paisley rekdal

We Do Not Live Here, We Are Only Visitors

In Taipei one of the first things I notice are the white cotton masks strapped to the faces of the women. Men wear them, too, but the number of women wearing these makeshift face-filters exceed the number of men, and give Taipei the look of being run by a skinny, anonymous band of surgeons.

After two days my mother, who notices this as well, wants to buy a mask for herself. I argue against it more vehemently than the situation requires, saying that we will only be in Taipei twelve days; whatever damage meant to be done to our lungs in that time will not magically be eliminated by a piece of cotton with two rubber bands. But my mother insists. Near the markets where they sell the masks, she spends minutes haggling with the merchant for a better price than she believes she is being offered. I lounge and snort, tug her away when the merchant's gesticulations become too frenzied to be understood.

In restaurants we argue halfheartedly about the necessity of the masks until we reach a compromise. Now she walks around clutching an old scarf to her face and breathing shallowly. Soon we notice older Chinese women doing the same. Only the young women seem to have adopted the ear-band model. With my mother's wiry skunk hair and still-unlined almond eyes peeking over the tips of her scarf, she has the perfect outfit for traveling. Her brown scarf allows her to blend in with the crowds of older Chinese women in the markets and on the street while always covering her mouth, muffling the fact that she can't speak Chinese.

At night in Taipei after my mother dozes off in front of the hotel television, I think about Mark in Seattle, how we argue in bed together about whether we should marry. Mark had almost proposed twice but thought better of it, he said, when he recalled how easily I became seasick. Mark is an Englishman from Kent who works as a navigator for certain shipping companies. We met in Ireland, where I lived for a year; he followed me home when I returned to Seattle. Mark had half the year off from work and decided, in his typically spontaneous fashion, to buy a plane ticket to the States the morning he drove me to the airport. Within two weeks of my return he was sharing my room in the house I rented with friends.

Mark has hired himself out as a sailing instructor now and spends the better part of every weekend teaching his latest student the rudiments of tacking. I can't spend more than a few minutes on a boat without being overcome by nausea. Besides the fact of my seasickness, however, I have found other, more pressing reasons to be hesitant about marriage, such as our inability to agree on anything. Still, marriage seems like the next logical step we need to take in our relationship, and for a while we have pursued the subject relentlessly. But whatever reasons we could invent for ourselves to believe marriage is the right answer, neither of us makes a move to propose. We have stopped referring to marriage at all; my nausea has become a symbol of our stasis. "I'm going sailing," Mark will say, looking meaningfully at me. "Do you want to come?" And I, bilious at the sight of a dock, shake my head.

In the past weeks we have argued so much that we have stopped conversing almost altogether, replacing normal dialogue with sexual banter, teasing each other about our accents. "Zee-bra," I say. "Zeta-bra," Mark answers. Tonight in Taipei, in front of the flickering television, I think about his pink hands. The way his face always appears chapped in the sunset. I won't admit it to him, but I love his accent. The first time my maternal grandmother, Po Po, met him was at her birthday celebration at my parents' house in Seattle. "I can't understand a thing he says," she announced loudly after he'd greeted her.

In bed sometimes he asks me to recite the few Chinese phrases I know. "Kai nooey," I say, stroking his chin. "Gung hay fat choi. Shie shei. Soo jiep." But his favorite is the insult: the epithet Po Po called my father before my parents married.

"Loh fan," I murmur, kissing him. "Old savage. Loh fan.

In Taipei my mother asks about Mark. At first she didn't approve of my sleeping with him out of wedlock and, on their first meetings, had to mask her dislike of him on account of this with excessive politeness. My mother's politeness is terrifying. I've learned about this from ex-boyfriends who insist my mother is the most intimidating woman they have ever met; a single dinner once reduced a man named Tim to sweats and stutters. But when I confront her about this on a tour of the city, she acts playfully bemused.

"They're afraid of me?" She laughs. "I'm so nice."

"It's the niceness that's killing them. They think you're really pointing out their flaws."

"If their flaws are so obvious then I don't have to point them out, do I?" she asks. "It must be cultural. Politeness like that is very Chinese."

My mother has softened toward Mark since she suspects the relationship won't last. She gathers this from the number of times Mark and I fight, the days I've called her up, still yelling my side of the argument because Mark has stormed out of the house and stranded me with my anger. Any time we spend alone together, my mother feels free to question me so intimately that I have begun to suspect her concern really fronts some prurient desire to live through me vicariously. "Oh, you're just in this for the sex," she'll say, and then accuse me of innocence, of becoming steeped in the romantic tripe that has similarly ruined her generation of friends' marriages. To defend myself I try to dismantle my image as naif as quickly and finally as possible by confessing the most embarrassing, cruel details of our couplehood; things I know I shouldn't tell her even as I reveal them, because if the relationship is going to lead to anything, some amount of privacy and trust has to be preserved. She knows this.

