Читать книгу The Ends of Kinship - Sienna R. Craig - Страница 23

Wangmo sinks into the cushions of her sleeper sofa and contemplates the birthday card. To be more precise, she stares at the letters. They begin, as usual, to float and wobble. Wangmo squints and sucks in her breath. It makes the words sit still. This act is more instinct than thought—an old habit that she used to get through school.

Wangmo holds the note with both hands. Alone in her apartment, she reads the words aloud.

I love you mom wangmo because you are my mom wangmo. my MOM. happy birthday.

She exhales. Wangmo not only feels proud because her child at age seven can form these letters, clear and beautiful, but also because she knows that, if her daughter were unable to do so, some well-mannered teacher’s aide would pull the girl aside. The school would offer tests. Her child would get help. The problem would be named and hopefully managed, if not cured, rather than handled with an inevitable rap across her knuckles.

The birthday note is written on lined paper. Printed blue, pink, and purple hearts run across the top of the page. Her daughter has copied these hearts, making a neat row along the bottom of her message, in lieu of a signature.

Wangmo is not convinced that today, March 30, is her actual birthday, but it became the date inscribed on her nagarikta identity card and, now, her green card. It would do. Her mother said she had been born in spring.

Wangmo holds this endearment from her small child. The note dissolves the residue of an argument they’d had earlier this morning about which leggings her daughter would wear to school. But the note also does something else. It brings back memories of her own boarding school days in Kathmandu. Decades compress into these minutes of quiet. Before her journey on the 7 train, before the start of a twelve-hour workday at Nu 4 U Nails, Wangmo finds herself inside a twenty-year-old memory.

In the days before monsoon brought thunderstorms to settle dust and cool temperaments across the Kathmandu valley, everything felt hot, edgy. Wangmo was not alone in her discomfort as she sat in her classroom. Still, she felt the flush of embarrassment as her English teacher, a feather-thin Nepali man who rarely smiled, announced an assignment: “Write an essay about your parents and why you are grateful for them.”

This assignment posed two problems for Wangmo. First, she did not really know her parents. She was not allowed to know her father, and although she had lived with her mother until age seven, several years had passed since they’d seen each other—a veritable lifetime for a child. The truth was, she felt more pity than love for her mother. Wangmo worried for her mother’s welfare, but she did not miss her.

Second, Wangmo struggled to write in any language but especially in English. The neat line that ran atop Devanagari script seemed to keep the letters in check, tethered them to one another like a rope. They only had Tibetan class twice a week, and much of this time was spent reciting the alphabet, memorizing prayers, and singing songs. She could find reliable shapes in the graceful lines of this, her natal-yet-not-natal language, and could reproduce, fairly faithfully, these shapes when asked. But English was unhinged. Shapes turned backward and forward. She couldn’t wrangle the words.

As soon as the teacher turned his back to the chalkboard, Maya poked Wangmo in the ribs. They always sat side by side, sleeves of their crimson blazers brushing up against each other, ankles entwined in a clandestine hug. This intimate act was made possible only because the classroom was that crowded. The poke meant that Maya would help Wangmo with this impossible assignment.

Maya was Wangmo’s best friend. They were not from the same part of Mustang, but this didn’t matter. As children, the differences in their local dialects fused quickly into a vocabulary of sisterhood, wherein mother tongues mingled with the lilt of Nepali.

Maya was only a year older than Wangmo, but she seemed much more mature—maternal even. When Wangmo had been fairly new to Buddha Heart Boarding School herself, a six-year-old boy from Tangye was deposited at the school by an uncle and enrolled in kindergarten. With no empty cot in the dormitories, nine-year-old Maya volunteered to share her bunk with this terrified creature, his ankles pockmarked by bedbug bites, his cheeks mottled by wind and sun. The boy loved her, instantly. Even after a bunk became available, the boy resisted this move, wetting his bed each evening and being scolded each morning until the housemother returned him to Maya’s nocturnal care.

Maya came from an important family. Her father was a Tibetan doctor and a Buddhist priest, someone who commanded respect. Her mother was loud, big bosomed, hilarious. Both loved Maya and her siblings unconditionally and took more than the usual interest in their education. In other words, Maya had something to write about when it came to parents.

