I’m greeted at my aunt’s door by Buddha.
Not the Buddha himself—though it certainly wouldn’t be the strangest thing to happen to me this week—but a giant poster of him, half peeling at the corners and framed with gold. Around it, there are little yellowing stickers my aunt has clearly tried and failed to scrape off, some advertising cleaning services and what may be a porn site, and others sporting nothing but a surname with a phone number printed underneath. Next to the Buddha’s serene, smiling face, they look almost comically out of place.
I shake my head. It should be the local wuye’s responsibility to get rid of all the spam, but in a small, rundown compound like this one, most tenants are left to fend for themselves.
“Yan Yan!”
Xiaoyi’s voice drifts out to greet me before she does, and despite myself, I find my lips tugging upward at the familiar childhood nickname. It’s hard for me to really feel at home anywhere with all the moving around I’ve done, but there’s something about Xiaoyi and her little flat that always grounds me, pulls me back to simpler times when everything felt safe and warm.
Then the door swings wide open, the strong smell of cabbage dumplings and damp cloth hitting my nose, and Xiaoyi appears before me in a plastic floral apron, patches of white flour sticking to her permed hair and hollow cheeks, her resemblance to Mama striking despite the nine-year age gap between them.
She grabs my hands in her calloused ones, the cool wooden beads of her bracelet brushing my skin, and proceeds to pinch and pat my cheeks with alarming strength for her petite frame.
Once she’s satisfied I haven’t lost or gained too much weight, she steps back, smiling, and asks, “Have you eaten, Yan Yan?”
“Mm,” I say, even though I know she’ll make me sit down and eat with her anyway, that she’s probably spent half the day preparing my favorite food for me with fresh produce from the morning markets. Xiaoyi doesn’t have any children, but she’s always doted on me like I’m one of her own.
Just as I predict, she starts ushering me into the cramped dining room, pausing only when she notices me bending down to untie my school shoes.
“Aiya, no need to take your shoes off!”
“Oh, it’s fine,” I say, as if we haven’t had this same exact conversation every single time I’ve visited. “I don’t want to dirty your floor—”
She speaks over me, flapping her hands in the air like wings. “No, no, make yourself at home. Really—”
“Really, Xiaoyi,” I tell her, louder. “I insist—”
“No! Too inconvenient for you!”
“It’s not inconvenient—”
“Just listen to me—”
“No—”
Ten minutes later, I’m sliding into a pair of faded Mickey Mouse slippers while my aunt hurries into the kitchen. She yells something to me about tea, but her voice is drowned out by the roar of the range hood and the loud pop and sizzle of spices heated in oil.
As I wait for her, I sit myself down on a wooden stool near the window—the only surface not littered with old jars and boxes Xiaoyi refuses to throw out.
Maybe one of the reasons why Xiaoyi’s flat is so comforting is that it always seems frozen in time. The fridge is still covered with photos of me as a baby, head unevenly shaved (Mama swears it’s the secret to shiny, straight black hair) and dressed in baggy split pants that give no consideration to privacy. There are photos of me as a toddler, too, from those last days before we moved to America: me making the V sign with two fingers from a crescent-shaped bridge in Beihai Park, willow trees swaying in the background, the emerald river water flowing underneath; me chewing happily on the end of a bingtang hulu at a Chinese New Year parade, the sugar-coated haw fruits glistening like jewels.
But even the unsentimental objects in the room haven’t moved an inch all these years, from the butter cookie tins filled with threads and needles and the pair of strange walnut-shaped balls meant to improve blood circulation, to the jar of paper origami stars and vials of green medicine oil perched on the windowsill.
I’m distracted by the savory aroma of herbs and soy sauce wafting out of the kitchen. Seconds later, Xiaoyi emerges with two plates of steaming dumplings and a bottle of black vinegar balanced in her hands.
“Yan Yan, quick! Eat before it gets cold—the dumplings will stick!” she calls, disappearing back into the kitchen before I can even offer to help.
Soon, the small fold-out dining table has been weighed down by enough dishes to feed everyone in the building. Aside from the dumplings, Xiaoyi’s also made fluffy white steamed buns with embedded red dates, sweet-and-sour pork ribs sprinkled with cut scallions, and a thick rice congee topped with delicate slices of century eggs.
My mouth waters. The cafeteria food at Airington is pretty impressive, with daily specials like xiaolongbao and fried dough sticks taken straight from the pan, but it’s still nothing compared to this.
