The Spirits in My Head by Megan Zhong

Author:Megan Zhong [Zhong, Megan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781637302972
Publisher: NewDegreePress
Published: 2021-04-25T09:14:15+00:00

That night during dinner with my mom, I figured I should hold off my questions about the envelope. I wanted to find a way to let her know I found it, so she could take some time to develop answers to my questions. If I had asked her out of the blue, she would give an inadequate answer or change topics, doing an ungraceful swerve to avoid a deep pothole in the middle of the road. The swerve would leave me frustrated and disgruntled but less harmed than I would have been if she had driven over it immediately. But I didn’t ask, so there would be no pothole and no swerve.

The answer came to me a few nights later. Spirit went on for a while, warning me not to hate my mom after finding out. I wondered what she would do to make me hate her. She irritated me deeply sometimes, but I knew she would part the skies and the oceans for me. In a way, she did, just like many immigrant parents.

“This trip isn’t going to be a fun visit to Hainan,” Spirit said to me while I was reading a print copy of a science journal in bed. My advisor was constantly emphasizing the importance of “following discourse within the scientific community,” so I subscribed to several journals that trailed me through different mailboxes as I changed addresses over the past year.

I squinted at the gene names, blobs of letters and numbers I was too sleepy to decipher. “I have always thought they were silly, the names of these genes.”

“Your mom recognized she had made a mistake, but she fixed it.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Okay, well, I’m going to bed now. ‘Tis been quite a long week, my friend.” I turned off the light and slid under my blankets.

Pretty soon, my mind dissolved into a different world. It didn’t look like the Hainan I had grown accustomed to seeing over these past few months. I was in a small apartment painted yellow. The walls were bare except for a scroll painting of a serene river and mountains in shades of green, blue, and brown—the strokes of gods. Looking out the window, I saw checkers of windows on another apartment complex. There was also a tiny tear-off calendar written in Chinese by the door, above a faux leather sofa. I had read somewhere if you couldn’t read words or dates you would know you’re in a dream. Clearly, the calendar said April 1, 1997 in Chinese. Spirit told me my mom made a mistake that day. You could also say she pulled a prank on me that day, the American way of looking at things. It wasn’t a big deal since I could only see the sunny side at the end of the day.

Through the half wall between the room I was standing in and the kitchen, I could see an older woman with swirls of gray streaks in her hair bun trying to soothe a baby wrapped in a blanket.

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