i Act One
CHAPTER ONE Kit
Philadelphia, April 2015
So where are you from?” the Uber driver asked.
The cloying scent from the Black Ice air freshener sat in the back of Kit’s throat. She could see the hairs coming out of his ears. She glanced at her watch.
“Here, I’m from Philly,” she replied. Kit Herzog knew what he really wanted to know.
He looked at her in the rearview mirror. Their eyes met, then he set his gaze back on the road. There was another odor beneath the freshener: dirty hair or skin. She kept her hands on her lap, not wanting to touch any of the surfaces. A new song started to play on the radio.
“You know this tune?”
She nodded. “Teardrops” by Womack & Womack; her mother played it in the kitchen sometimes. She started to see signs for Roxborough. Not far to go now.
“Great song.” He hummed.
She would be late for Sabrina, but at least Sabrina’s mother would be
out. Mrs. Chen worked a Saturday job and Sabrina was always at home alone.
“So hon, are you from Philly? You look, uh, I don’t know, like there’s somethin’ else in there. Like, where are you from from, you know?”
Kit was asked this almost every time she met an adult outside of her family circle. Mr. Fischer, the new History teacher, got straight to the point at the beginning of the semester. “What is your ethnicity exactly, dear? Pan-Asian is it? Hawaiian? South American?” He had a habit of putting her on the spot, and she dreaded his class.
Her skin bristled at the thought that the ambiguity of her complexion and eye shape should become an open invitation for questioning. Cece Daley, with her long legs, platinum-blond hair, and cheerleading squad accolades would never be asked to explain her origins. “Daddy’s from California and Mom is from Ambler, right here in Pennsylvania,” she would probably say, unprompted. Kit had seen Cece in the Home Depot on weekends, calling her father “Daddy.”
“So? What is it?” he persisted.
“What is what, Sir?” she asked, her voice sharp.
“What is your background, hon?”
There was no reason for her to hold this back. She could put him out of his misery in a few words. But she thought, Why should she explain? She was still stewing over the fight with her mother that morning, and the kiss with Dave in the basement the night before, and how he had said: “Hey, we’re still keeping this between us, okay?” She wanted to get to the safety of Sabrina’s bedroom. She wanted one of those jasmine teas Sabrina always made. They would watch a movie, talk late into the night—just the two of them, so they could really talk, unlike at her house on Gravers Lane, where she was always listening for the creaking floorboards announcing her mother’s arrival.
“If you don’t mind my asking, of course.”
She thought, Actually, I mind very much. “I’m adopted,” she replied quietly. i “Tupperware . . . when I grow up, Kit, I’m going to invest in Tupperware.” Sabrina sighed as she looked into the fridge. She stacked and unstacked plastic containers. “We have so many empty butter containers for leftovers. Does your mom do this? Probably not, I guess. I mean, look at this one. One dumpling. Why didn’t someone just eat it? And Tupperware is cheap. You can go to Walmart and buy like a dozen sets for nothing.” She shook her head, replaced the top of the butter container, and put it back in the fridge. “Oh! I found them,” she said, her voice singing in happiness as she brought out a plate with a picture of penguins dancing on an iceberg. No dish in their home was the same, unlike Kit’s house, where everything was a full set from Crate & Barrel.
“You gotta try these, they’re so good.” Sabrina placed the plate, which held two cakes, between them. The top of the pastry was carved with intricate ridges in the shape of a goat.
“Did your mom make these?” Kit asked, holding one carefully, cradling it in the cup of her hand like a small bird.
“Course not. We bought them in Chinatown.”
“Your mom makes things sometimes. Those cute flowers out of the vegetables and stuff? She could have made it.” Kit felt the heat rise to her face.
“I guess. These are mooncakes, my mom buys extra for the year on discount—she doesn’t believe in sell-by dates. They’re still good to eat though.”
When she put the cake back down on the plate, Kit noticed that the edge of its soft casing had a dent. She felt her mouth curling down at the thought of an old cake, long past is expiry date. Sabrina returned with a knife to cut it in half.