I grab one of the buns and sink my teeth into it. The warm dates melt on my tongue like honey, and I lean back, a happy sigh escaping my lips.
“Wa, Xiaoyi!” I say, ripping out another chunk of the bun with my fingers. “You could start your own restaurant!”
She beams. This is the highest praise for anyone’s cooking—unless, of course, you’re eating at a restaurant, in which case the highest praise is naturally to compare it to home-cooked meals.
“Now, Yan Yan,” she says, helping herself to the dumplings, “what brings our busy little scholar over to see her old aunt, hmm?”
I swallow the rest of my bun, open my mouth, then hesitate. My invisibility issue is the whole reason I came here, but it hardly seems like the kind of conversation one should have over a plate of cabbage dumplings.
“Oh, it’s nothing, just…” I stall, searching for another topic. “Did you know my parents were thinking of sending me to America?”
I expect Xiaoyi to look surprised, but she simply nods, clasping her hands together over the table. “Yes, your Mama told me a while ago.”
My gut clenches. How long have my parents been planning this without telling me, preparing for the very worst as I prepared to return to school? I was with them all summer, laughing and chatting with them every breakfast and dinner. If they could hide so much from me so easily, what else—what other hardships and burdens and worries—have they kept to themselves?
“Why don’t you look happy?” Xiaoyi asks, reaching over to smooth my hair. “I thought you would want to go back to America, no?”
Go back.
The words scratch at my throat like barbed wire. Go back, as if the teachers and kids at my school in California weren’t always asking me the same thing: if and when I’d be going back to China. As if there’s still a home in America for me to return to, as if America is home, and Beijing has been nothing more than a temporary stop in between for an outsider like me.
Yet the truth is, I remember far less about America than my relatives realize.
The memories I do have come in bursts and flashes, like something from a dream sequence: the sun pressing down on my bare neck, a too-blue sky stretching out overhead, cloud kissed and endless, palm trees swaying on either side of a quiet, suburban road, pale hills rising in the distance.
There are other memories too: the bright, stacked aisles at Costco, the crumpled In-N-Out burger wrappers littering the back seat of our rental car, filling the tiny space with the smell of salt and grease, and Baba’s voice, with its uneven inflections and stuttered pauses, reading me a bedtime story in English as I drifted off to sleep…
But simmering beneath it all was this—this tension. A tension that grew with every odd look and ill-concealed insult and racist joke tossed my way, so subtle I didn’t even notice it building inside me day by day, the same way the teachers failed to notice Rainie Lam’s slowly changing hair color over the years. It wasn’t until I stepped out into Beijing International Airport, suddenly surrounded by people who looked like me, suddenly both seen and blended in, that I felt the full weight of that tension right as it lifted off my shoulders. The relief was dizzying. I was free to simply be a child again, to shed the role of translator-chaperone-protector, to no longer feel the need to constantly hover around my parents in case they needed something, to shield them from the worst of America’s many casual cruelties.
“…you to stay, but, well, I didn’t have enough to lend to your Mama at the time,” Xiaoyi says, moving the dumplings around with her chopsticks to stop them from sticking.
The clink of plates pulls me from my thoughts, and it takes a moment for my brain to register the rest of Xiaoyi’s sentence. My heart seizes. “Wait. Mama…came to you for money? Why?”
Xiaoyi doesn’t reply right away, but deep down, I already know the answer: For my education. My school fees. My future.
Me.
But Mama is even prouder, even more stubborn than I am; she once worked a twenty-hour hospital shift with a sprained ankle just because she didn’t want to ask for a break. The thought of her bowing her head to ask for money from her own little sister makes my chest ache. Mama and Baba would really do anything just to make my life easier, better, no matter the cost.
Maybe it’s time I do the same for them.
“Xiaoyi,” I say, and the urgency in my voice gets her attention at once.
“What is it?”
“There actually is something I came here for… Something I need to tell you.” I push my bowl aside. Take a deep, steadying breath. “I can turn…” I pause, realizing I’ve forgotten the Chinese word for invisible. Yin shen? Yin xing? Yin…something.
Xiaoyi waits, patient. She’s used to these abrupt gaps in conversations with me by now, sometimes even tries to fill in the words I don’t know. But there’s no way she could predict what I want to say next.
“People can’t see me,” I say instead, settling for the closest translation and hoping she’ll understand.
Her tattooed brows knit together. “What?”
