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.

Panda love

This entry chronicles the most meaningful conversation I had with my boss today.

H: what kind of pic is the panda pic? (referring the panda picture on my MSN)
L: the male panda pressing the female's head down so she could give him a BJ
L: thats my interpretation
H: agree, pandas are indeed dumb animals, he apparently doesn't know where are other ways to get her to cooperate
H: send me that pic by the way, want to share with the husband
L: I just sent you a better pic (referring to a picture of two pandas having hot steaming sex)
H: but send me the BJ pic too

100 seconds on positive change

My grandmother is 80-year-old and she is illiterate. Although smart and bright, she never learned to read or write. When she was a little girl working in the rice fields in a small village in Taiwan, she had no idea that one day her grandchild would speak the two most popular languages in the world- English and Chinese. While my grandmother lived her entire life unable to read street signs, I grew up bilingual and educated in the best schools in Taiwan, Japan, and the U.S. I have traveled the world and have lived in more than 4 countries, but my grandmother stays at home all day. The idea of pursuing one’s dream, as I did, is simply unimaginable to her.

Unfortunately, today, there are still more than 100 million children in the world unable to attend school. Even worse, in the least developing countries, illiterate women account for half the country’s population. The inability to read and write leaves women with very few options to escape a life of hardship. My grandmother certainly didn’t have an easy life. Education empowers women and gives them knowledge to improve living conditions for themselves and their families. So I believe that educating women is an important step toward positive change.

So I dream. I dream of a world in which every little girl can read and write, be fascinated by children’s stories and literature, and to see and imagine the world with beautiful languages. And that to me, is a powerful way to make this world a better place.

在寫作之前，我不能和世界碰撞

- 鍾文音

Leo Tolstoy

"All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." - Leo Tolstoy

I’ve been chewing on this Tolstoy quote for days- it is the very first line in Anna Karenina, a book that I could never get passed the first fifty pages. Like what I said to J in our email correspondence, the quote sums up the story of my life in one telling. It is absurdly true and heartbreaking. The story of my family isn’t probably stranger than fiction. It is more realistic and in your face than you would have preferred.

Unfortunately it is again that time of the year. The time when families gather, family dinners shared and enjoyed. The time that gives me unspeakable anxiety and a heart ache that I find it impossibly difficult to transcribe to friends. I am not yet sick of answering those questions and giving people the response they were hoping for. Most of the time I only wish avoiding the question could be easier.

It amazes me how much I psychoanalyze myself and every word I utter, every gesture I make. It can’t be good. So I tell myself.

I am imagining the perfect picture of familial bliss...

Thank you

You have so much faith in me, in what I have always been, in what I will eventually become. You tell me you have been seeing certain things about me that I have long failed to see, to feel, to believe in.

The whole world believes in you, in me. Why don’t you?

親愛的你，
到底過了多久 又到底需要多久的時間你才會學會愛與珍惜自己
到底積累的傷害 過去的陰影 需要多久的時間 什麼樣的方式 哪一個合適的時機 才能完全擺脫
親帶的 你不是她
親愛的 也許是該離開的時候了
我需要你 需要你找回自己 需要你發現自己 需要你好好愛 需要你肯定自己 需要你相信
需要你真心相信 需要你擺脫那些不應該的人事物 需要你看到
親愛的 該是開口說話的時候了 你可以選擇克服 你可以證明 你可以你可以

Questions about time

Does time make one bolder?
Does time make us a better person?
Does time eventually make things right? or perhaps better?
Does time take away the heartache? Does time obliterate the heartfelt memory?
Does time take you back to where we began?
Does time give you the chance to become good again?
Does time give you the answers?
Does time love you the same way?

A story about you

I wanted to write about you, or us, whatever that had happened to us, whichever that came to mind first. I wanted to write about how we had loved, or how we had lost each other, how we had not learned to care for one another better than we should have. I wanted you to be there when I tried to write about you, I wanted you to feel the pain, the heartbeat when a story about you, on you, for you was being shaped, formulated, given a life into this world, a world so ugly that neither of us could possibly have continued to love and live.

So I have been writing about you, on the day that you turned your back on me, the day I was left alone in the wind, and the day our world was overturned. I continued to write about you, or us, whoever that deserved a carefully crafted story more. You were given a life to live well, to its fullest, and so was I. But here I was, in the middle of the day, doing not a thing but drafting a story about you, on you, for you.

So the love of my life, how have you been? in the time that we have been apart, that you have grown into someone completely strange to me, journeyed through this life on your own, without a hand to guide you in the darkest nights. How have you been?

I imagine you, the very special individual, traveling in the air, wandering all by yourself, with no one to talk to, no one to look after, no one to care enough for. Would I want that for you? so much was lost, so much pain. Would I want that for you, the love of my life? So I wonder if the pain, the heartache deserved a voice, too.

And my love, you didn’t have to be a novelist to be writing a story about yourself, or us, whichever that deserved a few pages, a few passionate words, paragraphs, a couple carefully crafted stories.

C (June 2008, Shanghai)

The first few paragraghs of the story I am currently working on.

C's Story

I’ve been meaning to write down C’s story, a story that took C months to disclose. The story about the little boy, whom brings soaring joy to C’s mother, yet causes C many agonized nights and unspeakable pain at the very sight.

It is a story about a unified yet broken family, an all too familiar scenario to me. C preluded the telling of the story with “I don’t tell this to a lot of people…,” the very line that I’ve whispered a number of times before I began setting the stage for my story to come.

To C, the little boy meant too little and too much. To the mother, the boy may have meant the world, a whole new world, one in which for years C’s mother denied the very existence.

