Magic Lantern

By A.I. Chow

It was hard to imagine, but many years ago, their mother had been a little girl. That was the first thing Erika said when Amy picked up the phone. 

It was early Tuesday evening, right after Amy got home from work. She took the call while plucking dead leaves off of her money plant. 

Erika was Amy’s little sister and a credible artist. She had gone to art school and now sold chairs made of twisted strips of wood veneer to galleries in New York, Philadelphia, and even Seattle. For this reason, Amy rarely felt pressured to make sense of what Erika said.  

“When Mom was fifteen, she visited the Shanghai Zoo and met an elephant,” said Erika. “The elephant had been trained to stand up on its two back legs and bow to the lucky patrons of the zoo. Its feet made no sound when it brought its front legs down. No more than falling rain. What do you think?” 

“It doesn’t surprise me that Mom saw elephants back then. Even I saw elephants in China, back when we lived there.” By ‘we,’ Amy meant herself and their parents. She never meant to hurt Erika’s feelings when she said this. It was just that there had been eight years of her life before Erika existed. 

“Yes, fine,” Erika said. “Aren’t you interested in where that came from?”

Erika said the passage came from their mother’s memoir. Their mother had given two hundred pages to Erika to read the week before last. It was a very moving book. Their mother believed in the power of love and Christ. And Erika had learned so much! For example: did Amy know their grandfather had been an alcoholic? 

“I did know,” Amy said stiffly. She disliked the scandalized way Erika had whispered the question, like she was talking about a celebrity rather than the grandfather who always gave her fistfuls of jasmine and osmanthus blossoms when she visited. “Mom wrote it in English?” 

“Oh, I’m sure she has a Chinese version for you somewhere, and it’ll be so much more authentic than the English one.” A rough, scratching sound entered Amy’s ear, as though Erika was running her nails over the speaker. “Is there anything you want me to bring you from Boston? I’m going to the Japanese fish market on Saturday.”  

“I don’t think the fish will keep that long, thank you,” Amy said. “Goodbye.” 

⁂

After hanging up on Erika, Amy called Jeff and asked him if he wanted to see a movie. 

“A movie?” Jeff said. His phone voice always had a hint of alarm in it, like he was looking over his shoulder. “I can’t go out in public right now.” 

“Your place is fine,” she said. 

Jeff lived in a one-bedroom apartment in downtown Hartford, overlooking the Connecticut River. They were both thirty-two, cycled more than fifty miles per week, and liked James Bond movies. They met online three months ago. He was Korean and some mix of German-Italian-Turkish. He was also an accountant. 

Today, he met her at the door in a navy t-shirt and olive chinos. He had a wad of tissues in his hand and kept bringing it up to his prosthetic eye, as though he was dabbing away tears. He had lost his left eye in an accident at a friend’s bachelor’s party the year before. It had been from before they met, and she never felt the need to mention his eye or ask for more details. She had been a doctor, once. She had seen worse. 

“Did you already eat?” she said, knowing better than to ask about his eye right away. 

The movie they chose was a Frankenstein adaptation, and she thought the outlines of it would be familiar enough that they could talk during the boring scenes, like when Victor assembled the monster or when the monster loped through the countryside. Nothing they hadn’t seen before. She tried, two or three times, to begin. “My sister called today,” she’d say, and Jeff would hush her, as though they were in danger of losing the plot. 

“What about your sister?” Jeff finally asked. 

What about Erika? Amy tried to recall what exactly had upset her. Usually, when she was upset with Erika, it was because Erika had reported something their mother had said. Their mother’s words were usually something like: Amy was not getting anywhere at the insurance company, where, as a licensed but non-practicing hospitalist, she consulted on difficult claims; but what did that mean? Any lives saved? No? 

Their mother’s opinions were normal ones. But Amy didn’t know why Erika insisted on faithfully parroting her mother’s words back to her. She found it malicious, but she also knew Erika was incapable of serious malice against her. 

“I’m thinking about going to Boston this weekend,” Amy said. 