“What’s so great about this cake?”
“They’re just totally different. Not like anything you get here, you know?”
“I don’t get it,” Kit muttered. But her friend hadn’t heard her, and she wasn’t appreciating the personal sacrifice Kit made to be there: the cab driver and his questions, the stench of Black Ice still on her clothes. She glanced at her phone; there were no messages from Dave.
Sabrina cut the mooncake in half, revealing the shiny, perfectly preserved shape of a heart layered in pink, yellow, and orange-red bean paste.
“Isn’t it beautiful?”
Kit shrugged.
Sabrina pushed the plate over to her, offering her the first taste. Kit’s mother had brought her up well; she should have eaten the first mouthful with relish and complimented her host. But she couldn’t remember these lessons in that moment.
“I hate that red bean shit,” Kit said.
Sabrina’s features clouded with hurt. She looked like a girl in a manga comic book, a close-up of her face in the picture box with giant weepy eyes and a wobbly line for tears on the way.
“Don’t have it, then,” Sabrina retorted and forked a big portion into her mouth. The piece was too big, and Kit could see that Sabrina’s pleasure had floated away like a child’s bubble that had burst.
The meaningless hurt caused over a mooncake.
Kit looked at it and thought how she actually did want to try it, she wanted to taste something sweet. But this had always been their dynamic— Sabrina, the chirpy mouse who would edge too close to Kit’s
lair, where she would snap and snarl as Sabrina limped away. Th is was her nature against Sabrina’s soft, accepting ways. She thought of the books she’d seen on her mother’s bedside table, like Nature vs. Nurture: The New Way to Parent. Sabrina said that she was always taught by her mother, Lee Lee, to avoid taking risks at all costs and respect her elders. There was no other way in the Chen household; everything came back to these two rules. But Kit found other ways, and sometimes wondered why Sabrina didn’t try to as well, even if the freedoms in her home were different. Maybe it was as simple as that, that her parents never enforced the same rules that Sabrina had to live by. Or maybe it just wasn’t in Kit’s nature to do as she was told.
“What’s up with you? You’re in a terrible mood,” Sabrina asked, her tone cautious, as she poured their tea.
“Yeah, family lunch at the Harrisons’ was annoying. Dave was there.” Kit wanted to say more, about how he had asked to meet her the night before and they had fooled around in his den while his parents were out. But the words wouldn’t come. Sabrina’s kindness in spite of her own snappy remarks left her feeling guilty.
“You wanna talk about it?” Sabrina asked, pushing a steaming mug toward her. “I know you guys have some kind of understanding or whatever, but I’m here, I’m a good listener.”
The balled-up jasmine leaves began to unfurl in the hot water.
“You think Dave is a racist?” Kit asked suddenly, dipping her fi nger into the liquid.
“What?”
“Nothing, never mind.”
“I don’t think so, Kit. I mean, he’s dated different girls. He’s in my political science class, and he’s a liberal,” Sabrina said.
“Yeah, I guess. I just don’t understand why he is so weird about us, you know?”
Kit saw Sabrina searching for the right words to respond.
“I’m like the last person who understands guys. I kissed Seth Hartmann three times before I dumped him, and like, we were hardly even boyfriend and girlfriend . . .” Sabrina’s voice trailed off.
“I know, I know. But hey, this is your summer, right? And then we have college. We are going to live!” Kit forced a false cheeriness to her voice, but underneath she wanted to cry.
“Do you think so? I really hope so. I’m so ready for high school to be over,” she replied in almost a whisper.
For the first time in weeks Kit shifted her gaze away from her problems with Dave and noticed that Sabrina looked tired. Something was weighing on her friend. She tried to remember what Sabrina usually did on weekends, but she realized with some surprise that she always assumed her friend was studying or waiting for Kit to invite her over. It never occurred to Kit that Sabrina’s life extended beyond her blue row house, her studies, and Kit herself. She looked around the kitchen and saw Sabrina’s Dell laptop nestled and shut on top of the side counter. The stickers on the cover had started to fade. The pile of kawaii Japanese corgis looking over their backsides now looked like a fluff y cloud, but the Keith Haring dancing figures and the “So Fetch” and “Hacker Inside” stickers still retained their original colors. Kit remembered how happy Sabrina had been when Kit had brought them back for her from her vacation to San Francisco the year before.
