What We Were Promised by Lucy Tan

Author:Lucy Tan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

The next two weeks passed quickly. Lina’s train ticket was purchased and tucked into the inner pocket of her luggage; rolls of cash were zipped into the lining of her jacket. Plastic bags of watermelon seeds were packed along with mantou, dried sausages, and tea eggs, all to eat on the train. The single trunk Lina planned to bring with her sat near the front door, filled to its corners with clothing, books, and miscellaneous items added by her parents. One would remove something the other had put in, thinking it not important enough to take up precious space, and later, when Lina arrived at school, she would find that she had her grandmother’s silk shawl but only one sweater for the winter, and a lonely volume three of Eastern Life Sciences.

On the night before her departure, Lina was so filled with emotion that she could barely swallow her rice at dinner, let alone appreciate the taste of the fish her mother had cooked for the occasion. She acknowledged her parents’ chatter without looking them in the eye because she knew if she did, she would cry. And then, halfway through her meal, when it was impossible for her to field any more questions with mumbled utterances, she cried anyway.

At first, her parents looked at each other helplessly. Then Fang Lijian turned in his seat so that he was directly facing his daughter. He grabbed the two front legs of her chair and pulled her closer to him, as he used to do when she was little. She was surprised to find he was still strong enough to move her weight like this. With his left hand, he picked up her right one, which was still holding on to the chopsticks she’d been using. “Look at the position of your fingers on these kuaizi,” he said. “Remember what this means?”

She was holding them as she always did, fingers high up, near the thick end of the bamboo. She remembered the old saying her parents had taught her, about how the distance between the tips of the chopsticks and the beginning of one’s grip indicated how far a person would travel in life. She started sobbing harder. “It means I’m going to end up far away from home,” she wailed.

Lina’s mother hit her husband lightly on the arm, a rebuke, but he ignored it.

“Right. It means that to do what you were put here to do, you will need to travel far. But look at this, Lina.” He picked up his own chopsticks and motioned for his wife to do the same. Both sets of fingers had natural positions close to the middle.

“Your ma and I aren’t going anywhere,” he said. He lifted his free hand up to her face and stroked her cheek with his walnut-shell fingers. “You’ll always know where to find us. We’ll be right here waiting for you to come back.” And right then, Lina believed it—that her parents would always be the center of her world, that she would do whatever it took to come back to them.

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