Perhaps it was because they spent so much energy in school on rote memorization, and maybe it was even a gift, but Wangmo’s memory rarely failed her. She could still recall with alarming accuracy the English essay she turned in all those years ago.

Parents is extremely essential for all human being. If they didn’t give birth to us, we can’t come into this life. They are like a God. Our parents give us whatever whenever we wanted. They solve our problems and help us to get success in our goal. They do hard work night and day. This is all for our future. In our life they are nearest and dearest friends. Our parents is really good and kindness for us. They always support us till our last breath. We all are so lucky we got such a parents like ours. So, we should respect and love our parents. At last, always love your parents because their face got wrinkle by giving time for us.

Wangmo really liked the line about wrinkles. She remembered gripping her pencil, following the motions of Maya’s hand, one beat behind her friend. Wangmo copied each of the letters, each of the words. These two girls deposited their completed essays on the teacher’s desk at the end of class, careful to let several other students turn in their assignments in between their identical compositions. When the teacher handed back the essays the following week, he said nothing of plagiarism. More concerned with form than content, he noted the improvements in Wangmo’s penmanship and corrected Maya’s grammatical scrambles of the verb “to be.” In his mind, these were students with very different prospects. They couldn’t have written the same essay.

Now that Wangmo has become a parent herself, such memories carry a different weight. From the relative comfort and security of a one-bedroom walk-up in Sunnyside, she takes a sip of sweet tea and closes her eyes.

She thinks of the tiny two-room dwelling that had been her childhood home. It was a crook in the elbow of Monthang, tucked into the neighborhood known as Potaling. It had a hearth, a place for sleeping, a nook for storing grain, one small window, and a wooden ledge that served as a shrine. The interior shone a lacquered black by candlelight, painted by years of dung smoke. A poplar trunk, into which had been carved footholds to form a ladder, led to a rammed earth roof that stitched this dwelling to her neighbors’ homes, a row of brambles partitioning the differences between them. In the summertime, Wangmo used to scamper across the stacked firewood divides between houses, stealing handfuls of cheese set out to dry on other people’s roofs. She recalled her mother’s heart-shaped face underneath a tight woolen cap, the dull black braid that hung down her back, the fraying edge of her woven apron.

Her mother said that their family had been poor, “from the beginning of the beginning.” Both of her grandparents had died when her own mother was hardly a teenager, her grandfather from drink and her grandmother from work and an illness of the heart. All these years later, Wangmo still wondered what this really meant. Her mother’s elder brother and only sibling had been killed in a road accident in Lucknow during a season of winter trade. This further propelled her mother into an orphaned indentured servitude. She worked for one of the noble families of Monthang, weeding fields, harvesting grain, collecting firewood and manure for fuel.

Wangmo vaguely understood that she was not allowed to know her father because he had power, because he did not claim his paternity. But she would never hear the story of her father from her mother. Instead, it took two decades and ten thousand miles before someone laid bare the circumstances of her birth.

It was at a Losar party, late in the evening, during her first year in New York. She’d been in the bathroom, smoothing her chuba in the mirror. An older woman emerged from one of the stalls. Instead of adjusting her own outfit, fixing her hair clip, or washing her hands, she just stared at Wangmo with a look that hooked incredulity to compassion.

“Whose daughter are you?” the woman asked. Her speech was slightly slurred, as if a shot of Johnnie Walker Black Label, meant for the men, had made it into her Coke. Perhaps it was the slow medicine of drink that made the woman pause, that made her notice Wangmo in the first place.

There was no escaping kinship here. Wangmo knew that the woman expected the name of her father, but she gave a different answer. “My mother is no longer. She was from Monthang.”

The woman fixed her gaze on Wangmo’s features. “She was poor, from that little corner house, right? I remember her, and the family she worked for. You must be that nobleman’s nyemo! Your eyes are just like his! How old are you? About twenty? I remember how hard she worked in their fields. Nyingjé, your mother died when you were young. I knew her brother—the one who was killed in India. But you found a good foreign sponsor for school in Kathmandu, right? At least you got an education.”

The woman gestured to her forehead. She did not have to say anything for Wangmo to know what she meant. Karma was written here, inscribed in invisible ink on the swath of skin above the eyes. “And now, here we all are, rich and poor, yoked to the promise of money in New York.”

