In truth, this was a bad thing that Yan Chang had done, telling me my mother’s story. Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth.
I know what to avoid, what to worry about. I’m like those kids who live with gunfire going off around them. I don’t want pain. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to see other people around me die. But I don’t have anything left inside me to figure out where I fit in or what I want. If I want anything, it’s to know what’s possible to want.
Being forty seems now more tangible. Life signs, like freeway signs, occasionally pop up. I’m getting there and I want to get there faster – without the stops and turns and detours. I want to be forty and have all those forty years behind me. Forty is secure. At forty you are a full-fledged being. Not awkward, not groping, not waiting. It’s an arrival point. There’s so much that I don’t know. So much that I’m not sure of. When will I overcome this feeling that I’ve been foolish for 24 years?
I don’t have too many lines ingrained upon my face. I look rather pixieish. Sometimes I wish that as I get older my eyes would become lined and take on more character. It just looks like I haven’t suffered enough in my life.
I have a sense of my life as a percentage of what has been used and what is likely left. And I get impatient now when I waste time trying to find lost things or doing mundane chores, when I dwell on the unpleasant, when I give my mind to it. So I will kill those moments, banish them, and try to find the moments that can be relived. That’s the role of the imagination. It’s like reassembling what has happened, yet it’s still inaccurate.
She said that if I listened to her, later I would know what she knew: where true words came from, always from up high, above everything else. And if I didn’t listen to her, she said my ear would bend too easily to other people, all saying words that had no lasting meaning, because they came from the bottom of their hearts, where their own desires lived, a place where I could not belong.
Sometimes I feel like I’m a pair of eyes and ears, and I’m just trying to stay safe and make sense of what’s happening. I don’t want pain. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to see other people around me die. But I don’t have anything left inside me to figure out where I fit in or what I want. If I want anything, it’s to know what’s possible to want.
I threw my head back and smiled proudly to myself. And then I draped the large embroidered red scarf over my face and covered these thoughts up. But underneath the scarf I still knew who I was. I made a promise to myself: I would always remember my parents’ wishes, but I would never forget myself.
I remember all these things. And tonight, on the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, I also remember what I asked the Moon Lady so long ago. I wished to be found.
I wanted everything for you to be better. I wanted you to have the best circumstances, the best character. I didn’t want you to regret anything. And that’s why I named you Waverly. It was the name of the street we lived on. And I wanted you to think, this is where I belong. But I also knew if I named you after this street, soon you would grow up, leave this place, and take a piece of me with you.
Once the story captures my senses, I am no longer conscious of the act of reading words. I am in the story.
Fear, I think, is the worst element of religions of all kinds. It is used to justify more fear, as well as hatred, lack of compassion, intolerance, and war.
I think about our two faces. I think about my intentions. Which one is American? Which one is Chinese? Which one is better? If you show one, you must always sacrifice the other.
Praise, I had learned, was temporary. What someone else controlled and doled out to you, and if you accepted it, and depended on it for happiness, you would become an emotional beggar, and suffer later when it was withdrawn.
Real people don’t learn how to be unselfish... But maybe they can be more self-aware for a second that they are. Or perhaps they are patheticly more unaware. How do you cure somebody of selfishness? Send them to Mother Teresa school? There’s something deep-seated about selfishness.
As with all hardships, he took this as yet another test of faith. He almost seemed glad he had been called upon on to endure it. And show how great his faith was. He would pass the test and save his son.
But why didn’t I flood in the same way? Why was their happiness tenfold what I felt? Did I lack the proper connection between the senses and the heart? And then I realized that this was my habit. To hold back my feelings.
I remind myself that I know the difference between elusion and delusion. It is the separation between desire and belief. I know what separates the past from the present. What lies between then and now, it is but a moment, an easy thing to lose.
Endings are’nt there to please you. Endings happen the way they do for a reason.
Religion teaches you that faith takes care of hope. All my hopes are gone, so why do I need faith anymore?
We could choose what we wanted to believe. However, she added, any student who did not choose to believe in Jesus was a corpse-eating maggot, and when this unbeliever died, she would tumble into the underworld, where her body would be pierced by a bayonet, roasted like a duck, and forced to suffer all kinds of tortures that were worse than what was happening in Manchuria.