Crow's Mouth
October 2023I dream of her killing herself frequently. She crouches, her shoulder blades drawn back as she leans over the edge of the high-rise that used to be our vegetable garden. Her body is arced with tension; she is about to spring forth, open her arms in rapture and glide through a sliver of the horizon – swirling, deep, and orange. I believe that she can fly and I grin because I have always known that she was destined for great things. That is the faith daughters have in mothers. I feel suspended with her as she leaps, with pleasure and without thinking. But she plummets instead. In my sleep I am still not sure if we are two different people or the same person. I am falling with her just as I am watching. When I wake, shaking her residue off like cold dew, I become lucid and fraught with grim implications – that the hole I left in her was so complete and unshakable I had begun to imagine us doing horrible things to ourselves.
This year was the same. I had left a crack open in my window the night before and the cold rush of morning traffic woke me. The downwardness of my mother’s leap lingered at my temples. I rubbed at my eyelids and I finally remembered to exhale, a hot breath escaping me as if I had been holding it in all night. I turned onto my belly and reached into my pillowcase to remove a red envelope, the paper so soft from age it had the texture of a handkerchief. From it I pulled out a tuft of hair. She had cut it from my head when I was born. I imagined her patting my baby scalp and deciding selfishly to save some of it for herself. I must have inherited that selfishness because when I left Taipei I fumbled through her drawers and took it with me. I had paused over her jade bangle and emergency cash, slightly nauseous from the smell of mothballs, but I left those there. It felt good to just take a piece of me she had kept. Looking at my own limp hair, I ran the strands through my fingers. They were soft like dawn. I brought them to my nose and inhaled but I couldn't smell anything.
It all started with a television set. I told my mother that my best friend Gao Wen had a new flatscreen at her house. My mother was frying an egg and she paused in her swift movements. Her hair, long and black to her hips, swung subtly back and forth.
“Why do you need a TV?” she asked.
“I never said that, I just thought it was cool,” I replied. “We watched a nature documentary on it and the lizard looked like it was about to jump out of the screen!”
She laughed lightly and flipped the egg in the pan. She had painted her nails pink the day before at work and they matched her slippers. When I had asked her if her boss cared that she was doing her nails at the front desk, she just shrugged. Her pale hands moved in and out of the morning light, catching glints that sharpened the pink to a red. She used to paint them that color. Until I told her my favorite color was pink when I was ten. Soon after everything we owned became that color — pink radio on the window still, matching pink bathrobes, pink soap. When I started liking purple more I was afraid to tell her.
The door to the kitchen creaked open. It was my grand-uncle; we were living in his house at the time. He moved slowly, almost imperceptibly, but his eyes were still quick with life and I could see him calculating, adding up the money he got every month from his pension and tenants.
“Er Shu Shu!” my mother said, rushing to help him to a seat. He was almost deaf and did not hear her, his eyes whirling around in panic as she approached him from the side. The egg started burning. She was too frugal with the oil. I got up and turned off the stove, sliding the egg from the pan and onto a plate.
“Where is Maria?” my mother fumed. Maria was the nurse from Indonesia my uncle hired to take care of his dad. “They are paying her, not me!”
“I saw on the news that there was some flash flooding last night, maybe something happened?” I said.
“Don’t be a crow’s mouth!” my mother gently slapped me on the wrist. “God, I hope she gets here soon.”
I stayed quiet. Crow’s mouth was when someone mentions a possible unlucky event, superstition goes that it will actually come true. It was my mother’s greatest pet peeve.
Maria arrived in a couple of minutes as I was scooping congee into our bowls.
“I’m so sorry, they had to close some of the lanes,” she said, her Chinese slow and broken.
“It’s Ok-la,” my mother chimed. “Safety first, take your time.”
I set the bowls on the table. Maria hungrily eyed the bowls and I looked down guiltily. My mother was strict about food in the house. She’s being paid in money, not food and drink, she’d always say. I secretly disagreed, it wasn’t her money.
“Oh shoot, I still haven’t washed my face yet,” my mother said, fanning her face. That was code for: I haven’t done my makeup yet. She sat down and skimmed the top of her bowl of congee with her chopsticks. I watched as she got up, having sat down for not even a full minute, headed to her room.
“You can give this to Bao Luo,” she said.
Bao Luo was our alleyway dog. Today was another lucky day for him.
I sighed as she left. The steam of her unfinished congee abstracted the beaded curtain leading to the back room, where Maria fussed over my grand-uncle; she was slow but gentle. I ate quickly so that the food wouldn’t go cold.
