How We All Knew She Was a Fake

She told us to call her “Aunt Sandy”, but I was wary the moment she insisted she knew what it felt to be from another culture since her family moved a lot when she was younger. We were at a conference for kids who grew up in other countries, which meant we were all bound to each other by our common unfamiliarity with the Western culture.
What credentials "Aunt Sandy" had to consider herself a TCK (third culture kid), I’ll never know, since she admitted to only living in the United States.
     “But I know what it’s like to leave friends,” she said as she looked sympathetically at each of us.
The girl from Nigeria caught my eye, half-smiled and shook her head. By instinct we all knew: leaving people was not the same as living with people; being the only white person; running from car bombs; eating monkeys; being forced to live on a compound; or drenching oneself in another culture.

So, while this “Aunt Sandy” implored us to embrace bittersweet friendships that would end in four days, we busied ourselves with making memories. We did not fear leaving. Rather, the knowledge inspired us to climb a mountain at 4:00 a.m., skinny dip after the bonfire and explore the Colorado mountainside in the middle of the night with nothing but two flashlights and a large stick to keep away the mountain lions.
Instead of learning names, we called each other by our home countries.
Moldova: the black haired boy who went with us to hike the mountain and whose violin looked like fire in the sunrise as we sat on boulders twelve hundred feet above sea level.

Russia: the girl who showed us how to braid flowers into a wreath; who taught herself sign language because her younger sister went deaf after a high fever.

Japan: the boy who got road rash from the afternoon we decided to play hockey using nothing but sticks and a coke can.

Kenya: who puked for an hour after he drank an entire bottle of hot sauce just to win $75.

Thailand 1 and Thailand 2: the brother and sister team that borrowed their parent’s car so we could cram thirteen people in and drive downtown and watch “Finding Nemo” at the dollar theater.

Names and pasts didn’t matter, only making memories. Because, in the end, they were the only things we carried with us. Memories were the only things that permeated our being, stuffed unseen cultures beneath our skins and changed our paradigms.
“Aunt Sandy” would never know us truly, not till she understood how to be an alien in her own skin. (Months later, we discovered that “Aunt Sandy” had taken notes on each of us, met with our parents and had given them psychological evaluations of each of us. To my knowledge, not one person from our group ever contacted the woman again.)

We were, by nature, episodic, pieced together with shards of what past we could remember. After all, we who felt aborted from our nations loved our cultures with an unnatural ferocity for we ourselves were unnatural, born of two worlds yet belonging to neither. Protecting our past and our country from ignorant comments became part of navigating Western culture. Like when my parents put me in a one-week American camp when I was fifteen and the counselor told us all to sit in a circle and introduce ourselves.

That was when I began learning to protect my past by gauging my audience, because when I mentioned growing up in China, the pimply boy across from me jerked his head up.
     “Do you know anyone that, like, died from SARS?”
No one spoke, but I felt my throat tighten and grow hot.
     “Excuse me?” I asked.
     “Do you know anyone,” he raised his voice and spoke slower, “that got that SARS thing and died?”
Without missing a beat, I snapped out the coldest lie of my life.
     “Actually, my best friend died two days ago from SARS.” I cocked my head sideways, still staring at him. “She had to suffer for a week without medication before her lungs filled with blood and she drowned.”
My lie sank in; I saw the weight of my words slap the boy, turning his face red and opening his mouth to flap like a dying fish on hot pavement. Everyone was silent. I continued to stare across the circle,  not caring.
I wanted them to feel the magnitude of his ignorance.

Since that day, I’ve wondered many a time why the fifteen-year old me could not simply smile and forgive the high school jock and why his rude question spurred such a vicious retort.
Perhaps it was because I remembered my entire family wearing pale green masks during the SARS epidemic.
Perhaps it was because I could not forget how a stranger’s cough brought a surge of fear.
Perhaps it was because I know what the hospitals were like, and what primitive treatments awaited the unfortunate.
Perhaps it was because the memory of my younger brother burning with fever, limp, flushed and coughing still makes my heart ache; how we knew it was only a bad cold but had to hide him so the health inspectors would not take him away and lock him up with people who actually did have SARS.

I know now that the memories of brutal reality spilled over into rage when asked such an insensitive question. Now I have learned to guard my memories as much as my tongue. Our memories shape us, inspire actions and stitch together who we are as people.
Warp them, and they will warp you.
Idolize them, and your past will forever trump your future.
Ignore them, and you ignore yourself.
Come to peace with them, and you will learn to love your colorful, patchwork past. 

