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Annie Yang, United States

i. 

In a two-story colonial-style white house in a suburban Boston town, a father prepares salted pork ribs at the granite kitchen counter. He takes out the still-frozen meat from the refrigerator to thaw; in the winter he had slathered it with handfuls of salt and hung it out in the frigid wind to dry, so that the taste stays through the spring months till the summer that is now here. He learned how to do this when he was a farmer boy in a Sichuan village, and he has remembered it ever since; it is the muscle memory of belonging that sinks into his skin and settles between his bones. He turns to look at his daughter and tells her this, proudly. When he talks about Sichuan he always says 老家, the old home, his voice heavy with pride and wist and melancholiness and something else in between, just like all the grown-up children who reminisce about the hometowns they fought to escape during the youthful years that they’ve left long behind them, reminisce about their little towns and villages choking with cracked muddy roads and houses with bare concrete walls raw under harsh white sun. He left his when he was nineteen, a two-RMB bus ticket to the provincial capital clutched in his farmboy’s calloused hand and an acceptance letter to the capital's university of engineering tucked inside his thin luggage pack; and so many long years have gone by that he reminisces about it somehow, in his soft, wistful way. So there is only the hue of memory in his face when he tells his daughter about his childhood; how at six years old he learned to stand on a stool to reach a stove and make thin porridge with cheap rice and water, how at sixteen years old he worked in the neighbor’s rice fields in the summer for money that he gave his father. And the bamboo duck corrals, the little bridge over the shallow river. So there is almost wistful light in his eyes when he looks up from the salted pork ribs before him and says it: 老家. The old home.

A daughter looks up from her AP chemistry worksheet at the island table and nods wordlessly, like she always does when he talks about Sichuan. Sichuan is a fuzzy half-mirage to her, half-real stories floating absentmindedly in hazy secondhand memory. Sichuan is the dusty cardboard boxes of rural-raised free range eggs with FRAGILE written on the flaps, sent by the grandmother she’d met three times in her life to their Shanghai doorstep once or twice a year. Sichuan is the blurry concrete walls and grinning faces she stares at through iPhone screens on awkward WeChat video calls at Lunar New Years and these silky streams of Sichuanese dialect that she never can understand. But the summer she turned fourteen she walked alongside her father on the rainwashed village streets of his childhood, her new blue sneakers scraping against chicken litter and damp sand, and she watched him speak Sichuanese to the passers-by and the shopkeepers with lazy afternoon sun slanting across their tired faces. There was a fluidness in his voice, a confidence in his eyes as he spoke the dialect of the place he fought to escape. Maybe that is where he belongs after all, after all these years, she thinks. Then she thinks of herself, how she can’t speak the dialect of any place like how she doesn’t belong to any place, not really anyway. She grew up in a 170-square-meter apartment in the old French concession district of Shanghai where butter yellow sun somersaulted through the south-facing window of her ivory white bedroom to kiss the rose-patterned wallpaper and the soft sheen of the billowing curtains. In the airy rooms of a kindergarten a ten-minute walk from home she learned the soft Jiangnan syllables of Shanghainese, learned to say 侬好 (hello) and 谢谢 (thank you), learned to chant 下雨咯，打烊咯，小巴辣子开会咯 and 炒，炒，炒黄豆，炒完黄豆翻跟头 on a green playground with white magnolia trees. Never much, just enough to call herself Shanghainese: 阿拉上 海宁 (us Shanghainese people). At home they spoke nothing but Mandarin Chinese; neutral, careful. But one listless Saturday afternoon in Massachusetts’s gray February, four years after they moved to the United States, when the words of Mandarin Chinese had begun clattering stiffly across her tongue, when she was desperately clutching on to anything she could use to define herself as Chinese, she sifted through corny Chinese comedy episodes on her iPad until she heard an familiar accent, spoken by a plump actress with a too-wide smile. She couldn’t figure out what it was until she remembered airy kindergarten rooms a ten-minute walk from home and green playgrounds with white magnolia trees, remembered 侬好 and 谢谢 and 阿拉上海宁, and then she knew. She wanted to cry then, but not enough to really cry, just enough to sit on that leather sofa in a living room in a two-story white colonial house in a suburban Boston town, feeling weary like spinning gray puddles after rain. She felt something in her eye, but she pretended it was nothing.

ii. 

