The Wind Beneath My Wings

Leslie C. Lin
February 2009

I became an aunt for the first time last year. My niece, Julia Megan Wang was born a healthy and beautiful baby in Washington DC in July 2008. As I listened to my sister Elaine telling me everything there is to know about this new life and how much she is enjoying being a mother, I couldn’t help but wonder, where did my ambitious, career-driven super woman sister go?

I wasn’t the only person who was surprised by this change of personality and new found motherly love, my sister also took some time to understand what it takes to be a parent. Before the birth of baby Julia, Elaine has been a small business owner who would travel several weeks at a time for work. Today, she leaves work at noon so she could take Julia to the park or mommy’s group in the afternoons. I would never have imagined that my workaholic sister had eventually become one of those mothers who couldn’t end a conversation without mentioning the name of her child.

But it wasn’t always like this. Elaine didn’t particularly care for children or even want children of her own. Having involuntarily become the surrogate mother for her three younger siblings 13 years ago, Elaine had always thought very little about marriage or changing diapers. She was very much focused on her career and would spend longer hours at work than most people. Her friends had no doubt that Elaine would be the last to marry, if she married at all.

Unfortunately, I was one of the reasons that Elaine wouldn’t have children in the first place. After our mother passed away 13 years ago, I, along with my other sister and brother and a house in Boston, were handed down to Elaine like a pair of socks. She was 19 years old at the time. I wouldn’t call it fun when a college freshman had to rush home after classes to cook dinner for her younger siblings or take them to the mall to exchange the broken calculator.

On the weekends, Elaine would take us out to dinner and movies. We would have Korean food one weekend, Indian the next, but Japanese was always our favorite. She subscribed to teenager magazines like the Seventeen and dressed us like American teenagers, buying tank tops and flip flops for us. Elaine encouraged us to watch sitcoms like Friends or Everybody Loves Raymond and songs with easy lyrics like the Wind Beneath My Wings so we could learn American culture. When she took us out to restaurants, she would wait patiently for me to muster courage and construct a sentence in English to ask the waitress for a fork.

In her spare time, Elaine learned to fix the broken toilet and managed the household finance. As the new mother of three children at age 19, Elaine didn’t have very much personal time or the luxury to live the life of a normal college student like most of her friends. It probably wasn’t fair for her, but I had always pictured of us from the movie the Little Women- the four of us made a happy family. I never told Elaine, but it was one of the happiest years of my life in the US.

Years later, my sister would confess that she didn’t particularly enjoy that year of child rearing. Like every other 19-year-old American college students, she wanted to go to parties or go on dates with boys her age. There were times when she dreaded going home to three kids or having to drive us around to our tennis lessons or attending parent’s day at my middle school. But she stayed home. She stayed home and coached me on my college applications and analyzed the pros and cons of each university that I was applying to.

My freshman year in college, my father’s business faced serious financial setbacks and could no longer afford our education expenses. Against my father’s request for us to drop out of school, Elaine insisted that we stayed in school and continued our education. She sought help and looked for resources to finance my college education. She believed that a good education for her brother and sisters was more important than anything else. She was 22 years old at the time.

Throughout my college years, Elaine taught me how to write impressive resume, the importance of doing internships, or how to prepare for job interviews. But she also made sure that I understood why it is important to take courses that are unrelated to my psychology major, courses like economics and accounting- think personal finance. She urged me to take courses in art history or anthropology so I could be exposed to different areas of knowledge. She was happy for me when I spent my junior year in Tokyo as an exchange student. Elaine wanted me to have the kind of college experience that she never had.

A few years ago, Elaine moved to Shanghai and wanted to “make it” in China. As luck would have it, she fell in love with a man who knew how much she had gone through and vowed to take care of her for the rest of her life. Taking all of her friends by surprise, Elaine got married at age 25 and moved back to the US. When occasionally I whine about not having her luck or meeting Mr. Right in Shanghai, my sister would say, “I know its cliché, but seriously, love comes when you are least expecting it”.

With the encouragement of her husband, my sister continued on to get her masters’ degree and became an entrepreneur with an education consultancy. We have always joked that we were Elaine’s first clients and guinea pig. After all, she was the one who saw us through high school and college.

Ever since my sister became pregnant with Julia in the end of 2007, we would talk on the phone more frequently than usual. And it was then, for the first time, that my sister didn’t sound like a fifty-year-old female CEO of a fortune 500 company. She actually sounded her age and seemed vulnerable for the first time. My sister told me how much she missed our mother when she now carried a child inside her. She wanted to know what kind of baby rearing tips our mother would give her. She doubted her ability to be a good mother to Julia while she continues working full-time.

