Diamond Head (32 page)

I turned twelve and it became abundantly clear that no one else at school wore handmade dresses that matched their mom’s. My mom stood in the parking lot that day after school and I stormed past her, infuriated, humiliated by her teal dress, my own in a trash can, ripped at the neckline where I tore it from my body, hysterical. I was furious, betrayed that she had allowed me to be taunted until I found myself in the nurse’s office, tears and mucus running down my face, begging for a set of gym clothes. It was the first time I had ever been mad at her and it was dizzying, nauseating to the point of panic. I felt out of control, blindsided by the collision of my two worlds. The popular girls, their questions came at me from nowhere; they struck me like pellets, rapid fire, relentless and hard. For seven years we’d been going to school together. Their moms knew my name and they knew my mom’s—I’d been to one of their birthday parties, had swum in one of their pools. That day they sat at my lunch table, smiling, two other classmates sitting with me. It caught me entirely off guard.

Theresa. Does your mom really make all of your clothes?

Yes.

Really? Even your underwear? Can we see?

No!

Are you even allowed to buy normal clothes?

Yes. I mean, I think so.

They asked their questions, six more, eight more, question after question—it startles me now that I answered them all, not knowing what else to do, not knowing how to lie or even omit. They probed me until I was entirely rattled, bruised from their jabs, pushing myself from the table as I felt the tears. My name, the laughter, the blur of the hallway as I tore past the older kids, the bright doorways streaking by my vision, colors running down my face.

My mom, she felt terrible. I know she did because immediately she backed down. I demanded that we go to Liberty House and buy new clothes and my mom reluctantly agreed, paying three times as
much for the brand-name, factory-made crap that everyone else was wearing. I threw a tantrum in the dressing room when she told me she could easily make all these clothes. I called her poor. I told her she came from the country and she would never understand me. I told her it was her fault that I had no friends. She was selfish. She was weird. I said some horrible things and I remember them all, because they hurt me as I said them. I didn’t know if it was true. I didn’t know if she was the reason I hated myself that day but she was all I had and I knew that no matter how out of line I was, how cruel, she would never look at me the way those girls had. I took pleasure in that fact; I purged myself within her safety.

Walking through the racks of synthetic materials and stamped-out patterns, grabbing at anything with a price tag larger than I knew was reasonable, this is the moment I point to when I think of what went wrong—with me, with my mom and me both. That day, I asked to be homogenized. I begged her to let me be like everyone else, to help me erase the beautiful peculiarities that knitted me close to her—and she didn’t fight me. She couldn’t. She could never say no and I knew it well.

Things changed after that; I changed. I wanted friends. All I could think about was how to be liked, how to be envied, how to never,
ever
feel that searing nausea of humiliation. The day I wore the teal dress, I heard my family’s name in a way I never had before.
Are you really a Leong? So why does your mom make your clothes? Aren’t you rich? Aren’t you from Diamond Head?
The popular girls said it like they’d been wondering for a while, like tiny grown-ups lording a secret over me, their question loaded with such intention. It made me feel at once exposed and protected by my last name. It was my first glimpse of what made me important and interesting and in that instant, heat arriving at every inch of flesh, I considered the spread of my family. I thought of the strange ritual we performed each year, driving from Maku’s side to my mom’s, from Diamond Head to Kaneohe, a day unlike any other of the year, a stretch of hours where my parents had parents and we
were Chinese and I had a family so large, so mismatched and contrary that never once had I seen them together.

I thought of my uncle’s house in Diamond Head and, even at twelve years old, I began to understand that there was something very strange about my family. That there were things meant to be held up to the attention of the world, things to be admired from the outside, and things that were better left in the darkness, in the safety of my mother’s sewing room. But at twelve years old, without the knowledge of my family’s history, I had the two entirely confused.

As the day approached, I could feel it coming. A week before, my mom fluttered around the house, her hands busier than normal, the house immaculate, everything she sewed some variation of red. The three of us, we got our hair cut. We got new toothbrushes, new towels, new socks.