“I mean—no one can—my body becomes—” Frustration boils inside me as the words jumble around in my mouth. There’s no correlation between fluency and intelligence, I know that, but it’s hard not to feel dumb when you can’t even string together a complete sentence in your mother tongue. “No one can see me.”
Understanding dawns upon Xiaoyi’s face. “Ah. You mean you turn invisible?”
I nod once, my throat too constricted for me to speak. I’m suddenly afraid I’ve made the wrong decision by telling her. What if she thinks I’m hallucinating? What if she calls Mama, or the local hospital, or someone from one of her many WeChat shopping groups?
But all she says is, “Interesting.”
“Interesting?” I echo. “That—that’s it? Xiaoyi, I just told you—”
She waves a hand in the air. “Yes, yes, I know. I can hear perfectly well.” Then she falls into silence for what feels like eons, her large earth-brown eyes thoughtful, her lips moving soundlessly.
I can’t help squirming in my seat as I wait for her verdict. It feels like the buns in my stomach have turned to stone, and in hindsight, I realize I probably should’ve told her all this before we started eating.
Finally, Xiaoyi glances up and points to some spot behind me. “Yan Yan, can you fetch me that statue of the Buddha over there?”
“What?” I twist around, and locate the little bronze statue sitting atop an old bookshelf. Old worn copies of classics like Journey to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber are stacked beside it. “O-Oh. Yeah, sure.” I nearly trip over my chair in my haste to grab the statue for her, my fingers trembling as they close over the cool surface. I’ve never been the super religious type (when I was five, Mama told me that all humans are just a clump of cells waiting to decompose) but if I can lose all visible shape and form without warning, who’s to say a mini bronze Buddha can’t give me the answers I need?
I hand it over to Xiaoyi with both hands as you would a sacred artifact, heart hammering in my chest, watching intently as she unscrews the Buddha’s foot, reaches inside and pulls out…
A toothpick.
“Um,” I say, uncertain. “Is that for—”
Using one hand to cover her mouth, Xiaoyi slides the thin wooden stick between her teeth with a loud sucking sound. She snorts when she sees the expression on my face. “What, did you think this was for you?”
“No,” I lie, the rush of heat to my cheeks giving the truth away. “But, I mean, I was kind of hoping you could…”
“Offer you guidance? Explain to you what’s going on?” Xiaoyi offers.
“Yes.” I plop back down on my chair and look pleadingly across the table at her. “That. Anything, really.”
She considers this for a moment. “Hmm… Then you’ll have to tell me how it first began.”
“If I knew how it began, Xiaoyi, I wouldn’t be having this problem right now,” I point out.
“But how were you feeling at the time?” she presses. “What were you thinking?”
I frown. The first memory that surfaces is Henry’s smug, disgustingly pretty face as he moved to join me onstage. I quickly shake it away. My hatred toward that boy might be all-consuming and powerful enough to keep me up at night, but it’s not so intense as to trigger some freakish supernatural reaction.
And besides, I didn’t notice anything weird until after we both got our awards and our photos taken, or after it occurred to me that…
“I would be leaving,” I murmur. My hands go still on the table. “That without Airington, I’d be—”
I’d be nothing.
I can’t bring myself to finish my sentence, but Xiaoyi nods sagely, as if she can read my mind.
“One of my favorite authors once said: Sometimes the universe offers us the things we think we want, but which turn out to be a curse,” she says, which would probably strike me as a lot more profound if it weren’t for the toothpick still sticking out of her mouth. Or the fact that I know her favorite author is a web-novelist who exclusively writes fantasy books about hot demon hunters. “And sometimes the universe grants us the things we don’t know we need, which turn out to be a gift.” She spits the toothpick into her palm. “Another author also said that the self and society are like the sea and the sky—a change in one reflects a change in the other.”
As I listen to her speak, I get that feeling I often do when analyzing Shakespeare for Mr. Chen’s English class; that the words should mean something, but I have no idea what. Yet unlike in English, I can’t just bullshit my way through the answer with pretty prose.
“So…are you telling me this is a curse? Or a gift?”
“I think,” Xiaoyi says, screwing the Buddha foot back on, “that depends on what you make of it until it goes away.”
“And if it never goes away?” It’s not until I’ve spoken the words aloud that I realize this is my greatest fear; the permanent loss of control, the rest of my life fragmented and ruined, forever at the mercy of those unpredictable flashes of invisibility. “If I’m just…stuck in my current condition? What then?”
Xiaoyi shakes her head. “Everything is temporary, Yan Yan. And all the more reason to seize whatever’s in front of you while it’s still there.”