“What’s up, Rina?”
As Sabrina looked up at Kit, an expression of surprise passed behind her friend’s eyes.
“Oh, I’m just trying to work through some stuff, you know, end-of-year things.”
“Talk to me.” Kit leaned forward. She remembered how her mother
would do this when she wanted to encourage her to open up, and Kit congratulated herself for being so sensitive to her friend’s needs.
Sabrina took a breath and closed her eyes for a moment, as though she were about to jump into a cold pool.
“I’m trying to figure out how I can get to China before college. I want to go visit my family. Or at least see this place I’m supposedly from.”
Th is wasn’t what Kit had expected to hear. It took her a moment to take it in, until thought after thought tumbled out, one after the other.
“What do you mean? Like this year? For real?”
“Well, yeah, I mean I gotta do it soon. I haven’t really talked to my mom about it yet. You know how she can be. I’ve been saving up money from tutoring and babysitting jobs. I think I’m going to have enough by the end of July.”
Kit nodded. She did know how Sabrina’s mom could be. Kit’s usual exasperation with her own mother would disappear the moment she saw Lee Lee Chen with Sabrina, enforcing her rigid rules that often made no sense to Kit at all. It was in these moments that she allowed herself to be grateful for her adoption by a nice, liberal, upper-middle-class Pennsylvania family. The kind of parents who would let her stay out late because her friends were. The kind of parents who congratulated her for simply trying even though she achieved mediocre grades and showed no real promise in sport. You got your dad’s hand-eye coordination, that’s for sure, her father joked. She was relieved that they allowed her to experiment with her clothes when she started to care about how she was dressed, and even helped her shorten the hem of her school uniform skirt. She was thankful that they bought her a cell phone at almost the exact same time that all her other classmates got them. Sabrina was never given such freedoms.
And somewhere deep in the recesses of Kit’s mind were thoughts that never passed her lips. She was happy that her life was nothing like
Sabrina’s. She didn’t dare consider how it might be to be raised by a mother like Lee Lee Chen. She thought of all the parties Sabrina had missed because her mother did not believe in socializing outside of school hours, or the times that a trend for a certain water bottle or backpack had swept through the girls in her class and Sabrina had looked on, with the same old items she had started school with that year.
Don’t you ever just want to say no? Kit wanted to ask Sabrina, but she knew her friend well enough to know she never would. They were built differently.
“If I save and work these summer jobs for the first month, and get going with the passport application, I might be able to visit for two weeks in August. Just before college starts. Even if I don’t manage to go to Mom’s exact birthplace, I could see some of China. I could see the land, listen to the people. Travel, fi nally. You know what I mean?”
“Why do you want to go so much though? Like, do you even know the people you’d have to stay with? And what if you hate it there? And you’re on your own?” The moment Kit said it, she felt foolish.
“I guess that’s the whole point. I don’t know anything about what to expect. That’s the part that’s exciting to me. It’s about knowing where you’re from. Where you belong. You know what that feels like, of all people.”
The silence dragged on for a moment too long. Kit wasn’t sure how to respond to that.
There was a constant struggle within Kit: her need for control, to always have exactly what she wanted, battled against the kindness she also
wanted to give. Most of the time it was easy, because Sabrina was the people pleaser. They had been friends in kindergarten, first and second grades, and then they stopped talking. Kit couldn’t remember why, but something had shifted in her circle of friends. If she really examined it, she would come to realize that her mother had nudged her toward their family friends and their children. Their friends, who lived in their neighborhood. But Kit wouldn’t realize this until much later in her life.