"You don't understand," I say.

"Oh, I do. You're fickle," she replies, and then demands to hear, yet again, how Mark drunkenly begged me to propose to him on New Year's and then, laughing, told me no. She tells me my boy-craziness is only exceeded by my gullibility when I tell her about the time I got so stoned I ended up in a corner and wouldn't leave until Mark, drunk himself, wrestled me out of my clothes and then left me there, naked. I embarrass myself, admitting these details. But I realize how proud my lack of loyalty to Mark makes me, how these secret transgressions increase my sense of independence. The more I tell my mother, the further apart I feel from him. "She wants to know," I tell myself. I feel like I can punish him.

By the seventh month of living with Mark, it was as if my mother had wormed her way into my skin, lodging there like a tick. Even now when Mark touches me after I spend a day alone with my mother, I become distant. I imagine she is there, bobbing above us along the ceiling. The next day the phone rings and I know it is her. I can hear her even before I pick up the receiver, her private ticking, how she is prepared to translate everything.

No one associates my mother and me with each other. To shopkeepers and hotel bellhops in Taipei we are two women traveling together, one white and one Chinese. Only when I address her as "Mom" within earshot of a Taiwanese is our situation made clear. "Your daughter?" he or she will stammer at this revelation, then I am scrutinized. I sometimes wonder what people make of our obvious age discrepancy, how they would explain the older Chinese woman paying for the restaurant and hotel bills and clothes, what kind of relationship they could possibly expect between us. On the streets young women hold hands, cuddle, rest their heads on each other's shoulders. They walk arm in arm, like nineteenth-century couples, helping each other over puddles and curbs. My mother and I, when we travel, often walk like that together in public, where at home we would never think of doing it. In Taipei my mother takes my elbow at every corner (for my safety, not hers; she's fearless in traffic), runs her hand along my back in restaurants or while waiting in long lines. Occasionally people look.

I don't blame the shopkeepers and bellhops for not immediately understanding our relationship. My mother and I really don't look alike, though during the trip I begin to insist that we do. On Christmas Eve, I stand beside her facing the hotel mirror as we make up our faces and say, "I have your nose."

"You do not have my nose," she replies, looking at me out of the corner of her eye.

"I do. Look, there's your nose."

"You don't look a thing like me."

"Mark says we have the same smile," I say, grinning widely to show her.

At this she snorts. "I don't think Mark sees you the way I see you.

"No, he sees me better. He's not as biased. Look," I say, and tilt my face so that its roundness becomes more apparent. "The same face."

"You look more like your father," she says then, ending the discussion. I can't argue with this. I do look more like my father -- brown hair, narrow nose, even a chin that gently recedes in the same manner, though I do not have his light blue eyes and his broad shoulders. Still, I am taller than my mother, and thinner. Tonight, next to my mother in the mirror, I am struck by a sudden wave of vanity. I imagine that my face, next to hers, seems to glow. I pretend that my skin looks taut, my cheekbones sculpted. For those few imagined minutes my features are no longer a mark of oddity or Western exoticism, but of beauty. In this mirror I look more beautiful than my mother. And I feel strangely distant, cut off from her as if she were covered by a veil.

On the street people stare at me, but not because I am beautiful. Taipei is not populated with hordes of white Westerners like Tokyo or Hong Kong. Here I am scrutinized, though politely, by passersby. They do not, I believe, ever recognize that I am half Chinese. They do not realize that my mother and I know each other. I walk quickly while my mother tends to shuffle; ten minutes into any walk my mother ends up six feet or more behind me. No one, unless they suspect that she is my handservant (as my mother jokes), would place the Chinese matron with the white girl.

Watching my mother in shopwindows, I see her round smooth face with the curls of permed hair, the thicker lips and wide nose. I remember the childhood friend who visited my home and met her for the first time. "What is your mother?" he had asked in private afterward. He did not, I notice, ask the same question about me.

Appearance is the deciding factor of one's ethnicity, I understand; how I look to the majority of people determines how I should behave and what I should accept to be my primary culture. This is not simply a reaction white America has to race. If for the past several years I have become a part of white America it is because it has embraced me so fully, because it is everywhere, because it is comfortable to disappear into, and because the Chinese would not recognize me on sight. Any struggle to assert myself as more than what I seem to be is exhausting. A choice, I realized, either could be made by me or asserted for me. Alone in the bathroom, I plucked my thick Asian eyebrows down to niggling scrubs and watched my brown eyes grow wide in my face, less hooded, more Italian-looking.

Only when I am shown photos of myself and see the new frozen images of me, the overplucked brows and insincere halfsmile slapped onto my face, do I become disturbed. Only when I say, "I'm sure I don't look like that," and my friends agree -- "No, you don't look like that in real life, you look very different" -- does it occur to me what facade I am staring at. What digs at me so painfully when I see myself.

Contents Copyright 2001, National Public Radio