A few weeks ago my sister called me and told me about this high school student she recently met through work. The girl told my sister that she was adopted into an American family from Columbia when she was an infant. However, her adoptive parents told her about the adoption when she was little. They also made sure that she grew up understanding her roots and being able to speak Spanish well; The family would spend every summer in Columbia. My sister was extremely moved by the story of this 16-year-old and said to me: As much as I am now grateful for being a mother and enjoys taking care of another human being, I wonder if I could ever love and go this far for someone else’s child.

But I wanted to tell my sister that she has already been loving someone else’s children more than they could ever have hoped for. She has opened more doors for me in my life than anyone else and made a much better person out of me. I have no doubts that Julia would grow up to become an intelligent, compassionate, and happy young lady. And guess what, I am already a little jealous of Julia and all the attention she gets from my sister!

Elaine, this is for you. Thank you for being the wind beneath my wings all these years.

Come and encase me, save me from drowning.

I have loved you for the entirety of my life. The thought of having lost you to the wilderness of the world pains my heart.

So I go on life pretending everything is going to be ok, that I have your love until foreverness should overrule.

A whole new day

I lit a long-missed cigarette, fearing the arrival of tomorrow. As I drown in the poisoning cigarette smokes and tasteless coffee, the scent of perfume lingering on my fingers and lips, I fear the fear of Cinderella. Tomorrow is a whole new day, a day when I am no longer the Cinderella living in the perfect world, the day when I'd stop thinking of Barcelona, the men whom I had loved and made love to, the pictures of old jaded men walking aimlessly, wandering in and out of my heart, the moist openings for your big sweaty palm, the recklessness, the restlessness, the hate, the love, the melodies, the streets lined with men and women who haven't got the faintest idea of what love is.

You have come back to me, my life once again, or haven't you ever left?

I love you, I told L many many times in the days that went by without fear. Then I saw the tears welled up in his big round eyes, the innocence has long gone.

I wait

“If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.” – Oscar Wilde

I have been waiting. All these time. Waiting. Day in and day out, I wait. I wait by the door. I wait like a faithful dog for his person. I wait for a note from you. I wait for the time you would think of me. I wait with another life in this room. I wait petting his head, smoothing and scratching his fur. I wait thinking of the men. I wait with hopes. I wait hopelessly. And I wait.

I wait for the time you'd come home. I wait for the time we'd finally meet, the coarseness of your hand on me, my eyes. Your eyes on me. the tenderness breaks my heart. I wait for the one chance to see you. Beautifying myself, my ever gesture, the way my hair is pinned. The moment silence would and should take over. The time I'd not have to say a word. And you would, you would understand.

Now that you are in my life, you said, the words you said, I'd always be here for you, you said, and you said that thousands of times. So I wait, with or without traces of tears, for you. All my life. I wait for you.

The bananas have gone weary. The water now stale. The cat hides no more.

The hide

In the middle of the day I left room twentyeight with a slight regret of having said too much, of having disclosed every thought that roams through my mind, be it mature or immature, deserving to be known, or better buried for the dead. I walked out of the room with a large pane of glass window, where we were bathed in the warm afternoon winter sun, the kind of world I was often lost to, in which I would let down my guard, and consequently say more than I should.

It comes with a fear, a kind of fear that you'd taste in between your teeth in the middle of the night, wishing you hadn't told the world everything there is to know about you. What is there to know about me? a 25-year-old who's seen too little of the world, who is nothing but judgmental, who has too much pride and too little faith? Who sits through dinner parties with her fingers twisted, bitten, stained with blood under the table? Who can't muster enough courage for a simple act of picking up the phone and dialing the numbers? Who tightens her shoulders at every word she writes down, stiffens her eyebrows at the unsightliness of the world?

There are times when I am told that I have a nice smile. A smile that would charm the men's socks off, so I was told. A smile that will bring down the bridge, the kind that'd melt your heart. I thought long and hard about the truth of the statement. And sometimes, just sometimes, I don't know how much I deserve the smile.

In between the jazz, I sat through Brown Sugar last night, among the cigarette smokes and whiskeys, from time to time asking if the man was missing me. Having lost Lilu to the hide the entire day, I was starting to understand what it would feel like to having lost your precious one. I was at one point someone's preciousness. Today the man sits at home, fears for his life, goes on life not knowing how well his precious one is faring the world, or how the world fares her.

