cousin

When I first came to America, at the age of ten, an elderly American in our church asked me if I had any siblings.

“Yes.” I responded in one of the few words I could say in English.

“Well, where are they?”

“China.”

“Your parents didn’t bring them?”

“No.”

“They left them in China?”

I nodded silently, he had an appalled look on his face. I had an urgent feeling that there was a miscommunication. Yet I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. They were indeed my brother and my sister, but it was also okay that my parents didn’t bring them here, because they had other parents, truer parents. I tried to make all of this clear to him with an earnest expression, hoping something would translate. It did not work.

Beset by the guilt that I had somehow misrepresented my parents, I told my dad about the conversation. He taught me the English word “cousins”.

“What does that mean?”

“Well, it means cousins.” He said in Chinese this time.

“But what is a cousin?”

I was raised to call my two cousins “big sister” and “little brother”. Because of the only child policy, they were the closest to siblings that I could have, and I was theirs. The first time I went back to China, 8 years later, my “little brother” and I didn’t see each other much, but it was okay because he had a job and was making something of himself. The second time I went back, we didn’t see each other much, because he had fallen into such a pit of video game addiction and a level of indifference to his family and the outdoors, it was alarming, though we pretended it wasn't. Everyone in my family talked about it, yet no one talked about it in a way that did anything. We knew his parents had histories of gambling addictions. We knew his father was even jailed for reasons related to those addictions. We knew the addictions might be genetic. We knew he was behaving badly toward his mother, possibly verging on being abusive. And we talked and talked and talked about getting him a job, a therapist, and his mother a different apartment. But his mother didn’t move out, and he quit every job my uncles found for him.

Armed with my privileged upbringing and American ethos, I judged him and his apparent laziness for not picking up and fixing his life—it would be so easy, it seems to me. Stop playing the World of Warcraft-esque games, and come back to real life. Don’t spit on the floor while you chew sunflower seeds and play on the computer for the 14th hour in a row. Don’t scare your mother so much into silencing her. Get a job. Don’t quit a few weeks later, not tell anyone about it, and sneak off to internet cafes instead, only to be found out one winter day when our grandfather decided to trail behind you as you went off to “work”.

The thing is, I don’t understand his addiction and its complexities. And I don't want to understand. It's so helpless when I face it head on. And I’m so far away. And I can’t help him even if I weren’t far away. I think of him now in two distinct images: as a gangly, tall young man sitting in front of a computer, with one foot propped up on the seat and his protruding knee pressed into his chest, his glazed eyes bugging out slightly; and as a small boy who played and fought with me and saved snacks until the weekends so he could share them with his two “big sisters”, with a deep-set dimple and a smile that was magic to the cameras. I can't reconcile the two images.

There was a time when I couldn't reconcile the two languages in my head either. I solved the problem by expelling my fluency in Chinese from my head almost completely. Nowadays, I think in English, not in Chinese—and when I think of him, I think “cousin”, a word so foreign, I learned it in English before I learned it in my native tongue.

**

flip side of hope

More than a year ago I wrote about an event that left a mark on me, and made me hope. The mark disappeared all too quickly and without even a whimper. The hope turned out to be ill-placed. Unlike its companion at the inception however, the hope never quite completely left me, though it faded just the same -- I hoped for smaller, for different, and eventually, I hoped for it less often.

Now my small, changed, and forgotten hopes have morphed their way into reality, better than if I had orchestrated it from the seats of the gods. I think I played it perfectly this time, armed with clarity that wasn't there the first time around. Sickeningly, this clean feeling disturbs me. Like a patient who's been informed of a lack of diagnosis but can't quite take the good news and go home. I keep feeling like I should be harvesting more significance from this second coming, and I can't tell if it's from a fear of having missed something, or a secret celebration of murky, useless melodrama. Or maybe this is simply the feeling that accompanies all existential crises--not at the end of failures but at the end of successes--the unremarkable-ness of our world after we get our hearts' desires, the confusion over why our lives must continue the same way it has been going, that what happened when the stars and luck aligned in our favor has only (and always) been just a moment in time.