Making a Baby Is Like Catching Fish

People usually trickle into the village market long before the birds start their half-startled calls. Dogs pick through shadows and wander back to their self-claimed hovels. The bitches trot through the streets; several litters have weaned their tits so long they hover and dance above the dust, each step making the teats quiver. Some walk with their brood next to them, a tumbling swarm of warm puppy fur that follow their swinging breakfast.

A long row of boards, propped by cinder blocks or bits of stone, lines both sides of the market like a gauntlet, the stalls arranged in their own food demographic. First the fruit, then the fish and finally the meat, propped on damp, blood worn boards. He stops in front of the first vegetable stall.
          “How much?” He picks up the bok choy, feeling the firm groove of while stalk and feathery green leaf. She mumbles something, sizing up the tall, thin man before her.
        “Too expensive”, he says putting it down, knowing she will then shake her head, pick it up and thrust it again at him, telling him to name his price.

He feels at a loss, like a child told to prepare a meal. Buying food is his wife’s job, but she could not get out of bed this morning for the nausea wracking her body as their baby violently splits from cell into cells into cells. Mei Ah had smiled while he put the bucket next to the flat, bamboo mat bed, happy to be sick with child again. 

This was the third try, the third attempt to incubate life inside her without letting it slip out in a wave of cramps, blood and lumps of baby. The doctor said something about hostile environment, unstable uterine walls. Their parents told her she should lie still after love making to ensure implantation. Like trapping a mass of cells is as easy as catching fish.

The ground is wet from the red, blue and green plastic buckets filled with last night’s catch. Each basin traps different aquatic delicacies—urchins inch along on their black needles, blue dart fish nibble at each other, sting rays hover at the bottom, tails poking from the rims, shrimp flail legs over each other, their heads up like race horses. 

Tubes of air filters snake into the water, providing oxygen for sucking gills. White foam bubbles at the edges of the basin and the fish sit below, eyeing him from below the slick, opaque shield. 

Occasionally one will escape, jumping over the edge in a spray of hoary water to gasp and flop with unblinking eyes till the owner leaps up to re-catch it.

Everything smells of dirt, water and salt. Mei Ah would know which vendor to talk to, the one who would give an honest price. Now she huddles at home, creeping from room to room like her bones are made of hollow glass.

He walks towards the pig heads hanging on wire hooks, the ones with tongues rolling from their mouths like white swollen worms. Flies lick at their open, still eyes. Three cow hearts are lined next to each other, white tissue clinging to the muscle walls like cobwebs, strings of veins just visible between each groove of muscle.   

        “I need ribs.”
        “Hoof? Tail? Cheap price today. Only here. Not like that son of a bitch next to me. He’ll rob you blind.”
        “Sure.”
And as the owner crushes ribs with the cleaver, he backs away to avoid the blood, skin, and bone residue on the block which sprays up with each chop. Looking at the skinned rabbits, naked and ivory white, the ducks hanging by their plucked necks on red strings, he wonders why he is not a vegetarian like his wife. Familiarity breeds hunger.
But he does remember the first time he felt the sting of regret for taking a tiny life. It was a morning like this one, the same dirt and dust, the same yelling between stalls covered in raw food. Pig, cow and dog blood tainted the air with a metallic twang, one he could taste at the back of his throat when he breathed in. He was here to buy sparrows—six of them.
        “Here! Buy! I’ll clean them for you!” The woman motioned towards him, her hand covered with dried blood. Small feathers stuck like flags to the back of her fingers.
        “Skin them for me, will you? I don’t want to have to do that later.”
        “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” She had already turned and had picked up the scales and bundle of plastic bags. Brown crust had gathered under and around her nails.

A wire cage, rusted and woven from pools of metal, sat beside her foot. Inside huddled the mass of dusty brown feathers, wings and blinking eyes. Her hand dove in, searched for a warm body and brought it up. The tiny thing did not struggle; merely shivered. The woman thrust her thumb between the neck and chest, piercing through with her nail, pulling skin and feathers off in one swift stroke. 

Throwing the inside-out coat of blood, down and hide with the pile, she jammed her middle finger through the chest cavity, grabbed the still beating heart and pulled it out. Putting the naked, slippery bird into a plastic bag, she tossed the heart in, too, weighing the whole thing before giving it to him.

The heart kept beating until he reached the bus stop.

As the butcher hands him the ribs wrapped in brown paper, watery blood dripping from the corner, he feels a wave of regret for the birds. Their hearts, smaller than his pinkie nail, could not have been bigger than his still-growing child, the one struggling to huddle in the dark coop of his wife’s womb.

