GOLDFISH by Ada Zhang
We were not connected by blood. He was my mother’s best friend’s father, and though I never readily recalled this detail, his wife had just died, prompting him to leave China and move in with his daughter in America. I was told to call him Yeye. Grandfather.
“What about sir or mister?” I asked my mother, scratching a fresh mosquito bite on my leg. “What’s his last name anyway?”
It was Sunday, the afternoon just dipping into evening. We were hanging our clothes to dry in the backyard, and we were lucky because the heat wasn’t intolerable. Gusts of moist air cooled our sweat, and gave the clothes we’d hung a dreadful liveliness, pants and shirts swaying like dismembered body parts.
Downpours throughout Texas that summer beat a century-old record and ended the drought that had lasted nearly a decade. The rain came in its variations every week. Abiding drizzles, slanted thunderstorms, fat drops that hit the ground a few at a time and then all at once. Lake Austin had risen six inches so far, and would rise eight more before the summer was over. Until the rain stopped in August, temperatures would never reach above 92. Hot, but nothing compared to what we were used to in Travis County, a heat so oppressive that radios would overheat and shut off, the view in the distance breaking and bending, as though the whole world had gone up in flames.
In front of the clothesline, my mother cocked her head at me and squinted. Tiny goldfish appeared under her eyes, their tails fanning out from the corners to reinforce the symmetry that made her face terrifying. I handed her a damp shirt from the basket. Zelda, one of Benny’s. Looking away from me, my mother shook it out just once, with such force that the crack – a clean and empty sound – made me jump.
“You will call him Yeye,” she said, and clipped the shirt onto the line. Still squinting, she took a step back and examined her work. “That is the Chinese way.”
She turned to face me, using her hand as a visor. The shadow split her face diagonally, one half light, one half dark. The goldfish had disappeared.
I was going into fifth grade, and if I didn’t test into accelerated math this year, there was no hope for me. The district rule was that from fifth grade on, math levels were set.
“You’re lucky,” my father said to me the night before my first lesson. He was leaning on the kitchen island, shuffling almonds like dice around in his hand. “This Yeye was a professor at Beida before the revolution. Do you know what Beida is?” He caught an almond in his mouth and chewed.
I was sitting at the dinner table, my right knee up, left arm dangling over the back of the chair. I shook my head slowly, exaggerating the movement to show I was serious. Across from me, Benny was finishing a bowl of ice cream. He scraped at the sides to collect the melted dregs.
“It’s a university. The Harvard of China. Do you know what Harvard is?”
“Yes,” I said, but what I really wanted to know was, What revolution?
“Me too!” said Benny. He raised his spoon into the air and licked the circumference of his mouth, his tongue, for that moment, its own creature.
Yeye was tall and long-limbed. Tawny skin. Tufts of white hair. His breath smelled of cigarettes and bread gone sour in the mouth. We spoke in Chinese because my Chinese was better than his English.
“Multiplying and dividing fractions is easy,” he said. “It’s the adding and subtracting that’s tricky.”
I nodded. He cleared his throat.
“Do you know how to multiply fractions?”
“Bu zhi dao,” I said quietly, aware of my accent.
“Okay,” he said in chipper English. And then in Chinese, “Let’s begin there.”
My parents drove me to Yeye’s house every morning. He lived across town, in a neighborhood where all the houses were short and bright, a menagerie of yellows, pinks, and baby blues. I would eat my breakfast in the car, a piece of toast with peanut butter or a pork-stuffed baozi, and stare out the window at the lake as we went over the 360 bridge, imagining that I could see the latest rise in water level with my bare eyes. My lessons were four times a week, Monday through Thursday, 8:30 to noon. When the lesson was over, my mother or father, alternating days, picked me back up during their lunch break and drove me home, where I was expected to complete the homework Yeye had assigned.
I could always see Yeye as soon as we turned into the cul-de-sac, sitting with perfect posture on a resin park bench on the front porch, bright-eyed, thinking contentedly, it seemed, about something far away. Most days, he didn’t even notice us until I’d already climbed out of the car and shut the door. Only then would he come to, inhale and stand as though pulled up by his breath, smile and wave at me in a way that made me wonder if he’d forgotten about our lesson entirely. Together (in my memory, our heads moving in sync) Yeye and I would watch my family’s black car round the curve before driving off, picking up speed. I took my time walking up the driveway to meet him, dragging my feet on the slight ascent.
