The Astonishing Color of After

I leaned against the wall out in the hallway and listened to Dad riffling through papers, searching, moving from one side of the room to the other, sounding as desperate as I felt. I heard him open her jewelry box and shut it again. Heard him shifting things around on the bed—he must’ve been looking under the pillows, under the mattress.

Where the hell did people usually leave their notes?

If Axel were there with me, he probably would’ve squeezed my shoulder and asked, What color?

And I would’ve had to explain that I was colorless, translucent. I was a jellyfish caught up in a tide, forced to go wherever the ocean willed. I was as unreal as my mother’s nonexistent note.

“Leigh,” said the bird.

I would have known that voice anywhere. That was the voice that used to ask if I wanted a glass of water after a good cry, or suggest a break from homework with freshly baked cookies, or volunteer to drive to the art store. It was a yellow voice, knit from bright and melodic syllables, and it was coming from the beak of this red creature.

My eyes took in her size: nothing like the petite frame my mother had while human. She reminded me of a red-crowned crane, but with a long, feathery tail. Up close I could see that every feather was a different shade of red, sharp and gleaming.

It’s frustratingly ironic that I’m the one with Chinese and Taiwanese blood running through my veins, and yet my Irish American father is the one who can read, write, and speak the language.

Why was Mom so stubborn? Why did she reject Mandarin and talk to us only in English? The question has bothered me a hundred times, but never as intensely as now, looking at these strange letters. I always thought that one day she would give me an answer.

“Listen. Your grandparents put this package together, planning to send it. But they changed their minds. Instead, they burned it. The photos and the letters. The necklace, which I mailed to them. They burned all of it.”

Waipo murmurs something, shaking her head.

“They burned it so that your mother could have these with her on her next journey,” Dad translates, his voice dropping low.

“But Mom—the bird.” I feel everything tilt and bump. I’m a top teetering at the end of its spin, a squeeze of asphaltum paint sullying zinc white. “You have to tell them about the bird.”

It was an Axel type of scene. He would’ve pulled out his portable watercolors and made us stay until he’d gotten at least two good pages. And once he went home, his quick strokes of color would bake from raw visual into warm, delicious audio. The kites would be rendered in arpeggios. The children would become little timpani gods roaming the earth in seven-eight time. For Axel, watercolors are just his way of taking notes—his own form of shorthand. He uses the colors to guide his compositions, to produce pieces of what he calls opera electronica.

Even as Waipo and I walked home, even as we ate dinner with Waigong, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Axel would do and say if he were here with us.

“Hunxie,” she repeats, and proceeds to explain the term.

Eventually, I gather that it means biracial. And then I recognize the parts, like finally seeing shapes in the clouds: Hun. Mixed. Xie. Blood.

Back at home, sometimes people say I look exotic or foreign. Sometimes they even mean it as a compliment. I guess they don’t hear how that makes it sound like I’m some animal on display at the zoo.

[…]

And now finding myself so directly named—hunxie, mixed blood—like a label printed out and affixed to my forehead…it makes something twist in my guts in a dark and blue-violet way.

Memory is a mean thing, slicing at you from the harshest angles, dipping your consciousness into the wrong colors again and again. A moment of humiliation, or devastation, or absolute rage, to be rewound and replayed, spinning a thread that wraps around the brain, knotting itself into something of a noose. It won’t exactly kill you, but it makes you feel the squeeze of every horrible moment. How do you stop it? How do you work the mind free?

He asks what’s wrong, how he can help, what she needs. Her words come out in shattered pieces, unintelligible, thick with hopelessness, heavy under the weight of something that’s taken me years to even begin to understand.

Nothing is right, she says. The only three words I catch.

If someone had asked me, I would’ve said that everything seemed right except for my mother, who seemed totally wrong, and that in turn made everything else feel dark and stained. I would’ve carved out my heart and brain and given them to her just so she could feel right again.

“After a person’s death, they have forty-nine days to process their karma and let go of the things that make them feel tied to this life—things like people and promises and memories. Then they make their transition. So the temple will keep each yellow tablet for forty-nine days. After that, they’re burned.”

The thudding in my head matches the thudding against my ribs. “What transition?”

“Rebirth, of course,” says Feng.

While we waited in line at Fudge Shack I looked up Emily Dickinson on my phone. The depressing thing? She published hardly anything while she was still alive. Nobody had any clue who the hell she was. She was just there, writing poem after poem. It was only after her death that she became relevant.

But also, apparently Dickinson asked her sister to burn everything she wrote. I guess she never wanted to become relevant in the first place.

The burning, though…that’s what I didn’t understand. Even if you didn’t want to share your work with the world—even if you were private about it—wouldn’t you want to be remembered?

“I know emotions are all internal and whatnot. But I just wonder if it’s visible on the outside. You can tell when people are falling in love. So there must be a way to see if people are falling out of love, right?”

Axel slid down so our eyes were at the same level. “Maybe, I guess.”

“Do you think people can be in love but also unhappy?”

“Yes,” said Axel, the most solid answer he’d given in a long time. “Definitely.”

As if Feng knew her. As if she somehow, once upon a time, walked these streets alongside my mother.

Something in me snaps.

My body turns. My feet root down into the ground. Even as I’m telling myself to hold back, the words are boiling their way up, pouring out of my mouth. “Stop pretending you know about my mother.”

“Huh?” says Feng.

