Toothless at forty-six
My mom has one brother and he's my favorite uncle and he used to put me up all the way to the ceiling where the helium balloons hovered and I used to scream, "Put me down," because the sound I hated the most was the sound of a balloon popping, and two days ago at dinner, my aunt who is married to my uncle told us that my uncle blew out his last two teeth sneezing, and now he has a row of fakes, and we all said, Eh-yeuuuuuuuu, which roughly correlates to Oh God! and my mom, his sister, said, Forty-six and already an old man.
When my father took me and my mother to Fudan, his old university where he spent thirteen years of his life, there were some kids on bikes, who were wearing sweatshirts and shivering, and had pimply faces and fairly unwashed hair who seemed like the other side of the globe equivalent of Stanford kids in red sweatshirts on their way to IHUM, and one kid said to the other, "We'll want to remember this when we we're forty and fifty," and the other agreed and for just a split second I thought we'd all just think about this in our minds, but my dad changed that by saying to my mom, "That's us. Forties and fifties," and I have to say, that felt strange, because my father was wandering around the place he spend 13 years of his life trying to reconstruct the buildings that had been razed, changed, or built over, and when we entered the Building of Foreign and International Studies, his building, we walked in on a man who seemed suspicious, and he came out from a haze of smoke to sort of greet my dad, mostly shoo him off, and watching to the two of them talk was painful.
Haven't you seen those movies or documentaries where they built up this meeting, this return home, some adoptee, or someone returning to a place that has been important to them, only to realize no one remembers him or her, nothing is quite the same, and even the people he or she had been secretly hoping to embrace are not interested, don't even know what this is all about.
But we did get to go in the library, and a man with missing teeth, and the rest completely brown black and yellow, wearing his sweatpants very very high on his waist told my dad that he had been a staff at the Foreign Languages Center the longest, and now it was its own college, and my mom and I were like, Dad, did you know that guy when you were here, and my dad was like, Of course not, and I wanted us to wait there because the earlier uncaring guy had said that some of my dad's colleagues and former friends who were now heads of departments or professors were in a meeting together but my mom was ready to go back and maybe my dad wasn't really so invested in the kind of ending I thought he wanted, so we went back and met a girl on the bus who called me little sister, and said a lot of words and I only half listened and half read my book, which Karan recommended me, and thanks Karan, it's a pretty good book!
When my father took me and my mother to Fudan, his old university where he spent thirteen years of his life, there were some kids on bikes, who were wearing sweatshirts and shivering, and had pimply faces and fairly unwashed hair who seemed like the other side of the globe equivalent of Stanford kids in red sweatshirts on their way to IHUM, and one kid said to the other, "We'll want to remember this when we we're forty and fifty," and the other agreed and for just a split second I thought we'd all just think about this in our minds, but my dad changed that by saying to my mom, "That's us. Forties and fifties," and I have to say, that felt strange, because my father was wandering around the place he spend 13 years of his life trying to reconstruct the buildings that had been razed, changed, or built over, and when we entered the Building of Foreign and International Studies, his building, we walked in on a man who seemed suspicious, and he came out from a haze of smoke to sort of greet my dad, mostly shoo him off, and watching to the two of them talk was painful.
Haven't you seen those movies or documentaries where they built up this meeting, this return home, some adoptee, or someone returning to a place that has been important to them, only to realize no one remembers him or her, nothing is quite the same, and even the people he or she had been secretly hoping to embrace are not interested, don't even know what this is all about.
But we did get to go in the library, and a man with missing teeth, and the rest completely brown black and yellow, wearing his sweatpants very very high on his waist told my dad that he had been a staff at the Foreign Languages Center the longest, and now it was its own college, and my mom and I were like, Dad, did you know that guy when you were here, and my dad was like, Of course not, and I wanted us to wait there because the earlier uncaring guy had said that some of my dad's colleagues and former friends who were now heads of departments or professors were in a meeting together but my mom was ready to go back and maybe my dad wasn't really so invested in the kind of ending I thought he wanted, so we went back and met a girl on the bus who called me little sister, and said a lot of words and I only half listened and half read my book, which Karan recommended me, and thanks Karan, it's a pretty good book!
posted by Jenny at 12:28 PM
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