We woke up early on the eve of the New Year. Downtown, in the shops of Chinatown, we filled white paper boxes with flat, brown rice cakes cut into shimmering squares that jiggled when shook. We picked the fattest mandarin oranges from a heaping pile, holding them in our hand, one by one, to check for a good weight. The flower shop, where Maku spoke Chinese to the old lady with long, wrinkled fingers, arranged plum blossoms and narcissus into a silvery bouquet, the whites of the petals lit up by specks of crimson and apricot.

Each year my mom complained how difficult it was to find gifts for Maku’s family. All the delicacies they sold in Chinatown, Hong already made by hand. The red paper lanterns that cluttered the shop doorways, my Uncle Kaipo made new ones each year, except his were made of fabric, of silk with gold characters painted on the front. These things—the items made from paper and glue and plastic confetti and bits of string—we bought for my mom’s family, for my Grandpa and Grandma Chan. These things my mom bought without ceremony, without checking for quality or weight or blemishes. We barely saw her buy them, scooping up a handful of red envelopes or
noisemakers from a bin and paying quickly, never asking our opinion. These things went into a separate bag.

After I turned twelve, Chinese New Year was the only time I allowed my mom to make my clothes. I understood how important it was to her, how hard she worked on each of our outfits, how complicated her patterns were, how fussy the material: a dark crimson shirt for Maku with thin strands of silver running vertically through the silk, a steamed collar, buttons made of koa; a ruby dress for me with a short skirt, pleated generously, full from the waist with a thick gold zipper that ran up the back; a sheath for my mom, long and thin with a slit up the side, a deep shade of scarlet. In our house, as we stood before the mirror, a trio of red shimmering in our extravagance, we looked ridiculous, the backdrop of our house entirely unsuitable. But I knew that as soon as we crossed through the gates in Diamond Head, our clothes, polished and slippery, would help ease us into an evening that seemed to drop from another world entirely.

The year I stopped wearing my mother’s clothes, I counted down the days to my uncle’s party, my plan fully formed. There would be a triumphant end to the sixth grade. I would gather details that I never thought to remember, things that never seemed important until that year. We were rich, I was sure of it but I needed evidence. The house in Diamond Head looked different every year, which made it almost impossible for me to explain it to the girls at school. I sounded like a fraud: one year there were dark wooden horses lined up along the garden path, another year there were snakes with neon-colored scales, fuchsia and teal, rising from the ponds, which were lit from below. I felt so stupid when my mom explained to me later. They were the signs of the zodiac, matched with the year’s element. Horse and wood. Snake and water. We’d learned these things in school; if only I’d put it together before that day in the cafeteria, they might have believed me. Had the universe tilted in my favor that day, perhaps I would not have wasted the following years searching for my in, trying to make up for it.

As we drove through the giant iron gate, I thought about how passing through that gate felt like being swallowed by the volcano, how it wrapped around everything and, once the gates closed, how there was no seeing out.

The Eve of the New Year, we learned at school that we were supposed to eat a fish. We saw pictures of Chinese families from around the world gathered before a steamed fish, a simple table of dumplings and rice wine. Perhaps there was a melon carved into a bowl, but nothing in those pictures compared to the five-foot lanterns that lit my uncle’s garden, shaped like monkeys, the towering candles flaring from their open mouths, their gaping eyes. Sleek red canopies dipped above us; they caught the candlelight and reflected it back down against the dark depth of the ponds. Between the canopies I looked up to see the ridges of the crater, the walls that surrounded us, powdered gold in a silhouette of flames. The effect was immediate. We were within a pit of fire and as light touched the golden surface, it blazed. Music poured from speakers I couldn’t find and my Uncle Kaipo’s voice called out above it, yelling my father’s name, then my mom’s, and finally mine.

“Every year, I always think you’ll cancel on me, Bohai, but here you are! And I couldn’t be happier to see you.”

“You’ve really outdone yourself this year,” Maku said, hugging my uncle. “I barely recognize the place.”

“Well, you wouldn’t, would you? You never come to visit!”

My Uncle Kaipo hugged my mom and leaned down to hug me.

