Born of Both

by Keira Deer

I do not confide in my father and mother. They would not understand. How could they? He is English, she is Chinese. I am different to both of them– a stranger, tho their own child. “What are we?” I ask my brother. “It doesn’t matter, sissy,” he responds. But it does. 

-From Sui Sin Far’s “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian”

 

My Yeye’s name was John Deer, though it was not his first. He was my father’s father. Pulled from the mothballed corners of bedroom closets and dresser drawers, he wore slacks and a white tank top every day I knew him, staking a cane alongside him when he shuffled quietly, room to room. In his high cheekbones and thin face, I could see my father’s, and I could see mine.

Yeye brought the family to the United States from China in the 1960s, when exclusionary immigration laws and quotas were abolished. His name was Man Chip Tse. In crossing, he called himself John and his wife Susie, his children Raymond, David, Andy, Danny, Judy, Benny, and Kenneth. He and Grandma Susie’s tailor shop was in Chinatown, two miles away from the apartment in Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles, where they raised their six sons and one daughter, where he lived for the rest of his life even as the others moved or passed away. For the last fifty years of his life, he navigated America through the lens of his assimilated childrens’ translations of English to Cantonese and back again. Yeye didn’t learn to speak English, not really. He wasn’t the type to try to communicate, my father later told me. Nearly ten years after Yeye’s death, I can’t now remember a single English word he spoke to me as a child, though I can remember the texture of his voice so clearly– how soft it was in our loud rooms, how hard the effort was to push it beyond himself, how strange for so quiet a voice to be spoken by one who placed such heavy hands on our shoulders.

As I examine my own memory for details of my ancestry, the search comes up deficient, and I wish so regretfully that he had told us stories: the escape from Communism, as it’s been deemed by my parents; the early move from Oregon to California; the work in Chinatown. The glimpses I have of such stories are just that– glimpses, smudges of an intangible past that I can’t ever reach back into. A vital piece of our family history died when Yeye did, simply disappeared in what I’ve come to realize was his wordlessness, his lack of language. Fragments of our story vanished in what I, as a child, perceived only as his silence. But it is my silence I am more ashamed of.

At Yeye’s funeral service, I made acquaintance with my first dead body. I was twelve years old. The seats around me were cushioned with darkly-dressed mourners, and in the tear-blinking line of my vision, everything was aflood. The room was perfumed with incense– each breath drew it deeper into my lungs, its acrid sting clung to the walls of caverns which heaved from crying. When the grandchildren lined up to say something of Yeye– what we would remember of him, why he mattered to us– my older cousins spoke of his presence in their lives, despite the language barrier that barred his stories from reaching us. We went down the line. The eyes of my family and my grandfather’s strangers turned to me, and I shook my head, and I said nothing.

There, at the front of the room, was his body, waxy and grave in the open casket. I bowed three times before it, each bow like the slow ringing of a bell disrupting the fragile skin of my young grief. I peered in. His body was so close I could feel it there with my eyes closed. His body was so far it was as if he had already sunk his ultimate depth. I held a mangled tissue in my fist and looked down into the face of the man I had known my entire life, but when I blinked away the tears to see him clearly again, that man was gone.

*

A memory full of blanks: I remember being at his apartment one afternoon as a kid. We didn’t often visit him there– it required a fifty-mile drive into the LA jungle that my parents didn’t like to take– except for Lunar New Year, bowing before heaping rice onto our plates, a photograph of Grandma Susie hanging above us. That afternoon, the apartment was not well-lit, and I sat patient, bored, as he and my father discussed something in Cantonese– Yeye fluent in the language, my father only as fluent as he might have been when he arrived in America as a grade-school child. There must have been papers on the table, documents, responsibilities I didn’t know the meaning of. I was at an unidentified age. A curtain of time has since stretched itself across my memory. Had the apartment actually been dim, or is that my forgetfulness painting a wash of gray watercolor over the scene? What was the floor plan of that apartment? And where was the photograph of Grandma Susie hanging? –in the kitchen? by the piano? or was it on that high beam that ran along the ceiling of the living room beside us?