We didn’t use workbooks. Yeye hand-wrote every equation so that no two were ever the same. He was right: multiplying and dividing fractions was easy. It was the simplification that messed me up. I ended up with large numbers on the top and bottom, earning only half the points.
Yeye slid my worksheet across the table, a 50 circled at the top in faint pencil.
My cheeks prickled. I said, “But my answers aren’t really wrong, are they?” After some seconds, when he didn’t answer, I met his eyes. “The fractions are the same.”
Yeye scooted forward in his chair and put his elbows on the table. He wove his long fingers together, creating a hammock for his chin. “The same, yes,” he said, “but uglier.”
I put my pencil down.
“Think of it this way. Someone is telling you a story, maybe it’s something important. They talk and talk, and while you eventually understand what they’re getting at, you wish they’d said it in fewer words. You wish they would have stated only exactly what they meant. Math is sort of like that. Numbers, remember, have no end.” He paused here to pantomime an explosion. His eyes darted from side to side, chasing a spectrum both ways. “There is always some bigger one. The challenge and beauty of math is in finding the smallest numbers to convey value. The fewest words to convey meaning. Ming bai le ma?”
I took a fast breath in and controlled the shaky exhale. I wanted to say something smart, like that I wouldn’t really mind it if someone told me a story that went on and on. Picking up my pencil, I said, “Ming bai le.”
“Tsan le! Shit!” My mother opened the back door and ran outside, her hand-visor up again. It was the third time our clothes had gotten rained on. “Eileen!” she shouted. “Lao Wang! Benny!” Benny was playing a computer game with headphones on. My father was painting in his studio with the door closed. I was in the living room, reading on the sofa. I couldn’t even pretend I didn’t hear her.
Outside, my mother unclipped the clothes as fast as she could and threw them at me. The rain picked up suddenly with a loud hiss, and my mother said “shit” some more. Halfway to the end, she began ripping everything down. The line bounced like it was laughing at us.
“It’s getting heavy,” I said.
“What?” my mother yelled over the rain.
“My arms hurt,” I said, louder. “It’s getting heavy.”
“Take those clothes inside and hang them up.” She draped my father’s corduroys over her forearm.
In the utility room, above the dryer we never used, I began hanging the clothes on a rail my father had mounted beneath the cabinets for this very purpose. I took my time so I wouldn’t have to go back outside. The smell of rain filled the room, a mineral scent that I knew would linger long after the clothes had dried, turned stiff.
Every once in awhile, I would catch Ahyi, my mother’s friend, Yeye’s daughter, on her way out. I’d known Ahyi all my life, and she’d always treated me and Benny with tender indifference, a pointed affection that never sank in because she was always in a rush, headed somewhere else. Her heels knocked against the peach tile, a cool fast beat that slowed when she saw me at the door. She combed my hair back with three fingers.
“So pretty and well-behaved,” she would say before grabbing her keys off the wall hook. “Study hard, okay?” She winked before putting sunglasses on, her smile the last thing I saw in the door before it was pulled shut.
At four weeks, I was adding and subtracting fractions with alacrity, an addiction (almost joy, but not quite) that made my brain thrum with enthusiasm at the sight of Yeye’s skinny numbers. The method – matching denominators, basic addition and subtraction of numerators, simplification – had become instinct. It was a wonder that I’d ever not known it. I reveled in my manipulations, the way I made numbers appear large – or, as Yeye liked to put it, ugly – only to reduce them at the end to their true forms. 12/32 became 3/8; 14/35 became 2/5.
Grading my work now, Yeye’s eyes were downturned, thin lips pushed out. Farsighted, he held the worksheet away from him. His chin became like the moon, craterous, and retreated into his neck. He moved his middle finger down the page and across as he reviewed my work.
“Good,” he said, circling my grade at the top. He slid the worksheet to me. A tall skinny 100. “See? Who said you’re bad at math?”