“Boston! What’s up there? People? Snobs? Their doctors are phonies, their streets smell like wet puke. I’d rather be in New York. At least the trains would run on time.”

“Trains don’t run on time in New York, either. What’s wrong? Hmm?” 

He made a throaty, chuffing noise, like a sick cat. He turned to face her. She recognized, in the tremor of his forehead, an early swell of emotion. People often made fun of him for being emotional, but she never resented him for it. So what if he had feelings? She liked that better than him holding back. If she could refine him, someday, she’d bring him home. 

He threw his arm across her shoulder and smushed his nose against her shoulder. He scraped his teeth on the back of her shoulder, as though to hold onto her. 

⁂

On Friday night, she drove to her parents’ house eighteen miles outside of Boston. Her parents had moved to a small, forested town after Amy went off to college. It was the same size as Amy’s childhood home closer to Boston, but with a much larger lawn and backyard. 

Since Erika was an artist and, therefore, more American, she was allowed to be in love with Robin, a meek woman about Amy’s age. Erika and Robin were staying in Erika’s former bedroom, which also served as the guest room. Amy would sleep on the couch. 

At dinner, Robin kept apologizing to Amy. Her brown hair was too short to be tucked behind her ears and kept swinging in front of her eyes. “If I could, I’d let you take it, I would. It’s my bad back. I’m sorry. When you come visit us in Providence again, Erika and I will give you something special from the workshop. I’m sorry.” 

“Of course, it’s not a problem,” Amy said, but she was losing her patience. She wanted to hear what Erika and their mother were talking about. So far, all Amy had caught was Erika saying, “My favorite part was when you fed your pigs rice instead of pig gruel… didn’t even get a chance to eat it.” The next thing Amy caught was their mother saying, “Here, look. The doctor says I have the arms of a thirty-year-old woman.” 

Throughout dinner, their mother kept raising her hand and waving her fingers, then putting it down and raising her other hand. For circulation, she said. When Amy was a little girl, their mother had been strict with them on how to conduct themselves. Skipping had been forbidden, and so would have, at least Amy would think, sitting at the dinner table while waving one’s hands in the air. But many things had changed since she was a girl: new countries, new houses, new names. 

Robin and their father had run out of things to talk about. Robin had stopped eating. 

“Are you all right?” their mother said to Robin, switching to English. “Hungry? Are you having stomach problems?” 

“I’m eating very well,” Robin said to the plate. 

“Robin’s picked up her Chinese lessons again,” Erika said. “Go on, try.” 

“Thank you for cooking delicious food, mother,” Robin said in Mandarin. Amy didn’t know why Robin kept trying. They had been through the ‘Robin learning Chinese’ stage a few times now, and it never lasted. Robin would never be able to sit at the dinner table without forcing more than half the table to switch into their second, or third and fourth, language. Who could blame Robin for feeling awkward? 

Amy tapped the table and shook their mother’s arm to get her attention. “Mama, what was it you were saying about pigs?” she said. 

“Hmm, pigs. Remember, when I was a girl during the Cultural Revolution, I lived in the countryside…” She put her hand up in the air. Her bracelets clicked against each other. Amy detected, out of the corner of her eye, Robin falling out of the conversation. 

“You used to say that whenever you or your brothers or sisters had a birthday, your dad would kill a pig and you’d have its head for dinner. Mama’s aunt or grandma would cook it in the kitchen for hours. It was always meant to be a surprise, but you could smell it even over the smell of mud and mouse piss,” Amy said. 

“It was not like that!” Erika said. 

“Of course, I defer to you,” Amy said. She didn’t truly know, after all, what the smell was. She didn’t even know if it was an aunt or a grandmother who was cooking. All she had were the words without the substance of memory. Erika, as usual, looked completely certain: it could not have been that way. But what was that based on? No one had ever told Erika anything. Words, just words. 

Their mother laughed and said, “It was exactly that smell!” 

Something slid into Amy’s chest. Elation. She had been right after all. 

“But you never spent much time in the countryside, ah. We made you live in the city instead of sending you away to grandma and grandpa like other parents. So were you making that up, hmm? Or did Daddy tell you?” 