Then I thought perhaps I shouldn't have said so much about who I really am. It was the sunlight. The warm winter afternoon sunlight.

Lucky

In loving memory of Fen Fen Chang, the woman who loved me unconditionally for 12 years and continues to watch over me today.

I stole for the first time when I was 9 years old.

It was a cold winter night. My parents had been out to a wedding all night, so I knew it was the perfect time to steal. I went to my mother's room and took out 200 Taiwanese dollars from her drawer. I slept that night with the fear of being caught, and of having to lose this precious money before I could make good use of it. The next morning I woke up early, skipped breakfast and ran to school for the most important school event of the year- the book fair.

Later when my mother found out that I had stolen money from her to buy books, she wasn't happy about it. But she eventually learned to resign herself to the reality that her daughter had taken after her and had become another hopeless bookworm, and would do anything to get her hands on a book.

My mother taught literature in a high school. As a parent and an educator, my mother understood the power of reading in shaping a child's character. She understood that reading fictions stimulates children's imagination and opens up a world of possibilities for them. She believed that reading about people's lives teaches children and young adults to be empathetic and compassionate. So I grew up in a house with a huge study where every wall was stacked with books from top to bottom. When I close my eyes and think back on my childhood, I see my mother reading to us 4 kids in our favorite reading spot. My mother made sure that if anything, the house would never run out of books to read, stories to be told, and wild fantasies to be imagined.

Unfortunately, on another cold winter day, my world fell apart. The chapter on my happy childhood came to an end. I was 12 years old and my mother was 42. A heart attack that happened within seconds took her life and left me without a mother. I grew up overnight.

Shortly after my mother's death, my father sent my siblings and me to boarding schools in the U.S. At age 13, I started living in dormitories without parental supervision in a foreign country. I didn’t speak English very well and I wasn't very good at making friends. I was always lonely, and I was very scared. After I finished all the Chinese books I could lay my hands on, I resorted to reading English novels. I could go on for days without speaking to anyone at school, but I learned to appreciate English literature before I could even speak a word of it.

In books and literature, through beautifully written language, I found escape. I found escape from living the life of a miserable teenager in a foreign land. I was often instantly transported into different parts of the world. I could easily be in Tokyo one morning with Haruki Murakami listening to his favorite jazz melodies, or witnessing the cruelty of the Vietnam War with Tim O'Brien in The Things They Carried. And of course, hanging out with Africa's number 1 lady detective was always top priority.

My last year in high school, I took a creative writing course called the Found Voices. I started writing, and I wrote like a mad woman. I wrote one story after another. I wrote mysteries and love stories. I wrote dramas. And I wrote about my mother. I wrote about the life of this extraordinary woman, about how well respected she had been and how much she was missed in the neighborhood. I wrote about the pain and the heartache of losing her. I wrote about life without a mother as a teenager. I wrote about the love of reading she wanted to instill into me when I was a child. I wrote about the time that we had spent together.

In my writing, I told my mother the things that I never had a chance to tell her. I apologized to her for being rude to her the night before she passed away. I made promises to her that I would not let her down. And I promised myself that I would always stay true to my feelings in my writing. At age16, I couldn't think of a better way to feel closer to my mother.

At the end of the school year, I was awarded The English Award. I was the first student whose native language was not English to receive the award in the high school's history. And I thought I was going to win the math or science award like other Asian kids.

I thought long and hard about how you could possibly get to know me better. I thought about telling you the one time when I ran naked in college. I thought about telling you how it is like living in 4 countries in 5 years. But then I realized that, nothing would do a better job than telling you about how I came to build my life around reading and writing.

If there was one thing that my mother wanted me to understand, it was to love and appreciate literature and the joy it brings. There is a Taiwanese folklore that goes: children who have mothers are precious beings and children who don’t are wild grass. But I have always known that my mother had already given me the best present before she had to go. And because of that, I never became wild grass. I know in my heart that I will always be the luckiest child.

Snow trucks and all

I'd wake up in the middle of the nights mistaking with full conviction that I were in Boston, a city I believe for a fact would never crumble under any circumstances. I'd hear the sound of the snow trucks and find comfort in knowing it had snowed after all. Strangely enough, Shanghai isn't the sort of city you'd confuse for any other city, with its unique lot of people, how the streets tasted like, the way the air felt on the hair of your skin. A little while ago, T wanted to believe it had been San Francisco. I'd want it to be Boston any night.