Yeye’s compliment kept me in a good mood until late that evening, when my mother called me into her bedroom. I walked in just as she drew the last blind, twisting the stick that made the shades fold inward. When I grew older, I would play moments like this in a sequence. Me entering her room, my mother engaged in some small task that announced her dominance over the space. Adjusting the mirrors that multiplied her presence. Closing the imitation French doors to the bathroom slowly, hands behind her back, attention on me the whole time. And now, shutting out the night.
“Sit down,” she said. “How are your lessons going?”
My feet dangled off the edge of the bed. “Pretty good.” I knew she wanted something more precise, something quantitative, but I had learned from her how to withhold, the silent authority that came from keeping always a part of yourself, no matter how small, back.
She sat next to me and squeezed her hair clip. Black waves rolled over her shoulders, their peaks turning auburn in the light. “You’re lucky, you know. To have such a good teacher.”
“Yeah, Dad told me.”
My mother smiled, but the goldfish did not appear. “What else did Dad tell you?”
“That Yeye was a professor in China, and something about a revolution.” I brought my pinky up to my lips and began biting the skin around the nail, a habit I’d picked up recently. My mother knocked my hand away.
“I got a 100 on a worksheet today,” I said. “And in the past week, my grades have all been in the nineties.”
“Not bad,” my mother said. “There are still a few weeks before the test. Keep working hard and listening to Yeye.”
“So what was it?” I asked.
“What was what?”
“The revolution in China.”
Her face grew wide, every feature stretched out. The question sounded abrupt and strange even to me, though my thoughts had been circling around this for at least the past month. It would be years before I realized that what I was actually asking about was her. As long as I accepted my mother as a mystery, I didn’t wonder at her steely quiet. But now that Yeye had become a real person, I was starting to see my mother in a fresh light, as someone who existed outside of me.
She played with her clip, making the teeth open and close like a greedy mouth. “The revolution was a period that your father and I, and Ahyi, grew up in. The government at the time was very controlling. They were against intellectuals.” She paused. “Do you know what intellectual means?”
She said the word in English. I did know, but I shook my head.
“It means highly educated. Someone devoted to their studies.”
I joked, “Like me right now. I’m an intellectual.”
My mother stared me down, her eyes dark and muted.
“During the revolution, anything anyone did or made that didn’t praise the government was considered bad. Books, music, art. History, too, because it held the country’s past, which the government was trying to erase. You can see then how it would be hard for intellectuals, people whose lives were devoted to these subjects, to keep doing their work. But Yeye assumed he was safe. He came from a very brilliant, well-respected family, but he was a mathematician. He’d seen a few teachers from the wen hua department get carted away by the police, but no one from his side.
“One morning he arrived at his office to find a poster on his door accusing him of disloyalty. Government officials searched his office later that day and found letters written in English. Yeye explained that these letters were between him and a friend he’d made during his year abroad in the U.S. They discussed ordinary things. Mostly a way for him to practice his English. He begged the officials to read the letters so they could see for themselves, but he forgot that the officials were, like most people at the time, illiterate in English. They thought he was making fun of them. Yeye lost his job at the university over this and was forced to work as a janitor at a middle school for six years before he was allowed to return.”
Her spine curled as her body softened. The vertebrae visible through her shirt were like bolts, as though my mother were held together by metal. She sat up straight again. “You’re fortunate, Eileen, not only to have such a wonderful teacher, but also to be able to study without worry or shame.”
“What about my real grandparents?” I said, riding the excitement of the story. “Were they intellectuals, too? Did they die in the revolution?”
My mother blinked twice. “You shouldn’t talk of death like it’s the easiest thing in the world.” She stood and walked to the front of the room. She flicked the lights off, as though whatever she said next could only be heard in darkness. “Your grandparents died of natural causes a long time ago. Now, no more questions. You won’t fall asleep with such a full head.”
The room was awash in rose gold, the just-risen sun filtering through the humidity. It wasn’t raining now, yet, but the weather report said sprinkles on and off for the next week. The rain was letting up. Autumn was moving in.
We practiced decimals. Lining up the dots for addition and subtraction. Counting the numbers behind the dot for multiplication and division. Converting into a fraction, a percentage. With the placement test quickly approaching, our lessons had become mostly drills. Yeye gave me a geometry worksheet and left me alone to work while he smoked in the backyard.