It tumbles out of me, wretched and wild and black with rage: “As if you know a single real thing about her. As if you’ve traveled back in time and met her—”

[…]

“Stop it. You’re not part of this family. You don’t know anything. Why are you always here? I wish you would leave us alone.”

We watch, transfixed, as it pushes its way out of the back, where the shell has opened like a costume unzipped. Slowly, the fresh body wriggles out, a pale summery green. The new legs kick a few times, inky eyes shining like they know everything of the world. Wrinkled, cabbage-like bunches unfurl themselves from the sides, smoothing out into long wings, green at the edges and translucent in the centers, tissue paper soft.

Its husk, brown and stiff, clings to the branch. A ghost left behind.

The guilt tripled. Could she tell that I was just itching to leave the house?

[…]

After my mother’s treatment at the beginning of the summer, I’d ditched my plans to find a job and started spending all my time with her. I would’ve done that even if I hadn’t been grounded. The smile she’d been wearing for the last few weeks—so genuine, so radiant—had me convinced that she was really recovering. But I also worried that once I was gone every day, when school started again, she’d sink back into her darkness.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had to give her as much of myself as I had, that I was the pillar holding her upright.

“I think people see ghosts all the time,” says Feng. “And I think ghosts want to be seen. They want to be reassured that they truly exist. They drift back into this world after passing through the gates of death into another dimension, and suddenly they hear every thought, speak every language, understand things they didn’t get when they were alive.”

Mom came and sat beside me, perching on the edge of the seat. “It’s okay to be afraid. But not okay if be afraid means you do nothing. You must not do nothing. That’s not life worth living.”

I tried to swallow, but my throat wouldn’t work; there was something stuck in it, dry and methyl violet.

Later I wondered: Was that how my mother felt? That she was doing nothing? That her life was not worth living?

It was impossible for me to know how late my mother slept in after I had left for school, but it reassured me that she at least got up to feed Meimei, put out clean water, sift through the litter box.

That dark and horrible part of me envied the cat. I’d learned to be self-sufficient; it was a habit forced upon me by my mother’s condition. But here was a creature who was helpless, an animal who didn’t deserve the name of her species because she couldn’t even be called upon to kill a cockroach. She was the one to get my mother out of bed. She was the reason my mother changed into real clothes, the reason my mother rose to brew a pot of tea.

Long before I lost my mother, my mother lost her sister. My mother lost her parents—or at least, that’s what she believed.

Believing is a type of magic. It can make something true.

Long before doctors put a label on her condition and offered slips of paper bearing the multisyllabic names of pharmaceuticals. Long before my father started leaving on his work trips.

Long before everything: She was already hurting.

What if I wasn’t meant to unlock all those memories? What if those things were supposed to stay tucked away, hidden and eventually forgotten?

Is this what my mother—before she turned into a red and winged beast, back when she still wove magical worlds over the piano keys, and delighted in the look of a perfectly done waffle, and called my name in her warm bismuth-yellow way—is this what she would’ve wanted? For me to chase after ghosts? For me to uncover what answers I could, and try to stitch together the broken pieces of my family history?

[…]

I want you to remember

Maybe Mom crossed that out because she changed her mind.

My mother’s dying soaked down through the carpet, through the wood. When it was done with the bedroom, it took over our house, and then it moved on to me. It soaked through my hair and skin and bone, through my skull and deep into my brain. Now it’s staining everything, leaking that blackest black into the rest of the world.

“All I do is remember what they say. They say, ‘You are supposed to marry Chinese man. If you marry that white man, this is no longer your home. You are no longer our daughter.’ How can someone say that to their child?”

[…]

“They blame me. They think if I never come to America, if I never meet you, Jingling would be alive. Why everything always my fault? Maybe I blame them. They ate lunch with her the day she died. They should see how sick she was. Why everything my fault? Why not their fault? They will never meet Leigh. They will never hurt her like they hurt me.”

Sometimes Waipo says something, and I can feel Dad tense up beside me. In those moments, even though I don’t understand exactly what’s being said, I know it’s something about Mom, something he doesn’t like. I nudge my hand close, so he remembers that I’m there with him. And then I watch his shoulders unwind just a bit.

There are still things to be worked through. There’s no way to speed through the grief.

There’s still a mother-shaped hole inside me. It’ll always be there. But maybe it doesn’t have to be a deep, dark pit, waiting for me to trip and fall.

Maybe it can be a vessel. Something to hold memories and colors, and to hold space for Dad and Waipo and Waigong. And Feng, even though she’s gone.

It’s not my room at all. I mean, it is, but it looks completely different. While I’ve been away chasing after ghosts and memories, Axel has been busy painting my walls.

[…]

It feels like the inverse of what he usually does—making music out of images. This time he’s captured a world of sound in two dimensions. It feels like one of Mom’s piano sonatas described in paint.

[…]

There is, at the top of the southwest corner, a red beast with wide wings, a dark beak, a long trailing tail. I freeze in place, because there’s no way he knew about the bird.

This series is a memoir of sorts, born out of the excavation of my family history. Each piece represents a different memory found. The gradual introduction of color from one piece to the next is meant to illustrate a developing epiphany. All of them culminate in the final piece, Cicadas, which is a surrealistic mosaic piece done in full color.

[…]

Memories that tell a story, if you look hard enough. Because the purpose of memory, I would argue, is to remind us how to live.