CHAPTER 12
MEI-BALL
AT THE DIM SUM RESTAURANT, I saw Xing first and needed a moment before I could alert him to my presence.
He was so familiar (always on his phone, not paying attention to his surroundings), yet I didn’t know this person in front of me with lines on his face and wearing a button-down instead of a hoodie. Part of me wanted to reach out and touch him, to make sure he was really there. My parents had scrubbed him from our lives so thoroughly I used to pull out his Dartmouth sweatshirt just to make sure he hadn’t been a product of my imagination. That ratty sweatshirt was all I had left of him since my parents had thrown his stuff on the lawn, then changed the locks. I hated my shiny new brass key, which had replaced the worn silver one. I refused to carry it with me and was locked out of the house more than once, but somehow it felt better to sit and wait on the porch than to carry physical proof of my brother’s nonexistence.
“Xing?” I finally said.
When he saw me, his face completely brightened, the way it used to when we made blanket forts. But then the hesitation crept in. We approached each other slowly, not sure what to do. A handshake was completely weird, but so was a hug since we never did that even before our four years apart. We ended up with an awkward turtle dance, where he stuck his arms out reluctantly, I sort of bobbed and weaved a bit, there were plenty of jagged starts and stops, and finally we managed a one-second hug where he patted me on the back and I didn’t fully enclose my arms around him.
Um, success? I guess that was the most affection any Lu ever exhibited.
Our table was tucked in a remote corner, accompanied by wobbly chairs and a stained tablecloth. A Chinese woman, a stranger, stared at us from across the restaurant. Was she judging my chunky figure or American clothes? Probably a mix of both.
Most of the waitstaff spoke Cantonese, not Mandarin, so we ordered by pointing to dishes on passing carts. As usual, many servers ignored us, some were rude, and others tried to push the less popular items like chicken feet. The best carts never made it past the central tables, so Xing took a cue from our father and chased down the shrimp dumplings, stuffed eggplant, and turnip cake. Only, he managed to do it without creating a Lu Pàng–size scene.
The smell of the food stirred up memories of lazy Sunday afternoons with my family, stuffing ourselves so full of shrimp we could barely move. Even my mother’s clucking tongue had been silenced by thousand-year-old egg congee.
And now we were divided. Those memories were fading.
Xing and I clicked our chopsticks together—a toast he had created to distract my younger self from our parents fighting about the thermostat, my mother’s cooking, the amount of tofu in the house. Well, more accurately, it was my father yelling as my mother cowered.
My shoulders relaxed, falling away from my ears. Okay, we could do this. Yíbù, yíbù, until we took enough steps to wade through the crap.
But then it was like my brain couldn’t take it anymore—the chopstick toast, the dim sum smell, the fact that Xing felt both like my blood and a stranger. . . .
I hated myself at the moment, for lots of opposing reasons. I hated that I had let this go on for so long, let others decide for me that my only sibling was going to disappear from my life. I hated that I was disobeying my parents right now, choosing the person who had so easily abandoned me and ignored my subsequent phone calls.
And I hated myself for adding yet another secret to my already overloaded plate. It was like trying to contain three spoonfuls of stuffing in a dumpling—it was so overfilled the skin barely met on any side. All the secrets threatened to spill at any moment. If I ever tried to finish the dumpling, it would explode when I squeezed—meat and veggies everywhere.
This had happened to me, literally, when I was little and learning how to make dumplings. It seems like it should’ve been a small issue—maybe even something many parents would have laughed at and given the child a pat on the head for being cute—but to my parents who grew up with nothing and scrimped and saved every grain of rice, wasting food was punishable. That was when I learned life was unfair.
I knew the danger of what I was doing, yet I had done it anyway. There was no one to blame here but me. I had called Xing first.
Shit. Maybe I should run for it now while I still could. We hadn’t actually spoken yet—it was salvageable.
But then he smiled at me, and I remembered. How he knew my—correction, our—parents, and I didn’t have to explain myself. He knew the culture, not just as a whole, but through our little window.
We didn’t speak as we loaded our plates, and it shouldn’t have surprised me—we had four years of ground to cover—but it still made me anxious. What if too much had been lost to time and we could never get it back? What if it would never be the same again and he would forever be a stranger?
“How could you just disappear like that?” I blurted out, my voice shaky. “I tried to call you so many times.”
Xing’s mouth was open, a piece of eggplant a few inches away, but it slipped from his chopsticks and clunked onto his plate, spraying sauce. He was frozen for a second before closing his lips. . . . But he left the sauce where it was, which reminded me that he was still the same person I remembered, never cleaning up after himself.
I could see him turning the words over in his head and it sent a zap of frustration through me. “Stop filtering everything, Xing. Just tell me what you’re thinking, the truth. Not some pretty answer you think will resolve everything.”
He spoke immediately, the words falling out fast and a bit jumbled. “I didn’t want to make you choose. I bowed out so you could keep your relationship with them. You need them more than you need me.”
“How could you decide all that without asking me?”
There was a long pause. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have. But you were so young. I thought I was doing what was best for you.”
“Best for me? You shoveled a bunch of crap on me when you left. I had to fix everyone whenever your name came up, and worse, I had to become the perfect Taiwanese poster child to make up for all the shame you caused. I was never let out. I missed prom. I became this sheltered, awkward turtle destined to be an outcast no matter where I went. You weren’t there to tell me about the world, and because of you, Mom and Dad made sure I never saw it. Now I’m a seventeen-year-old college student who’s never been kissed and who’ll end up with the guy who peed on my foot because you couldn’t try to make it work with our parents.”