In the past when he’d done this, I’d been impressed by his timing, how he never failed to lower himself into the chair, spreading his fresh tobacco scent just as I was completing the last problem. I’d made a game of trying to beat him, but even as I got faster, he seemed to anticipate my improvement. That, I thought, or his cigarettes kept getting shorter.
I boxed the last answer (area of a rectangle with decimal-digit dimensions) and waited for his return. When he wasn’t back in a few minutes, I decided I would bring the worksheet to him. I walked toward the back door, into the wonky rectangle of light on the linoleum kitchen floor. I saw Yeye’s sandaled feet, high white socks crossed right over left. I got closer until my nose touched the glass.
I gazed up. The sky had lost its warmth in mid-morning. It was pale blue, with clouds in lumpy, ragged sheets. I had planned on tapping the glass with my nail, Yeye just a foot to my right in a monobloc chair, but something about his posture – leaned back but rigid, eyes closed in a deliberate, unnatural way – stopped me. His left hand, the one holding the lit cigarette, was shaking a little, hovering above the chair arm. A cloud moved in front of the sun. I watched its progression as a shadow on Yeye’s face. In the dimness, I thought I saw that the corners of his eyes were wet, but seconds later, once the cloud had passed and his face was restored to its previous glow, I couldn’t be sure. Yeye opened his eyes directly to the sun. Not blinking, he brought the dying cigarette to his lips and pulled.
I walked back to the table and waited for his return.
A week after I took the test, Yeye passed away in his sleep. Days later I found out that my score did not meet the mark, and I believe everyone was relieved that Yeye had been spared this final disappointment. The school year would pass uneventfully, and the next summer and all the summers after that would return to the dry heat.
I’m able to recall that particular summer in great detail, and I’m not sure if that should be attributed to the unusual weather or Yeye’s presence. Or perhaps that summer has become, retroactively – fashioned by the fickle nature of memory – a prophetic season, one in which it was determined that I would not lead an academic life. Benny would end up at Harvard. I would not.
In my adulthood, illnesses would rob both my parents of a long life. Ahyi, who remained unmarried and in good health, though her eyesight was diminishing, now lives with me in my home in Philadelphia. It was my mother’s dying wish. I was 34 when she moved in. She was 60.
I was sitting with her in the backyard one early spring morning, the world still transitioning from night to day, when Yeye drifted into my thoughts as he sometimes did. It was the first time I felt comfortable asking Ahyi about him. I told her what I knew. She’d been living with me for a year, and while I could never say that she and I were close, our relation through my mother something we had both taken for granted, a playfulness had found its way into our dynamic. I was starting to think of her as an older friend.
Ahyi’s face went completely still. She moved only her mouth when she spoke. “Your mother told you what happened? How old were you then, eight?”
“Ten,” I said.
“That’s no story for a child.”
“I asked. My father had mentioned it, so I was curious.”
“If you’ve already heard the story, then what do you want to know?”
“You’re his daughter,” I said, as if that clarified anything. The truth was, I wasn’t sure.
Ahyi rubbed her knees, and I was about to retract my question by way of apology, thinking I had bothered an old woman for no reason, when she began.
“It must have been the 69th year. Your mother and I were in eighth grade. We were best friends and neighbors. Our families were close. People would call us ‘Twins!’ as if it were our names because we were together so often. The revolution was exciting, I don’t know if you can understand. We both joined the Red Successors so that when we reached high school, we would automatically become Red Guards. We wanted to be part of something. We were kids.
“Things started getting extreme around that time. Every day, it seemed, people were accusing each other of treason for things like uttering a Confucian phrase. Your mother’s parents ran a very successful tea parlor that had been the family business for generations. A beautiful space. Tall ceilings, the walls decorated with red paper cut-outs that your grandmother created painstakingly, each one completely different, like snowflakes.
“People at school began taunting your mother. I remember a boy yelling in the hallway, Your parents serve tea to rich pigs! She was embarrassed and scared of losing her spot in the Red Successors, so she tipped some of the Guards off about my father, your Yeye. I suppose she thought she was saving herself. She knew he had letters from the U.S. because he’d used them to teach us English some evenings at our house. She would only tell me much later, when we were able to touch these old wounds without reopening them, that she figured they would knock him around a little and destroy the letters, but also that she couldn’t honestly say she was thinking carefully at all. She could not have guessed that the Red Guards, the oldest of them just sixteen, would come to our house at night and beat my parents in front of the whole neighborhood. Your Yeye was punished not only for having the letters, but also because – ”
“Because they thought he was being arrogant, when he asked them to read English.”
