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Member
Join Date: Apr 2004
Posts: 3
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The Photograph
There was a photograph of their family next to the computer in the living room, with mother father and daughter sitting neatly on a couch. The daughter was in the middle, with her mother on her left and her father on her right. Side by side, you could see how much she looked just like both of her parents: she had her father’s square nose and thick mouth, and her mother’s oval face. Her parents stared straight into the camera without smiling, surrounded by a beige couch, tough carpeting, and walls that needed new paint. The parents couldn’t have been older than thirty-five, but the skin on her mother’s face looked like pieces of her features had been pulled off, and the extra skin had remained. And her father wore thick, black, square glasses that his eyes lost themselves in, and it seemed that if he spoke, his voice would come out rusty at first, as if the hoarse words had been marinating quietly in his mind.
But this was the first year this family had been in America, and the daughter looked into the lens happily. She was in sixth grade, and the fleece jacket pulled over her body made her seem to lose herself within the entire mass. Her straight, thick, black and shiny hair was cut short; most likely by her mother. But her face was round, and happy and smiling, as if she took the extra pieces of flesh from her mother, as if when she spoke, her voice wouldn’t be scared to loudly sound out American words, as if she couldn’t smell the molding stench from the kitchen, couldn’t see the bugs in the carpet, and the decay in the walls. She would spend junior high and high school with a mother that believed that criticism ran a healthy home, but friends at school, and tight American clothes.
The daughter had long grown out her hair when she got accepted, to her parents’ delight, to an excellent American university. That same year, they sold their apartment and their car, and gave the entirety of their savings to their daughter. They moved back to China, where they promised her that the government would take care of them. They told her she was finally allowed to date (although she already had a boyfriend), and wished her the best of luck. The daughter moved to a new city, and for the first time in her life, she learned how to pay rent and do taxes. She sent her parents letters, and called when it wasn’t too expensive, but for Christmas break, when her friends migrated to different parts of the continent to see their families, she stayed home and did her coursework.
When she graduated from college, and than graduate school, and than moved up the corporate ladder of the business world, she found herself a respectable condominium, and than a respectable lover, who became her fiancée. Sometimes she was very grateful that her parents were still in China, because the man living with her wouldn’t have pleased her conservative parents. But two months into their engagement, without a planned date of marriage in sight, the daughter was very surprised to hear her father calling her. Her mother had passed away. The daughter hastily moved her meetings back, and apologized to her boss as she found her way onto a plane seat, and back into China. She didn’t bring her fiancée along.
In China she greeted her father, who suddenly became all smiles as he commended her on how wonderful she looked, on how much she had grown up. She stared at him in shock as she told him, in rusty Chinese, to remember her dead mother, that that was why she was here, that she couldn’t understand how he could be so happy. But still all smiles, he mumbled something about coming back to China, about sacrifices, about how happy her mother would be.
She and her father spent the next week getting condolences from relatives and friends. They passed her mother’s funeral without any problems, and the very night after the funeral, when the daughter couldn’t sleep, she went into her father’s room. He was sleeping, and she lay down next to him the way she used to, when she lived in China as a little girl. She remembered his usual smell of tobacco and red pepper. She searched for that same smell this time, and felt it mixed in with something putrid, something that reminded her of their old house when they first came to America, something that smelled like her old kitchen. She moved closer to him, smelling his clothes, his hair, and than suddenly she got an absurdly strange, a ridiculous feeling. She nudged her father, telling him to wake up. Nothing happened. But her father had always been a sound sleeper, so she nudged him again. Her voice got louder, and she began to use more force, but nothing happened. She put her head to his chest. She couldn’t hear anything.
Later, the doctors said that her father had passed away at approximately 10:30 that evening. That he had been dead for over two hours when the daughter came into his room. She stayed another two weeks to sort out her business, although the corporate world in America was getting angry at her delay. She packed up the old family plates, and wrapped up letters, and even found some old toys. She cried unstoppably for the first time in 20 years, all throughout the second funeral. She flew back to her job, to her condo, to her fiancée. Her mother would have never approved of this man, she told herself, but regardless, she fell into his arms at their wedding two months later.
A week after her thirty-third birthday, the daughter declined a big promotion at work on the grounds of maternity leave.. She gave birth to a girl, and her husband bought a disposable camera into her room after labor. He had a nurse take a picture. Everyone smiled.
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