Gao Wen and I were not quite delinquents, but we were surely not on any teacher’s favorites list. Nobody expected big things from us. There was a small “waterfall” behind our school which was essentially a 10 foot dam with a steel pipe that sputtered out water into a small pond. We thought it was the most magical place in the world. We found it in the beginning of middle school but went there less and less frequently.
We still upheld the tradition of going right before exams. We felt like kids again, casting spells with twigs and prodding at the mud on the banks of the pond. It was a good release from constant test prep classes that ran late into the night.
I remember the day before finals in our last year of high school, when we sat on the rocks under the dam, our schoolgirl skirts were speckled by the water from the pipe. Light filtered in through the fresh leaves, still glossy and unabashed in their newness. I yearned for a more expansive canopy, for the exams to be over and summer to arrive. Gao Wen was quiet in her ways, and she relied on games and good questions to mediate conversations.
“Would you rather be a princess or a witch?” she asked.
“Witch!” I said quickly. “I want to be able to cast spells!”
Gao Wen replied that she would want to be a princess. “There are more people to keep me company in a castle. Witches live alone.”
I thought about this. “But you’ll be powerful enough to get whatever you want, isn’t that better?”
Gao Wen shrugged. “What else could I want? I’d be a princess.”
I waved my arms in exasperation. An idea strikes: “You could get as much mango shaved ice as you want.”
Gao Wen considers this. “Tempting… but I feel like if I were a princess people would just bring it to me if I asked.”
I rolled my eyes. “Ok, be your princess.”
I decided to stand up and leave Gao Wen on the rocks as I looked for crawling critters in the pond water. I knew it made her nervous but that was kind of the point.
“Have you seen the kid from America?” Gao Wen asked.
“Oh the one with the hair as yellow as straw?” I said, a little louder than my normal voice so that she could still hear.
“Yeah, Mai-chal,” Gao Wen said.
“He is really quiet, I guess his Chinese isn’t really good.”
“Yeah,” said Gao Wen. “He’s teaching me some English.”
I could tell she was debating whether or not to reveal more information. I stayed quiet. “He said he was returning to America after classes ended. But he has two really young siblings. His parents are looking for a nanny that speaks Chinese.”
I felt my eyes grow wide. “Did he ask you?”
“He did, but he also asked if I knew anybody who would want to do it if I couldn’t.”
Things like this just happened to Gao Wen. I feigned nonchalance, pretending to find something interesting in the water.
“You should do it,” I suggested.
“No no, my parents would never let me. I’m supposed to go to college here,” she said. “Plus, a new place is so scary and I would hate it there. My English isn’t that good.”
I shrugged having done my due diligence as the encouraging, adventurous friend.
“But maybe you should go,” said Gao Wen. “I told him about you and he said your English is better than mine.”
“Why would you do that before asking me?” I asked. “Why would you just assume that I would want to go?”
“You don’t like it here, you’re the class poet, you’re the dreamer,” said Gao Wen. She suddenly got up, animated. She mimicked the Statue of Liberty, torch in hand. “Come to the land of dreams!”
I wagged my head, but was secretly flattered, even hopeful.
Later that month I came back from tutoring to find a brand new television on the coffee table. It was sleek and shiny, completely out of place against our wicker sofa with cushions rotting from humidity. Even the smell of the room shifted with the arrival of this sci-fi looking apparatus – a tinge more plastic. I stood there in disbelief.
“Ma…” I hollered. “How did you get this?”
No response, so I decided she was at work and I started dinner. Our fridge stank from the volume of leftovers, all in black containers stacked and anonymous. I fumbled through them, smelling carefully before deciding to give it to Bao Luo or to heat it up in a pan. It was only until the food was piled up on the table that I thought something was amiss.
Her room was in the little studio above my grand uncle’s garage. To get there I had to cross the alleyway between it and the main house, one of the last surviving one-story buildings on the busy Taipei street.
May in the city was alive with the sound of motorcycles and bugs as the smoke of late night grills pulsed through the air in waves. Vines snaked across the house’s walls and small violet flowers, looking surreal in bluish security light lighting bloomed in explosive bursts. The staircase from the garage to her room was narrow and lopsided. I hated going up there.
I opened the door and found her sleeping feverishly. Her bed was under a bright pink mosquito tent and through it, moonlight casted a white glow onto her brow.
“What happened?” I said to myself.
Her room was a mess. Fake luxury perfumes and designer bags lined every wall, a thin path spiraled from the door to her bed and desk amidst the clutter of wigs and make up and magazines. I went to her desk and found a stack of papers. Apart from the rest of her room, those papers seemed sterile and alert. There were numbers and graphs and signatures, but the words that stood out were blood plasma donation. I immediately grew red and embarrassed. In the sweet stink of her room, I wanted to unzip the mosquito tent over her bed and throw the papers in her face.
“I must’ve lost track of time,” I heard her grumble.
