Fiona and Jane(8)
“Dog fart,” Mah had replied.
“You think something will happen to Jane? She will fall for mainland propaganda and run away with her piano teacher? The revolution is over,” he said.
Mah had laughed, and I was relieved, though I didn’t totally understand what they were talking about. “Your daughter is one hundred percent American, like it or not,” Mah said, which made Baba laugh, too. I’d felt like I was being insulted, but another part of me enjoyed being the punch line to their jokes. I hadn’t heard my parents laugh like that in a long time.
“Baba,” I said. My voice was caught in my throat. “I’m—sorry. I . . .”
My heart was beating fast in my chest. It wasn’t my secret to tell, but I’d told it anyway. All I wanted—all I’d ever wanted—was the possibility of my father’s safe return to us. I thought revealing the truth about Lee, the reason he was growing more and more distant from Mah and me, would bust the problem wide-open. Call him back to his life—his real life—with us. But I was wrong. In the silence before he said anything, I realized: Baba was already living his real life.
“Jane,” he said. “It’s okay. It’s okay, my daughter. My baby daughter.” He kept saying it was okay, over and over again, as if that might make it true.
The Inheritance
Fiona Lin was twenty-two, in her final semester at UC Berkeley, when her grandfather passed away from a stroke. He’d had two of them already, since turning eighty. The first was a warning, the second a threat, promising imminent death, said his doctors at National Taiwan University Hospital. Even then, he refused to give up smoking, according to Fiona’s eldest uncle, and there was nothing anyone could do to change his mind. The family was lousy with heart conditions and respiratory troubles; two aunts had undergone chemo for breast cancer in the same year, a cousin diagnosed with a degenerative autoimmune disease who was being treated simultaneously with Western medicine and Chinese herbs. The Lins always survived. Fiona had heard this mantra her entire life. The power of this belief held such sway that his third stroke, the one that took her grandfather’s life, managed to catch everyone by surprise, including the patriarch himself.
Fiona hadn’t seen her grandfather in years. In high school, there’d been occasional phone calls her mother monitored, and red envelopes in the mail for Chinese New Year. Fiona was the only daughter of her grandfather’s youngest child. At times, her mother lamented the curse of being his favorite, the surprise baby after six older siblings and the only one born on the island after the family fled the mainland in 1949. His favorite, and his biggest disappointment: her mother’s way of explaining the long periods of estrangement between them, the reason why Fiona didn’t meet her grandparents until she was six years old. Back then—back in Taiwan—her name was Ona. No one called her that anymore, except her mother.
Fiona’s mother flew to Taiwan for the funeral the following week. When she got back, her mother called to relay the news that Fiona’s grandfather had left behind money for all of his grandchildren. Today, a banker’s check arrived in the mail to Fiona’s apartment on Blake Street, addressed to her name in Chinese, accompanied by a short letter she couldn’t read, signed and stamped by a notary. She walked down to the B of A on Telegraph and deposited the check.
Ten thousand two hundred fifty-seven dollars and thirteen cents, minus the international conversion fee, credited to her account, just like that.
Fiona knew work; she’d held part-time jobs since she was thirteen, when she knocked on the doors of their apartment building to ask if anyone needed a responsible babysitter (she was in charge of her younger brother, Conrad, all afternoon anyway—what was another kid to watch?). In high school, Fiona was highly sought after as a peer tutor for almost every subject, and she’d worked during all four years of undergrad, supplementing her Pell Grant and work-study maximum with the money she earned pouring coffee and bussing tables at Caffè Strada on College and Bancroft. She knew how to save, seeing the figures add up month after month. She set a goal and reached it: like how she bought Shamu, her first car, not long after she turned sixteen. What she didn’t know was how to deal with money like the unexpected inheritance check, all those zeros suddenly in her bank account she hadn’t earned.
In a month, Fiona was graduating with a bachelor’s in political science. Her boyfriend, Jasper Chang, was an English major whose greatest desire was to move to New York and write the twenty-first century’s Great American Novel. Only people who grew up with money thought this way, casting about life without a realistic plan, an inherent trust in things falling into place, Fiona thought. Everyone else begged, borrowed, and stole—Fiona had done all three.
Two years ago, she’d let herself be talked into taking an envelope of cash out of the pastor’s office at Jane’s mother’s church, while her best friend stood watch outside the door. Her hands tingled and her stomach lurched at the memory of it. The money was meant for a team of volunteers going on mission. Jane hated that church, how her mother had been transformed into an evangelical fanatic by those people. She felt none of the guilt Fiona did, only the thrill of subterfuge. In Jane’s eyes, it was a game, something to get away with. What they did wasn’t exactly right, Jane reasoned, but on the plus side, they were definitely sparing some innocent African people from cultish Jesus rhetoric spewed by a traveling band of Christian crazies. Fiona needed the money. There was nearly three thousand dollars in cash donations stuffed inside the envelope. The opportunity presented itself, and Fiona had seized it, with Jane’s help.