What I remember mostly is Yeye’s voice. At one point my father stepped out of the room, used the restroom, and Yeye stood from the table. I felt embarrassed for not knowing a word of Chinese to speak to him, the way I imagined my cousins might be able to. I sat quietly. A wave of his hand and a series of noises that simply fell from his throat were his signals to me to follow him. In my memory, there is no hallway, no directional path that led us to that lifeless bedroom in some shadow of the apartment– we just arrived there, as if placed. There may have been carpet beneath our feet. There may have been a window facing the door, with sheer drapes in a shade of beige that blended with everything else. I remember no dresser, no desk, no shelf. From somewhere, Yeye produced a silver ring and urged it into the palm of my hand. In stilted and staccato English, he said grandma, grandma’s ring.

Grandma Susie had died many years before I was born, and so, I was holding an untouched past in the palm of my hand, collected like a clipping from my family tree. This is how I fill in the blanks of memory. The only definitive proof I have is the ring– silver and scratched, no inset jewel, no design, only a divot where the two end-prongs hug to make the ring looser or tighter. Many years after bringing it home from Yeye’s apartment, I’ve never readjusted its size. It is loose around my every finger. I like to imagine my finger slipping into the space that Grandma Susie’s might have once held, the fact that that empty space that circles around my finger could be, and perhaps once was, filled by hers.

*

My mother’s mother’s name was Patricia Brown, but everyone– my sister, my cousins, my mother, my aunt– calls her Grammy, a name I’ve never been able to bring myself to say. She died three months before I was born. As my hair grew in and I got older, a streak of blonde began to shine within the natural dark brown, my mother called it Grammy’s angel’s kiss on her way up to heaven. Every once in a while, my mother would inspect my hair to ensure the blonde streak was still there, and each time she did so, I realized she was looking for her mother.

I’ve been told I’m a lot like her. When I walk ahead of my mother, she tells me I have Grammy’s walk. When I stand, one hip fixedly pitched up higher than the other from scoliosis, she tells me I have Grammy’s tilt. Grandma Patricia was five feet tall and had a very slight frame, her arms and legs thin, her stature tiny. She was the single mom who raised my mother and her siblings. She was, in my mind, the center of a hub of ordinary, beautiful people– the one who started us all.

On this side of my family, the relatives are White and ride John Deere heavy machinery, maintaining weathered yards and clearing trees in Maine. They think the name Miguel is exotic, because it appears so rarely in their lives. When they speak, they drop or add the -er at the ends of words: yoga classes become yoger classes, and lobster becomes lobstuh, and sighs of defeat or agreement or affirmative all bottle into one word: ayuh. They hunt moose and deer and when they send my mother photos of the wild game they shot, I remember the four letters of my last name and wonder if they think of us when they whisper deer! on their hunting trips with guns loaded in their hands. They bake whoopie pie cakes and fill them with ice cream, slide down rocks in the park, swim with loons in the lake in August. Make scarecrows out of plaid shirts stuffed with leaves, pick apples in the rain, run into childhood friends and classmates in pizza parlors on random afternoons. I am a child of God, they tell me, and I am whole.

Last year, I flew across the country to be with them for my twentieth birthday. Autumn was dying out as mid-October stretched toward winter, and it rained over the broken black tar roads of my mother’s small New England hometown. Just behind the corner store was the house where Grandma Patricia raised her five daughters and two sons. White with green trim, the house is found at the edge of the corner store’s parking lot, and the perimeters are strewn with the current owners’ junk. Behind a brick wall next to the house, we found an abandoned toilet, and my aunt– who now lives less than one mile away from her childhood home– laughed and called this place the new ghetto of the town.

Later, my mother and I walked to the Lakeview Cemetery where my Uncle Wade’s and Grandma Patricia’s gravestones lie next to one another. In my mother’s Mainer accent, the wind was wicked and wretched as we pumped step after step against the gusts, searching the rows of headstones for our family. It was only after my aunt arrived that we found them. She plucked the weeds away from the stones and righted the ceramic figures of laughing rabbits that protected my grandmother like rascally angels. These little buddies have been here for twenty years, she said. Not lookin’ too good are they? Their paint was faded and chipped, but still they laughed. Etched on my grandma’s gravestone was the one photograph of her I’m most familiar with, her white hair curled in a cloud around her head and her large-framed glasses on the bridge of her nose. In the same way I grieved for the Yeye I knew, I grieved for this grandmother I did not. My mother wiped away the dirt from the etched portrait, like polishing the lenses of her glasses, and I stepped back to take a photo of the two stones in their field of green. I did not trust my forgetfulness with this moment. I couldn’t lose this place the way I lost Yeye’s apartment. This is the closest I have ever been to my grandmother.