The Real Savage

Anna had to urinate. The urgent tingle had turned to a frantic, dull pain that would not quiet no matter how she adjusted herself. Sitting on the train, watching Russian countryside flinging by, she knew that once she stood, another would take her well-deserved seat. Seven hours to Urumqi, not including immigration checkpoints. She couldn’t wait that long.

Four other women stood close to her, their hips, rough clothes and feet bumping into her body each time the train jolted against the iced tracks. They were waiting for her to get up; leave so they could squabble over who got her seat.

She had been breathing through her mouth ever since the famer had pulled his infant son’s pants down just enough to let a stream of urine splatter next to her foot. The urine specks on the seat had frozen over and now looked like misshapen freckles.

Dirt. Sweat. People bundled so thick that their arms jutted from their sides. Body odor seethed from any exposed skin, turning the compartment into a steaming enclosure of human stench.

Well, if these people were miserable they certainly were not showing it. Impassive, dark eyes, wide noses, black hair, ruddy cheeks—what was she, the only white person, doing here?

The train lurched, and woolen hips smashed her face. Hard. Anna let out a small bark of air and felt her cheek, sure that the farmwoman’s clothes had flogged her cheek raw.

Looking up, Anna saw that the woman simply stared at her with curious indifference before turning her head, closing one nostril with her thumb and letting a rocket of snot shoot to the floor. The content of her nose emptied, the woman sniffed once and continued to stare at Anna.

God, these people are savages.

She had come onto the train with her ticket between her teeth, arms clutching her one, heavy backpack. Maneuvering to her seat, she saw that a woman already sat there, a pile of sunflower seeds spilling around her feet and knees. As the woman cracked shell after shell with one hand, Anna tried to show her that the surely she was mistaken for sitting in the foreigner’s seat.

            “Look, this is my ticket,” Anna said, thrusting the pale blue paper into the woman’s face. “This seat, 23, is mine.”

The woman blinked and spat out a shell. Anna’s friends had been right. It was first come first serve, no matter who bought the ticket.

Frustrated, Anna took a deep breath and sat on top of the woman, backpack and all. The element of surprise worked; the woman shouted and tried to push Anna off, but she pressed all her body weight against the padded thighs and wouldn’t budge. The woman finally slid to the floor, glaring at the white girl and cursing under her breath.

Anna held up her ticket, pointed to the number on the seat and then the number on her little piece of paper. However hard, however wooden, however soiled, this seat was rightfully hers.  

Now, four hours later, the entire compartment knew about the white girl who snatched seats. This was one moment Anna was glad she did not understand the language.

She looked out the window.

Snow. Ice. Snow. Farmhouse. Trees. Snow. Snow. Snow.

Pee.

She had to pee.

The next jolt brought a stinging surge of pain and Anna uncrossed her legs.

Unable to bear the pain anymore, she stood, grabbed her ever-heavy bag and began to pull, shove, push, and squeeze her way to the bathroom door. Loud, thick voices behind her announced a winner, but she didn’t care which of these uncivilized creatures now sat on the cherished, cracked seat.

The slap of body waste and wind hit her as she opened the bathroom door.

A hole had been sawed into the floor, and she could see the tracks clacking below. Piles of waste and frozen pee clearly marked where others had missed—probably because the train swayed and lurched every few seconds.

With nowhere to hang her bag, and using one hand, she untied her ski pants and wiggled down three layers of leggings.

Cold. Oh dear Lord it is cold.

Holding her bag with both arms, she began to squat. Frozen urine covered the sides of the hole, and her thick-soled boots barely held her upright.

As she emptied her bladder, the steam from her body fluids misted the air. Like others before, she missed the hole.

Relief.

The train lurched sharply to the right. Her boots slipped on the iced surface and both ankles snapped inwards. Anna’s head hit the side of the wall; her backpack fell into the sick filth.

First heat radiated from both legs, then pain.

Her feet were pointing the wrong way.

Four hours later, an immigration clerk and two soldiers beat down the door to find a white woman lying with her pants halfway pulled up. 

It wasn’t till the soldiers lifted her by her arms that they realized that the blood had frozen her pants to the floor. 

taste dangerously random: towel thing.

taste dangerously random: towel thing.: It's a strange bird, being married. I haven't had to establish the importance of keeping my towel mine very own in a long, long time. Yes, ...

How Two, Not-So-Single People Decided to Be Very Single Once Again

The man and woman met overseas and struck up a conversation while bumping down a nearly deserted road in Kenya. After discovering a mutual love for peanut butter and other topics of interest, the two exchanged emails.