Ahyi nodded. “Yes. They left my father with two broken ribs, bleeding into the street. They kicked my mother’s head until she was in a coma. You know this already?”
“Yes,” I lied. “Continue, please.”
“When my mother woke up, she couldn’t speak or walk, the damage to her brain was so bad. She would be in a wheelchair the rest of her life. Your mother’s plan backfired. The Red Guards, excited by their first big public beating, grew more aggressive. A week later, they barricaded your grandparents’ tea parlor while your grandparents were still inside and burned the whole place to the ground. Your mother was in school when it happened, or else she might have been inside too. From anywhere in town, you could see the smoke.
“That night my father opened the front door to find your mother covered in soot, kneeling and touching her head to the ground. If anyone saw her, both she and Yeye would have been in trouble, as what she was doing was considered a feudal gesture, so Yeye quickly pulled her inside. That’s when I saw her. Forgive me, forgive me! she cried and cried and cried. But I had sworn in my heart to never speak to her again, and I didn’t think it was right to feel any differently now simply because she was an orphan. I slapped her across the face. Shut up! I said. When she continued, I struck her again. And again and again, until I was just hitting her with whatever part of my body I could. My father pulled me away, but I still swung at the air.
“After that your mother lived with us. For the first year she and I didn’t speak. We established a routine, avoiding each other and taking turns caring for my disabled mother.”
Ahyi rubbed her knees again. I wondered if this conversation was causing her physical pain, but I said, “And after that?”
“After that,” said Ahyi, the words wrapped in a sigh. “Forgiving her was the hardest thing I ever did, and I didn’t do it out of nobility or a good heart like my father. For me, it just eventually happened. As an adult, your mother met a good, clever man, your father, and together they moved to the U.S. They sent money back to Yeye and me every month. My father, after he retired and was free to care for my mother full time, insisted that I move, too, so I did. He waited to come until my mother was gone. And then that’s where your story picks up.”
Ahyi looked around, blinking. The trees up the street were still black cutouts against the rising sun, whereas the ones in our yard were beginning to take on color.
“What was it like once Yeye returned to the university? Once the revolution died down.”
Ahyi stared in my general direction. “He was allowed to return, but he didn’t. He kept being a janitor. The middle school he worked for was a walk from our house. He had flexible hours. It was the easiest way to keep caring for my mother.”
“What about you?” I said. “How come you never married?”
“I could ask you the same thing. Even our naughty Benny found a wife! Why haven’t you found a husband?”
“I’m young still, by today’s standards.”
“Today’s standards, yesterday’s standards. After 30, it’s all the same to men. There’s a saying that goes: Better luck finding pure gold than a perfect man. I decided long ago that it would be better to skip the man, go straight for the gold with those odds.”
She laughed. She was in a jokey mood, as she often was these days. When I’d become old enough to care about what the adults around me did with their time, I learned that Ahyi was more successful than my parents, who’d both worked in computer software. Ahyi was a real estate agent. Toward the end of her career, she was mostly selling to millionaires in California who viewed Texas as the next frontier. She’d retired not so long ago. How different she seemed now, already, from that intimidating, efficient woman I’d grown up watching.
That night I couldn’t sleep. I thought about calling Benny, who was on a business trip in Beijing. It would be morning there, but I decided not to in the end. Why tell him what my mother wouldn’t? The dead do not have a say in the truth, but I could still honor the decision she had made in life.
Laying there in wakeful discomfort, it reminded me of the year I was 26. The man I loved had left me for another, and I’d swallowed an entire bottle of sleeping pills and drank as much red wine as I could stomach. When I woke up in the hospital, my mother was there. The goldfish beneath her eyes had set, I noticed for the first time, and wondered when that had happened. She crawled into the small bed with me and held me to her, bowing my head to her chest. It’s one of the only times I can remember her touching me.
“Is this the worst you’ve ever felt?” I said. I was crying.
I’d almost forgotten about this until tonight.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
Ada Zhang’s stories have appeared in Witness magazine, The Rumpus, Catapult, and A Public Space.