The hospital room is alive.
She has always hated waiting rooms. She hates the way the space hums with a nervousness: low murmurs and muffled sobs. She thinks this must be what muted grief sounds like. She scratches her wrist. She doesn’t want to be here. She thinks about her life in New York: the dingy studio apartment she shares with four roommates on the Lower East Side. Each of them sleeps at different times as if on rotation because they all work multiple jobs which they bitch about to each other in passing while lying to themselves that they’re slaving away for something that actually matters. They’ll bitch about capitalism while working themselves to the bone. They’re all artists.
She’s an artist too or at least that’s what she tells herself. She lacks their conviction. She’s not sure if she’s an artist or if she just likes to wear berets and paint-splattered overalls. (She’s been told berets don’t suit her, but she’s sure they do. They have to. She’s an artist.) Maybe she likes the performance of suffering: sleeping four hours a night, scrubbing dishes until her skin is raw, wolfing down greasy Chinese take-out. As if this suffering will one day spill across her canvases and into greatness. She’s a great artist. It’s what all her professors have told her. The world just doesn’t know it yet because greatness is sometimes unappreciated, unnoticed. At least, this is what she tells herself.
She’s definitely an artist because all artists have a degree in studio art from NYU which their parents wouldn’t pay for unless they also majored in computer science. All artists receive a weekly check from their parents which they hide from their actual artist roommates to pay for rent and the copious amounts of weed they buy. All artists sneak off to Fifth Avenue to buy bracelets from Tiffany’s which she’ll tell her roommates she “thrifted”. She smokes a lot of weed but that’s because she’s an artist. She also runs an Instagram poetry account; she’s the next Rupi Kapur. At least, this is what she tells herself.
“Grace!” Her mother’s voice pulls her from her thoughts. She’s pulled into a hug. Her mother smells the same: jasmine blossoms and oolong tea. “I’ve missed you. Come, we’re in Room 104. Ba’s in there with your Yeye and Nainai.”
Switching between English and Chinese, her mother leads her to the room where her grandparents and father are waiting, heels clicking on the hospital tiles. Even in a hospital’s waiting room, her mother still looks professional in a matching navy blazer and jumper. Grace made sure to wear slacks and a pressed shirt to the hospital too as if she were going to a job interview instead of to visit her sick grandfather. She’s heard the lecture about saving face and 面子 enough times and doesn’t feel like rehashing the argument in the hospital waiting room, especially since her mother promised to double her weekly check if she visited.
“-if you had just stayed in China this would have never happened! You should’ve never become a U.S. citizen. If you could just be more like your older brother. I don’t need to be in a Western hospital.” The conversation filters through Room 104’s door and Grace takes a deep breath, cradling the air in her lungs. It’s been years – four actually – since she last saw her grandfather. But she recognizes the argument immediately; it’s one she’s heard countless times.
“Grace is here!” Her mother swings the door open and pushes her in. The argument stops. She looks first at her father who is perched on the window sill in a Red Sox’s jersey, a blue Yankees cap pulled over his head. She smiles at that. Her father has always adored America, which is why he immigrated to the country as soon as he graduated from Tsinghua University, but he never quite got the nuances of the culture quite right. Maybe she inherited that quality from him in her performance as an artist. She stops smiling at that thought.
Her eyes move next to her grandmother who’s dressed in a garishly red and black patterned collared short-sleeve shirt, the kind that only Chinese grandmothers from the Mainland can pull off. Her eyes move past her grandmother’s tight smile and “oh, Grace, aiya, you’ve grown to be so big now…in more than one direction!” comments to where her grandfather lies in a hospital bed.
He’s glaring at her.
Suddenly, there is no air in the room.
Grace has tried to prepare herself for this moment. She has repeated the speech of how she was a woman now and how she demanded respect over and over again in the JFK bathroom at 6AM this morning before her flight. She rehearsed it on her flight from New York to Texas. But suddenly, in that hospital room, in slacks instead of paint-covered overalls, she finds herself shrinking into herself once more. She’s no longer an independent 23 year old artist in New York but a scared 12 year old girl looking out into the sunlight from barred windows. Somehow, even surrounded in antiseptic white, her grandfather in his white wife beater with his gray crocs looms. Instead she can only manage a trembling smile and stiff bow.
“Come.” Her grandfather grunts. Without looking, she knows her father has breathed out a sigh of relief, happy that the attention is now off of him. She recognizes this sigh. It’s the same one her father would make when her grandfather yelled at her for imperfect pronunciations in Chinese instead of yelling at her father for the bills. It’s the same one her father would make when his semiconductor manufacturing business finally took off and he could escape family dinners marked by tight smiles and his father’s bamboo lashings.
She walks towards the bed, her knees quivering. Have the hospital room’s walls always trembled? She’s not sure.
“人.” He intones.
“I’m sorry, what?” Her voice is a whisper. Her Chinese is rusty and she winces at the sound, her accent grating the Chinese into bits and pieces of dissonant consonants.
“人!” His voice is sharp, and she flinches. Spit flies out of his mouth. “I said, 人!”
Her memory is a tape recorder and suddenly it comes spooling outwards in her response and she’s suddenly reciting the San Zi Jing, poetry used to teach Chinese children Confucian values that her grandfather used to make her memorize before the school bus came every morning. Her body remembers where her mind forgets. “人之初, / 性本善。/ 性相近, / 习相远…” She keeps reciting until her grandfather holds his hand up. Her mouth snaps shut.
“可以.” Ok. Never good. Always just ok – just passable, just bearable. She feels her shoulders round and she tries to suck in the air.
He shoves a tape recorder into her hands. “Take this. Listen to it. Someone-” His eyes dart over to her Yankee cap wearing father who is sinking into the window sill and he sneers. “-in this family needs to remember what it means to be a Li.” His eyes settle on her bottle-dyed blonde hair, lips curling. “Even if it’s you.”
His eyes move past her and settle on her father once more. She’s been dismissed. The rest of the visit is a blur. Her grandmother pokes at her stomach when she forgets to suck it in. Her mother hands her a lint roller from her purse. She can feel the fluttering of the hospital room’s heartbeat – barely there but still beating softly. She tries to ground herself based on her research on WebMD. She did this research because she thinks she has generalized anxiety disorder; all artists do. It’s what gives them that little bit of edge, a little spice. That’s right. She’s an artist.
She clutches the tape recorder when her mother pulls her out of the room to explain that her grandfather has Alzheimer’s, but it’s nothing that his mind can’t fight off. Just as how Grace’s generalized anxiety disorder is something she could fight off if she would just put her mind to it. Just as how her choosing art over the software engineering position at Google was just another symptom of her weakness. Grace doesn’t say anything, just sucks in the air until her mother hands her a little red envelope (It’s June. It’s not even close to Chinese New Year.) with the promised money.
On the flight back to New York, she’ll hold onto the tape recorder. The TSA agent will ask her to put the tape recorder in the basket and she’ll anxiously watch it go through security, terrified it’ll get lost. She won’t know what to do with it. Whether or not to throw it out. Confident artist Grace from a couple hours ago would have smashed it into pieces and posted a picture of it with a poem on her Instagram. But hospital-waiting-room Grace isn’t so sure what to do. She is simultaneously too terrified to throw it away and too terrified to listen to it. She’s not sure what she’s more scared of: the tape recorder, her grandfather’s lessons, or the burden of figuring out what it means to be a Li.
Thank you for reading part 2 of Becoming Woman by our columnist Amanda Chen! Stay tuned for more works by Amanda in the future and read more about her here. The third part of Becoming Woman is scheduled to be published next Tuesday, July 5th, 2022.