End of East, The by Lee Jen Sookfong

Author:Lee, Jen Sookfong [Lee, Jen Sookfong]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-02-16T22:00:00+00:00

We are all eating dinner together—my sisters, my parents, my grandfather, my older sisters’ boyfriends. I am almost bursting with something I really want to say, something that burns my six-year-old throat from being kept in too long, something that is really, really important. Every time I open my mouth to let it out, someone else starts speaking, makes a joke or spills something on the floor. I squirm in my seat. My face is red with frustration, and I stop eating altogether in protest.

Finally, when everyone else is chattering and the noise in the room just can’t be any louder, I stand up and yell, “You’re all mean, just mean!” Everyone stops. A pair of chopsticks clatters on the floor.

My mother pulls me out of my chair and drags me to the back door. I look in her eyes (fleetingly, surreptitiously, for it would never do to have her catch me staring) and immediately see that the fire behind her glasses will only consume me faster and more ferociously if I try to stop it. I let my body go limp.

As she shoves me through the doorway and onto the porch, she hisses, “See how you like it outside all on your own. I bet an old, scary lady will come and take you away, so you’d better watch out.”

She turns around and closes the door.

I creep to the window, press my ear to the two-inch crack my mother has opened to air out the steam that collected during dinner. I can hear everyone, still eating, laughing at me. “She’s just a shrimp,” someone says. “Watch out, she’s going to turn out wild,” says another. My grandfather makes a clucking noise with his throat. “She’s just angry,” he says quietly. “Your grandmother used to say things before she thought all the time, just like that.” I hear my mother let out her derisive, cruel laugh, and the conversation falls silent.

I walk to the edge of the porch and peer down at the cement driveway and vegetable garden below me, now covered in frost. The alley is dark. Garbage cans stand in the dim—short and squat like demonic little leprechauns, waiting for just the right moment to spring on me and search my pockets for hidden gold with their precise, skinny fingers. To the east, illuminated by the dull yellow of the street lamp, a long-haired grey cat stands, staring. It blinks before running off, its paws skittering on the loose gravel. I pull my turtleneck over my nose and inch backward until I can feel the cool stucco of the house through my sweater.

An old lady, I think. I shiver as I remember that I don’t know any old ladies. One of my grandmothers lives in Hong Kong, where, my mother once told me, she is slowly going blind and getting fatter and fatter. The other grandmother, my father’s mother, died the day I was born, a story my sisters like to tell when they want to scare me.

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