Mamiyaroid 29
A few weeks ago, I got a DM on Instagram from my cousin, Xiang Ling. She wrote me in Chinese, and I used Google translate. She asked for pictures of my mother and after I sent them, we exchanged New Year’s wishes.
I mentioned this to my mother because I rarely hear from my cousin, and she told me my uncle, Xiang Ling’s father, her brother, was in the hospital. The way she spoke I stopped and asked, “Did he die?” and she said, “Let me finish,” like I was ruining the punchline to a joke. My uncle had been taken off a ventilator and my aunt had been urging him to make a smooth journey to (Buddhist) heaven when he started breathing on his own again. My mother spoke of his cheating death with delight. Her theory was that he continued to live to spite my aunt for not letting him play mahjong before his stroke.
A week after that Xiang Ling messaged me again to ask me to tell my mother that her father had died that morning. When I told her she said, “No wonder why I haven’t felt good all these weeks.”
In 2010 I visited Taiwan for the first time in ten years. The last time I was there I was a fresh college graduate and my cousin Xiang Ling, who hadn’t gone to college, was working as a hairdresser. She and I didn’t see much of one another that last time, and this visit wasn’t any different. She had switched to working at an outdoor market selling clocks and wristwatches, things I now realize are obsolete. My mother said Xiang Ling was a good saleswoman and I believed it. Xiang Ling is big and soft. She seems shy, but is also persistent, in a way that when we were children made her sister grab my hand and set us running away from Xiang Ling. I didn’t like to do it, but I understood the desire.
That visit I stayed with Xiang Ling’s sister, Fui Ling, above the hair salon Fui Ling ran. My first day at the salon Xiang Ling introduced me to her two daughters, Jia Qun and Zhi Han, fraternal twins.
Xiang Ling took me on a drive on her motor scooter. We didn’t speak much because she doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak Mandarin. Our silences were companionable, if strained, not by tension, but because of all the things we wanted to say to one another, and ask each other, but couldn’t. Then we brought the girls to my uncle’s house.
My aunt and uncle cared for the girls while my cousin worked during the day. We brought the twins upstairs and set them on the hard wooden bed. They crawled up and over Xiang Ling and she dozed off. Sunday was her sole day off and it was clear she needed some rest, but the girls had started standing on their own and had learned to bang objects together, the noise amusing only them. I could see that while the girls were adorable, they must have been exhausting. As I cuddled one, then the other, I was acutely aware of my ambivalence toward having children. I wanted to buy them toys and teach them things, but I was also relieved when I went to my room and shut the door to read, or write, or simply stare.
My mother was staying with another uncle and helped me figure out Xiang Ling’s situation. She and her husband had met through friends and started a long-distance relationship. They married even though he wasn’t able to find a job in Taichung, where Xiang Ling lives. Then she became pregnant and when they found out they were having twins they decided to continue living apart because he had a job in a printing factory in Tainan, and he was too proud to live under my uncle’s roof while he waited for a job opening in Taichung. The other reason Xiang Ling stayed with her parents is because her husband’s family didn’t want to help care for her daughters while she worked, so moving to Tainan wasn’t an option for her, either.
About a month into my seven-week stay in Taiwan, Xiang Ling’s father had a heart attack. My aunt cared for my uncle at the hospital, so Xiang Ling delivered Zhi Han to Fui Ling’s salon, and Xiang Ling’s husband came and picked up Jia Qun to deliver to his mother, who’d reluctantly agreed to care for her granddaughter while my uncle recuperated in the hospital.
Xiang Ling cried at being separated from Jia Qun, but Fui Ling had a salon to run and couldn’t do that and care for both babies. Before he took Jia Qun to live with his mother, Xiang Ling’s husband drove us to the beach. He struck me as gentle and well suited to my cousin. She leaned over the car seat and offered him snacks as he drove and tried to figure out where we were going. I snuck peeks at his face and saw tadpole eyes with the tails at the corners pointing up toward his temples. His eyes made him look like he was just on the verge of smiling, even when he wasn’t.
