Fifteen Airport Memories
1
My dad doesn’t like to look at me. I’m only eight years old, but I already know that much. I think that’s why he talks the most when we’re in the car, when I’m in the back seat and he gets to stare at the road coming fast. While searching for a spot in the airport parking lot, he makes me jump by honking at a car that’s trying to find the exit. Nobody has taught me the term road rage yet, so I don’t know how to put the way Dad scares me into words.
“You’re going to love China,” he says. “When it rains, the mountains look like they’re crying.”
When Dad talks like poetry, it means he is about to teach me a lesson.
He tells me that I am not allowed to speak English while we are overseas, not a word. There are bad men there, and they want nothing more than to get their hands on rich little American boys who are worth something to someone. He describes how these evil men will hear my words and realize that I am Chinese in name alone. He describes how they will tie me up, demand a ransom. They won’t believe him when he can’t pay, so they will extract a different price, starting with my fingers—sliced off, bloody, and sent through the mail, a butchery delivered to his house piece by piece. They will start with the thumbs and move toward the pinkies. When those are gone, they’ll start on my toes.
“In the end, they will send me your head.”
Dad finds a spot to park between two SUVs. He unloads all of our suitcases himself but gives me the largest one to wheel around the airport. It’s like he always says: we all have our responsibilities.
2
Dad was born in a Chinese airport. He tells me and my sister all the time. My grandmother wasn’t there to fly—that wasn’t something she could afford—but to visit a friend working late. They had to rush my grandma into a bathroom, her stomach luminous. Minutes after her water broke, a trio of men rushed in, gloved and slick. There was no time for anything else; Dad was ready to see the world. One of the men kept telling Grandma to push, but the dialect was unfamiliar, and Grandma’s friend had to translate the word, again and again: the command passing from region to region, tongue to tongue.
Sometimes I ask Dad why, of all the things that make up history, this is the story he can never stop telling. He has this way of talking; everybody acts like his tales are delivered to him by a god. People would listen to anything he told them, so why does he keep describing the roar of planes vibrating through walls, the crack in Grandma’s voice when he took his first breath and wailed? It makes everybody laugh, but I’m sick of it.
“It’s not just a story. It’s our lives,” he says. “She gave birth to me in an airport, a place where you come and go. That means the world is our friend. We’re home wherever we are. That was your grandma’s gift to us.”
I’m only twelve, so I don’t yet know how to put existential crises into words. Words don’t come to me the way they come to everyone else.
It should be so simple. My father’s fate was decided from the moment he was born, and my fate was decided with his. The world is my friend, but I received it secondhand. If I run away from home, it will capture me again no matter where I turn: deep woods, back alleyways, under bridges, up in the sky. That is what he is saying. How can he stay calm? How can he keep himself from shrieking?
3
I hear Dad swear for the first time when we are late to our Boston flight and security makes him go through the scanner twice. I’m seven, so I get to keep my shoes on.
“Fucking stupid,” Dad mutters.
The word sticks inside my ears, only because I didn’t realize that good dads could talk like that. My sister first taught me the word’s power on the last day of Chinese school, when I couldn’t understand the instructions written on the test and cried until Dad whisked me out of the room. On the way back, my sister let me play with her hair tie.
“Don’t get down,” she said.
“Dad thinks I’m stupid.”
“Who cares? We live in America. It doesn’t fucking matter anyway.”
But the word is different coming out of Dad’s mouth. When he says it, one of the TSA employees jumps a little—like a bear just growled in her ear—and she rushes us forward. How is Dad so good at parting crowds, at making waiters bring food to us before anybody else? Maybe it’s because he treats his words like keys: two syllables, and a door opens.
Fuckingfuckingfucking.
4
My husband and I are flying to my father’s funeral. Before the plane’s wheels touch the ground, I have to think of a story to tell: something mundane, something profound.
“How does this sound?” And I describe how, when we spent too much of the day running errands together, Dad would stop at a gas station before reaching home, and he would bring back a hot dog and a slushie from inside. I always spent the rest of the ride checking the sun visor mirror to catch the exact moment my tongue turned ribbon red. When it happened, the chemical color always reminded me of blood—the way it looks in movies—but mostly, I was overjoyed at my luck: no other kid in the world got to have a dad like mine.
“Or I could tell the one where he used to lock me in the basement bathroom whenever I refused to eat my cherry tomatoes. He had the light switch removed because he knew that I was scared of the dark.”
Tomatoes, darkness—all the same to Dad. Things one must face to become strong. Things one must learn to fight.
Turbulence strikes, and my husband pats my shaking hands. “I liked the slushie story.”