In this place of public secrets, a woman she had never met—of whom she had no memory—had just succeeded in giving voice to so many things that Wangmo wanted not to hear, not to name, and yet ached to know. She had done so with a turn of phrase that dizzied Wangmo but that also made her strangely satisfied with the ways their language could harness truth.

Pleased with her discovery—this falling into place of another piece in the mosaic of kinship that stretched between Nepal and New York—the woman now seemed disinterested in Wangmo. She adjusted her apron and headed out the door.

Before that encounter, Wangmo had often wondered if the man this woman named was her father, but she had never received direct confirmation. The moment opened up so many emotions, from outrage to compassion. As she used to do with Maya when they had lain awake in their dormitory cots, she finds herself spinning stories about people she did not know, the people who were her parents.

Wangmo imagines her mother at the end of a long day of weeding, her father coming to inspect the work. Her mother’s back is soaked in sweat, her doko brimming with new fodder for his animals. He sees her, a young woman who works hard but is not yet weathered by sun and wind. He takes an interest. He comes to call on her in that crooked little house. Maybe there is sweet talk after he takes a swallow of the milky chang she has borrowed from her neighbor. It is unthinkable that she would not offer him libations. What unfolds after that remains veiled. There is nobody to see.

Maybe a singular visit plants the seed of her. Maybe the affair goes on for months. Wangmo cannot know. She wonders about rough words, tears, the violence of a slap, talk of responsibility. She wonders about tenderness. She imagines that her mother would have found herself as startled by the cessation of her monthly bleeding and the swelling of her belly as Wangmo herself had been when the blood began to flow from between her legs at fourteen.

Thankfully, Wangmo does not remember feeling shame during the years of her life that she spent in Monthang. She remembers hunger and the wisps of winter air that slid under the door and through the one small window. She remembers how her mother filled the water offering bowls each morning and lit a butter lamp each evening, never thinking about the butter she might have spared for tea. Now, Wangmo understands that this act of faith could be many things: a reclamation of dignity at the bookends of long, invisible days; an enacted sense of duty; a hope to win favor with the gods.

Wangmo also remembers joy. She and her friends used to play games: finding the nests of Himalayan snowcock and sucking out the warm, yellow life from their eggs; building towers of stone with the flattest rocks they could find; using patties of frozen cow dung to sled down snowy embankments at the edge of the village; making bouquets of wildflowers and placing them on the household shrine.

Robert, the Swiss man who became Wangmo’s sponsor, discovered her while she and her friends were giggling and gorging themselves on sweet peas. He had been wandering through Monthang’s fields in midsummer, taking pictures. The foreigner had a strange face: a reddish beard that reminded Wangmo of the wrathful masks worn by monks during festivals but green eyes that seemed kind. In their unequally imperfect English—she with the words one photo, chocolate, pen and both of them with phrases like How old are you? What is your name?—they made some sort of connection.

Still, Wangmo registered alarm when a knock on the door revealed this foreigner again, along with a local young man who spoke some English. She realized the door to their house was small only when she watched Robert fold himself in half to walk across the threshold.

Her mother spoke no English, but the message was communicated over cups of weak butter tea. This foreigner was from a place called “Swiss” but may as well have been from another universe. He would like to send her daughter to school in Kathmandu. Wangmo’s mother smiled, nodded. It was a gesture of imperfect consent. Wangmo remembers her saying, “I hope that education will give her a better life than her mother.”

It only occurs to Wangmo after that chance encounter in a New York bathroom that the young intermediary who appeared at her door with Robert was the nephew of her father, that they were unacknowledged cousins.

Several days after Robert’s visitation, Wangmo found herself bundled up in all the clothes she owned, with tsampa and dried cheese stuffed into recycled instant noodle and powdered milk bags tied with string, heading south. She had never before left the village. She could not have imagined the worlds she would see in the capital, a place many from Mustang simply called “Nepal.” In retrospect, she found the trust implicit in this transaction as astounding as the release of parental responsibility. What, now, was her mother to do?

Those first few months at Buddha Heart passed slowly. Each new experience had a vividness to it: the damp cots, the delight in steamed buns and curried goat every other Friday, but also the sharp edges of loneliness. Until Maya befriended her.

