Baba talks like he will never stop again.

The words leave his lips through the too-wide gap between his front teeth, like the whistling February air that always sweeps through the torn window screens and leaves the inside of our house the same temperature as the outside. Baba tells me to close my eyes and imagine I’m lounging on a warm beach, perhaps Clearwater or Coronado, and pretend the cold away.

I ask Ma why he can never help but finish a story, and she just shakes her head in exasperation: The words will bottle up inside him and rattle like a bell. 

Once I watched the butcher beat a fish to death at the Asian supermarket. It was flailing the way I imagine a frog’s torn limb would, still shuddering, twitching, not knowing it was already dead. 

That night I turn away, tight-lipped, from the steaming bao buns Ma places in front of me. I’d like to imagine that my stomach is roiling from the memory of slaughter, but more likely it rumbles at the smell of braised pork belly, shiitake, crumbled tofu, and chives that get stuck in the back of our teeth, needing to be coaxed out with a toothpick. 

Baba’s chapped lips quirk at the corners, and I already know that the words are about to stream out of him like the perpetual trickle of water from our downstairs faucet, leaky and dejected, but not yet broken enough to be fixed. 

When I was young

我小的时候                   he always begins

we ate bao buns on New Year’s. We would eat sunflower seeds and chip our teeth from cracking them open. We ate peanuts and sweet syrup on a stick and called it candy.

He bares his teeth, and I can see the ridges where the sunflowers wore them down, like little anthills on stained yellow enamel. 

We tried to stay awake as long as possible, as if the sun would never come up again. And the first morning after we ate bao buns again. On the second day, we also ate bao buns. And we did on the fourth and fifth days, too.

I never ask him what happened on the third day. Baba forgets to eat as he talks and his eyes glow yellow like a hawk’s under the waning kitchen lights. He twirls bamboo chopsticks between his fingers and traces shapes into the grain of the table. Perhaps, if he had been an artist like his father was, they could have been beautiful. 

We ate so many bao buns that they would come right back up. Your grandmother’s cooking was awful. He pauses to think. And they were always vegetable filling. It was the Li family tradition to eat vegetable bao buns on New Year’s day. 

Ma likes to plate our dinners obsessively, forbidding us to eat until she forms neat rows and columns. We watch, pretending that the spirals of radish and salt-boiled bok choy won’t immediately be desecrated by our chopsticks.

The further along the bamboo you hold your chopsticks, the farther you will end up from home when you grow old, my mother warns me. So I slide my fingers down the bamboo even when it makes it harder to pick at the blush-pink radish ribbons. She wipes the edges of the plate of mapo tofu and afterwards, uses the napkin that comes away red to wash the dishes.

Each bite of food you leave on your plate is a mountain that you will have to eat in the afterlife, she warns us, and I exchange a glance with Baba. So I bite into the bao bun. I can’t pretend that it isn’t one of the best things I have eaten. 

. . .

Baba never lets me watch TV lying down. You’ll lose your vision and go blind, he says. It is just another one of his sayings. He likes chengyu 成语, Chinese idioms the most. 

乱七八糟 (luàn qī bā zāo), he shakes his head in mock displeasure at my trash can, overflowing with stubs of papers, empty Crunch wrappers, and the butts of pencils too short to reach the blade in the sharpener. Without asking, he silently empties the trash can. He replaces the plastic bag with a new one. 

He watches the 2 a.m. bruises that hang below my eyes and frowns, 废寝忘食, “forget to eat, forget to sleep.” He brings a plate of mangoes to my door, sliced in tic-tac-toe. I tell him I like blueberries better, but my fingers peel the cubes from the mangoes’ skin, and juice stains my pants in plaid stripes of yellow. In the morning, there are three boxes of blueberries stacked in the refrigerator. 

The fifteenth day of New Year is special, he tells me. That day your grandfather would make lanterns. He would draw Pigsy and Monkey from 西游记 (xī yóu jì) and place the candle inside. The smoke would push the drawing and the figures would move. The other kids’ lanterns could only light up, but the ones your grandfather made were special. 

I hear the crooning of the mourning dove. I imagine closing my eyes to the burning of candles. I imagine Pigsy dancing in circles on a ballet stage. I imagine my grandfather’s hands, ones I have never seen, making special lanterns till morning comes.

. . .

The day my grandmother died, I watched Baba’s bowed shadow from the end of the hallway. I saw him crumple under the news like a paper airplane, holding the receiver to his ear, his goodbye sent seven thousand miles too late. I pretended not to notice the sheen in his eyes, and he pretended that it was not there. He blinked and it was gone. 

Cows know when they are going to die, he tells me. Our family owned a cow, and when I led her to her death, she was crying. I laugh and tell him that cows can’t cry. 

. . .

We argue, and even the creaking floorboards cower, too afraid to make noise beneath our fury. His face twists like a storm and I am filled with such hatred that I believe if I pierced my wrists, my blood would run black. 

White-eared wolf, my mother howls at me somewhere beyond the doorframe, hands patchy white and dripping with clumps of unkneaded dough. Ungrateful. 

Baba is silent when he is angry. My vision tunnels so that his face shrinks and then balloons so comically large that I laugh, forgetting for a moment I’m supposed to be furious. He rips the glasses from my face and I stumble like a blinded mouse through the house and out the back. When my shoe jams in the door, I tear another hole in the mesh screen. Let the mosquitos bite him at night, I pray. 

In the morning we pretend that nothing has happened. We are good at this, pretending. 

. . .

You are the banana children, my father tells me. 

You have the hair of a black waterfall and they will pull their eyes into slits and laugh at you. Don’t be upset. 

My heart flutters. “But I am American,” I protest. 

My father is afraid of new cities. He tells me that he feels lost and unfamiliar, like he has been pulled into a dream where no one understands his tongue and the world is written in what he cannot read. I can’t pity him, this man who has read me stories and eaten the tomatoes I picked off my plate and placed onto his.

My tongue also twists into sharp sounds—a quick, light t that is imperceptible to the ear, think the flap t of “water” (wader) or the glottal stop of “forgotten” (forgo-n). My father pronounces each syllable carefully, painfully, as if afraid they will go unheard. Each comes out with a puff and the clack of teeth, like the sharp t of “pretending.” I listen to him, and the vowel pacing rises from the back of the throat like bile; it comes out too fast, too sloppy. 

I am the banana child, and I spill from my father’s tongue the way Dionysus tore himself from Zeus’s thigh and Athena sprang from his gnarled skull.

I see my father’s hair as the color of static on old TVs and I press on the bulging veins of his hands as if I could force them to stitch back together with his skin. Sometimes, in my dreams, I pretend that I speak as he speaks, the words so dense that they form a canopy of fig trees that reaches through my bedroom windows. Afterward, in the morning, there is the tang of metal that sinks into my gums, my tongue, and I remember nothing.