Soon, the two single people decided to be not-so-single and dated. This led to a conversation about meeting His Parents, who lived in Boston. She was warned that His Parents were rather old fashioned and came with old money.

So to Boston she went, the young Texan girl who had lived in Africa. Twice in the airport her shoe squeaked in the security line, and she felt obligated to repeat the noise just so others would not think she had passed gas.
Boston. The air outside the airport was cold, biting her face and nose each time she breathed in deeply.

Face against taxi glass, she watched as they went deeper and deeper into suburbia America, till the small homes gave way to old, Victorian buildings and upper-upper class neighborhoods. 

Till they stopped in front of the largest, most grand-looking home of them all.

The family stood on the sweeping stairs, waiting to embrace their adventurous son and his new-found woman.

After the awkward hugs and vainly trying to remember his aunt’s sister’s name, she asked if she could use the bathroom. The Aunt With No Name took her down the hall to a small door and opened it.

She walked in and saw, to her horror, there was no toilet, only a bathtub and a sink. The Victorian styled home apparently had a bathroom and a restroom. One held the toilet she so longed for, and the other was meant for taking baths. She was in the latter, and felt her face get hot.

She couldn’t walk out and ask for the restroom, having already stepped on his mother’s toes and accidentally nailed his grandmother in the ribs with her elbow. Surely the family was already calling her an obscene amount of names and telling their misguided son that he needed a more graceful woman. This elbowing, toe stepping one simply would not do.

Looking around, she saw a small stool next to the bathtub. In a moment of infamous desperation, she pulled the small stepping stool over to the sink, unzipped her jeans and climbed onto the porcelain sink. This should be no different than peeing behind bushes.

As she began her business, there was a slight creak. And then there was a clinking noise, like cement pebbles hitting glass.

Patting hands and heavy voices woke her. As she opened her eyes, she became aware of how cold her posterior was and how very red everyone’s faces were. Then she noticed the dripping water and the smashed tiles.

The delicate porcelain sink lay on the ground, broken into several undignified pieces.

As the women helped her stand, she realized that her pants were still around her ankles, and that her head had a new and rather nasty bulge. Patting pieces of cement off her thighs and rear, she grabbed her jeans and pulled. As soon as she was decent, the ladies of the house fluttered and coaxed her down the hall and to the sitting room.

Relieved to see the large, high-back chair, the poor girl sat with great heaviness only to hear a faint crunch. The grandmother stared at her, wide-eyed and mouth open. The uncle (though she could not remember which one) jumped towards her, yanked her up by the crook of her elbow and pulled from underneath her a now-limp poodle.

She knew the dog's name—Jacque—because her dear boyfriend had mentioned nearly half a dozen times just how excited he was to see the family pet. Jacque, now limp and still in the uncle’s hands, was pronounced dead from a broken neck.

The grandmother’s eyes welled with reluctant tears.
Someone behind her coughed.
The girl saw her luggage near the door and stood. 

Thanking the family and apologizing profusely, she picked up her weather-beaten bag and left.

I Never Buy Instant Noodles Because

The smell of instant noodles reminds me of the train ride to BeiJing, how the cart rolled by our beds, and we smelled the mist of chicken bullion and salivated.

It reminds me of the barren countryside, tinted orange sun rising above reaching tree branches, dirt homes flinging by the window.

It reminds me of the stops made at stations no bigger than a stretch of cobblestone between two more tracks; people bundled in large, green coats to their knees.

It reminds me of the woman and her dying husband who met and played cards with us the entire way, surprised the foreigners could speak their language and play their games; of the shitting hole we would squat over as we went, watching the track’s rhythm beneath our asses, wind blowing up into our faces and smelling of piss, shit and godknowswhat.

How things would crawl towards our feet while we peed, antennas smelling the air and human food-waste; and how we would pour, wait, stir and slurp yellow noodles, uncomfortable with our passports shoved into our underwear, money beneath each bra.

Click by click, we raced towards the north, playing cards on a table made from my backpack.

Instant noodles remind me of how we would smell of the salt oil that came from the broth, lick our lips, want more.

How I wept to leave my country.

How the blankets smelled of dirty hair and car exhaust.

How the woman was stoic as she told us Bei Jing was her husband’s last chance to find a cure for his cancered kidneys.

How I hated my white skin and wanted to be noodle-yellow.

How anger boiled between the three of us when we spoke of packing our lives into one black box.

How acid sick climbed into the back of my eyes when the child threw up on the floor.

How we took turns clamoring into the dining car to eat rice porridge and fried eggs.

How we felt aborted from our people, ripped away to shitfuckingnowhere.

It is never just a cup of noodles.