Sabrina referred to the years that Kit and Sabrina were no longer friends as “when you were in the group.” Kit barely thought of Sabrina at all during this time. She had not deliberately broken away. In fact, her memories of those years were like any eight-year-old’s: the spotlight was on herself. Her mother had organized her social life with the care expected of a Chestnut Hill Academy parent. Kit went on playdates at large mock-period houses after school. She carpooled with Casey and her sisters to ice-skating in the afternoons and attended birthday parties. During the time she wasn’t friends with Sabrina, her world existed purely within a five-mile radius of Germantown Avenue, the main boulevard that ran through her leafy, well-heeled suburb of Philadelphia. Kit’s life was a rhythmic composition through the seasons: summers eating ice creams the size of her head at Bredenbeck’s after camp, pumpkin picking at Maple Acres Farm, choosing Christmas trees with her father, Terry, behind the Saturday market, and Easter egg hunts at the country club. In the summer, they rented houses next to her parents’ friends down the shore with activities packed into each day, so Kit was never bored. That is why she never thought of Sabrina during those years—there wasn’t time. When Kit turned nine, there were three unbearable weeks of school when she cried every day in the car and begged her mother to let her stay home. There was a trio of notoriously cruel girls who were a few years
older than her, and she had somehow come into their line of fire. Overnight it became Kit’s turn to be their source of amusement. During a freezing February morning, the name-calling began. “Kit Herzog has got tiny eyes. Kit Herzog has a mustache of blackheads. Kit Herzog has such gross dark hairy legs. She’s a tarantula from the jungle.” Her eyes were not slanted, nor did she have a mustache of blackheads or hairy legs. In fact, she was remarkably less hairy than the girls calling out to tease her, which seemed to her the greatest injustice of all. When Kit was younger, she had a tendency to attract attention. Unlike Sabrina, she was loud, and until these taunts began, she was unfazed by older children—if they were game, she would play or talk with them. Sabrina, on the other hand, maintained a well-practiced invisibility that kept her out of trouble, making her body as small as it could be, folding into herself, disappearing into a crowd. Kit’s voice carried across a room or a playground, and she was always conspicuous to both new friends and enemies.
During those weeks when she was the target of the mean older girls, Kit’s eyes were red from the panic every morning of what she faced at school. Please please don’t make me go to school today, she begged Sally. The three older girls stood in the corner beside the library when she walked in. They all had the same mousy hair, freckles scattered across their noses, they could have been siblings, wearing the same hoodies from J.Crew in red, with mittens hanging out of their sleeves. She searched for the teacher, a point of safety. The clock showed another four minutes before Mr. Greenhill would come out and tell them all to go to class. But it was too late, they’d seen her.
“Hey, look who it is,” they started. “I could see her mustache from the other side of the room.”
Kit dipped her face into her fleece collar.
“Ewww, yeah I can see it, even though she’s trying to hide her face from us.”
The librarian, Mrs. Bleecker, walked past, and they all chorused their good mornings with playful smiles stamped across their mouths. Good morning, Mrs. Bleecker.
Kit’s stomach lurched.
They started to walk toward her, she tried to edge closer to Mrs. Bleecker, and suddenly, she felt a weight crash against her, her backpack pushing her forward, four or five steps out of control before she regained her balance. She looked behind her to see Sabrina staring at her wideeyed, as if to say keep moving. And all Kit could remember after that was getting away from the girls and sitting down at the desk beside Sabrina’s, relief settling over her. Even when Kit had been in “in the group” and distant from Sabrina, there was never a moment when she couldn’t reach out and fi nd Sabrina there if she wanted to, and she always did.
Chestnut Hill, April 2015
That day with the mooncake, which was the last time Kit slept at Sabrina’s house, though neither of them knew it then, Kit was preoccupied by her friend’s significant plans for summer, and moreover, by the fact that she had made no such plans for herself. As always, she relied on the safety net of her parents’ annual rental of a beach house. Dave’s family, the Harrisons, would rent the house next door. She would go to parties down the shore with the same people from the year before and the year before that. Her parents accepted that Sabrina would stay with them at the beach house for a few days every summer. Back at home in Philly, Kit would sunbathe at the country club pool when temperatures soared, and when she felt like company she’d invite Sabrina to join her. But now, Kit was overcome by an impulse to leave Chestnut Hill as soon as possible. And preferably before her friend, because she always did everything first.