*

It became painfully obvious to me that when I was in Maine with my mother, I was the only one there who was marked with the kind of diversity I had grown accustomed to being around all the time at home in California. Though surrounded constantly by my own blood relatives in Maine, I felt as if the presence of one side of my identity was erasing the other, for the fact that there was no one around to balance the two. I hadn’t been to New England in fifteen years, and the sudden constant presence of my White family members seemed to shroud the existence of my Chinese blood, neither my father nor sister nearby to provide me with companionship. They had stayed home to work and save money on what would have been expensive airline tickets to travel with us. The isolation I felt was entirely unexpected, and it came as a shock to me when I realized why: though it likely didn’t occur to my family in Maine, I kept thinking they were looking at me and finding a half-stranger sitting on their couch. Everyone here could relate to one half of me, but the other half was a more mysterious thing.

*

How many times have I thought of Sui Sin Far and wanted to cry? I do not confide in my father and mother, she wrote. I am different to both of them– a stranger, tho their own child. I read these words for the first time in college and underlined them furiously in black ink. Her English father, her Chinese mother. My Chinese father, my White mother. I wonder, how many times have I felt that one half of me disappears in certain rooms? Found myself wordless, lacking language, my voice too hard to push beyond myself? How many times has my seam been split down the middle after trying hard, so terribly hard, to keep the two sides sewn together?

While I was away from home, I kept writing imaginary letters that began: dear sister, trying to connect myself to the one person who shares the ingredients of my genetic distribution.

Dear sister, they don’t know the things we know. 

Dear sister, I finally saw Grandma’s house. 

Dear sister, don’t you feel guilty?

Guilt for feeling a stranger to my own parents. Guilt for assuming my sister did not feel the same. Guilt for still thinking she doesn’t. Guilt for not asking. Guilt for not wanting to. Guilt for feeling guilty.

Dear sister, do you feel this way too? I am a stranger to everyone but you.

*

On Main Street, near Grandma Patricia’s old house, was a Cantonese food restaurant called New Great Wall. My family walked past it, but when I turned my head to see the face of the man there– flooding the leaf-clogged sidewalk with a garden hose– I lingered an extra step to look inside. Light blue vinyl seat cushions on black metal chairs, honey-colored wooden tabletops, a Coca Cola vending machine. On the menu: chow fun, spring rolls, one dozen types of chicken, beef, pork, shrimp, rice, wonton soups. The man who swept puddles into the street stepped back for us to pass by him, and in his face, I found the familiar features of my Chinese family members: the texture of his skin and nod of his head, the pleasant type of worn smile on his lips, the tufts of hair kicking up sparsely underneath his baseball cap. I couldn’t help but wonder how did you get here? –on this corner property of a tiny Main Street. How did you get here? –in this small town of less than four thousand people, so small and so steady that the Asian demographic is 0.9% of the whole, perhaps one single bloodline stretched across the entire town. 

Without my sister there to experience this with me, I thought of my family back home and imagined them meeting the family I have here. Never have the descendants of Patricia Brown gathered around the glass dim sum tables and exchanged red envelopes or chattered over the glazed pig’s head, just as the descendants of John Deer have never bought split-top boiled hot dogs in Freeport or fretted over the price of moose-meat butchers or eaten whoopie pies in the bite of the Eastern cold.

I stood at the curb of the New Great Wall. How did I get here? It was my grandmother Patricia who brought me to Maine. It was Yeye who brought me to America. When I looked down at the puddled sidewalk at my feet, I met the convergence of the two in my own reflection– my small body, the rise of my cheekbones, my dark eyebrows, the fair freckled skin.

 

Keira Deer is a writer based in Southern California. She holds a BFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University and has been published in Calliope Art & Literary Magazine, Ouroboros Magazine, and Polaris Literary Magazine.