Karaoke

For the first time, Xinran didn’t show up to our weekly Downton Abbey night. Without her, we fell out of the teenage numbers: twelve mothers spread across the La-Z-Boy set at Liping’s. Xinran said she had joined the group to work on her English, but we spoke to each other in Mandarin, and besides, her English couldn’t be good enough to understand the show. She probably wanted an excuse to have company, like the rest of us. We would never shell out twenty dollars for a movie ticket and a gallon of popcorn in downtown Lexington, Kentucky; none of us were that American. But we enjoyed Liping’s every Sunday. Suits and dresses screamed and sobbed on surround sound—a soundtrack that allowed us to forget, if just for an hour, the tantrums of our own adolescent children.

Five minutes into the episode, Liping cleared her throat. Those of us she had already told pursed our lips. Liping splayed her long fingers out on her iPhone and read the magnified words in English. Michael had posted the article on his Facebook earlier that day. The headline: “To the Mother I Love.” Xinran’s son on the byline; date, today; Huffington Post, "Queer Voices" section. She paused two lines in and took a breath before continuing: “I liked my ass stuffed up, bursting at the seams. But I wasn’t telling Mother that.”

Liping switched back to Mandarin. “They say it’s genetic. Bad luck.”

We jumped in.

“So Xinran or her husband has the problem too?”

“They’re married, like the rest of us.”

“A kid doesn’t just catch it anywhere.”

“It’s getting popular. More states are spreading gay marriage now. Did you see that CBS special of them going to City Hall in packs?”

We didn’t know people back in China with this problem. If Xinran hadn’t moved to America, her son might have been fine. A few of us shivered. We weren’t God-fearing like the neighbors who staked crosses and angels in their front yards, but we were practical. We didn’t understand why Michael would make life hard for himself. For all our efforts, who thought it would come down to this? We had taught our boys to stand up tall, to grow a shell, to fight back tears. Yet, the best one had cracked: the Chinese son who had made it from Kentucky to Harvard. Michael had become a gay. Not only that, but he had the nerve to broadcast himself on the Internet.

The plastic crinkled as Zhen dug into the peanut bag. With her thumb and index finger, she positioned a peanut under her right canine. Her bushy eyebrows rose with satisfaction at the crunch, the nut ridges cracking like fault lines. Some of us tried shelling peanuts that way in the privacy of our own homes, but we didn’t dare look like beavers in public. Zhen didn’t care. Nothing fazed her, not even this conversation. She looked jaded, as she did when we gossiped about our kids’ classmates and their new SAT scores. Crack, crack. Scraps of shell fell on the sofa. Liping scanned Zhen’s pumpkin-shaped body up and down, and, as she did every Sunday, handed Zhen a paper towel to clean up her mess. No one would ever call Zhen a role model, but—sometimes we wanted to be more like her. She had become even more blasé in the past month, ever since the Army had dispatched her son to Afghanistan. Her kid had gotten Cs in school; his career was doomed from the start. But still—to let your child play with death like that? That was Zhen. She could stomach risk and roll with the punches, which helped her play the highs and lows of the stock market for a living. She made more money than any of us at Lexmark or the University of Kentucky.

“Maybe Sheng was abusive,” Liping said.

“Xinran says good things about her husband.”

“You never know. Have you noticed how his eyebrow twitches when he draws a bad hand in poker?”

“Or Xinran,” Liping said. “She did something wrong.”

Zhen grabbed the remote and turned the TV down, leaving a bit of peanut shell between the volume buttons. “So tragedies are the mother’s fault?”

“That’s not what I meant.” Liping rifled her fingers through her hair so hard a few strands fell out. She swiped them off her lap and onto the floor.

We understood Liping. She needed a scapegoat: genes, child abuse, bad parenting. But to blame Xinran for her gay Michael as we did Zhen for her Army brat, that took it too far. Xinran, of all people. If she couldn’t usher her son to success, which of us could? Xinran had had Michael young, and he was the first among our kids to graduate from college. She loaned us prep books; our closets were full of her son’s hand-me-downs. With the exception of Zhen, we mothered as she did, our fingers thumbing through the U.S. News and World Report rankings before our kids started high school. We kept appearing at the principal’s office until our sons got assigned the best math teacher; we committed the format of the SATs to heart. Our kids wouldn’t grow strong and tall by themselves. Like saplings, they needed wooden stakes around them, our chiding and chauffeuring and vigilance, to scale the gates of the Ivy League and Wall Street. We wanted her Harvard mom sweatshirt, to claim a successful son like hers—well, successful until now.

“Xinran never left that kid alone,” Liping said. “Sons can get messed up that way.”