When Wangmo left the village, she did not know that she would never see her mother again. Some part of her understood that the lack of contact was a function of distance, poverty, and language. Still, she felt like an orphan during holidays when family members would arrive to collect their kin. But she knew that she wasn’t an orphan.

When the principal of Buddha Heart summoned her to his office on a rainy day in class three and told her that he’d had a visit from someone from Monthang who said that her mother had fallen ill and died, Wangmo herself fell into a silence inside a silence. She held her chest. It felt like the time she had fallen off a horse back in Lo. No breath, no breath. When she took days to recover from the fall, people had said that she must have TB, but this, too, remained mere speculation.

Over the years, Robert wrote Wangmo letters into which he would fold chocolate bars and a few francs, but these gifts came infrequently. He told her that there were mountains in Switzerland, even yak. She drew pictures of white-faced herders beside yak wool tents. She did not tell him about her mother, although she guessed that the principal may have passed on the news. Robert never mentioned it.

As the years went by, though, Wangmo began to wonder about this relationship. She heard peers talking about their sponsors, comparing the letters and gifts they received, wondering about their lives in other countries. As she grew older, Wangmo remained grateful for Robert’s generosity, but she wondered how he talked about her. She was grateful for the education, but she began to imagine herself as a curiosity, a burden, a charity case. Wangmo asked Maya to help her read Robert’s letters and write thank-you notes in return. Their exchanges became formulaic. Robert was someone she had never really known but who had changed her life. In this way, he was like her father.

When Robert wrote his last letter, it was to say that his wife was ill and that he needed to take care of her. This was in the middle of class nine. He told her that he was sorry but that this would be the last year he could pay her school fees. He knew she only had one more year to complete her SLC. He hoped she would forgive him. He wished her well.

It was her friend Maya, of course, who read these words aloud to Wangmo. Before this news had softened into air, Maya had already planned a response. She would ask her uncle—a wealthy trader who moved between Nepal and Hong Kong—to pay for Wangmo’s last year of school. Wangmo had spent enough time with Maya and her extended family during vacations that a request of this sort did not seem unreasonable.

“My uncle will do it,” Maya said when Wangmo could say nothing. “My aunt will like to brag about helping a poor student.” Their friendship could tolerate honest irony. “She’ll think she is earning merit.”

Maya and Wangmo made it through class ten together and, each in their own way, found passage to New York. That was a decade ago.

This sense of time astonishes her. Wangmo thinks about the fact that her daughter is now the same age she was when she arrived at Buddha Heart. This child over whom she frets. This sweet girl who can write birthday cards. This Mustang-American who, as a toddler, was sent off to live with her father’s parents in Kathmandu for two years. This was during the most difficult phase of a new marriage, with no money to speak of and the daunting process of immigration paperwork a daily stress. Still, there is a continent of difference between her own childhood and that of her daughter. She is different than her own mother; she has always had a plan. The separation that she and her daughter endured was not permanent. And yet …

Wangmo’s husband is a good father. He treats their daughter gently and enjoys reading bedtime stories, which he does each night after he comes home from his job at a Thai restaurant. He is not from Mustang but shares, generally speaking, Wangmo’s Himalayan roots. For Wangmo, meeting him and falling in love has been a great and enduring gift. There would have been nobody to arrange a marriage for her anyway, even if she had wanted that.

Together, Wangmo and her husband are figuring out what this word “parent” means. They speak with each other about what has and hasn’t changed between their childhoods and that of their daughter. Wangmo knows she can be judgmental about the ways some in her community raise their children—here in New York and back in Nepal. Still, she bristles when she hears news about Himalayan people, now transplanted to New York, being called in by Child Protective Services because one of their children reports a slap or a spank to a teacher at school. She thinks about the distances between parents and children, the ways the ends of kinship can stretch and fray, and about the different forms of love and anger and grief.

Wangmo gets up from the couch and clears the breakfast dishes. She should have left for work ten minutes ago. The train will be packed at this hour, hurtling immigrant workers into Manhattan. The birthday card sits on the coffee table. She picks it up, folds it in half, and then in half again. Wangmo keeps folding until the card becomes as small as an amulet, as small as a prayer.