In a two-story colonial-style white house in a suburban Boston town, a father prepares salted pork ribs at the granite kitchen counter. He drops the thawed meat into boiling water and watches it roll in the undulating liquid surface, damp steam blooming onto the lenses of his glasses. Then he pushes the sides of the ribs down with the chopsticks 

he holds in his hands until it is all submerged in the cloudy broth, so that it doesn’t stick to the pot's metal sides. He learned to do this when he was a boy in a Sichuanese village, and he has remembered it since. After all these decades his hands are still calloused and rough from his farmboy days, but that’s all right; the hundreds and thousands of nights spent studying or working into the morning took him to leave for Chengdu, and then Chengdu for Nanjing, and then Nanjing to Shanghai, and finally Shanghai to Boston, and now he is content. When he goes back to the little village where he grew up they know that he is the successful man who bought a house in Shanghai and now Boston, and he is content. He always did care what they thought, somehow. One year when they still lived in Shanghai, he insisted on driving his new Range Rover on a road trip from Shanghai to Sichuan over the kids' winter break, even though his wife protested that it would be so much easier to just take a plane, even though it took three days and three nights to drive from the east coast to the southwest, even though the gleaming flanks of the new car could barely fit through the dusty village streets overflowing with worn-down tricycles and fruit carts. Perhaps he insisted so that his seventy-year-old mother and father would know for sure that their son is now a successful man. Perhaps he insisted so that the boys whom he grew up with and who are now men that never really left the province would know who he is now. But most of all, perhaps he insisted so he himself would be proud, or that village farmboy anyway. But still he has left him behind; for Chengdu, then Nanjing, then Shanghai, then Boston, and he is content that his daughter will never need to do the same. So he doesn’t understand her when she raises her head and talks again of leaving Boston for college, of Chicago and Los Angeles and London and anywhere far. Boston is the best place, he tells her again, frustrated, impatient. He tells her he fought to go somewhere better, all of his life, from the little village to Chengdu to Nanjing to Shanghai and now to Boston, and this is the epitome of success, the dream, the final destination, the place where you stop leaving. Why, he asks again and again. He tells her that she is someone who will never need to keep leaving for another place.

A daughter bends back down to her AP chemistry homework at the island table and is silent. She thinks to herself that maybe he will never quite understand, that they are different people, and that is all right. But if she studies, then she will be accepted into a college far from Boston, and if she is accepted into a college far from Boston she will leave this city that was never her home. She arrived in a misty March the year she turned ten; on the smooth highways rolling out from the airport she looked out the car window into the gray New England dawn and thought to herself that this isn’t like Shanghai, not at all. They had always called her a sentimental child, and she was; so sentimental that she clutched onto everything from the past desperately, afraid of losing who she was. So she defended herself painfully against a country she could not and would not call her own; sat stonily during the morning Pledges while her classmates rose sleepily to face the limp star-and-stripe flag, used centimeters and meters condescendingly in front of baffled faces, scoffed at the words Asian American. She was Chinese, not Chinese American, and she belonged in a south-facing white bedroom in an apartment in the Old French district of Shanghai, even as the words of her mother language began to clatter stiffly across her tongue. But in January, when her mother told her that they were selling the apartment, she knew that she had lost it; lost the last lighthouse that she looked towards, waiting to go home. Now she feels trapped in this place but she has nowhere to return to, she is a ship cut from its anchor and drifting at sea, a bird lost from its nest and wandering empty skies. She'll never belong no matter where she goes, so why stay anywhere? So she studies and she tells herself of leaving Boston for college because it is the only thing she can think of, tells herself of Chicago and Los Angeles and London and anywhere far. Her father tells her that Boston is the best place, the best economy, the best college town, the best life, but she tells herself that she doesn’t want to go to the best place, just a place that is hers, and her father will never understand really; she thinks to herself that they are different people, she and her father. But one day she suddenly remembered that maybe they really are similar after all. We are both people who spend our entire youths trying to escape from where we are, after all. She wants to ask questions. 爸爸, why are we never content with where we are and who we are? What is it that we are trying to escape? What is it that we are running after? She thinks to herself that she is tired, just tired. 

iii. 

Inside a two-story colonial-style white house in a suburban Boston town, a father prepares salted pork ribs at the granite kitchen counter. He lifts the boiled meat out of the steaming pot with his chopsticks and slices it on the cutting board; the silver blade of his knife grinds one, two, three, severing puffy white fat from sleek pink flesh, ashy bones from translucent tendons. They lie perfectly flat on the cutting board, one against the next, so smoothly that they look almost like you could put them back together again but you know that you can’t. He learned to do this when he was a boy in a Sichuanese village, and he has remembered it ever since; muscle memory coalesces with the memory of his 老家 and sinks into his hands, his heart. When he finishes he slides the slices into a plate, carries it over to the kitchen island, and sits down across from his daughter. Have some, he says. She takes a slice and bites into it. He smiles and asks How does it taste? She pushes her AP chemistry homework aside and chews slowly, thinking to herself that it’s salty like the tears you cry for a home you lost or maybe never had, for something left behind, for something you don’t even remember the name of but that makes you cry anyway. But she doesn’t say it. Instead she swallows and tells him, slowly, pensively, It’s just right, 爸爸. He nods, smiles. And they sit, chewing salty meat along with the years like all of the sojourners and pilgrims. And they sit.

Annie Yang is a high school junior who is originally from Shanghai, China, and now lives in the Boston area. Besides writing, she enjoys chemistry, theatre, and summertime.