HYDRANGEAS ANONYMOUS, FLIGHTLESS BIRD, AND OTHER STORIES OF THE DIASPORA

02. [SICHENG] HYDRANGEAS ANONYMOUS PT. 2

I quit dancing for good when I was 16. Honestly – looking back, it was a shame because it was, I can say with confidence four years later, the thing I was best at. I don't think I understood as a 16 year old that giving up one thing you excelled at for something else didn't guarantee you success. Only later would I stare at the ceiling in utter darkness, unable to fall asleep, thinking of all these things I had lost, and lost willingly.

It had been the second to last day of school when I brought it up to my mom. For two months, I'd been beating around the bush of talking about how I wanted to spend the summer at the SAT class that Jieqiong had enrolled in. I needed to raise my score by at least 200 points to be seriously considered for any of the colleges I'd had on my list, and since I was about to finish my junior year, it had been stressing me out.

"I think she'll understand," Jieqiong had reassured me when we were walking home from school the previous day, after again urging me to talk to my parents about it. "Your mom. And if not, I can ask my mom to talk to her, if you want."

I gripped the straps of my backpack tighter. "It's okay. I'll take care of it," I promised, wondering how I had let it drag out this long.

It'd been a warm morning. I was sitting across from my mom at the dining table, eating the breakfast she prepared for me, like she did every morning. There was always some sort of fruit spread out on a plate next to our bowls of congee, peeled and neatly cut into slices. That day it happened to be white flesh peaches, the first of the season. They glistened in the harsh summer sunlight streaming in through the kitchen window.

"Ama," I started as she lifted her porcelain spoon full of congee and mianjin to her mouth. I had barely touched my own, my stomach in knots. I'd barely slept the night before too, and I didn't feel the least bit hungry. "I want to quit dance."

Her spoon paused. She put it back down into her bowl, and it sunk slowly in the thick milky white depths. In my nervousness, I don't remember what expression she had made. Her face in all my memories of this moment was such an indecipherable blur that I couldn't even project a feeling onto it.

I swallowed. The hand I was sitting on was sticking to my wooden chair in sweat and half-fallen asleep. "I want to go to a SAT prep class instead," I said before I could lose my guts. "There's one near that new Starbucks – you know, where the Korean bakery used to be? Jieqiong's going there. She says it's good."

My mom still didn't say anything. Her silence was unnerving, and seemed to go on for hours. My mom was not a tiger mother by any means, but she was quick to voice her opinions, and she wasn't one to mince her words into easily digestible pieces. It was unusual for her not to speak a word when she disagreed with me, which I knew she had to.

My mom was the one who'd signed me up for dance lessons when I was four years old. The only Chinese traditional dance academy in our locality was an hour away by car, and my mom was usually the one who drove me there on alternating Saturdays after Chinese School and Sundays. I'd grown used to falling asleep to the lull of the car bumping along the highway, the leather seats hot from the lazy evening sun coming in through the untinted car windows even with the air-conditioning up. When I was a kid, the car ride seemed comforting and routine. I came to resent that hour lost in the backseat as I grew older. Instead of napping, I would stare out the window at the wide gray lanes of the highway, quietly stewing in my anger, anger that I would never try to explain to my mom.

A few times out of the year, my dad would drive me. I never really knew what to say to him, what he liked to talk about. Whereas the car rides with my mom were silent from her assuming I would fall asleep, the trips with my dad were so silent that the constant sound of the engine felt perturbing. It was strange to think that we saw each other everyday – we even lived together – but we had absolutely nothing to say to each other, and possibly nothing in common either.