What Kit couldn’t tell her mother or Sabrina was that the most pressing reason she had to travel after graduation was to get away from Dave
Harrison. When Sabrina revealed her plan to go to China for the summer, within a matter of hours Kit decided that she too would leave for her own adventure, as though she had come up with the idea herself.
As the end of high school drew near, everything in Chestnut Hill was a searing reminder that her heart had been brutally discarded and she had no way to mend it unless she could be somewhere where he wasn’t.
The fi nal semester of high school had been weighed down by the clandestine embraces and heated kissing in corners of houses out of anyone’s sight, followed by his distance from her in public. Most days, her eyes fl ickered over the length of the hallways, searching for his silhouette, waiting for him to acknowledge her. She never learned from the pain she felt as he looked through her. She just continued to hope that one day he’d be different.
The next weekend, Kit was lying on her bed daydreaming. She’d spent the last week creating a full picture in her head of what her own adventure abroad would look like. She heard her mother’s footsteps passing down the hallway and called out to her. Sally stood in the doorway with a vase of wilting flowers. Kit never called for her mother.
“Mom,” Kit said, turning onto her back and shuffl ing herself up to sit against the headboard of the bed. “I think I want to travel.”
She watched her mother’s expression, a rearrangement of thoughts for a moment. Kit had expected a different response, enthusiastic support for her declaration. It occurred to her that she should have waited a day or two to bring this up; they had put their family dog down that morning, and though Kit had felt sad momentarily, Tripper had been her mother’s dog, not hers. But her self-reprimand evaporated as she rationalized, She needs to know as soon as possible. Flights need to be paid for,
and where was she going to stay in Tokyo anyway? Kit started to imagine herself checking into a hotel on her own, pulling a suitcase along to the check-in desk and waving her parents’ “emergencies only” credit card at the receptionist. She wanted to laugh aloud at the image she’d built in her mind, as though she were playing house at the Please Touch Museum.
“Sure, of course you do,” Sally answered, fi xing her expression, which did little to hide her surprise.
“No, you don’t understand. I want to travel this summer. Like in the next couple of months. To Japan. I know my ethnic heritage has always been a little blurry, but you know how I’ve always had this really strong pull to Japan, right? Sabrina and I were talking about our Asian heritage. I think it would be good before college starts to have a better sense of my identity? Don’t you agree, Mom?”
Her mother stared at her. Kit noticed a redness around the edges of her green-gray eyes from the tears she’d shed earlier over Tripper. Kit didn’t really see her mother cry, she only heard her behind the closed doors of her bedroom sometimes.
Kit stared back at her, unable to control her smug expression as she felt a surge of pleasure from the delivery of her words. The satisfaction of stating the importance of her beliefs, the phrase sense of identity, felt good coming out of her mouth.
“I . . . what?” Sally asked, looking for her words.
“Mom, you don’t need to answer now. I just needed to ask you, okay?” Kit said.
Kit felt she had truly done a good deed: thoughtfully giving her mother advance notice. And she smiled at the fuzzy internal glow of her mature generosity.
“Kit, this is not the time,” was all her mother said fi nally.
“Mom,” she groaned, knowing that the more she pushed, the better the chance her mother would acquiesce. But for now, Sally had shut her down.
“What is it, Kit?”
Kit looked up, hostility starting to build.
“I’m sorry about Tripper, Mom. I am. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked right now. But I think this is important too.” She waited for the recognition of her empathy, the olive branch extended.
Instead, Sally walked away, and Kit felt a hot anger spread inside of her, right up to the roots of her hair.
“Where are you going?”
Her mother continued down the hall to her bedroom, and Kit sank down and screamed into her pillow.
She rolled over and stared at the ceiling, but her fury dissolved quickly. Kit’s life suddenly seemed ignited with possibility.
She relished the thought of sharing the news at school the next day: how she had planned to go to Japan to fi nd her roots. It had always been Japan to her, after all. Finding her roots and fi nding her birth parents were two very different things, and the former was far easier to stomach, with less possibility for unwelcome surprises.