My uncle was my mother’s eldest brother and the family patriarch, something that the other members of the family chafed at from time to time. He had always struck me as stern and humorless, much less prone to bursts of laughter than my younger uncle who always seemed to be sharing some story or joke with my mother. He was also traditional in a way that highlights my mother’s breaks from tradition. In New York my mother seems very Taiwanese to me, but in Taiwan I see all the ways America has changed her. Since my uncle had two girls and no sons, he worried that there would be no one with his name, Chen, to honor him on Ghost Day after his death. When Xiang Ling found out she was having twins my uncle and his son-in-law came to an agreement that the second-born would carry the Chen name instead of Xiang Ling’s husband’s name. So Zhi Han’s full name is Chen Zhi Han and it was understood that it would be her duty to honor my uncle after his death. Jia Qun carries her father’s name and shares his smile and calm demeanor. Zhi Han, on the other hand has her father’s eyes, except they look a little bit mischievous on her face. My mother said she looked sneaky, but I said she looked clever.
After a few weeks of little sleep, combined with her high blood pressure, my aunt collapsed at the hospital and was admitted right along with my uncle (Taiwan has universal health care; no one was worried about going bankrupt). One day my uncle told her that he was hungry, right after he’d eaten lunch, and then he left the hospital to get a snack. This caused my aunt to worry because besides the heart trouble, my uncle was also diabetic and didn’t need the extra calories. She wondered if he was becoming senile as well, but she was laid up in bed and could do nothing as he left the room. Instead of going to the 7-11 for a snack, Fui Ling picked him up on her motor scooter and drove him to her salon so he could spend a few minutes with Zhi Han. He had missed her while he was in the hospital and needed to hug her and gently reprimand her when she reached for yet another forbidden object. True to his taciturn nature he made my cousin promise not to tell anyone that he’d been there to see his granddaughter, except my aunt told everyone she was convinced he had Alzheimer’s, so my cousin told them the truth and made them promise not to let my uncle know that they knew.
I have one picture of Xiang Ling’s husband, but I regret that all you see are his feet. We had finally made it to the beach, but this wasn’t a swimming beach and it had been difficult to carry the girls in their stroller, so we spent some time contemplating the water and I took some pictures of the girls, and then we left. When I look at this photograph I see his legs, and the girls, and then my mind adds his face even though it’s not there. Through time that image has become distorted. Hasn’t it already become clear to you that I don’t even know his name? Well, I don’t. Taiwan is a country that clings to hierarchies, so because he was a few years older than me I called him by the honoric for brother-in-law. He was my Jiefu, and to call him anything else would have been disrespectful.
A few weeks after that beach trip Fui Ling’s assistant at the salon rushed into my room holding Zhi Han and thrust her into my arms. She asked me to take care of her while she went downstairs to help my cousin, Fui Ling, who was wailing. Zhi Han’s father, my cousin’s husband, was dead.
Xiang Ling had spoken to her husband a week before. He was supposed to come to Taichung to visit her and the girls for Father’s Day and move to Taichung the following week. The separation was wearing on everyone, and my uncle asked him to swallow his pride and come live with them in Taichung despite not having work lined up. Except he told my cousin he wasn’t feeling well. He didn’t stay on the phone for long, saying he wanted to lie down and rest. When Xiang Ling didn’t hear back from her husband, and he didn’t answer her phone calls, she asked his mother to send his brother to check in on him, but her husband had been too proud to tell them where he lived. It seems incredible to me, but Xiang Ling herself had never even seen the room her husband lived in when he wasn’t visiting her in Taichung. (None of this makes sense to me.) She called the Tainan police to help her track him down, but they told her they couldn’t help her. Finally, after he hadn’t responded to her calls for a week, she asked her boss to drive her to Tainan and they forced the police to track him down. When they broke down the door of the tiny one room apartment Jiefu lived in, he had been dead for days.
Despite my ambivalence about having a child I fell in love with my cousin’s daughters. If your saw their pictures you would understand that anyone would be helpless against their charm. I took so many pictures of them, and my then husband posed so lovingly with them, some of my friends who had not seen me in a while wondered if I’d adopted a pair of Chinese babies.
Before Jiefu died, many people had joked about how difficult it was to care for the twins. Sometimes they would jokingly offer one of them to me. “You like? You take home to America?” I didn’t like the joke, but at the time it had all sounded harmless.
