of minutia, while pulling out entirely to scan the bigger picture. She liked to get carried away with the color pink and sugary details. The color pink has its very own insouciance. I liked her as a woman who made things happen. For whatever reason, I preferred the dictation of a male voice, maybe as a result of how the woman who raised me, my godmother, spoke like a man.

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I spent most of my childhood covering my ears. My parents had the worst kind of relationship. They were loud and stable, bonding over the full gamut of human emotion, with pride and humility. All I ever wanted was to live in my own property and snuff them all out.​​ There was a colossus who stole me from all the mothers. He did just that. He had a discography and a few trunk shows. He was the king of insouciance, making everyone wanting dearly to be Black. Although he secretly wished to be a White boy. Where's the logic in that? Why did White women want to be Albanian or Armenian? How is a sleazy demeanor considered to be insouciance? Why do Armenian women want to be White in Hollywood? And why do some White men aspire to be like Gengis Khan? It can't be certain exactly, but what if it's true?

 

There is no sense in defining it.

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II Wilhem

 

If only insouciance could prevent wars.

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The Wilhelm family was inconspicuously apart of Nazi Germany. Father was a soldier, while Mother and their six children hid in the Black Forest during bomb attacks. There was no sense in being killed and so the children snuck out during odd hours to collect wild blueberries, eating sparingly on the few silverware and plates they carried in rucksacks from Munich.

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Everyone from their childhood lost somebody in their family and as time went on, the children accepted the normalcy of casual impact. There came the awareness that not a single day passed without war somewhere in the world without the passing of life.

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After the war, Germany looked like modern day Iraq or Afghanistan and naturally, families began to rebuild their houses to put their lives back together. During the 50s, Father Wilhelm never stopped to question their way of life past the present. In the 60s, their family became obsessed with material welfare, but it wasn't enough. There had to be more to life than collecting objects.

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Then came the 70s, during one beautiful summer, the eldest Wilhelm daughter met an African American, who taught her there were ideas to live for. Not just living with animals, sexual encounters, eating, or earning a wage just to buy things. Ideas of love and peace and freedom that came perfectly from the counter culture of America in protest against the Vietnam War. 

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There was scandal, but hippies didn't care.

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The eldest Wilhelm daughter was a newly minted American. She identified with Women's Liberation more than her German roots. She collected trinkets from Africa, studying black women in red clay from Namibia, offering the friends of her children tiny Zulu figurines on her mission to preach Black love. 

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As time passed, the children took her kindness for granted and forgot about the horrors of Nazi Germany - trampling forward to collect the dues owed to their fore fathers until no one cared anymore.

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No one in China cares about Africa except for the raw minerals mined in the interest of the technology arms race. Ideas of love or peace or freedom are still democratic values in stark contrast to communist ideals. Blacks are entirely out of luck in China. Family and human rights are considered to be luxuries.​

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Over the generations, the Chinese have adapted to harsher climates that called for warfare with the evolutionary trait of developing extra fat deposits to hide their emotions and protect their features. The signs the enemy can't read could be the very thing that keeps a person alive. Who could say why certain noses are blunter or what purpose is served with epicanthal folds. All that is certain is that one should never ever insult an Asian person for their unique evolutionary facial features. The only thing they care about is survival. They behave foolishly for survival.

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If only people from China understood the idea of insouciance.

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Imperial Japan understood the idea of insouciance well enough to murder an entire population in Nanjing and drop a bomb on Pearl Harbor.

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Americans possessed even greater insouciance for bombing Hiroshima. Swiftly and with finality.

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Isn't true that if insouciance were a beautiful killer, there's a chance that China might be good? No. Omicron is not going away. The Chinese are total idiots. I renounce my Chinese ancestry. I am now anything else at all.

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III Yellow Jacket

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The old man, my father, carried China's ancient wisdom in his bones. He was like those weathered oaks that stand alone on California hills, refusing to bend to foreign winds. His truth about men was simple and terrible, learned through years of watching them pass like seasons.

 

We'd sit together in those red-lacquered dim sum houses, where the air hung heavy with grease and waiting. The fluorescent lights caught the gold dragons on the walls, making them dance like fevered dreams. "McDonald's is cleaner," I'd say, young and foolish as spring wheat. But Pa would quiet me with those dark eyes of his, teaching me to watch the parade of men like a farmer studies his livestock.

 

"Look there," he'd whisper, his voice low as evening fog rolling over the Bay.

"See how that one moves? See his eyes? That's no man - that's a shadow of one."

 

And I'd giggle, knowing when I shook their hands, I held a secret bigger than my small years could properly carry.

 

We made a study of men, Pa and me, from the safety of our rusted Toyota. Through the Financial District's glass canyons, past the rainbow-painted Victorian ladies of Haight-Ashbury, into the concrete valleys of the projects - all while Mama did her endless errands. Every street was a classroom, every passing face a lesson in the terrible arithmetic of masculinity.

 

"Too soft," he'd say, watching the parade of Chinese men who'd lost their steel somewhere between the old country and the golden shore. After seeing the silver screen giants - Bond, Schwarzenegger, Indiana Jones - Pa would grow quiet, like a man counting his losses. "Kung fu looks like a dance," he'd say, "but a gun in a tall man's hand, that's the song of power."

 

Then he'd look at me, his girl-child, with trouble in his eyes deep as the Pacific. The blood of Northern China's warrior class ran thin in America's gentle valleys. What chance did his daughter have, this strange shoot from an ancient root?