Wendi spoke up. She was one of Xinran’s closer friends. “Don’t pick on the poor woman. Imagine what she’s feeling.”

Most of us could recall the nights we came back to find our sons dressed in all-black, with ear piercings, or worse, a nose ring or puke green tattoo. But at least they could remove clothes or metal, even ink. Not gayness.

“We could bring leftovers to her house tonight,” Wendi continued.

“What good will that do?” Liping snorted.

Wendi bit on a manicured nail.

“We’re all going to Xinran’s for Mid-Autumn Festival, right?” Liping asked.

We nodded.

“Good. We’ll see her on Saturday.”

Wendi didn’t press further. We’d wait until Xinran’s dinner and karaoke party. One of the lords on TV was bickering about his son’s choice of fiancée. Tonight, the actors’ polished words went in one ear and out another. Zhen looked down, her squat legs dangling inches above the carpet. She gathered the mound of peanut carcasses in the paper towel on her lap and pulled herself up to throw them away. A few shells still fell onto the floor. They crackled under her step.

~

In the days after Sunday’s TV showing, our minds tallied up a list of the differences between Xinran and the rest of us, each notch a layer of separation between her son and ours. Xinran studied civil engineering in Beijing, but here she swept floors for a living. The rest of us had learned enough English for office or lab work. Neither science nor medicine was our “passion”—that word Americans used for their careers—but the salaries paid for big houses in good school districts. Our work didn’t allow us the time with our children we wanted, a fact that tugged at the bottom of our shirts like our kids’ fingers had years ago. But our children wouldn’t be like Xinran’s; they couldn’t. Up Xinran’s driveway, the newly fallen leaves crunched under our steps. Her subdivision was as soundless as the ones we lived in, the quiet in the cold air a reproach to our own silence. We hadn’t reached out to Xinran since the news, half-hoping that she’d cancel the dinner and karaoke party. Of course she wouldn’t dare, for that would only call more attention to her situation. But she must have been tossing at night, haunted by the same question we had. Were the lives we gave up in the motherland worth the children we raised here?

Our husbands filed into the den to bond over bottles and cards; our kids went down to the basement for Xbox. We shuffled into Xinran’s kitchen to arrange our dishes, but not until the last of us arrived did Xinran come out of the bathroom, right hand to her stomach.

“Xinran!” Liping yelled, her hands flapping up. Zhen scowled at her. Liping, in the American way, liked shouts and cheer.

“My son’s out seeing a friend. My husband’s traveling for work,” Xinran explained, though none of us had asked. We could translate her words: they were avoiding the party she had to host. Her son was probably squirreled away in his bedroom, and her husband had gotten out of the house. We spoke in the same euphemisms; last week, Wendi had explained away Kevin’s poor PSAT score for the Duke summer camp. He had the stomach flu on test day.

“You’re here,” Liping said to Xinran. “That’s what matters.” Comforting Xinran would be easier with her son out of the picture.

Liping stepped back and bumped into Wendi. “Sorry,” Wendi and Liping said at the same time. There wasn’t enough room for all of us in the kitchen. The kitchen island was especially crowded today, for most of us cooked extra-large portions this time, our twenty-odd potluck plates rammed up one against another, the way our shoulders did with swarms on Shanghai streets and crowds at Kunming corners. We had fled the multitudes, but after years in this alien country, we now missed the sweat of strangers, the bumping of bellies, the impossibility of ever being alone. Here, alone meant quiet time, time to pick at our pimples in the too-wide mirrors of our master bedrooms, to re-tuck the pantyhose that never matched the color of our skin, to fall victim to our hamster wheel of thoughts, back and again to the ways our children had failed us, and the ways we had failed them.

Xinran was making a racket with the aluminum foil and Saran wrap on her dishes.

“Let me help.” Liping’s hands reached toward her.

“I’m okay.” Xinran looked up, the cracks in her lips showing. In the split second that Liping moved forward to grab the foil, it looked like her hands would brush against Xinran’s. We were being ridiculous—Xinran wasn’t contagious—but it felt safer to keep our distance from her and her food. Liping took her time with the long plate of Pyrex, picking at the places where the Saran wrap had bunched up. Impatient, Zhen took the dish and tore off the plastic with one swift motion. Liping backed away.

Xinran sighed. “In two decades of cooking, they’ve never looked so bad.” The signature dish at Xinran’s parties was her dumplings, but today’s wrappers had stuffing spilling out of the seams, the handiwork of a rookie. The whiff of grease brought us back to the hours we spent in front of the stove, making the perfect dinners that our children gobbled up in seconds, their belches the only mention of gratitude.

Our voices bumped into one another’s, each more high-pitched than usual.

“You must have spent so much time cooking.”

“They look perfect.”

“The brown spots must be so crispy!”

