SmokeLong Quarterly

Ma says girls should stand pigeon-toed so their bones learn how to stack themselves in triangles, the strongest shape. Bridges are built out of triangles, she says, and every weekend we visit the Golden Gate Bridge so we can count the number of cars that make it safely to the other side, each representative of an abuse that will be done to us by a man – a Honda civic for the day he lays a hand on our skin, a chevy for every time our spit whitens the floor. See how the bridge never wavers? Ma asks, and I can tell she is jealous of its solidity, how it reddens the fog instead of the other way around. Ma is thin like tissue paper, punched through by sunlight. When she speaks, her words curl inwards as if created on the backdrop of a flame, even when she hooks her tongue through her teeth to create triangular vowels, or when she props her elbow on her waist and intersects two ankles underneath the dinner table. Even when she swaps circular chinese for triangular English, hopping v and l on her uvula, calculating the shortest distance between ü and u. In all of her school photos, Ma is the shape of a rectangle, the tallest in her grade. She stands with her feet spread apart and her chest pulled outwards, proud of her early puberty, the nickel shine of her hair, how her lips are bowed like cupids in opposition, death centered at the philtrum. When I show her old photographs, she submits this as evidence for all her future misfortune – she stood too straight when her father convinced her that her American husband would ask for her opinions at the dinner table, when her parents said a Chinese degree would hold the same gravity in Silicon Valley. Ma doesn’t trust any scale after she learned that weight fluctuates with location, that mass was not an independent variable but a liability. In America, she is always lighter than she was in her hometown. Once, she created missing posters for the weight she had been promised, printing a picture of her scale and the difference between lb and kg, not just in letters but in strokes, along with a photoscan of her diploma from Tsinghua University. No one called the number listed along the bottom: 1-800-FIND-ME, except for a man who wanted to report a missing Siamese cat, because isn’t Siamese a Chinese name? When that failed, she called Best Buy and demanded a refund on her scale, but the worker insisted she had bought a cooking scale, which measured in grams, not pounds, and had most likely measured the weight of her words instead the weight of her person. In the days after, she weighed everything from hullabaloo to sticky to no, tallying the barely perceptible changes against her wall with a Number 2 pencil, next to the tick marks of my growth from preschool to junior high. I wanted to tell her it was futile – no words would weigh more than half a gram unless they were spoken in unaccented English, unless they were raised in America and fattened by adolescent TV shows like The Kissing Booth and The Summer I Turned Pretty, but I knew she wouldn’t understand that, either. Ma works at the massage parlor next to the Subway no one goes to anymore, the one that someone said was haunted by immigrants, muttering the names of bones and arteries underneath her fingertips in Chinese until her customers tell her to stop, fearing ghosts, fearing shapes they can’t identify. So instead, I allow her to remake our wall with a new mural, a benchmark for development, my growth from collapsible to indomitable, feet turned to face each other, shoelaces licking ankles, shortened and lengthened, pigeon-toed. We will be strong forever, Ma exclaims, even though we both smell perpetually of cigarettes and cheap essential oils and I am forgetting how to converse with her. When we are afraid of disappearing, we dye our hair a matching red and stand underneath the morning San Francisco fog, two blocks in between, shouting i can see you, i can still see you until the fog eats through our shadows and we must find each other again, arms outstretched, unwavering, the wind unable to move us, the crowd unable to separate us.