“You told me,” Amy said. “I hated the apartment and you’d tell me stories about the countryside and tell me how lucky I was to not live there.” 

“Oh, yes. I did tell you that. I remember now.” 

And as she said that, Amy remembered it, too. She remembered not just the words, but how her mother had told it to her, as though it was a scene in a movie: she was a small girl crying on the bed, her face and arms pressed down in the musty blanket. She could see the flowers printed on the fabric through the prism of her tears and smell the anise and Sichuan peppers from the kitchen. 

In that kitchen, Amy had a different name: Zhengzheng. Zhengzheng was not upset about the apartment, but about school. Zhengzheng was not getting along with her math teacher. And her mother was saying how, when she was a child, she had been thrown into a classroom with three-year-olds and seventeen-year-olds and no one knew how to teach her; she was considered impossible to teach, but it was only because she was a genius; Zhengzheng had a class of people her own age, so Zhengzheng should stop crying… and Zhengzheng had cried out, But you had four pig heads a year! 

Amy wanted to push herself deeper into that memory, but every time she tried, Robin would miscalculate a sip and cough. Soon everyone was staring at her. 

“I don’t understand why she’s so uncoordinated,” their father said in Mandarin. “And she’s allergic to tomatoes. What kind of neurotic loser is allergic to tomatoes?”  

“I would love to have a whole pig head for my birthday,” Erika said in English. She put a hand on Robin’s back and kissed Robin’s cheek.  

⁂

After dinner, their father went to Home Depot to buy discounted fertilizer. Their mother went on a walk in the neighborhood. Amy went with her. 

Their mother wore a magenta shell coat, fastened with brass buttons, and, underneath that, her usual house clothes, dark leggings and a spring green cardigan that had been knit for her by a friend at church. Occasionally, she’d stop and do lunges. For flexibility, she said. 

The neighborhood hadn’t changed much since Amy’s last visit. A few people had put up Easter decorations. They passed a few neighbors who, looking at the two of them, asked, “Is that Erika? Hello, welcome back!” 

“Yes, I’m Erika,” Amy said the third time a neighbor, an older Indian man wearing an oversized flannel shirt, asked if she was her sister. 

“Erika finished her residency and is taking a break from medicine,” their mother said, putting a hand on Amy’s shoulder. Occasionally, she’d rock forward and put her weight into Amy, as though urging Amy to perform a series of apologetic bows. “But she will be back soon.” 

“Do you know any new treatments for arthritis?” he said. 

“No. In my neck of the woods, we don’t learn anything new,” Amy said. 

They walked to the end of the block and then turned around. 

“Why did you let him think I’m Erika?” Amy said. She didn’t mind being Erika if it meant she could make Erika sound like a buffoon, but it had bruised her that her mother had gone along with their neighbors’ mistake. 

“It doesn’t matter what he thinks. You are both my daughters,” their mother said. “Cheer up.”

They walked for a while more. Amy tried to cheer up, but her mood remained resolutely glum. She would not be going back to medicine, and she was not Erika. What was there to be cheery about? “Why did you show Erika the memoir but not me?” 

“Erika is artistic,” their mother said, switching to English. “I thought if your career was going well, you wouldn’t have time for it. So sorry for assuming you were good at your job.” 

“Did you write about me? Is that why you don’t want me to see?” Their mother stepped out of the lunge and into a brisk walk with her hands behind her back and a tight, tolerant smile on her face. “Has Dad read it, Mama? Am I the only one who hasn’t read it?” 

“You are not the only person in the world who has not read it. Your Daddy has not, he doesn’t care to. Your grandma and grandpa, they have not. I wrote it for myself and my private thoughts. You should be happy I’m not making you remember how sad that part of our life was. Nobody thought of us as anything back then. Your Daddy was barely a college professor, and me! The Army was always saying I didn’t know anything, but I was always very good at my job, even if no one wanted to say so.” 

The mucous membranes in Amy’s face, lining the insides of her eyes and nose and mouth, grew hot and slick. She felt like the bones of her face were liquefying.  

“Grandma and grandpa are dead,” she said. 

