Things happen because I see holes. Tiny tears. Dots and tunnels.

-East Los Angeles, 1984

___________________

It starts the day my father is driving to Rosarito Beach, Mexico. I’m nine years-old. My mother is reading a book. In the backseat, my sister traces the lifelines on our palms and I imagine the highway pouring through the windshield, riding over me, between my parents’ dark heads. The Tijuana hillside looms to the left. The shantytowns blur into terraced rock and crumbling cliffs, dusty and pale on the gray horizon. I stare out the window at the pieces of line-tied laundry blowing between dry trees. T-shirts. Bed sheets. Little pants. A blue dress for a girl whips over rubber tires and a cardboard wall, shifting with a string of elongated shadows across razor wire. My mother closes her book. She looks out at the hills too. She’s always said no matter how big the world seems there’s still nothing in it, that I should never let myself be tricked. My mother says this because she was a singer before she married my father and believes she has savvy. In Taichung they called her Da-Li Poadan on the radio, Mandarin for Dolly Parton. In white boots and a whirl of fringes, she delivered American Classic Country to an audience of sweaty islanders, her voice a refreshing wind across their sticky, dark skin.

___________________

I grew up in East Los Angeles, on the border of Whittier Narrows and the City of Commerce. Amid the whirl of headlights over Whittier Boulevard and its rows of pink and yellow clapboard houses, black dogs and chain-link fences, my mother’s advice about the world was all I had. In our liquor store, she occasionally remembered the best things in her life had been pretty and cheap. She would hold a bottle of White Port in front of a customer and smile, for a moment, wanting to describe the light through the glass before slipping it into a brown paper bag. At thirty, her face retained the brightness and elasticity of youth. Her eyes shone like black pools, each a distant oasis, strangely aglow beneath the neon signs and circling moths, the white ceiling vents blowing dust.

Her beauty had always been noticed. At night when the neighborhood was roamed by drunks and addicts, and my mother stood behind the counter ringing up the register, my sister and I heard what our customers wanted to do to her beneath her shirt. I could always see these men, our midnight patrons. The way they smiled on the sly. Wiped heir mouths with a full hand. But, my mother was stoic. She stared at the faces. She punched keys and counted change and pretended she didn’t understand words in English or Spanish. Behind the counter my sister and I played cats cradle on plastic stools next to our mother’s tall stool, our fingers wrapped in pink and yellow yarn, and we could see our father lifting wooden cases in the walk-in freezer across the store. Behind frosted glass, he trucked crates with a red dolly beneath rows and rows of milky icicles growing from steel rods.

My mother was no longer a singer in East L.A. But to prove she kept her spark, she broke dishes against the walls in our apartment upstairs. Once she bled to her elbows without wincing. She told us it was important in life to have control of our emotions, especially when it hurt. My sister and I swept the broken dishes into plastic shopping bags and kept them beneath our beds because it was rare that my mother spoke at all.

___________________

Maybe it’s the ocean air or the sunlight seeping through the clouds, but I remember my whole family is relaxed when we drive into Rosarito Beach for our first family vacation.

“Come on,” my father says, limping briskly across the sand to claim a spot near the shore. My father limps because his left femur is six inches shorter than his right. But, he doesn’t use a cane. He is a man who can do 100 push-ups before our eyes. My father walks on tippy-toes on the left side and shows us he’s normal. “Don’t want to be last one,” he jokes, inching towards the horizon.

Trailing behind him, my sister, Ming, looks brighter. The beach is speckled with giant umbrellas and families from Southern California. My sister is twelve and likes blonde boys. As she runs past my father, she eyes a pasty teenager in board shorts a couple of umbrellas down, watching as the boy yells at his pinkish mother who’s asleep on a towel. “Are you coming?” she calls out, looking back at me as she touches a pimple on her chin.

Before I can answer, my mother pats my shoulder and points across the sand towards the boardwalk a short distance away. I see the mix of colors, the barbeque smoke drifting across woven blankets, the crepe piñatas hovering along a low concrete wall at the edge of the beach. I see wooden puppets turning on strings. And, I want one. A puppet my sister and I can play with behind the liquor store counter when we are tired of cats cradle.

“Will you go there with me?” she asks in Mandarin.

I nod. I briefly forget about my sister and father until I see them shrinking smaller and smaller against the rolling shore. I expect my mother to send me after them, to tell my father where we’re going, but she just slips her fingers through mine and leads the way. Through the corner of my eye, I can see Ming rummaging the ice chest on her knees. My father is flinging a sheet over the sand, watching as the cloth settles at his feet.

