Kartika_Issue15

ISSUE 15 | SPRING 2013
into a heavy urn at the head of the table. She’s gone to heaven, I said, but
Chenxi was persistent. Where’s heaven? She’d asked and when I pointed
toward the ceiling, she asked, How is heaven in the sky? Can I see it? Can
we get there by airplane? That was when I said the thing about asking too
many questions. Although it silenced my daughter for the remainder of the
afternoon, I later regretted teaching her this lesson, worried that maybe I’d
stifled some childish belief that every question has an answer, that there’s
someone, somewhere in this world, likely a parent or grandparent, who
knows everything.
I stood slowly, feeling the heat of many eyes boring their judgment into my
back: How could he let his sick wife walk away? How could he let her
believe their daughter was as good a diver as Lili? How could he allow an
American to come to the rescue, the antithesis of what we’d been taught in
our Little Red Books? I shrugged off their gazes and followed my wife and
Lao K into the gymnasium lobby, down the corridor between the entrance
hall and the locker rooms, where plaques glistened golden on the walls and
more eyes, wide open, witnessed my failure to help my wife into her
wheelchair. Instead, Lao K persuaded Li-Ming to sit. Our American
daughter stood facing her Chinese mother with her bare arms tucked into her
sides, wet body shivering. As I drew closer, I recognized the purple goose
bumps raised along the flesh of her limbs. I recognized that quivering
buttock flesh, the smell of hair and sweat and chlorine and… What use was
there in recalling? I touched her shoulder and she didn’t jump. I ran my
fingers through her hair and she didn’t flinch. I saw purple and blue, the skin
attempting to pulse life back into the farthest reaches of her limbs. She was
looking at Li-Ming and I was looking at the girl’s hair, the way I could lift it
with one flick of my wrist, the weight of it damp, the density of gravity, our
one true curse: Time. All the spinning that kept us believing the lies of our
own origins.
“Lao Chen!” Li-Ming called, but I couldn’t hear her. We were down a hall
so deep even sound was marbled, spoken as in caves.
“Lao Chen! Go get your daughter.”
I released Lao K’s hair and when I did the American turned, her bare feet
squealing against the linoleum. Her entire body seemed at attention with the
sincerity and immediacy belonging only to youth: pink-red flushed cheeks,
pricked nipples pushing through her thin red bathing suit, blonde hairs
standing in columned attention on her long, golden arms. The camera
straddled her breasts. The camera Li-Ming used all those years to chronicle
Chenxi’s childhood now contained within it our daughter’s greatest failure:
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