In the eighth grade, Kit had decided that her birth mother had to be Japanese. It took almost no time for her self-declared origin story to become the truth in her mind and others’, because it was never questioned. Nobody would question the adopted mixed-race girl with white parents.
Why shouldn’t she be Japanese if she willed it to be so? The boys in her class were going through a Nintendo anime game phase. The female characters were drawn with long legs, short skirts, and big brown eyes with floppy fringes. One day Todd Peterson announced after a soccer game that Kit’s lookalike was one of the characters in a game they played. The other boys gathered around his phone and looked up at her and back, and they hooted and laughed at the resemblance.
“Hey! Come see this, Kit. It’s you,” he called as he waved the phone at her.
She stood, welded to the ground. A quick internal fight over whether she should ignore him or not took place. She hesitated and then walked over slowly. The heat rose up her neck and to her cheeks. She tugged at the neck of her T-shirt. She peered over Todd’s shoulder as he zoomed into the image. The girl did look like her. She could see the resemblance. Kit’s skin tone was a shade or two darker, but the heart shape of her face, the light brown specks in her eyes, and the way the bangs she had been growing out fell just over her eyebrows were like her. In that instant she decided she would keep her bangs and told herself to remind her mother to book a hair appointment.
Her chest fi lled with pride, and she felt a rush of happiness at all the eyes on her. She felt like the heat of the afternoon sun was warming her through the windows, just like a dog might be lying blissfully in the glow of the sunshine.
“Yeah, man, this is you. So weird! Even your hair.” Todd pulled at her ponytail.
From that moment, Kit decided she was a little Japanese. And over the years, the fictional narrative became a reality. In her mind, her birth mother also had the large shiny brown anime eyes. The mother she imagined would have worn a kimono on New Year’s Day, and sometimes Kit
would scroll through her Instagram feed to look at the Japanese mothers who posted elaborate lunchboxes, rice balls with cute googly eyes and octopus sausages that were both appealing and repulsive at the same time. She followed her favorite stars and influencers, and when they posted from Tokyo, she would like the images. Her mother bought her a vintage travel poster of springtime in Tokyo, and she had it framed on her wall.
As the years went by, the frame became dusty and hung askew, and eventually most of the image was covered by other moments in her life she wanted to display more. Photographs of her and Sabrina, a Valentine’s Day card from the tenth grade that she was convinced Dave had left in her locker. But somewhere back in the same recess of her mind where she was grateful for her white adoptive parents, she believed she might really be Japanese.
As Kit had expected, four weeks before the end of high school, her parents gave in and gave her a graduation present: a plane ticket to Tokyo. Sally called her old family friend Rick Buchanan, and it was agreed that Kit would stay with him and his family in Tokyo for the better part of the summer. Rick’s two children were about Kit’s age, a boy and a girl, and he held a senior position as a diplomat. Kit’s comforts would be taken care of in every way that was within a mother’s control.
It seemed the perfect arrangement, but Kit still wanted to apply her own conditions. Am I going to be chaperoned all the time, Mom? It’s important to me that I am independent, you know. Especially before college starts.
In truth, Kit felt some relief knowing that her mother was watching over her, because venturing so far from home scared her. Leaving her hometown, the familiarity of the same street she’d lived on her whole life, going so far away from her anchor points was terrifying. A controlled freedom was what Kit craved. Freedom that wasn’t too extreme or daring, with the soft landing of her mother’s touch.
She was thrilled at the thought of sharing her plans to travel with
Dave. What better way was there for her to tell him that his silence over the phone and at school was hardly noticed, than her bold decision to travel to the other side of the world. Her trip. She would explain to him in detail the long journey, the jet lag, and the mystery of a completely different land. When the Harrisons came over to watch the game that weekend, what would have been an awkward afternoon of Dave and Kit deliberately avoiding each other’s gaze suddenly gave her the hope of shifting the power paradigm between them.