My aunt used to sing a song to Zhi Han because she had trouble falling asleep. Now that I think about it, it’s no wonder she didn’t sleep well. A doctor once told me that babies pick up on their parent’s anxiety and it often manifests itself as sleep trouble. There was lots of surface tension in the air, and she was being passed around among so many people—her aunt Fui Ling, my uncle and aunt, and other relatives. Her father was someone she saw every few weeks. I imagine that it all had to affect her, but being a baby, she couldn’t tell us what was wrong. She just cried and fought sleep, so to lull her, my aunt sang a song, “Ni Wa Wa”. My then husband also sang snatches of this song to Zhi Han, but after her father died, I told him to stop singing it. It’s a song about a baby doll who doesn’t have a father or a mother.
My cousin’s grief was incredibly raw. She couldn’t bear to stay at her father’s house any longer because that’s where she and her husband stayed when he visited. Instead, she came to my cousin’s place with her daughter Jia Qun. The girls were reunited but they had to be kept away from my cousin because she frightened them with her wailing and tears. Eventually my aunt and cousin took her to the hospital where she was sedated. She returned home with strong sleeping pills and slept when she wasn’t crying.
The family returned to Tainan where Jiefu was to be cremated, but according to tradition, since it was August, the month of the spirits, they could not immediately perform funeral rites for him. It was considered back luck. They had to wait until the month was over. Still, my cousin’s family came by to pay their respects. I watched as Xiang Ling got on her knees in front of a wealthy and politically connected aunt of hers and begged her to seek justice for her husband. She believed that if the police had checked on her husband when she asked them to, he might have been rushed to the hospital and lived. I was amazed when a few weeks later the police officers who had taken, but ignored her request, took out an advertisement in the Tainan local newspaper and officially apologized to my cousin and her family for their negligence. My mother relayed this to me after I had returned to New York. I asked her if the apology had made my cousin feel better and she said that it gave Xiang Ling some peace.
On the day before we were set to leave, Xiang Ling spoke to my mother in Taiwanese. I saw them looking at me and I became wary. Especially since I didn’t understand anything they said. My mother asked me to come sit with her and Xiang Ling. My cousin clutched my hand in her moist one. My mother explained that in Taiwan, children who don’t have a father are ostracized at school. She then said that when her own father died when she was nine years old a close family friend had become a sort of godfather to her, and it had been a way for her to say that she still had a father. Xiang Ling wanted to know if my ex-husband and I would consent to becoming Zhi Han and Jia Qun’s godparents. They both looked at me expectantly and I really didn’t have much time to think about the implications. They were quick to reassure me that it wasn’t something official, we didn’t have legal obligations to care for Zhi Han or Jia Qun if something happened to Xiang Ling, and in turn, we would not inherit any of my uncle’s property. None of which had even crossed my mind! My ex-husband was eager to accept so I gave my consent. Xiang Ling thanked us over and over again.
My discomfort sank in slowly. Even though it went unsaid, I knew that my being their godmother was less important than my ex standing in as a replacement father in name, if not in actuality. My mother said that if anyone asked the girls if they had a father they could say, “Yes, he lives in America.” I failed to see how this would give the girls any comfort or reassurance. Like Ghost Month, and other Taiwanese traditions that I participate in, this is something that is part of me, but still somewhat removed from my everyday existence as an American.
The next and last time I visited Taiwan was summer of 2014. I had separated from my husband by then. I have no idea if he remembers he was their godfather. I’m sure the girls don’t remember him since they were babies and they barely remembered me when I saw them in 2014. Except for the intro paragraphs about my uncle’s death, I wrote the above in 2010, or 2011 and changed the tenses. At this point I can’t recall Jiefu’s face. I recall my uncle’s, because I have photographs, but what really sticks to me is his voice. Not words, really, because he didn’t speak English, but his customary gruffness, the grunts universal, not much different from my taciturn American uncles. But even more than that I remember his rasping breath right before he burst into laughter, and because his natural demeanor was stern, when he laughed his face looked broken, like a jack-o’-lantern that’s cracked in half, his joy always a shock compared to my uncle who laughed so easily, his smooth handsomeness never leaving room for surprise.
Until next time…
Adalena
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-Adalena Kavanagh