⁂

When they returned to the house, Amy went to the backyard and called Jeff. He had just come back from an appointment at the eye center. His prosthesis maker had found a rough spot near the top and smoothed it out. They moved to FaceTime so she could see him blink and move his eyes back and forth. 

“You look comfortable,” she said. “Much more symmetrical.” 

She told him about the walk. Instead of sneering at her or calling her mother names, he was very good. He nodded and made the right listening noises. 

“Never mind your mother. Ask Erika. She’ll let you read it,” he said. 

At first, she didn’t want to. She wanted to throw the memoir out of her mind. When she thought about it, Erika was the one who needed the memoir, not her. Erika couldn’t even speak Suzhounese, she had been to China only six or seven times, she was badly in need of someone to remind her how to be a real Chinese person. But those were just excuses. They were both their mother’s daughters. Even if she didn’t need it in the same way Erika did, she deserved to see it.  

She went upstairs to Erika’s old bedroom. Robin was flat on the bed, her hands folded over her stomach and toes pointed straight at the ceiling. Erika was sitting by the windows with her laptop. There was a binder-clipped set of papers, about a hundred pages, on the desk. 

“Are you two all right?” Amy said. 

“I’m recovering,” Robin whispered without sitting up or looking at Amy. 

“Is that Mom’s memoir over there?” Amy said. “Could I borrow it?” 

“I hate that thing,” Robin said, and her voice took on a girlish aspect, bright and clear. “It’s so much. All she cares about is money. What are you doing?” 

So Robin had read it, too. Erika had probably shared it with Robin to make her feel like she was part of the family. Amy smothered her annoyance. It was not Robin she had to please here. So what if Robin had read it? She would never belong and, therefore, did not matter. 

“We’re up to the last bits, so take from the top and we’ll give you the rest later,” Erika said. “Isn’t it weird? Can you imagine us writing something like this for our kids someday?” 

“We played lots of tennis and went to Chinese school on Saturdays,” Amy said. “Kids made fun of us because we ate pork floss on the playground. I’m asked to translate Japanese all the time.” 

“You don’t have to be mean about it.” 

“We’re not going to lead interesting lives, so I don’t know what there’ll be to say.” 

“They’ll be interested because they’ll be ours. Right, Robin?” 

“I don’t want to have bitter children,” Robin said. 

“I can just keep a private blog,” Erika said. 

The manuscript had been set across piles of old drawing and painting supplies: dried up tubes of acrylic paint, pencils ranging in hardness from 4H to 8B, and cuts of twine. Robin made an angry, strangled noise. Her hairline was damp with sweat and her cheeks were flushed. Amy felt like a doctor again, entering a room, smiling at a sick person, ignoring them in favor of checking on the machines and charts. 

“That’s too many pages,” Robin said. 

“Very well, only twenty,” Amy said. Her hand slipped and the papers fell across the desk. She scooped them back up, not caring whether they were in order. She decided that Robin must be small-minded. 

“Did you ask your mother?” Robin said. “We promised to not show anyone else. Did she say you could look at it?” 

“Oh, babe,” Erika said. She put her hand over Robin’s, but it didn’t dilute Robin’s fury. 

“Don’t you remember—don’t you remember, that your mother said that Amy shouldn’t see it, not in this state… You’re betraying her, your own mother. The best thing to do would be to make her put it back.”  

“I don’t know. I think it’s ready,” Erika said. She smiled at Amy and mouthed, You should go. She was a good little sister, in the end.  

She could hear Erika and Robin as she descended down the stairs. There was Robin’s urgent, angered voice, too small to carry all the way down, and then Erika, saying, “What’s the big deal? There’s nothing interesting in those pages, anyway.” 

⁂

Amy read the memoir in the dining room. She had pages four through thirteen, eighteen, twenty-six through thirty-one, forty through forty-nine, and fifty-two through sixty. On pages four through thirteen, their mother recounted the lives and careers of two of her high school classmates. 