“Kit has decided she is going to have an adventure this summer in Tokyo.” As her mother announced her news, she flushed with selfsatisfaction but still found herself avoiding Dave’s gaze.
Kit shrugged. “I figure, this is a good time, you know? Before college.” She surprised herself with her feigned nonchalance while her heart raced, hoping that Dave would pick up on the implication that it was her trip, to be taken on her initiative.
Mrs. Harrison gasped with delight. “Wow, Kit, this is so exciting! Honey, remember I told you about our friend from high school who is a diplomat? His name is Rick and his gorgeous wife is Yuriko,” she said to Dave, who wasn’t listening to his mother but grunted in acknowledgment. “Oh, and do you remember, Sal? When he introduced her to us? She was like a little doll just sitting there.”
“I wrote to Rick,” Sally told her.
Dave looked up from his phone. “How long you going for?” he asked before returning to his text message.
Kit wondered who he was messaging.
“Six weeks. That’s quite awhile, isn’t it, sweetie?” Sally said, answering Dave’s question for her.
He looked up again. Kit searched his face for signs of a reaction, but after their eyes met for a moment, he looked at his phone again.
“Yeah, it’s basically the whole summer.”
Dave heard her. She knew him well enough now to see the impact of her words. He put his phone down, closing the screen so she couldn’t see what he had been doing.
iA year ago, Kit had sat on the beach, shoulders pink with sunburn as Dave stood over her, his shadow stretching out along the sand. Hey, come down to Troy’s party later? His voice made it sound like it wasn’t really a question.
That night, as they sat on the sand watching the orange fl ames of the bonfire, her leg fell against his, and he didn’t move. She wanted to look up at him, to see any expression in his face that might give away his feelings, Instead, she studied the parts of him that she could take in up close. She studied his legs, the golden-blond hairs, and his hands. She liked Dave’s hands. His nails were always clean and short. She had noticed this about him long before he’d started to make her heart soar. Hygiene and pride in appearance: Kit cared about these things. For the rest of her life she always noticed men’s nails. And if their nails were too long, unclean, she would instantly strike them from her mind.
When he stood up and reached for her hand, she let him take it, and he led her down the beach. She only realized after they had walked for five minutes in silence, her hand in his, that she had left her sandals by the bonfire.
He draped his arm around her neck, and she felt herself lean into the side of his body, until he stopped suddenly and turned quickly. They were face-to-face, and she could feel his breath on her lips. It wasn’t what she had thought it would be. The kiss. She had expected tenderness and feel-
ing; she wanted words from him, but instead he said nothing. His tongue stabbed at hers, her mouth awkwardly open, feeling too wet, as he rubbed his hands over the small of her back, and then around to the bare skin of her stomach. When he stopped and came up for breath, she stepped back to search his eyes, but found nothing.
Philadelphia to Ho Chi Minh City, June 1998
There was little that Mimi could remember clearly in the time after she lost Ngan: the days morphed into weeks, months even. First, she was swept into a pitch-black hole of terror, and then she was thrust into the depths of ice-cold water, a ghoulish riptide taking her further and further away from her Ngan. There were no tears, instead she felt a choking in her whole body, a persistent ache that held back the tears that would fi ll the ocean between her Vietnam and America. She was flooded with images of Ngan: a newborn, her paw-like hand clutching the fabric of Mimi’s T-shirt. Sometimes Mimi had wanted to shake it away. But she loved her, how she loved her. Sure, during that journey to the airport, Mimi had lost her patience when Ngan tried to wander out into the aisle of the bus. But Ngan knew her mother loved her. A child knows how much a mother loves them. Even in that moment just before she was gone, Mimi told Ngan how much she loved her. “Good girl, smart girl,” Mimi had said as she smiled
and gently tried to reach below. And then she had searched beneath her seat, and the cavernous emptiness of that space swallowed her up.
“Ngan!” she had shouted.
Mimi felt herself being sucked into a well. She kept shouting into the crowd, into the space between the ceiling and the heads of people walking past her. She screamed at the blank faces that stared at her as they pushed their luggage slowly in front of her.
