Page 39 of Taipei Story

I took her in. Saw the lines around her eyes, the gray streaks of hair, the downward slope of her shoulders. It felt like the first time that I had looked at her, really examined her features, rather than filling her in with the memory I knew as Mom. My mother had always been a fixture, an unchanging authority. To me, my parents belonged to that category “middle-aged,” which was in fact ageless and infinite, and now for the first time in my life, I saw she was closer to an old woman than a young one.

How many more years together did we have? How many had I already wasted? Now I had begun to worry, and I would never stop worrying. Because I had researched these things in a panic last night, I wanted to ask her: are you taking calcium supplements, are you getting mammograms, have you considered weight lifting, do you stretch every morning, are you watching your macros, do you have fulfilling hobbies, would you consider taking up gardening, can you do all these things so that you can stick around, so that I will never be a girl without a mother?

“HOW’S YOUR FOOT?” I HAD NOTICED HER LIMPING.

“Bad,” she said. “It’s been hurting all summer.”

“When are you going to see a doctor?”

“I might see someone while I’m out here. There are better doctors in China.”

My mom walked with a slight limp when she was tired, because she only had nine toes. The fourth toe on her right side ended at a stump, so clean that you wouldn’t have noticed anything was wrong except that toe was much shorter and there was no nail. She was very embarrassed about this. She never wore flip-flops or sandals in public, even where no one would come close enough to see.

We all kept encouraging her to get a prosthetic toe, but she never followed through. She didn’t trust Western doctors; she thought their methods were too invasive. When she had a bout of shingles, she tried curing herself by heating a piece of string over a candle and burning her rashes. The shingles spread, and my dad made her get a prescription for antivirals, and then finally the shingles went away. She maintained it was the string that did it. We told her that Chinese medicine was junk, that she had to trust the doctors and at least accept a Tylenol, but she always reminded us about that Chinese scientist who had won a Nobel Prize for her research on traditional medicine. Anyhow, painkillers were bad for you. You had to feel the depth of the pain or else your body wouldn’t know to recover.

My mother wasn’t shy about how she’d lost the toe, however. She loved telling that story. “I was walking near a construction site with my sisters,” she would begin. “We always walked home together after school. And we were playing, and there was—you know, something.”

The details ended there. Whenever my mother didn’t have the words in English, she filled in the blanks with “you know.” But we didn’t know. In my imagination, there was a conveyor belt, like the belt on a treadmill, except it was running so fast it was essentially a saw. As I got older I realized that this made no sense. What would a conveyor belt be doing on the ground at a construction site? But I didn’t have anything else with which to fill in the blanks. Maybe she sliced her toe against an exposed bit of steel. Maybe someone dropped a hammer on her foot.

“I was the last person to notice. I didn’t even realize what had happened until my sisters started screaming.” At this point, my mother always grew animated, waving her hands in the air. “Your dayi sprinted home and got our father. We weren’t close. I must have been lying there for a while, but in my memory, your gonggong was there in an instant. He took me to the clinic, but it was too late—they couldn’t reattach the toe.”

Usually the story ended here, with a rare viewing of the stump as we all shrieked and giggled. But the last time she told it, she had lingered on the end. It was after that spring break WeChat call. She had been moody then, missing her parents more than usual. “Here’s what I remember most of all,” she’d said. “How your gonggong just scooped me up in his arms. He made it look so easy. Then I stopped screaming. I didn’t feel the pain at all. I just felt safe.”

I LED MY MOTHER TO THE FOOD COURT ON THE BASEMENT LEVEL. There I saw a familiar sign, yellow characters against a red placard. Xiaonanmen, 小南門, was one of the most famous tofu pudding chains in the city. They had locations across from the Dongmen metro stop and inside the Taipei 101 food court; I had been multiple times to both, and I knew they were good.

“Go sit down,” I told my mom. I felt like a tour guide, like I was responsible for showing her a good time. “I’ll get you some douhua.”

When I got to the counter they told me they weren’t serving tofu pudding until ten, but they had pork soup dumplings if I wanted to order those. I paid and brought the buzzer back to my mom, along with a tray of cold appetizer dishes covered in plastic wrap. I informed her about the change in menu. I hoped she liked the dumplings. My eyes prickled; it was hard to speak without crying. I was devastated by my inability to do this one thing for her: bring her the tofu pudding I said was so good.

“Oh, soup dumplings.” My mother peered over the tray like one might examine a jewelry display at the mall, with no intention of picking anything up. “They don’t have good soup dumplings in Boston.”

She jabbed her chopsticks at the pickled wood ear mushrooms.

“I can get you a cup of soy milk,” I said.

“No soy milk. It’s not good for your throat.”

“Tea, then?”

“Okay.”

I got up to ask for some tea. They didn’t have any ready yet—it was still brewing. I asked if they had anything to drink, anything at all. The checkout girl must have sensed that I was about to cry because she disappeared for a moment, then came back with a cup of hot water and a tea bag that clearly came from the staff room. I tried to pay, and she shook her head. “Just take it,” she said.

My mother ate like a bird, plucking a tiny piece of each small dish in turn and nibbling it with her lips. The only thing she seemed to like was the pickled wood ear mushrooms. I urged her to have a soup dumpling. She seized one between her chopsticks, dabbed it meticulously in soy sauce and vinegar, and then popped it in her mouth.

“Mm,” she said. “Very good.”

I felt a surge of protective concern watching her, as if she were the baby and I the parent, and if I could just care for her well enough, all her suffering would go away.

“So,” she said. “The funeral is tomorrow.”

In a calm and distant voice, she recounted the details. Her older sisters both lived in Guangzhou, and they had organized the proceedings. It would be a small affair. Gonggong had no surviving siblings. Our generation would be represented by my cousin Sting and his wife. I didn’t know my cousin’s Chinese name; for as long as I could remember, we had all addressed him as Sting. No one else was able to come back to China in time.

“Is there anything that we can do?” I meant myself and my sisters. “Like, send in a video or something?”

“No, it’s okay. We aren’t playing videos.”

“Will there be like . . .” I didn’t know how else to put it. “Like, any special traditions?”