Ruifang Yang (Candace’s Mother) Character Analysis

I arrived to the city carried by the tides of others. Most of my college friends were moving there, if they hadn’t already. It seemed like the inevitable, default place to go. Arriving, we did exactly what we thought we wanted to do. Jobless, we sat outside at sidewalk cafés, donning designer shades, splitting twenty-five-dollar pitchers of spiked Meyers lemonade, and holding tipsy, circulating conversations that lasted well into evening, as rush hour waxed and waned around us. Other people had places to go, but not us. It was summer of 2006 and the move itself seemed like a slight, inconsequential event in the grand sequence of things. Which was: my mother died, I graduated college, I moved to New York.

The rain had stopped by the time we left the restaurant. The air was warm. Gasoline puddles formed in the streets. Office buildings glittered as if in halfsleep, a scattering of darkened windows. The city was really beautiful. In a few of the fluorescent windows, employees worked late hours, each alone at his or her office. […] Looking at the office workers suspended high above us, I sensed for the first time my father’s desire to leave China and to live in a foreign country. It was the anonymity. He wanted to be unknown, unpossessed by others’ knowledge of him. That was freedom.

I looked up at my father, his gaze also directed to those office buildings. He glanced down briefly and smiled. Like worker bees, he observed in English.

I remember thinking in that moment that I was going to live in New York one day. That was the extent of my ambitions at age nine, but I felt it deeply. I didn’t want to go back to China […] I didn’t feel that way anymore.

When I was a kid, I used to watch my mother go through her daily facial routine. She subscribed to the Clinique 3-Step skin-care regimen: Liquid Facial Soap Mild, Clarifying Lotion 2 (because she had dry combination skin, like me), and Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion. Every morning and evening, she stood in front of the bathroom mirror, going through this process. It wasn’t always the same. Sometimes she’d wash her face in circular clockwise motions, other times counterclockwise. Then there were times when she’d finish with an extra, unsanctioned step: Fujianese face oil, patted onto her face. The oil was a mystery, tinted emerald green, reeking of some chinoiserie, a fussy floral scent, imparting unknown medicinal qualities. It came in a small broad-shouldered glass flask imprinted with the image of a poppy flower. I have looked for that product everywhere, in both Cantonese Chinatowns, in Fujianese Chinatown, in Sunset Park, in Flushing, and never found it.

I nodded, seduced. I’ve always been told my skin is too dry.

In a sudden, intimate gesture, she leaned over the counter, took my face in her hands, and spoke with care. You have beautiful skin, it is just uncomfortable right now. […]

And I remembered, in a sudden jolt of recall, that my mother had traveled to Hong Kong alone, one winter, when I was a teenager. The city was renowned among the Chinese-American communities for expert, cheap cosmetic procedures, and she was there to get the moles and beauty marks removed from her face. Her sisters used to call her a spotted leopard. When she returned, however, there were white spots on her face where the moles had been. She was still marked in the places she desired to be unmarked.

Half-in, half-out, I look around at am enormous red ballroom, decorated with gold bows, balloons, and banners, and crowded with people sitting around round tables, piled mountainously high with pig offal and Peking ducks and KFC buckets, toasting one another and smoking cigarettes. In one corner, a bunch of Chinese children crowd around a giant TV screen […] it’s playing Jaws […]

At floor height, I see people I recognize […] My grandmother and my grandfather. The other grandmother and grandfather, My great-great-aunt, eye blinded, world-weary. […] My four uncles, dressed in tuxedos, patting one another on the back and smoking so hard like it’s still the eighties. My father, sitting next to them […]

Then I spot my mother […] She sees me at the same time I see her. Coming over, she bends down and pulls me through the mouse door […]

All this she did as much for her relatives as for herself, snapping photos, at every instance, to mail back to Fuzhou. She bought a Clinique skin cream, which qualified her for a free gift of a makeup bag with several samples

Her homesickness eased in department stores, supermarkets, wholesale clubs, superstores, places of unparalleled abundance. The solution was shopping, Zhigang observed. He was not trying to be reductive.

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It was a delirious offer. I turned the number around in my head. I wrung it dry. It rained with Crème de la Mer moisturizing creams, Fendi handbags, and Bottega Veneta sandals—luxury items that my mother wanted but never allowed herself to buy.