Tingfang wanted to get married to Guo but Tingfang never would be happy she didn’t know… All she thought about those days were her studies, but everyone knew the teacher didn’t like her because Tingfang’s father was the mayor and that left her with big head… 

At Father’s funeral, I met Tingfang again. She is fat and she has three grandchildren already. I have none so far. Someday I’ll have even more than Tingfang who has done nothing with her life as we knew she would. She is on the city council and makes money by giving people jobs all the time, not so impressive. 

Guo becomes very handsome, like a movie star. He has a face like a big horse, wow! Now he has his third wife but I hear he’s looking for a romance again with someone who makes him feel supported… 

Amy found the elephants on page forty when her mother wrote about going to her college reunion.  

But the elephants in America are much more beautiful. 

Nonsense, all of it. 

Her eyes hurt from reading. Everyone else in the house was asleep. No one had come downstairs to wish her good night.  

⁂

On the phone, with Jeff. She sat in the dining room, in the dark, with her back to the wall, and used her phone’s light to read some passages to him. He scoffed with her at her mother’s more self-important claims. 

“Old Asians only ever write things to glorify themselves,” Jeff said. “Like we don’t have our own thoughts and lives!” 

“Ssh, not too loudly.” She flipped through some pages. “It’d sound better in Chinese. Do your parents write? Either of them? Does your Mom tell you anything?” 

“She’s always hated me for not dropping out of college when she got breast cancer. She never says so—but I know she does. What’s there to say about Korea these days? ‘All the presidents were dictators. We were all scared of being arrested.’ Can’t write it in Korean because no one wants to remember. Can’t write it in English because no one cares.” 

“Yes. Yes. There’s this story my Mom told me…” And then, thinking of the substance, she hesitated. It was a story she had been told only once in China. Unlike her mother and sister, Amy was not fond of flinging her stories out to just anyone. And she didn’t want Jeff to think she had chosen him based on a story she had heard as a girl.   

Even though everyone in the house was asleep, she said someone was coming down the stairs, and they’d have to talk some other time.  

Yes, her mother should have done the memoir in Chinese. Really, everything her mother had written in English was limited, and it was sad this was the way Erika would have to learn about who their parents were. Amy was lucky to have heard her mother’s stories the way they were meant to be told. 

For example, there was a story Amy had been told only once. It had never been mentioned in America. And if it was in these pages—even if it was contained in the memoir, she would always be the one to remember it correctly. 

When her mother was twelve, she won a prefectural level contest in mathematics. As a reward, her teacher, old Mr. Lu, escorted her out of the village to see a movie in the city. 

To prepare for her trip, she was given her older sister’s clothing: blue pants and a dark blue top in the military style. She wore her sister’s old shoes, the ones with the heels so worn that she was constantly falling backwards. She had to curl her toes to make them fit, and by the time they made it to the movie theater, her feet had swollen up and her heels were blistered. Tears kept covering her eyes, and though she and Mr. Lu stood in line for a long time, she couldn’t remember the buildings or the people well. What she did remember were the cars. Their aggressive visages, blurred from her tears, resembled discontented stone lions. 

In the movie theater, Mr. Lu guided her to the seat and then, looking at the way she tottered down the aisles, said to her, in his thin, creaky voice, “Never mind that, you should take off your shoes.” Blood crusted her socks brown. He put one shoe in his pocket and held the other in his lap. 

She couldn’t focus on the movie. The huge faces, rendered in bright and saturated colors, ballooned and shrank before her like a sick dream. There was an orphaned fishing girl who never cried; she ran along the beach and inspired older fisherwomen to become revolutionaries instead. The colors swirled around her and the pain in her feet throbbed and her head became lighter and lighter. She fell asleep. 

When she woke up, the movie was still playing. Mr. Lu was gone, and her shoes with him. Had he left out of anger, because she had fallen asleep and squandered the valuable gift of this movie? She stood up and tried to move to the end of the aisle to see whether Mr. Lu might be in the lobby. At the end of the row was a line of men in black or navy overalls, all watching the movie with expressions of passionate concentration. 

“Excuse me,” she whispered. “Pardon me!” 