“I’m sorry I still don’t have kids,” he joked, always trying with me, but it was never natural, articulating slowly, overly animated. “Not a lot of kids here—still, Hong is excited to see you.”

Every year, it was all adults: men dressed in tuxedos with women on their arms, the backs of their red dresses slit entirely open, thin flutes of champagne balanced between fingers. But unlike the years before, I didn’t care.

“Where’s your mom?” My mom smoothed her dress.

“In the back,” my uncle said, pointing, “in the sunroom. I think she likes the gold flames, because she’s been looking at them all day.” He grinned and my uncle was so handsome, so unlike Maku. I remember the thought frustrating me.

“It’s great to see you, Kaipo.” Maku patted him on the back. “We’ll just get a drink inside and say hi to Mom, then.”

My NaiNai, I thought. She never said a thing to me; she responded only to my mom. Every year my mom would say my name, slowly, as if introducing us for the first time. Some years my NaiNai looked at me, looked me clear in the eye and said nothing, while other years it was as if she couldn’t hear a thing, couldn’t see me right in front of her. That year, I tried to stay with her for as long as I possibly could but there was something in her face that I couldn’t take. Simply glancing at her features, the quiet trauma that seized her, made her presence unbearable to me. I said my hello and I left.

Thankfully, Hong appeared, as she always did, sensing my discomfort through the walls and the noise. She swept in and kneeled, hugging me first, always me first, even when I got older and she no longer needed to kneel. Hong was the only one who felt like a relative, how I imagined a relative should feel. An aunt who you see just once a year, someone you hardly know but who is so pleased by the sight of you. Who knows what it is you need as soon as you need it, who senses the exact moment that you need saving, whisking you into the kitchen to wrap dumplings, to fill the boxes of sweetmeats.

The counters would be lined end to end with rectangular silver platters covered in fish, adorned with flowers and fruit and sprigs of green and lavender. The smells of chili oil and vinegar, they returned to me. The lofted windows of the kitchen, the copper pots hanging above the stove, the abundance of clean, polished space, of a dozen men dressed identically rushing in and out, replacing their empty trays with new ones, and Hong, pulling out the bags of dried lotus root and coconut, melon seeds and carrots for me to distribute among the porcelain boxes—dozens of them, one for every guest.

At midnight a gong sounded, thunderous and sudden, and we rushed together to the backyard to find the adults crowded together, looking up to the sky. My mom and Maku were in the back drinking, their cheeks flushed even in the dark, my NaiNai in a chair beside them. From above, from the golden ridges that surrounded us, missiles of color shot into the night sky, crackling and popping as the adults shouted, raising their glasses, cheering for a happy new year.

The next morning, we slept in. When we woke, we dressed in our normal clothes, the regular things we wore to work and school, and my mom grabbed the plastic bag she filled in Chinatown and we drove to Kaneohe. We went to see her family.

Back then, I knew just one thing about my mom’s childhood. The house we visited each year, the tiny whitewashed home with rust stains along the bottom panels where the wood met the dirt—it was different when my mom was younger. She grew up in the basement, the space below that I’d never seen, but now her parents lived on the top floor, the ground floor. The year my parents got married, my grandparents bought the whole house.

The front yard was cluttered with people—
my cousins
, my mom called them without ever explaining how we were related. I was exhausted that day. I had no interest in going to Kaneohe. I complained when I woke up, told my parents that I was sick, but I was dragged anyway.

The sprinklers were on and my cousins ran through it, shirtless, even some of the girls, red dirt molded to their feet, plastic hula hoops left in their wake, half-eaten plates of food littering the ground. Smoke from a barbeque drifted sideways, into my Grandma and Grandpa Chan, who sat in folding chairs, their arms crossed across their chest.

“Is that who I think it is?” my grandma called out to me, lifting a hand to shade her eyes. “Is that my Theresa?” She stood from her chair as we approached. I waited for her to tell me how big I’d gotten, and she did.

“It must have been some party last night! I think we could see the fireworks from here. Did Kaipo tell you that we ran into him last month? I thought he might invite us but it’s okay. We’re old folks now. Too old for a party. Nothing to wear.”