___________________

Mother is stretching her arms against the horizon as we step across the sand. A blue bathing suit outlines her slightly pear-shaped body beneath a gauzy white dress. I am always a little afraid of her because of the dishes, because of the stoic face. The unreadable black pools of her eyes. But, because of her beauty and thin, ethereal voice, the fineness of her every feature, my sister and I want to be just like her even though my father’s said she has a hole inside.

When we cross over to the boardwalk, I notice a grainy quality about the sky and it reminds me of the dust drifting across our parking lot back home. A dozen helium balloons float overhead. Red peanuts pop in rolling carts. Cotton candy spins around paper cones. I hold onto my mother’s white dress, following her as she fingers silk scarves and imitation purses along a row of blue-tarp booths. The wind has blown most of the hair from her bun. The thick strands roll softly down her shoulders making her appear younger against the rippling scarves and woven rugs. My mother looks the way she does in the Da-Li Poadan nightclub posters that promised all her fans she was a sterling silver star.

When my father moved to L.A., he was told it would take another two years for the immigration papers to clear for his wife and daughters. In the Federal Building, downtown, he spoke to a woman through a hole cut into Plexiglas. My father tried to slide the forms through the slot towards her fingertips, but she would not let him. Behind the Plexiglas, people were typing. Phones were ringing. The woman wearing white and a small boat-shaped hat returned the photocopies of our Taiwan, R.O.C., passports and my father reluctantly collected the pieces of paper from the metal slot. As he folded our black-and-white photos, fitting them back into an envelope, he wondered what we were doing. His family. We seemed further away than ever. Or he did.

My father tells me all of this when I am older.

He will tell me he sipped Carlo Rossi wine after closing time and sat on the fire escape of our two-bedroom apartment, peering at the power-lines glinting in moonlight, glinting sideways from a flood of streetlamps. And very late, he circled the new city in a yellow Pontiac Firebird that he bought in cash from a young couple in Ventura County. On the dashboard there was a bubble sticker of Rosarito Beach left by one of the previous owners. Later my father will point to the puffy rainbow colors, the peeling glitter-filled sea, and tell my sister and me about those lonely two years when he imagined us in the car with him on our way to this happy place.

___________________

Rosarito is a lot like East L.A. except for all the off-duty U.S. Navy men walking around in Hawaiian shirts.

“Tonight’s whore-fisting night,” one of them howls, stumbling towards my mother and me as we stroll past a booth. The sailors are barreling through the crowd of locals in flip-flops and buzz cuts, cocking their chins at the pails of steamed tamales and the rotating churros, at the Mexican girls with short shorts and thick dark legs smiling back with silver bridges.

My mother has stopped walking.

A few feet ahead, the first sailor grips his friend in broad daylight like the world’s rocking and he’s going to fall off. He spins on one foot to keep from falling over and as he swings himself back up, his pale yellow eyes sweep across my face. I tighten my grip around my mother’s dress. I notice blue liquid spilling from his tumbler. The sailor blinks and then glares at his friend. “Did I say whore-fisting or whore-fisting?”

“No joke.” The friend is red faced and swollen too.

“No fucking joke, man. Real whores come right into your hand and they give you a fucking glove. It’s the shit. My friend, I do not lie.”

As the sailors pass, my mother looks away.

My chin is against her hip. One of the Navy men says the word “whore” one last time, turning around, glancing in our direction. As his voice disappears into a sea of strong, young men, I can’t decide if he was laughing at us or at the plain-looking Mexican girl selling lemonade from a tub behind us, the lemon slices floating with ice beneath her round face.

“Do you know the word ‘whore’?” my mother asks in Mandarin.

I don’t answer because I am scared again of her black eyes and the twist in her lips. I stared into the ground instead, at the Smurf blue liquid seeping into the concrete.

“I used to have everything, Cecilia,” she says, pausing for a moment. “Sometimes, I still have that old feeling, like I can have it all again.”

She slips her fingers through my hair and trickles her nails lightly across my forehead.

My heart is beating.

“Do you believe me?”

___________________

I believed anything my mother said when I was young and helpless and could not know any better. I believed everything my father said too, though she did not.

But, I will learn for certain the world is as empty as my mother insists in passing.

I see the first hole in Rosarito and then they will appear like sudden rips, tiny pinpricks leaking light. Later, they scatter like silver jacks across gray landscapes and stucco homes. The holes are portals, pipes between beginnings and ends, perforating the edges of dry hillsides and wet sidewalks, tracing my view of the world until I see that all-time is like starlight.