But Ngan did not come.
The things a person is self-conscious about disappear when desperation takes over. The rolls on your stomach you were so worried about against the waistline of your trousers, an ill-fitting shirt, the bags under your eyes. When the anguish comes, you just don’t care. You don’t care about the sound of your voice that’s decibels above everything, and the people who stare wide-eyed at you like you are a wild animal. You don’t care about the guttural savage cry that emerges from the depths of your breaking heart as you try to grasp for something that is gone, that has disappeared.
“Ma’am, you need to control yourself.” A man, who looked like a pink pig with sprouting orange hair, mouthed slowly.
A sound came from Mimi, from deep inside the well of her being. She didn’t recognize it as her own. The realization that she couldn’t fi nd the words, that the language she had a shaky grasp of got her nowhere. She couldn’t communicate her despair to anyone—it only pierced her insides and brought forth the animal from her depths.
“Ma’am,” he continued, but his silhouette blurred around the edges. She couldn’t make out the things in front of her. Someone was holding her arms behind her, thick sweaty hands squeezing her until she felt her arms might snap. Mimi’s mind raced through thick matter, she couldn’t see clearly nor could any word in any language other than her own form on her lips. She was pushed into a room with harsh fluorescent lighting;
she needed to squint to focus. The strength left her body, and she felt herself become limp. She whimpered and felt tears and mucus running down her face. Her shirt had opened, her faded bra exposed for everyone to see, but her arms were pinned behind her, and she was helpless.
The conversations that took place around her sounded muffled. She couldn’t catch the words, though she tried so hard to concentrate. “Documentation.” “Boarding.” “Police.” That was all she heard. Nobody came for Mimi that day. Nobody helped. Too much time was passing. She wanted them to search the terminal sooner, every plane earlier, every parked vehicle and every suitcase should have been searched. But nobody came in time. She saw no search party. And nobody was brought to the room with the blinding lights to speak to Mimi in her native tongue. Instead, she sat and waited. As the minutes passed and she could feel Ngan getting further away, Mimi’s whimpers turned into wails again. It was all too late.
When her sobbing fi nally became too loud, she felt a sting against her arm, the painful piercing of a needle through her flesh, and soon her eyes drooped. She fought it, fought with everything left inside of her. Then the world went black.
After Mimi was sent home to Vietnam, after she woke up on a plane with her arms tied to the chair, after she sat in transit beside security guards in countries she didn’t know, who would not look at her. She begged the officials in Tan Son Nhat to let her board another plane, but she was treated like a criminal. Finally she returned to Cam, who’d gone back to Saigon six months before her, and she laid in the bed her sister had made
for her on the floor. In her fits of sleeplessness and swirling grief, she heard her sister talking to her husband through the thin walls of the next room.
“What if she’s wanted by the authorities?”
“What are you talking about? If anything they are the ones who need to be held accountable. A child is missing and they did nothing.” Cam’s voice was rising.
“You are naive if you think that will ever happen. We have nothing.”
We have nothing. Mimi knew it was true, there was nothing she could do, but she would not accept it. Every waking moment held the deep fog of her loss, and when the air cleared briefly, the darkness returned, like a night that would never end.
Mimi would never get over that day. And it wasn’t because she was sedated and found herself flying over the Pacific back to Saigon without her child. No, she would never get over that day because she had been powerless, which forever altered how she saw herself. And because she had, ever since, been weeping from a private faucet inside her, unable to keep her thoughts from the pink smiling pig man with sprouting orange hair who told her to control herself as she wept for her baby and begged for help.
She lay in the darkened corner of Cam and Duong’s rooms in District 9 of Saigon for days. She woke up each morning with her head throbbing, her thoughts slowed by desperation, frightened to open her eyes and face reality. Her Ngan was gone. Sometimes her sister would draw open the curtains and Mimi would squint her eyes shut: too bright. When Cam would spoon food into her mouth, she felt the suffocating urge to cry. She would lie back down, replaying the moments in the airport, every day an emphasis on a different detail, how the men in uniform