I wanted to raise my hand and probe. Questions needed answers. How could I get going not understanding the very important basics to the development of the story?
How could I not hear the voice of the mother, sensing the urgency and helplessness in the fabricated version of the story that she would choose to defend herself with?

But I never got to where we began. C simply shook her head and confessed the lack of knowledge on any of the questions that I had raised. “She wouldn’t tell. She just wouldn’t,” C let go of the words matter-of-factly.

It all goes back to the fact that C’s mother never bored any son. Only daughters. Two very beautiful angels yet a daughter too many in a traditional Taiwanese family. For years after C’s sister was born, C’s mother would always say “daughters are just like boys, but better” whenever the conversation involving the apparent lack of sons in the family arose.

Growing up, C never felt any mistreatment from the parents or anyone in the family. Life went on as it was, son or not. The family, the parents and the two girls, lived happily ever after until C’s mother found the calling of her life and became a devoted Buddhist.

Freedom of speech for the day!

I am posting pieces of writings that I worked on in the last few months (not all, only a selected few) in Shanghai. China has decided to be kind and uncensoring Blogspot today. For all I know, it could all very well be gone tomorrow.

June 15, 2008

Saturday, June 15, 2008

A few weeks ago I walked out of a man’s apartment as early as four am in the morning with a bag of personal belongings and a belated new found sense of self-respect. Amidst the personal items and scattered memories of an all unfamiliar word dignity, there was a gray man’s cotton t-shirt that I had stolen from the man’s apartment.

I was a thief. A thief for men’s worn cotton t-shirts in the middle of the night.

To this moment that I am typing away the very words on my computer, I wonder if the man has thought of the shirt in the weeks that had gone by. The man has clearly not been thinking of me. This much I know is true. But what about the missing t-shirt? Does he care?

I wondered if it was his favorite t-shirt.
Perhaps he had wondered if the house had been broken in.
The thief wanted nothing but gray t-shirts. Gray worn men’s t-shirts.

You could argue that the thief wanted more than anything else but his heart.

To which I could never tell you the truth.

March 2, 2008

親愛的*deleted*，

蝴蝶在我肚子裡玩上了癮，玩瘋了
不亦樂乎

正午，我做了個夢 夢到好久沒想起的媽媽
死去許久的 我的母親
夢裡 有個像媽媽的女人 她的笑容好溫柔
好溫柔 像媽媽一樣的溫柔

我好想她再抱我一次 好想她告訴我 一切都會沒事
很快我們就能再一起見到奶奶
她一定知道 奶奶也好想她

但夢裡 還有另一個女孩 另一個跟我長的一模一樣的女孩
女孩也想要她的媽媽
女孩知道她必須趕走我 趕走我她才能得到她的媽媽

原來這只是一場比賽
我好幾天沒好好吃頓飯了 全身無力 女孩比我有力氣多了
一把就推倒我了 女孩不費力氣就贏走了我的媽媽
我跌坐在地上 好懊惱 好難過
我的媽媽 我死去多年的媽媽 我好不容易我可以再見她一面
女孩 你了為什麼

夢醒時 我流下眼淚 想起我又再一次失去我的母親
想起她溫柔的笑容
想起身邊友人的母親 想起我的忌妒
想起我對母親的思念

我想起奶奶 想起奶奶身上經歷的痛
台灣的天氣溫暖許多了吧
奶奶出院後 不知去曬過太陽沒
現在的天氣不需要再戴我那頂小紅帽了吧

Feb 24, 2008

親愛的*deleted*，

我想，我是全世界最會睹物思人的人。

我將開始以這樣的形式跟你對話，用我的方式悄悄地回憶那一晚的膽顫心驚。

午夜十二點，你在門外，我，拖著鞋，壂著腳，踩著一地的冰冷，來到你的身邊。

車子行駛在我不熟悉的道路，我知道即將要展開的夜晚，是超乎我所能期盼的。

那晚的我們，說了些什麼呢
但能那樣的聽你說說話也是好的，聽另一個人訴說他的過去不能克服的痛，他成長的旅程。

Feb 20, 2008

二月二十日 上海靜安


午夜的上海，我在靠著窗，凝視依舊燈火通明南京西路的沙發上斜躺的，努力抗拒成為一個普通上班族，把人生活得朝九晚五的命運。我細數著想跟你分享的字句，其實都太過浪漫。朋友總說，你不該打給男人，那樣你就輸了。我不知道我應該贏些什麼，這不是一場賭局，不用旁人的教誨。到最後，我連自己應該是誰，可以是誰都迷糊了。

「情人微不足道，成為自己是巨大的事」莒哈絲說。我畢竟還太過年輕，沒法把愛人這事看得淡薄些，而成為自己又是需要多少的力量。是你可以給我的嗎？而你，又是這世界上的哪一個人。

白晝裡在電腦上電話上談論中國醫藥市場發展潛力的那個自己，彷彿太過陌生。此刻的真實卻又顯得過於不切實際，原來這才是自己啊。我暗自慶幸，這個在寧靜的夜思念男人的我，在嘆口氣後，告訴自己春天來臨時我必然要愛上江南的早春。那才是你。

「站在邊界。我的生命課題。既不想孤單，也不想進入人群，這究竟是如何的邊界之邊界，我不得而知。」鐘文音的文字。

有很長的一段時間，我活在這段文字，活在這條邊界上，人群似乎不願與我親近，我孤單了好長一段時間。我一度以為，既不能改變自己，只好接受自己永如病者的靈魂。我最終還是半路出家了，離開了這條邊界，離開了那時的自己。不知道，也許我永遠不知道。