Read Online Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir by Rita Zoey Chin - Free Book Online Page B

down at the floor. “What is he doing to you up there?” she’d ask, as if there were an answer.
    But then Joanne and I would pull our duffel bags back to our old room, and my mother would play Supertramp on the record player, and we’d dance around the living room on the faded pink carpet as if that were our only life. In the evenings, after my sister went to sleep, I’d stay up late and listen to my mother’s tales of friendship, betrayal, and romance. We’d pull out astrology books and leaf through urgently, looking up the sun signs of her various crushes. “We’re both Libras,” she’d say, “so Geminis are balancing for us.” On those nights, she’d sometimes tell me stories about her childhood, how she still dreamed of the French chocolate-filled pastries of her young life in Paris. Other times, she’d stand in front of her bedroom mirror and try on different outfits to see which one I liked best. “But which is sexier?” she’d ask, and I’d point at various red and black and silky things. And my mother, with her new giggle and new barrettes and new cast of friends, became a heroine of light and laughter, became the moon outside the window of my bedroom in my father’s house, when I lay there dreaming up at it, longing for things I didn’t know how to name and the one thing I did: mother . In the weeks between our visits, I wrote her letters, and sometimes she wrote back. And each loop of her handwriting was proof that she loved me. I had a red purse then, adorned with puppy key chains and a small koala bear that clutched onto the strap, and I carried her letters in it so that they would always be with me.

NINE

    J ust after Larry’s first birthday, his parents, Chinese immigrants struggling to earn their graduate degrees in the United States, sent him to Taiwan to live with his maternal grandparents for three years. His childhood picture albums show the gap. It begins with a fuzzy-haired baby smiling in a high chair: before him burns a single candle on a small white cake. He hasn’t massacred it with his fingers or pressed his dimpled face into it the way so many babies do; instead, he’s looking at his mother, who must be smiling back at him from behind the camera. But his mother is missing from the following pages, a few square black-and-white photographs, each not much larger than a stamp. In them, Larry grins in his po-po’s arms or holds hands with his tall and regal-looking grandfather, Gong-Gong. And the next photographs, colorized again, show a four-year-old boy standing obediently beside his parents. Now the boy looks careful, smiling perfunctorily to complete the portrait that says, This is my family .
    On the plane back from Taiwan, Larry’s grandparents helped him practice his introduction speech to his parents. He had virtually no memory of these people he would soon be calling Mama and Baba. He spoke no English, and he missed his dog—a Pekinese who’d surprised everyone when he ended up killing the family monkey.
    At the terminal gate, Larry’s parents waited eagerly, like a couple about to adopt their first child. While Larry was away, his parents had missed him, but having to navigate their rigorous studies in a new language, they hadn’t had much time to think about it.
    Larry and his grandparents were among the first people to get off the plane. His grandmother had combed his straight hair neatly to one side and fitted his neck with a red bow tie, which he tugged at during the long flight. His parents stood immobile as they watched the baby they’d sent away now walking toward them, a young boy. Behind him, his grandmother was prodding, pushing him forward. “Go, go!” she urged. Larry acquiesced, walking steadily across the great plain between the generations. In Taiwan he’d seen pictures, and so he recognized his parents instantly; they were leaning over now, holding out their arms. But Larry stopped short, looked up squarely into each of their faces, and recited