-Taichung, 1976

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Tyler Lodson tells us he’s waited his whole life to meet someone as beautiful and sweet as my mother. He’s been following us for two hours now. At the end of the afternoon, the three of us sit on a bench at the far corner of the Rosarito boardwalk, watching the ocean and drinking the fresh pineapple juice he’s paid for.

My mother beams, chewing on a straw.

Tyler is clean-cut with thin round glasses, twenty-two years old, from South Carolina. He is an officer and a Presidential Fellow. When we were walking, my mother whispered we could trust him. He has a gentle face, she said. As Tyler quietly enjoys the sun, watching a seagull swoop over a black jetty, my mother speaks Mandarin over his slight body. She is smirking. She tells me she is sure Tyler is shy. She notes that he isn’t drinking from a plastic tumbler, how he has nice posture, and long delicate fingers as if he could play the piano.

“I love hearing the sound of Chinese,” Tyler says.

I peer at his milky complexion. His small brown eyes are chocolate almonds. I think he might have a gentle face. I don’t know what it means yet, but I can’t imagine someone as soft spoken as Tyler fisting whores with the others.

When my mother stops talking, Tyler leans over her to look at me sitting at the end of the bench. He asks, “How is it?” He’s pointing at the stick of cotton candy melting in my hand. “Good?”

I nod and try to smile. My lips tremble. I am embarrassed, but I don’t know why.

“She like everything.” My mother whispers over the straw that is now smeared with lipstick. “She no trouble. She good girl.”

“Well, she looks like a good girl,” Tyler says. He smiles shyly as I look away. Then he turns to the ocean like he can’t think of what else to say but doesn’t want to leave. He runs his eyes along my mother’s legs and tiny waist, the bulge of her small breasts, and meets her gaze once more. Tyler touches her knee lightly and then scratches his nose. “San Diego isn’t far from L.A. You can always visit.”

___________________

My mother gathers her hair into her hands and unsnaps her clip. Her dark locks cascade over her shoulders, curling and frizzing against her cheeks. She stares straight into his eyes and slides the straw back into her mouth. There is a picture of my mother back at home, hidden in her box of old things, where she’s winking at someone, smiling like she is now in red lipstick and black lace. She is sitting at her dressing table, backstage, and her hair is messy against her breasts. In the long mirrors behind her, the fleshy tones and silk slips of other women reflect to infinity beneath the round bulbs. I think of this picture because it was my favorite and now I hate it.

___________________ Along the boardwalk, the wind blows through the palm trees, making the sound of tissue paper when it crumbles, and Tyler looks up from my mother’s lips to the bending trunks and shaking fronds. He says, “They’re just like the palmettos back home. They make a whipping sound when the winds get rough.” He smiles, the corner of his eye pinching over a dimple. I suppose sailors care about the wind. “I wish you knew how pretty they are. The palmetto’s the state tree of South Carolina,” he says.

I lean against the bench and I pull my knees between my arms. I watch Tyler touch my mother. I don’t know why, but he makes her eyes brim with tears when he kisses right onto her smirking lips. He parts her mouth with a finger and kisses her again. He slides his milky hand inside her dress and hooks another finger into the top of her bathing suit. In the distance I can still see my father and sister on the sand. At least, I think I know which black figures are theirs against the ocean. I wonder if they miss us. If they might look for us, though they will not find us in this mix of people. I drop the stick of cotton candy and wipe my hands against my knee and as the sugar turns in my stomach I think a normal little girl would probably cry. But, I don’t.

___________________

Instead, I see myself from far away because I am outside of myself. Nine years old, sitting on the edge of a bench beneath the shaking palms, and besides me, an older woman with her beauty still in tact is poised in her own brand of gracefulness, wrapped in the arms of a young Presidential Fellow wearing dress whites. The sky is gray. Soft. Grainy. Near the water some distance away is a limping father and a sister marred by pimples. The blue-gray horizon is reflected in the beautiful woman’s eyes, and sitting next to her, the nine-year-old girl feels the mother’s loneliness because she understands it will become her loneliness one day. As the wind blows through the palm trees and the young Presidential Fellow remembers the palmettos of South Carolina, it’s as if the girl’s soul has slipped away, disappeared into the graininess.

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Susan Y. Chi was born in Taichung and grew up in East L.A. She is the editor of KGB BAR LIT. Her fiction has been published in BOMB. She’s received awards and fellowships from Glimmer Train, Indiana Review, Inkwell, Vermont Studio Center, and SLS -St. Petersburg, Russia. And, in a previous life, Susan was a researcher in the fields of molecular anthropology and experimental medicine at Columbia University and the Scripps Research Institute. Her scientific publications can be found in the American Journal of Human Genetics and the Journal of Virology.