Soy Sauce for Beginners by Kirstin Chen

Author:Kirstin Chen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Contemporary Women, Asian American, Family Life, Fiction
ISBN: 9780544114395
Publisher: Amazon Publishing
Published: 2014-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

Later, after I’d left for boarding school and stopped thinking of my parents’ house as home, I summoned the courage to question my mother, and of course, she told the truth.

In the years since, I’ve replayed her words, filling in blanks, adding detail—so much so that the scenes unspool in my mind like a film reel, like something I’ve witnessed with my own eyes.

The day after the disastrous welcome dinner, the vivacious lecturer finds herself at the door of the distinguished visitor’s office. There, she hesitates, quaking, already struggling with the pretense that she has come to apologize. But then she takes a deep breath and raps firmly on the door. He tells her to come in. He is tall and imposing, trim for a man of his age. He invites her to take a seat and brushes off her apology with a hearty American laugh. They continue their discussion from the night before; then, he inquires about her research on Dualla Misipo, or maybe Kum’a Ndumbe III, both Cameroonian writers who wrote in German.

Before long, half an hour has passed, and then another, and then one of them suggests they leave campus to carry on their conversation over a drink. One, or maybe both, glances at a wristwatch; neither points out that it is only three o’clock.

The boozy afternoon stretches late into evening—and then into other evenings spent at corner tables in quiet, dimly lit restaurants, or at the symphony, or in one of their offices, the door ajar, talking about books.

Try as I may, I can’t recall seeing my mother drunk back then. Maybe she was careful to sober up first. Maybe I didn’t know what to look for. Or maybe she only came home after my father had tucked me into bed.

It seems irrelevant—the fact that no matter how late she stayed out, she always came home. Or that although the American told her she was too brilliant to remain at this second-rate institution, although he begged her to come to Chicago, promised to find her work, and vowed to leave his pouffy-haired wife, theirs was a purely platonic affair. Here, on our tiny, insular island, that Ma and the American were seen together at all was scandal enough.

My mother had distanced herself from her own parents ever since they’d pressured her to return home, so I can only imagine their distress. Ahkong and Amah, on the other hand, made their outrage known. They’d never approved of my parents’ marriage in the first place, and now they planted themselves at our dining table and urged their son to cut his losses and start over, as I listened, stricken, from upstairs. This was the moment when I first understood that my parents and I made up a single, precarious unit. Everyone else, no matter how well-intentioned, would always be a potential threat.

Thankfully, once again, Ba defied his parents. My father and mother remained together, and in time, from my perspective at least, life returned to normal.

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