5
Whenever we fly, Dad puts on a superhero movie for me, but I’m always secretly more interested in whichever rom-com my sister is watching across the aisle. As we take off from Minneapolis to visit my cousins in Boston, Dad shows me a movie where a bunch of gangsters rob a bank; a man gets shot in the eye. He holds up his hand to his face, the red gushing through his fingers. My eye! He got my fucking eye!
Dad turns off the subtitles. Somehow, the word only expands inside my brain, an echo that never dies.
Fuckingfuckingfucking.
When Dad goes to the bathroom, I ask my sister to play Sixteen Candles on her screen so I can watch. A girl at school showed me clips of the movie online, and I liked the way they kissed at the end.
My sister makes a face. “Dad won’t let me watch that one. There’s a Chinese character in it, and Dad says it’s racist.”
“But it’s a real Asian guy.”
“Dad says that’s why it’s so bad—an Asian person making fun of the way Asian people talk.
“But that’s how Dad talks.”
When Dad falls asleep halfway through the flight, I take my chance and put on Sixteen Candles myself. A gong plays every time the Chinese character shows up on screen. I laugh when he mistakes the word hernia for hyena, but I start to feel sick for some reason and stop the movie before anybody has the chance to kiss.
6
It feels like we’ve spent weeks flying across the ocean, but we still have to make a connection in Japan before reaching China. When we step into the airport itself, there are more Asian people in one place than I’ve seen in my entire life. Dad tells me to stop staring, to close my stupid mouth. But it’s like asking me to not stare at the sun. When the light burns my eyes, I feel like I’m learning something about religion.
Some of the people milling around are wearing masks, and some are reading magazines, and some have dyed hair, and some are tourists, and some are working, but they all look more like me than any of the parents or teachers at school. I didn’t know the world could look like this; I didn’t know that people could expect so little from me.
In the end, no matter how much my body begs me to try, I’m too afraid to talk to anybody. Any one of them could be after my fingers, my toes, my head. I shrink into the seat next to my sister, and when she tries to ask somebody where the bathroom is, I hide my hands between my legs.
7
On an escalator at the Newark airport—only a short subway and train ride from my college campus—I ask my sister if she remembers the first time we visited China, of the time Dad told me that if I spoke English abroad, I would be kidnapped and mutilated and beheaded. It’s always like this when she visits: an investigation of pain, parsing out things that happened from things that didn’t. We try to do as much of it in Chinese as we can, but when the gaps become too massive and the sounds jab at our gums, we fall back on the words that make everything easy.
In the unholy space between the two languages, I remind her how terrified I was when we reached Hangzhou. At the time, I could barely whisper into her ear that I needed something to drink from a vending machine. And that was before I got lost in between terminals, before Dad had to pick me up, sobbing, from a security officer.
What was the point of the fear? My fingers on the floor, my head on a platter?
“Dad believed it. At least a little,” I say. “Imagine what it was like when he was growing up. And then coming here. He just wanted us to be ready for anything, right?”
“Maybe.”
“It’s not like he wanted to traumatize me, just…there’s no easy way of explaining evil to somebody, to a kid.”
“I think it’s the same with everything Dad says—making his issues ours,” my sister says with her evergreen tongue.
8
Dad won’t look at me, even when he has to reach over me to grab pretzels from the flight attendant in the aisle. He doesn’t like me right now. At nine years old, I understand that this is the way things are, the way things will always be. I have just finished telling Dad a story about school, how a girl saw the Chinese characters on my jacket and asked if they spelled a bad word or my name or the name of one of my ancestors.
I ask Dad if he can buy me a new jacket. One that doesn’t make me feel so embarrassed to walk around with. One that I don’t have to hide inside my desk.
Dad doesn’t raise his voice. “What did I do so wrong? Am I such a bad father?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do your white friends at school treat their parents like trash? Do they think it’s funny?”
“...All the white kids at school have normal jackets.”
“Too bad you aren’t white.”
Dad takes out his phone and scrolls through his mail—his way of telling me that he won’t be looking at me for the next hour of the flight. It’s a lesson he’s always teaching me: only good boys deserve their father’s eyes. When I come out of the bathroom later, I hope that he doesn’t know that I’ve been crying like a baby again. I do my best to break through the quiet.
“The mountains really did look like they were crying.”
“Why would a mountain cry?” Dad doesn’t even spare me a look.
9
An Asian girl around my age sits down a couple feet away from me in the baggage claim area, both our backs against a wall. “I hate airplanes.”