Okay, that may have gotten away from me a bit. But when I raised my gaze to meet his, I saw in his eyes that he understood and he was sorry. We shared a sad, knowing smile.
Then a shadow crossed his face (and I couldn’t help but think how much he looked like my father in that moment). There was an edge to his voice as he said, “Mom and Dad and especially Nǎinai are so backward in some of their thinking.” Offer up your fertile sister rang in my head. “There’s no working anything out with people like that. So you’re right. I didn’t try that hard, at least not after that night. . . .”
That night. That night had haunted me for so long. I had watched from the stairs, too young to fully understand but old enough to know something was different about this fight.
Xing had pleaded, begged on his knees, for our parents to give Esther a chance. But when they yelled at him to gun and roll out the door, his face had changed. It was like I could see the ties breaking, see everything drain from him to the point where he no longer cared what they thought.
“How could they throw away their son over a girl they hadn’t even met yet?” Xing’s voice was rising. “One strike and . . .” He slashed his finger across his throat.
Esther’s reproductive challenges had been the sole reason for Xing’s disownment. Her congenital endometriosis was caught late, and doctors informed her she may have trouble conceiving. Otherwise she was perfect, even by my parents’ standards: intelligent, Taiwanese, beautiful . . . or so Xing had said. My parents had refused to meet her. Not bearing grandchildren, especially if you were the firstborn son, was the worst kind of disobedience possible. And not only was Xing the firstborn son of a firstborn son, but he and my father were the only sons in their family. Double, triple, quadruple whammy. I never understood what was so bad about having fewer Lus in the world, but to my parents it was a crime.
“I’m sorry they were so hard on you,” I said, placing a palm on Xing’s.
He patted our pile of hands with his free one. “Thanks, Mei-ball—it means a lot.”
That nickname hadn’t touched my ears in so, so long, and hearing it now, my heart was bouncing in my rib cage. I felt us taking one step forward, together.
I wanted to tell him how much he meant to me and how much I had missed him, but I didn’t know how to say it. So I said the next nicest thing I could think of. “You and Esther looked happy.”
“Thank you. You’re so kind.” He smiled, intentionally revealing the chives stuck in his teeth.
I laughed, my insides warming at the game we used to play. With my tongue, I pushed shrimp bits onto my incisors. “You’re so welcome, good sir.”
“Tell me, what’s new with you?” he asked, his voice serious but his mouth full of turnip. It helped decrease the awkwardness of how he was asking me to sum up the past four years.
“I’m at MIT. I like it.”
“Premed?” he asked, but it sounded more like a statement, like he knew I didn’t have a choice. Which, well, he did know.
I gave an imperceptible nod. “Do you like it? I mean, I assume you’re a doctor now?”
He nodded. “It pays the bills. I’m in my first year of an internal medicine residency, still at Tufts. I’m thinking about doing gastroenterology, you know, endoscopies and colonoscopies.”
I couldn’t help cringing. “Was it hard to get used to doing those?”
Xing sipped his tea, oblivious to my nausea. “Yeah, it took some time. I used to laugh whenever I thought about the colonoscopy recovery room, where the patients can’t help farting up a storm. The attending threw me out my first day. Now look at me! I just told you about the room without even cracking a smile.”
I laughed, deep and throaty. Xing joined in, and the hearty sound filled me with memories. Xing reading me comics—Chinese or English, depending on our mood. Xing joking, asking me whether I thought Wang Leehom’s parents were prouder of their Taiwanese pop star son or the son who went to MIT. (We both agreed: the MIT son.)
“That is not what I meant,” I said between laughs. “I was asking if you were ever grossed out.”
“Sure, but I have a higher tolerance than most. You have to find what you’re okay with, you know? The nice part about medicine is that there are a lot of options. And most important, I feel secure in my future. I know Mom and Dad have their faults, but this was something they were right about—picking the right major and career is so important. I have friends who are barely scraping by with no end in sight. At least I know that in a few years I’ll be pulling a decent salary. Which is more important now than ever . . .” He trailed off, and his words hung in the air for a moment.
I felt like I was missing something but wasn’t comfortable enough to ask. “So you never wish you did something else?”
“That’s an entirely different question. I’m just saying that, practically, it’s important to find a career that can put a roof over your head and offer enough stability that you can sleep at night.”
I wasn’t sure if I was talking to my brother or my parents. How could this person be the same one who had done the ultimate rebellion and walked down the disownment path, eyes open? “Medicine’s not the only stable career,” I countered.
“True, but there will always be a need for doctors, and there aren’t many of us making a measly pay. There’s just less variance than other fields. And it’s respectable, right? You’re helping people, making a difference.”
My stomach flip-flopped, and for once, the smell of shrimp balls was making it buck even more. He was supposed to relate to me, make me feel better, but now I felt like the only person left on my own strange Mei-planet. Instead of telling him about my fears, my struggles, my secrets, I shoved them deeper, making the goddamn dumpling even fatter and more unmanageable.
“Don’t worry, Mei-ball. You’ll love it when you get there. I promise.”
I stuffed my face with shumai and mumbled, “Chubby bunny.”
Xing laughed, but I couldn’t smile, and it wasn’t because my mouth was full.