8
The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee
Age sixteen, my mother loads up red tubs of noodles, teacups chipped and white-gray as teeth, rice clumps that glue themselves to the plastic tub sides or dissolve and turn papery in the weak tea sloshing around the bottom. She’s at Diamond Chan’s restaurant, where most of her cousins work after school and during summer vacations, some of her friends, too. There’s Suzy at the cash register, totaling up bills and giving back change, a little dish of toothpicks beside her and a basket of mints that taste like powdered cream. A couple of my mother’s cousins are washing dishes behind the swinging kitchen door, and some woman called Auntie #2 (at her age, everyone is Auntie and each must take a number) takes orders at a table of women that look like Po Po’s mah-jongg club. They don’t play anymore. They go to the racetrack.
The interior of Diamond Chan’s restaurant is red: red napkins, red walls, red carp in the tank and in signature seals on the cheap wall hangings. Luck or no luck, it’s like the inside of an esophagus. My mother’s nails are cracked, kept short by clipping or gnawing, glisten only when varnished with the grease of someone else’s leftovers. Still, she enjoys working here, its repetitive actions, the chores that keep her from thinking. The money my mother earns will soon get sucked into the price of a pink cashmere sweater for Po Po’s birthday, along with a graduation photo of herself, also in a pink sweater, pearls, her face airbrushed fog-rose at the cheeks and mouth.
Graduation? Unlike her brothers, she knows she’s going to college. Smith, to be exact, though without the approval of the school counselor. “Smith is . . . expensive,” the school counselor told my mother only yesterday, which is why my mother is slightly irritated now, clomping around under the weight of full tubs of used dishes. “Smith is not for girls like you.” What does she plan to be when she grows up? “A doctor?” my mother suggests. Um, no. “Nursing. Or teaching, perhaps, which is even more practical. Don’t you think?”
My mother, who is practical above all things, agreed.
So it’s the University of Washington in two years with a degree in education. Fine. She slams down full vials of soy sauce onto each table, makes sure the nozzle heads are screwed on exactly. Someone the other week stuck chewing gum up under the lid of one, and my mother had to dig it out with an old chopstick and then forgot to fully tighten the lid. Black, sweet-smelling pool on the white tablecloth. Seeing it, she could feel the back of her throat fill up with salt. Smith is not for girls like her.
“Cindy!” someone shouts. The kitchen door swings open. A momentary view: white chef shirts stained with red and brown grease. A woman wiping her brow with the back of her hand.
It is not, my mother would argue, the fact she could be denied the dream of Smith so much that someone should tell her she could be denied it. My mother knows the counselor was hinting at some limitation my mother would prefer to ignore. Still, she is whiter than white, should intelligence be considered a pale attribute. Deep down she understands she has a special capacity for work; she likes it, she’s good at it, she excels at school and its predictable problems. Hers is a discipline entirely lacking in the spirits of whatever loh fan may sneer or wonder at her in study hall; to be told by a fat, dyed-blond guidance counselor she may be inferior? The monkey calling the man animal.
Now out of the kitchen erupts the newcomer, a smatter of duck fat and ash. Like everyone here, he’s someone’s cousin’s cousin, though he talks like he’s got marbles piled in his mouth.
“I come from Hong Kong,” he told my mother on break in the alley. “From real Chinese.” Is there a substitute? He leers at Suzy, waves his hand dismissively over the carved dragon beams, the waitresses gossiping in English. He’s two years older than my mother, lean, high-cheekboned, shaggy-headed. He has big plans for himself. He likes to whip his arms and legs around in the kitchen, threaten the other busboy. Already he’s dropped a dish, insulted the cook, cut his thumb on a knife blade. He smells funny.
“Mr. B.O. Jangles,” Suzy calls him. “Kung Fooey.”
“What the hell the matter with him?” growls Auntie #2. “I never seen nobody act like that before.”
“It’s all the rage in China,” my mother says. She is repeating what he told her in a tone of voice that is meant to seem sarcastic but comes out another way. All the rage. In China.
She stacks more dishes in her tub. From the kitchen comes a high-pitched human squawk and the sound of something clattering to the floor. He’s going to get fired soon and my mother is never going to Smith. A waitress scurries out of the kitchen, bearing more food, a panicked look on her face. My mother stands and watches the kitchen door swing in place behind her back. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
Around age thirteen, for summer vacation I come down with laziness heretofore unheard of in a child. I doze in bed till noon at least, stay up every night watching bad movies or reading. Sometimes, if it’s a bad enough movie and she is not teaching the next morning, my mother wakes and joins me.
Tonight is Enter the Dragon. I remember it because a year or two ago when it came out, all the boys on the block bought numchucks. We smacked our backs with the sticks on chains, left thumb-thick bruise prints on our rib cages. Jeff down the street still has the movie poster, still tells people he has a black belt in karate.
My mother and I watch Bruce Lee set foot on the island, followed closely by the playboy and the black man who will die after the banquet and all his women. Bruce Lee narrows his eyes, ripples his chest muscles underneath his white turtleneck.
“I knew him,” my mother tells me. “I worked with him in a restaurant when I was in high school.”
“Really?” This is now officially the only cool thing about her. “What was he like?”
“I don’t remember. No one liked him, though. All that kung fu stuff; it looked ridiculous. Like a parody.”
We watch in the dark as Bruce Lee confronts himself, over and over. In the hall of mirrors, his bloody chest and face seem outlined in silver. He is handsome and wiry; he caws at his opponents like an ethereal avenger. I peek at my mother beside me on the sofa. In the television light, her broad face twists into an expression I do not recognize. Then the light flickers, changes, makes her ordinary again.