Tomorrow they are saying it will snow, or at least some flurries, even though the high will be above freezing. I am sitting here, as an adult, wondering what the next day will bring me, where it will take me, in that flurry.
There have been many days of flurry in all these years going up to and experiencing, as I am still doing, adulthood. One day, one afternoon, that comes to mind is that one time my Dad threatened to expel me back to China. Only in retrospect, as an adult, can I see how ludicrous and cruel the threat was. We were in our first apartment still, some twenty-four years ago. I remember that the walls were full of wooden panels. I didn't know it was a style at the time; I only cared that it was a wall, separating me from the outside or the next door neighbor, or the adjacent room. It was just a wall. There was a sofa, and like the wall, I didn't care that it was covered with this cheap cloth material, and that it came from the sidewalk. I knew that part because I saw my parents carrying it up the stairs and into our room. Like the wood panel, the sofa was a novelty only in the sense that we never had either thing in China, but for me, it wasn't so fascinating that I would pay much attention to it. The sofa was a comfortable place to be, to sit in, or to sit against if I was sitting on the carpeted floor, which was another novelty that hardly caught my attention.
However, when the threat of repatriation came, I got nervous, and I started crying. I did something bad. I can't remember, though I felt as a child to be constantly doing something bad and constantly being threatened. But this threat was new and felt deadly. Suddenly everything mattered.
"This time you've really done it. I am afraid that your Mom will have to send you back to the village," said my Dad, in his usual bass tone, his stony face, and from the usual distance that demonstrated the gravity of the situation. Whatever I did wrong, however serious the punishment seemed, I just can't remember what I was being punished for. He said it not so much in an angry way but also in a defeatist way. It wasn't his commiseration that I might be sent back because of my Mother's cruelty, but more that he was giving up on me being a better behaved son. My tears were rolling out. I wasn't looking at him. I was sitting on the left hand-rest of the second-hand sofa, my head lowered, too ashamed to look at him. Granted, I don't think I was ashamed of what I did, more ashamed that the day had come when the ultimate punishment was waving its sickles at the threshold.
Across the living room from me was the TV, the second replacement after two burglaries that had sent the previous two TVs to their new owners and destinies. Suddenly I felt I would miss the TV. I wasn't looking at it at the moment, too busy with tears rolling like a waterfall down my eleven year-old cheeks. The heating was on, I could hear it. It was banging like a beggar banging his empty bowl with a spoon for either change or scraps. I had forgotten that it was a cold day, but in my tears I remember seeing the snow outside the window to the bedroom I shared with my sister, just next to the kitchen in which I had spent just about everyday cooking.
Did I do something wrong in the kitchen? Since I had so many responsibilities there, it was possible.
As many droplets of tears as there might have been, I was also thinking, despite all the emotions that had unlocked the dams. There was something I had to try, my last line of defense against what must have been a very real threat. I happened to be next to the cabinet full of potpourri of things in addition to books.
Did I forget to read books and made him worry that I would never succeed in this country?
But next to the books was a little trinket that my sister and I bought one day when we thought about our Father. So I extended my arm and grabbed it, then, carefully, delicately, dramatically, though, I handed it to him. I still couldn't look at him, but I assumed he was curious. I can't remember what it was, but it worked.
What worked? I don't think, now as an adult, that he or my Mother could really expel me back to China. My parents are always full of extremes, for which I blame my own histrionic behaviors sometimes. Nevertheless, for the smaller, younger version of me, the trinket presentation worked. He asked, "What's this?" And my tears flowed even more, the dams were now blown up, and hardly catching my own air caught somewhere in the trachea, I said that it was a present from his children. I don't know and really doubt he knew what it was or thought it was useful (everything had to be useful for poor people from China), but he was touched. He lowered his body, though not touching me, maintaining, actually, still a large distance, and asked, "Why are you crying?"
Catching my own breath, after a few more flooding on the nose and cheeks, I replied, "I don't want to go."
He sighed. I can't remember what he did with that trinket, but I felt relieved when he said, "Just behave better from now on, will you?"
Suddenly the tears stopped flowing. Suddenly I could see the wall panels, ugly and dark (and darkening) as they were, the even uglier sofa with the funny smell, of course, the TV that have become my friend (as part of a line of TVs). And I felt suddenly, though briefly, a fondness for the snow that was still falling outside, though as a flurry only now in the full sun.
That was the only time I was threatened like this, and the only time I had to resort to such pathetic but effective stratagem. And here, I sit, wondering about yet another snow flurry on this Groundhog Day that predicts a long winter this year, and I am grateful, at least, that I have now the choice as an adult to not have ugly wall panels in my living room here.