She must be from America, too. There’s a pink bow in her hair, and her sneakers look like mirrors. Her talking sounds less like talking and more like singing, just like the kids at school who act like kings and get picked up in blue cars.
I’m too scared to say anything, to speak the way Dad told me not to, but the girl keeps staring at me. I look around to make sure nobody’s watching or preparing to apply a knife to my knuckles. “I don’t like being in the plane, either. They don’t let you stand up.”
“Are you from America?”
“I live in Minnesota.”
“I’m from Arizona. My mom’s over there.” She points at a woman with big hoop earrings, large enough for an animal to leap through. “We keep coming here to visit my grandma, but I wish we could go on an actual vacation instead. Like Hawaii.”
“I’ve never been here before. Isn’t it bad to speak English here?”
“Why? I always talk in English. I don’t like the way Chinese sounds. I can’t get the tones right.”
She starts describing the last trip she took to China. Her family took a tour of Beijing and ate Peking duck, but one of the chefs tripped on the way to their table and spilled sauce on the ground. She makes fun of the sound he made, the funny way Chinese people swear. When the luggage finally comes pouring out, she waves goodbye, and a pang of sadness washes over me as the coolest person I have ever met disappears around the corner.
10
I am returning home from a business trip, hopefully in time to accompany my daughter to parent-teacher conferences. She needs me to stand up to a bully of a teacher on her behalf. On the plane, I am forced to sit behind an Asian girl—probably born somewhere south of Kansas from the sound of her accent—who throws a fit 35,000 feet in the air. She spends a whole hour begging her mother not to take her to Korea over summer break, not to make her eat food that stinks for a vacation. For some reason, I can’t stop myself from thinking that this must be the ugliest little girl to ever blemish the face of the earth.
11
When we arrive at Dad’s childhood home, my aunts screech, their wrinkled hands all over my face the moment I walk into the living room. This is our third time visiting China, but the first time I get to meet any of Dad’s family. My aunts teach me how to play Mahjong, Dad standing over my shoulder to make sure that I make the best moves. They feed me noodles and peeled apples cut into squares. As they wait with us at the airport for our flight home to start boarding, I am finally brave enough to speak with one of them on my own—the older one, who has softer hair. We speak through the translator on my phone, through letters translated into fractured characters and back again.
“Everything is hard here. I don’t know why Dad likes it more than America. The beds aren’t soft.”
My aunt laughs as we put together her response. “Your dad has seen many good and bad things. Me too. We didn’t see those things in America. We saw them here. That is what history means. Saying goodbye—it’s like peeling off skin.”
On the way home, a flight attendant asks Dad if he would prefer pretzels or cookies, but he doesn’t hear the question. He’s too busy staring out the window and through the canopy of clouds, down and down into some faraway place.
12
The bathroom nearest our gate smells like a laboratory, every surface sterilized to death. On the other side of this stall door, somebody has been washing their hands for what feels like months. All I can do is stare at the flower-like characters that have been scratched into the toilet seat beneath me, but I haven’t taught myself enough Chinese yet to decipher the meaning. Maybe it’s somebody’s name: proof that they were born, that they were given a name, that they put it to use.
Once the sink goes quiet, I’m finally alone. No high school freshman should be so embarrassed about leaving a bathroom stall in front of strangers, but here I am, knees knocking together. Why did nobody ever teach me to do anything but cower?
As I push the stall door open, my fists unclench, and the skin is red. I sing the alphabet under my breath and wash my hands before leaving, just like I did as a kid. Dad warned me once that I would die if I didn’t wash my hands for long enough while abroad. He told me that superviruses live in the East: they feed off the heat, get trapped in the sticky rice. It isn’t true, but I can’t get rid of the part of my brain that absorbs all of Dad’s lies. So I wash and wash and the redness of my skin deepens even further—the difference between the outside and the inside of an artery.
13
My daughter looks more like me, and my son looks more like my husband. And not just their faces, either. Take the insides of their mouths: our daughter makes Chinese sound like butter. When our son tries, those same words crunch like gravel against his teeth. I’m worried that I will never be able to love my son the way I love my daughter. I hope that the reverse isn’t true of my husband, but I think it’s too late.
The bustle of the MSP airport food court threatens to drown me out, but there can be no waiting on this, not after my kids finally revealed to me the names—the fucking slurs that they are being called in school. There are moments from my childhood that buried themselves in my guts and sprouted well into adulthood, and this must be one of those moments for my kids. There is a lesson I must impart to them about what they mean to me, about the awful, violent things I will do for them. We have ten minutes before our flight to Hangzhou starts boarding. I won’t even need half that time.