One of them, slimmer and smaller than the others, turned his head. His face, in the dark theater, looked normal enough, but as the scene changed from night to day, she saw his left eye was flat and dull and rolled off to the side, as though it wanted to keep watching the movie. 

“Poor thing,” he said. “You’ve lost your grandpa and even your shoes. Would you like to come home with me?” 

“Go away,” she said and turned back. But he reached over and put his hand on her arm. 

“What if he truly is gone, and only I know the way back?” 

“Then I’ll join the army!” 

“The army? Ha! Come with me. Come!” He pulled her arm and led her to the lobby, then onto the street. In the sunlight, she found that he was much younger than she thought he was. Not her father’s age, but her older brother. He had a worker’s uniform, not an army one. His hair, beneath his cap, was cut close and looked like fresh grass sticking out of the dirt. His mouth was strange, opening no larger than a needle’s eye when he spoke. 

“Where is Mr. Lu?” she said. 

“Be patient. I’ll let him come back when you answer my questions. Where are you from?” 

“I’m from here.” 

“Then why do you sound like an ugly country bumpkin?” he said. “Is that old man your boyfriend? Is that what you are? A little girl who likes to play with dribbly old turtles? What’s your name, turtle girl?” He took her by the chin and leaned in. She screamed and slapped him, once on the cheek and once on the ear. He doubled over, clutching his head in his hands. 

“Stupid, messed-up egg!” she shouted at him, and ran back into the theater. Behind her, the one-eyed boy shouted something: I’m sorry, forgive me! She didn’t look back. 

His friends were gone, along with everyone else in her row. She took her seat and leaned all the way back. She put her feet on the back of the seat in front of her. The girl on the screen led the fisherwomen against the Japanese and won. They cheered and pointed their guns and shot the sand. The credits rolled. She waited until the entire theater was empty to stand up on her swollen feet. Now, she thought, she’d have to go join the army or work in a factory… And would the one-eyed boy be waiting for her there? If he took her away, she wouldn’t be scared. She’d become an important person in his factory. He would forget that she had ever been frightened of him. 

But it wasn’t the one-eyed boy waiting for her at the very back. Mr. Lu had returned. He smelled of alcohol. He had lost her shoes.  

“And then Mommy had to walk all over the city with her bleeding feet for the rest of the day,” said Zhengzheng’s mother. She covered Zhengzheng’s face with the blanket and put her hand over Zhengzheng’s nose and mouth. She shook Zhengzheng’s face back and forth. “And when she got home, she went to bed and stayed there for a very long time because of all the pain. She stayed there all night long and let her Mommy go back to work.” 

“I won’t, I won’t!” Zhengzheng said from underneath her mother’s hand. She thrashed under the blanket, laughing and shrieking. The weight disappeared. She had made her mother angry. 

“If you keep that up, when I go to America, Mommy will leave you behind,” her mother said. “Daddy and I will leave in the middle of the night and you’ll have to go live with your grandma and grandpa and pick cotton. You’ll be chased by chickens day and night.” 

And what had Zhengzheng done then? She had laughed. Her mother always said those kinds of things when she was upset, and no matter how mad her mother got, she always took it back. Even now, when it felt like someone was poking her chest all over with wooden skewers, Zhengzheng knew her mother would kiss her hair and put her in bed. 

Her mother stripped the blanket off her and tossed it to the floor. 

“Do you think I’m joking?” she said, jabbing her finger at Zhengzheng. It was winter and cold in their apartment. Her mother wore a stained red parka over a navy sweater. A long day had wrinkled the winged collar of her black shirt, printed with roses. Zhengzheng’s father was at the university lab. In the apartment below them, someone slammed a pair of pots on the floor. All of their neighbors were awake. Their grumbling leaked through the walls. Zhengzheng’s eyes grew wet. 

Her mother turned away. An open electrical engineering textbook waited on the kitchen table, ten paces from the bed. She sat down at the table and returned to her problems. ◆

About the author:

A.I. Chow is a writer living in Chicago. She writes about doomed Martian expeditions, Chinese American tragicomedies, and animals up to no good. Her work has previously been published in Boudin.