“I didn’t ask for a TV,” I said.
“I know, but isn’t it so nice!” a lazy smile appeared on her face as if she was still dreaming. “You were right, the people look so real on the big screen.”
“You lied on this. You can’t be doing this twice a week. You’ll die,” I said.
“Crow’s mouth!” We stared at each other as she slowly realized that I was still angry, and that made her even angrier. “I should change your name and call you little crow. Do you want me to die?”
The accusation burned me. Instead of answering I count the number of acrylic nails on the ground. There were seven.
“What does Er Shu Shu think?” I asked.
“Don’t try to use him against me.” She narrowed her eyes. “You are never grateful.”
She said the word never with so much finality I felt my heart slam up against something in my chest. She decided to add, “I saw him watching the news on it earlier. He loves it.”
I nodded to myself. I felt silly, my head bobbing up and down in my mother’s dollhouse room, trying to love a flatscreen TV.
“How was work?”
Her acidity subsided and she returned to her childlike grin. She stretched her arms out, her dainty wrists adorned in silly bracelets. Completely immature! My eyes wandered down to the scars on the insides of her elbows. I imagined her smiling politely in the hospital as they stabbed her, again and again. I felt sick. I felt a weight that would never be lifted because of how much she loved me.
“No more work for me, I quit,” she said.
My shock quickly subsided. This was a common occurrence.
“What? So we can watch TV?” I said.
“Don’t worry about it.” She got up from bed and paced towards me, stepping on an eyelash curler and wincing. I winced with her. She put her hands around my arms and examined me. I was so much more tanner than her, and I smelled of kitchen fire. A smile rippled across her face. “I’d get anything for you.”
That night we fell asleep on the wicker sofa. I woke in the middle of the night and watched the unnatural colors from the TV screen light up my mother's beautiful face. I turned my attention to the screen, rubbing my eyes and feeling my eyelids crunch. I tried to blink my eyes back into clarity, but I failed. All sound grew faint, even the passing of traffic became just a murmur. I felt the back of my shoulders glued to my seat as my eyes stayed open. The screen before me expanded, images turned to pure color as my mother and I and the wicker sofa were absorbed by a sea of neon green. From the noise I saw myself, or a silhouette of me, emerge from a puddle of red, as red as my mother’s pink nails in harsh morning light. My clone walked towards my mother and put her face beside hers. I watched on as this static version of me melted into her. I could no longer differentiate the two. My mother’s skin became static, the curves of her chin and neck obscured by noise. I blinked again and I was inside this half mother, half television monster, the world a grainy, rainbow mess. All I knew was that we were one and the same. The two of us, all three of us. We were the same. I was paralyzed and I could feel my stomach twisting into knots, and then those knots folding onto themselves. I was positive that I was going to vomit. That was when I decided to leave home with Michael’s family to America.
A decade later, I stare at a bright LED screen in a shop window. I am at the Prudential Center because it is still frigid in Boston and there is not much to do except to wander around indoor malls, deciding what I cannot afford. On the TVs they are playing stock footage of ginkgo trees. The camera moves up and down tiny golden fans.
They never told me how she died, just that she was found cold in her bed two months after I left. It could have been the blood donations. But it also could have been me. That winter I saw my first snowfall in America and the world grew quiet, insulated by a soft, white cocoon. I wore my clothes from Taiwan in awkward layers as I felt the retraction of all life around me. I became mute for a long time. The snow on the outside crept inside me and any sound I tried to make was absorbed by it. The children I was supposed to take care of tugged at me, asking for their juice boxes, for me to read them stories about fairies and dragons, for the right pronunciation for home in Chinese. Their neediness rescued me and I began saving my money like it was water and I was crossing a desert. I put myself through school. I did hard things. All the while I would browse plane tickets to Taiwan ever so often, punishing myself. I haven’t been back. Instead, I watch her fall in my dreams, and I wake up smelling my baby hair wishing it was hers.
I look back at the screens of endless fields of ginkgo, their branches wildly intersecting and then shooting off and then intersecting again. I could smell perfume from department stores, so alike to hers in their dizzying effect. The TVs buzz with energy, an energy I had been paralyzed by before. I remember hearing that gingko leaves fall all at once. It was as if the trees heard me thinking through the screen. They fall instantly, and the dead leaves now morph into someone I could touch. Maybe it was her from my dreams. She approached me and sighed. Her exhalation washed over me, so bright that I blinked through my tears, concentrating on my own small palms so as not to be blinded. We were finally two different people. I felt myself wrapped in pixelated gold. I have not been warm like this in a long time. She reached out and touched my face, reminded me of the power of leaving, forgave me for it, and then beckoned me home. I called Gao Wen that night.