I tell my kids that if anyone in their class ever makes fun of them again for the way they or their parents look, that I need to be informed immediately. That is not an ask, but an order. Because when I am informed, I will find this bully and make sure they are sorry. A child can hurt another child, but not in the primal way an adult can hurt a child. It is one of the few things we hold over them. I will find this bully, and I will kill them.
While our kids are distracted by the iPad I regret purchasing for Christmas, my husband whispers, “Isn’t that a bit much?”
“You’re always babying them.”
“They’re kids.”
“You act like they’re so soft, like they’re nothing. Can’t you see how strong they are? Don’t you see how good our kids are?”
The two of them huddle together in the iPad’s glow. If I squint hard enough, I can see the brains incubating inside their skulls, pure potential glowing like bones under an x-ray. I can see all of it—their hearts, their thoughts, their scars, their souls. And here I am, tending to these sapling lights. Is there any greater honor in the world, any heavier responsibility?
14
Dad can barely hobble from the bathroom to the line forming outside our gate without gripping my arm, all his feeble strength anchoring his hand around my elbow. He refuses to use his walker; they were invented by men with soft hands and softer bones. I beg him to take it slow, to board early with the rest of the elderly parents holding onto loyal sons, but he refuses. Maybe he wants to savor this walk. In my heart, I know this is Dad’s last time passing through an airport terminal.
An agent stops us at the gate to tell us something about seat upgrades, and Dad responds for the both of us. The agent listens like her life depends on it. Even through the stuttering, Dad still commands every room lucky enough to receive him. His words will never fail him the way his body does. It’s the reverse for me: I suspect that I will be at my best when my heartbeat goes and my body is taken apart for science, when my skeleton can finally speak for itself.
“You should go back to school and get your PhD. Not getting one was my biggest mistake. Yours, too,” he says when we reach our seats on the plane.
“I’m not going back to school, Dad.”
“You should listen to your father. My father was the smartest man I ever knew.”
“Jesus, stop adjusting the fucking seat.”
“Hey. I didn’t teach you to talk like that.”
He’s right, of course. I developed my potty mouth despite all his punishments, all the times he heard my profanity and pushed hard on the back of my head. He swears once a year, if even that.
And yet, I learned it from him. I don’t know how to explain it. All these years, and I still lose all my words when it comes to my father. Somewhere in the world, there are a mythical series of sentences that will explain the phenomenon—connect my father’s voice to mine. But for now, all I have is the buried truth, insistent.
You did, Dad. You did, you did, you did, you did.
15
I am lost in a Chinese airport.
I am eight years old, this is my first time visiting China, and I am lost. The travelers passing between gates and planes and continents form a stream of potential kidnappers, torturers, executioners. If I ask the wrong one for help—in my own words, my own language—it will be the end of me. A plane races by the window, and for a moment, the sound of hot rubber joins the endless roar of Terminal A.
But hope comes in many forms. My saviors appear across the hall, wreathed in gold: three men who look like they could be parents at my school, the parents who pick up their kids and bring them their forgotten lunchboxes and sneak them out during lunch and paint their nails pink. The parents with blonde hair and bright skin. The parents who talk like me.
The three tourists look up at a list off departures, pointing at gate numbers. I push through the stream of travelers, through the dark-haired forest. I’m not sure what to say as I approach from behind. The shortest tourist sees me first and taps the others on the shoulder. They all turn, and I know I’m supposed to say something, but I can’t remember the words. The tallest man leans toward me slightly—not the way a parent leans down to their child, but the way a friend leans into a friend.
He says something in Chinese.
At first, I think my brain must be broken. But the sounds keep coming, relentless. He pronounces each word like it’s nothing, like this is simply the way his mouth was built. My mouth won’t move, and neither will my legs. I don’t know how to speak Chinese. I don’t know what a good Asian character in a movie sounds like. I don’t know where home went. I don’t know.
At least I now know that these three tourists are accomplices. Men who steal fingers, men who cut. They are testing me, and they will kill me when they find that I’m stuck between countries and stuck between gates, that I haven’t listened to Dad’s warnings. Now I understand what he was trying to tell me. The world is hard, the world is complicated, the world eats up little boys who can barely pronounce their own names. Why don’t I ever listen? Why don’t I ever understand before the pain kicks in?
I communicate with the world using the only means I have left—screaming as loudly as I can. Everyone in the terminal turns their attention to me, eyes wide. It’s a feeling I’m not used to, but for the first time in my life, I want it more than anything. My terror is a universal sound, and all I need is one person to decipher the message: I am far from home, I do not belong, and these nationless men are about to chop off my fuckingfuckingfucking head.