“They’re fine. Like any other dumplings,” Zhen said as she helped herself to some. The rest of us didn’t touch them. Still, it was a relief to shout out singsong words like these. Cheer for Xinran!

“But even these,” Xinran said, motioning to the few potstickers that kept in their filling, “they taste strange.” Her pointer finger trembled.

“We’ve all had disasters in the kitchen,” Wendi said.

“No, you don’t get it,” Xinran said.

The smile slid off Wendi’s face, revealing the same cleft between lower lip and chin that we had all gotten with age. If we were going to take care of our friend, the time was now. But what were we to do? We weren’t about to burst into chorus and sing, yes, we heard, your son is not a real man. We looked everywhere but into Xinran’s waiting eyes. One leg of her pantyhose was a different off-white from the other. She wore a tight bun, the first time she had come to a party without doing her hair, and had new wrinkles below her cheekbones, or was it the kitchen lighting, the bulbs and last rays of sun exposing pocket craters on our faces? With a gust of wind, the door creaked at the hinges.

“I’m having a hard time right now.” Xinran hung her head down, as if the muscles in her neck had lost tension. “I want a second chance.”

“Mom, can you stop it?” Michael strode into the kitchen.

We all gasped.

Xinran’s voice quavered when she spoke. “We had agreed. You were supposed to be at Adam’s.”

“Mom, both of us knew I was going nowhere tonight. You can’t hide me away when you feel like it.” Even in his frustration, Michael’s voice sounded like a radio announcer’s, baritone and rich, like a cello string vibrating to his words, not at all the way gays spoke in movies. His chest looked broader than the last time we had seen him; his face, too, leaner and less childlike, a shadow of trimmed hair under his chin.

We froze. We tried to look composed, to stop our legs from shaking and our eyes from darting anywhere but at the man in front of us. The Harvard kid we had admired. To look at him was to stare failure in the eye. He was like a majestic redwood that towered over the canopy, but under the leaves the trunk was browning from disease, a death from the roots.

We couldn’t read Xinran’s face. She must have known that we knew; she had Facebook like the rest of us.

“How’s life after Harvard?” Liping asked, forcing a smile onto her glossy red lips.

We harbored further curiosities: the moment he decided to be gay, the girlfriend he had in college, the impossible mechanics of two men in bed. It didn’t make sense. He was confused, as people caught between two countries and cultures were. But we chose our questions carefully:

“How have you grown so tall?”

“Do you have a job yet?”

“Have you tried your mother’s dumplings?”

Zhen didn’t say anything. She picked at her fingernails, bored or annoyed, we couldn't tell.

Michael took a breath. “I know the news has gone around. I posted it on Facebook for a reason.”

We crowded together more closely, like soldiers into formation. Zhen didn’t budge, keeping to the fringe of our circle.

“We’re not talking about this now. Go back to your room,” Xinran said to her son.

“I’m not hiding anymore, Mom.”

“I don’t know what to do with you.” Xinran crossed her arms.

“I’ve told you what to do!” His voice then dropped in volume. “Accept me for who I am.”

It might have been a trick of the light, but Zhen nodded ever so slightly. The rest of us were cringing. Xinran opened her mouth, but nothing came out. We wanted to see her put her foot down, to shout at Michael and shoo him upstairs, but she just looked down at the floor. It was crushing to see her give up like that, in her own house of all places.

Michael turned to the rest of us. “So what do you all want to know?”

We shifted weight from one leg to another. Our curiosity must have been obvious, in that grotesque way you can’t stop staring at a burned person’s face. But we also had a job to do. We needed to parry the blame from Xinran’s shoulders. We had to protect one of our own. She couldn’t be a failed mother.

Wendi came out with the truth. “We read the article.” The rest of us then chimed in:

“Are you sure?”

“Your mother wants grandchildren.”

“Did you consider how your mother would feel?” asked Liping.

“It’s my life, not hers.” Michael’s voice quavered: a hint of remorse.

“It’s her life too,” Liping said.

Zhen broke the silence with her lip smacking. She chewed the dumpling loudly, even by her standards, as if to be obnoxious. Xinran backed away from the circle to rest her elbow on the counter, head in her hands.

“I decide my own life.” Michael switched to English. “This is a free country. Isn’t that why you all came to America?”

We didn’t recall him having such mouth. Maybe it was his gayness, or his entitlement from Harvard. But our kids sounded foreign to us too: America etched into those bodies we had made, flagrant red and white stripes crawling under their skin.

“We wanted you all to have a better life,” Wendi said. “That’s why your mother is hurting.”