 

Sometimes I caught him studying me like a puzzle he couldn't solve, wondering if the gods had played a joke, sending him a daughter who carried herself like a son.

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IV Song Sara

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The land had given Sara everything she knew, and Shanghai might as well have been on the moon for all it meant to her then. She'd heard whispers of it, sure enough, like you hear tell of things that don't quite seem real - stories of Chinese girls who'd taken to cutting their hair short and dancing till dawn, creatures as strange to her as spirits in the night. Flappers, they were called.

 

An Opium den was something to behold.

 

The sweet-sick smell of it got into her clothes and her hair and maybe her bones too. Time does things to a person. Sara learned to leave the horse behind, trading it for metropolitan glamour. She wrapped her hair in rollers tight as fists, draped herself in jade that clicked and whispered when she moved, painted her face white as the moon. As white as a Geisha. The high society men of Shanghai watched her, their eyes hungry as wolves.

 

Her fingers, tipped in blood-red lacquer, moved across the Mahjong tiles like she was conducting some ancient ceremony, the pieces clicking and shifting on the green velvet that reminded her, in a way that made her throat tight, of the tea fields she'd left behind. The smoke hung thick as fog, and all around her the Chinese ladies sat straight-backed in their qipaos, the silk drawn so tight it seemed to gasp. Their jewels caught the lantern light, winking like stars falling, like tears.

 

Of course, nothing lasts, beauty least of all.

 

When the Imperial Forces fell, it was like watching a mountain crumble, with all its sure-footed creatures dashing for their lives, as the simpleton humans ducked and covered from the crescendo of explosives.

 

Then came the Japanese, and with them came such darkness as Sara had never known existed in the world. They swept through Nanjing like locusts, their boot heels clicking on cobblestones, their voices sharp as blades. The women and children could no more understand their orders than a rabbit can understand the hawk that swoops down to take it. They could only tremble, and wait, and pray to gods who had turned their faces away.

 

The eldest son stood like a weathered post against time's battering. War came and went, the earth dried and cracked, hunger gnawed at their bellies, but still he stood. And in standing, he held up the other five with hands that knew every kind of work - hands that could coax life from dead soil, that could feel the sickness in an engine's heart, that could guide any vehicle across the rutted earth. They were hands that had no choice but to know these things. Sara had lost her husband to the Pacific war, lost him to Japanese bullets and foreign soil. She allowed herself one sob, one moment when the granite of her face cracked, and then she had gathered herself up like a horse rising from a fall, because that's what women did in those days - they rose and they went on.

 

The average citizen could count on one hand, the luxuries offered in those times, as sparingly as sugar and butter on white bread. People paired off like work animals in a barn, seeking the simple shelter of shared survival. Sara never learned to see the fine details that made men different from one another - the sharp cut of a nose, the set of teeth, the depth of eyes. She chose as a farmer chooses a mule: for strength, for endurance. After fire had licked the countryside clean and war had taken its share, any man who could stand upright was good enough. The broad noses, the small dark eyes that hoarded greed like squirrels hoarding nuts for winter, the unruly hair that jutted out like wheat gone wild - none of it mattered when hunger sat at the table like an unwanted guest.

 

They had reduced her worth to the simplest math: a woman was meant to be looked at, nothing more. This truth settled into her bones slowly, like rain seeping into dry earth. But breathing - just breathing - that was the real victory. Each morning she woke to find herself still alive felt like finding money in an old coat pocket.

 

As her smooth legs withered away, underneath the finely knitted stockings, she met people who she could only describe as demons. The harsh American city streets stretched out before her, concrete and unforgiving, nothing like the silk-draped rooms of her Shanghai past. In those perfumed dens she had been somebody, moving through clouds of sweet smoke in rooms where mahogany screens cast shadows like lace. But here in this raw land, where everything was too bright and too loud, she was just another displaced soul searching for a ghost of home that would never materialize.

 

Lost, like many, except for her eldest son.

 

Sara sat quiet in the passenger seat, her weathered hands folded in her lap like tired birds come to rest. The leather seats of the Lexus gleamed with a richness she'd never known in her younger days, when calluses and dish soap had been her constant companions. Now her son - the boy she'd once walked to school in patched shoes - guided the machine with steady hands, his uniform crisp against the morning light. She watched the way his fingers curled around the steering wheel, remembering how those same fingers had once clutched at her apron strings, how they'd stretched toward every copper penny she managed to save. The purr of the engine spoke of something she'd never dared to dream - not of wealth exactly, but of seeing her child rise beyond the boundaries that had hemmed in her own life. Her chest swelled with a feeling too big for words, in ways she never imagined possible.

 

But, how much did Sara's eldest son love his own mother?

 

No, Sara was not present when her son suffered from a construction accident, falling an entire story off a ladder, recovering miraculously, like a cat with nine lives.

 

Sara was not around to soothe him after his root canal.

 

Sara could not confront the very idea, that demons wilder than the Japanese at war, existed in the city, strictly it seems to terrorize her son like alcoholic escapees of mental asylums.

 

He often stewed in silence. 

 

Sara was busy searching for the Shanghai glamour of Opium dens long past, with companions who did not care to open their minds to the realm of possibility.

 

After the funeral, her eldest son collected her belongings and scattered her ashes to the wind. Her song, a mystery to him still.  But what her own son missed was the cadence of her voice that could start a party, the sultry clicking of her tongue that could charm any animal to eat right out of her palm and a smiling face that grinned through the decades of hardship. No idea whatsoever, that she runs wild with wolves.