**

peak

It's time. It's time.
I have waited for the beginning of the fall
Because suspension prolonged is so dull
But I did not foresee this at all --

The ride is still without declination
The swing still paused before the dip
I thought we would have reached mid-descension
But we have yet to falter over the tip.

**

absence

It's been more than a year and I still can't shake you. You who squeeze in my head when I hear pinball machines or French songs, when I put laundry in the dryer or pick up takeout food, when I pass by a garden or smell rotting trash on the curbs. None of these things have anything to do with you or what happened. They are just random. So I can't avoid the flashbacks or prevent them. It angers me to think you may have done with other people what you did with me. And it angers me that it angers me, that I can't let go. My skin runs from hot to cold and back again just writing about it.

I wish it didn't end so unsatisfyingly. I wish there was closure, and even though I tried forcing one on you, you were too smart to take the bait. Now it's over, so over, but you didn't even let me borrow a period to properly end it -- even ellipses or Dickinsonian dashes would have sufficed. Instead you just let me hang

**

covering

If only we did grow wiser when we grew older
I could have seen the rejection before you
Crammed so much thought and lovely prose in my brain
That they left me paralyzed
On a silk comforter
As if we could only contain so much motion
That my head moved so much my body could not

I think I could have caught you
Or maybe at least see you coming
Or maybe perfected my
Laughing you off
Or maybe just do some covering.

**

ageless decade

W called today during class. I pushed it to voicemail and sent a text instead.

"Can't talk now, what's up?"

"Call me, it's important."

"Is it bad?"

"Yes."

"About who?"

"Me."

"I can call you in half an hour, okay?"

"Fine"

For the next thirty minutes I drifted in and out of First Amendment law. What was this news that was bad, but not so much so that required an immediate callback? Medical diagnosis? A break up of the engagement? I felt guilty for not calling but relished in 30 minutes when I didn't have to feel bad yet, whatever it was, even if it was really bad, I had 30 precious minutes of not knowing.

When I finally called, I found out it was pregnancy. At an inconvenient time, but at least not with an inconvenient person. As I ran through the options and laid out an attack plan, relief rinsed over me. And after I hung up the phone. Something more. Envy. Even 72 hours ago, I had marked the passing of my birthday with friends, faux complaining of becoming older. It's faux complaining because we were arrested in our aging. It's hard to say when it starts and ends, but I'd put it at the decade of twenties, when everyone within this range looks the same. The faces of non-age. Even if I have passed the prime, or have yet to approach it, or steeped in it, who's to know? From behind the superficial, thin skin, unmarred by acne or sun damage or trauma, I can feel something passing, but I have the freedom to demote and twist its significance. It hasn't been published to the world yet, not yet created into an image, so who's to know?

Yet here is news, the ultimate symbol of virility, of life, of production and fruit from seizing the prime, and making something with it. In Chinese, to be pregnant translates to "have fortune", to "have joy". Nowadays it comes loaded with other things, things opposite to joy and fortune.

"You should've been more careful." I told W. But even as I scolded her I envied her cross into becoming something worthy of so much celebration. I imagined holding the little fruit, nine months from this phone call. It filled me with such a biological, base giddiness. Envy only comes when you fear that you are not within reach of something, no one envies a thing they know that is eventually coming to them. I suppose this is the curse of the ageless decade. If there is a timeline for such things, who's tell us when we are falling behind, when our identical faces betray no sign of it?

**

tremors

The leftover coffee trembles and trembles
Up and down the white china and makes
Brown, ugly runs on the cup's insides.

What is there to say, except that we are
Permanently broken
A rupture in time and luck and
A series of small missteps
Has made what cannot be unmade.
And I tremble and tremble.
With the abandoned coffee, knowing
A small piece of my brain has
Dimmed its lights.

Recite to me, all of our carefully gathered lines
And inside jokes,
One more time.
If only to hear the new emptiness that fills them.
Your forearm muscles tense, tense, release
Like a rhythmic waltz
And I crave to stroke it away.
But I think that would be the wrong thing to do
So without quite knowing why, I keep my fingers in each other,
Letting them become as cold as the coffee
Whose grounds have already separated from the liquid
And seeped to the bottom of the cup.
As we tremble and tremble.

**