The rest of us nodded. Michael didn’t know how we bit our tongues day in and day out in this country, when we pronounced the -th sound in English, when we nodded to our bosses’ tirades, when we learned to show bright colors on our dresses but not in our voices. We knew better than to attract attention. We swallowed our pride and followed the rules.

“My life is good. And—I’m gay,” Michael said again in English, in a proud way that made us flinch. “The problem is that my mother can’t take it.”

“She knows you’re not a bad person. She just cares about you.” Wendi said.

A palm hit the counter—not Xinran’s, but Zhen’s. “Can you all stop?” she asked.

A few of us almost laughed; Zhen couldn’t be serious. But her face was flushed. “The kid’s fine,” she said.

“Fine?” Xinran asked, her voice also getting louder. Her arm extended toward her son. “Ask me if he’s fine!”

Michael did not look fine, his face red.

Zhen kept on going. “Michael’s alive and well.”

“I wouldn’t call his condition well,” Xinran said.

“He’s alive, okay?”

“Zhen, at least your son is fighting a war.” Xinran dropped the finger she had pointed toward Michael. “At least your son is a real man.”

Wendi spoke up. “Let’s not argue.”

“Let’s not bring my son into this,” Zhen said loudly and slowly, her chest heaving like the lid of a pot rattling from steam and heat. We knew what she was going to say: her son was halfway across the world with no plans of return; he was in mortal danger; Xinran shouldn’t dare compare.

Instead, Zhen turned to pick up the plate of dumplings. The rest of us hadn’t eaten any. “You thought these were terrible? They’re perfectly edible. But if you want to dump them out—”

“Those aren’t yours,” Xinran said. She lunged for the plate in Zhen’s hands. With her stubby arms, Zhen held the ceramic dish over her head, the porcelain shining under the light like a halo. Xinran grabbed hold of Zhen’s right forearm. Wendi stepped forward to intervene, but Zhen elbowed both her and Xinran, and then flung the plate, the food flying with surprising force. Xinran froze. Only the black beads of her irises moved as a succession of greasy plops hit the tile.

Zhen let the now-empty plate clatter back onto the kitchen island. The Pyrex dish made a hard landing, its echoes ringing in our ears.

“What’d you do that for?” Xinran said. “We could have eaten them.”

“Now they’re edible?” Zhen stepped away from the fallen dumplings. She paused. “You mentioned my son. You’d rather be mother to my son?”

Xinran looked to Michael, as if she would answer differently if no one could hear her reply. “That’d be impossible.” She bit her lip.

“You’ve finally said something right,” Zhen said. “My son is dead.”

The color drained from our faces. Not to one of our kids.

“I’m so sorry.” Wendi moved toward Zhen to hug her. “At least it was for a valiant cause.”

Zhen rejected Wendi’s arms, stepping back. “He never made it to the Army. He died of a drug overdose.” Zhen pursed her lips. “I don’t need your condolences. Just remember, at least your son is alive.” With that, she stepped over the mess and toward the back exit, the storm door rattling on her way out. None of us ran after her.

We were speechless. If we hadn’t seen Zhen’s lips move in front of our eyes, we wouldn’t have believed it. She, out of all people, tough and fearless, the mother among us who couldn’t be shaken. Her son had gone off to fight for this country, she had claimed, when he couldn’t even live to fight for his own life. What lengths she must have gone to cover this up for weeks—no obituary, no gossip, no nothing. It broke us, knowing that she felt like she had to hide the truth. But we couldn't blame Zhen. We would have done the same. Friendship had its limits.

“Sorry,” Wendi said to Xinran. “Zhen shouldn’t have acted out.”

“There’s nothing you could have done,” Xinran said.

We nodded. Maybe there was nothing we could do. What was better, for a mother to suffer in silence, or to have her son spill the shame out, all in public?

“Karaoke?” Liping asked, eager to get to our after-dinner ritual.

We had to clean up first. The dumplings littered the linoleum floor like small corpses, a crime scene almost. When the oily wrapping slipped between our fingers, we found a strange satisfaction in miring our skin in grease. We were useful, at least in this small way. Xinran grabbed her empty dumpling dish but ceded it to Michael when he insisted on cleaning it for her. The last of the food fight went down a plastic bag and into the trash drawer Xinran would empty the next morning. The floor was clean, but Zhen’s words still echoed: at least your son is alive. We lingered in the silence of the kitchen until Liping waved for us to follow, toward the plasma television. Liping had tried to point fault at Xinran and her husband, but maybe that was the problem—that no one was at fault, that no one had the power to be at fault. We trailed her at a distance, like a gaggle of gangsters slinking away from yellow tape. Wendi pulled Michael with her, and Xinran followed, making us a complete set in the living room. Liping turned down the dimmer lights and increased the TV volume. None of us mimicked the made-up stars, our lips pursed in silence.