Illustration by Ashley Yung
Content warnings for suicide and death.
I am making coffee when the two police officers ring my doorbell to tell me my daughter is dead. I never used to drink coffee— it was always Arlo’s thing. But after she left me for college, I gathered her residual beans, cheese cloths, and Mason Jars and tried my hand at her old cold brew methods. I didn’t like the coffee one bit. I suppose I was just trying to replicate her presence in the house.
In the weeks following Arlo’s departure for college, I would sometimes feel an out-of-the-blue but debilitating pain in my left clavicle, rendering me fetal and inert for several seconds. In my bedroom, I yelped in a mixture of agony and exaltation— Arlo had told me years ago that she sometimes felt such unexplained pains, but this was the first time I had felt the pain myself.
Arlo’s old coffee mug was in my hand when they told me. It was the first to go, shattering on the dark hardwood floor, biting and staining my bare legs. I had bought the mug for Arlo at Costco. It was adorned with a large ceramic purple “A” on its side. At the time, I thought it was perhaps too on the nose for Arlo, but I was wrong—she used it at every occasion, always reaching beyond the other glass cups to get to it.
Her father comes running down the stairs, his face round and shiny—his eyebrows furrowed and his eyes searching for the source of alarm. His hair is wet and his shirt is wet and his feet are wet. His bare feet—which have always been too big for him— stick and squelch on the marble floor. He sees me on the ground. He questions the female officer. He screams, but the sound waves travel slower than usual. I see his mouth open and his face crumple and clench before I hear the guttural wrenching.
I couldn’t wrap my mind around why her father was screaming. He never took care of her. He never told her he loved her. He never talked to her, not really. He never took her to amusement parks or gave her hugs or carried her on his shoulders like fathers did in American movies. He couldn’t be an American father, so why was he screaming? I’m the one who should be screaming. And so I did. Like two baboons on National Geographic, we screeched at each other.
One time, when Arlo was young, he said to me, I know you want to get a divorce. Just say it. The look on Arlo’s face was of such unblemished innocence— divorce was not a word she understood in Chinese. We agreed that we could not get a divorce— divorce was for white people. They flee at the slightest scent of trouble. We are not like them— we alone understand work ethic. Nothing else matters, only that we win gold in the Ethnic Hard Work Olympics.
Arlo did not understand this. She was not Chinese. Yes, she had the Chinese face of a Chinese girl, but she was not Chinese, not entirely.
I pick up a handful of the mug’s broken shards. Some of them are entirely purple. I squeeze them into my palm because it was easier and better to focus on the blood than the floor or the officers or her father or Arlo’s smashed dead body. The female police officer tries to pry my hands open. Her fingers on my fingers.
They come into the living room and speak in anachronism and anaphora, none of which I can understand. I tell them to leave. They say they will be back tomorrow morning with more details. Then, the door is shut and the alarm sings its oblong, flaccid note. It is only when they leave that I realize they have left too soon and not soon enough. The doorbell could not be unrung and the door could not be unshut.
In the coming days, her father becomes bedridden during the day, only venturing out in the darkness to drive very fast on open highways. After the funeral, he takes up bowling and comes home late, red in the face and carrying heavy bags with slippery shoes and black bowling balls. The Maotai piles up at the foot of his bed. He drinks from Shot Glasses he purchases from the Hardware Store and then from clear whiskey glasses he already owns and then coffee mugs and then straight out the bottle. This is okay with me. We’ve always slept apart.
Arlo is five when I start stretching her hands. She sits on the backless, uncushioned piano bench, and her bare feet rest, just barely, on a smaller stool above the pedals. Half an hour on the first day. An hour on the next. Three hours on the third day and three hours a day for the rest of the year— with ping pong balls strapped to the palm of her hands. Her fingers convulse and grow.
I go into the bathroom because the enormity of my bedroom scares me. The problem with the bathroom is the mirror. I cannot bear to look at myself— I look exactly like Arlo. So I remove all the mirrors in the house and stack them in a cupboard in the basement. Without mirrors, putting in contacts is very difficult, and I don’t have glasses, so for the next few days, I wander myopic around the house, holding objects very close to my face to see them.
In the middle of the night, I have an urge to see, so I must visit the mirrors downstairs, but upon the sight of myself and of Arlo, I puke and my stream of brown and clear froth covers my reflection. The next day I break all the mirrors with her father’s toolbox hammer.
Even when Arlo was 17, I kept on hoping that she would grow taller, feeding her a steady diet of calcium pills and oxtail soup. I still think she can grow. I don’t remember Arlo at the piano. I don’t remember how Bach and Chopin sounded, just the feel of plastic clothes hangers. I gripped their lukewarm, pale white exterior with nervous strength and broke them on her exposed skin, leaving red welts. I don’t remember why I did such a thing. I would wipe the remnant of salt from her tears on the ivory before the teacher came. I have more broken clothes hangers than functioning ones. My clothes lie in a heap on the floor of my closet.
At age ten, Arlo wants to cook with me. We are making dumplings. Shrimp and chives as the main fillings. I let her cut the chives and garlic and ginger, but when she cuts herself, deep in her right index finger, she misses practice for a week. She never cuts again.
Arlo’s body was flown home and then driven to a funeral home, a secondary home, a tertiary home, but never home.
Arlo’s seventh birthday was at a park with monkey bars and slides. I hired a clown to do magic tricks and blow balloons, which terrified the children. Arlo and her classmates sat silently on the farthest bench away from the clown, as he mercilessly pulled different colored ribbons out of his hat. I told him to leave when he pulled out a red button nose, promising to pay him the full amount. When the other children roamed the park after the clown left, playing tag and hide and seek, Arlo did not move from the bench. Instead, she surveyed the spasming children from a regal seated position. When I asked her why she didn’t want to play, she said, “Mama, I’m tired.”
Arlo’s funeral was on a Saturday. It was the first funeral I had ever been to.
In Moscow, I wrap my slightly warmer hands around her frigid fingers backstage, but it isn’t enough, so we pretend to need an emergency restroom break. I watch her run hot water over her hands. My hands need to be warm in order to play, she tells me. You wouldn’t understand, Mama. You don’t play. This is true. I don’t play, but my fingers are stretched just the same.
Mama, I’m nervous, she tells me one minute before she walks out. I squeeze her fingers tighter and tell her that if she wins, I’ll make shrimp and chives dumplings for her. Her favorite. You should start a dumpling shop in Chinatown. We’d make a lot of money is the last thing she says to me before the introduction and applause.
She wins, obviously.
Her father spoke first at the funeral. He looked like a little boy pretending to be at a funeral. He clutched the lectern until his knuckles turned white and until his face turned blotchy and wild. He stared at the crowd for much too long. We waited for him to say something. Arlo’s high school friends, Arlo’s new college friends, her high school teachers, my parents, her father’s parents— we all listened to the embarrassed scrapings of the chairs and the test-day sniffling of teenagers until the silence passed from unreasonable to unbearable. When he finally spoke, it was in Chinese... to a primarily American crowd. I didn’t blame him— his English was awful. “For many years, I would tell Arlo that she had to stop crying,” he said. “That she was a ‘big girl now.’And at that, she would cry even more. I suppose she didn’t want to be a big girl.” He laughed— a harsh amelodic bark. Nobody could understand him, of course, except me and the grandmothers. The rest of the crowd looked down into their laps and waited for the next speaker.
In the summer of Arlo’s 14th year, we flew to Beijing to study with Professor Liu Cixin at the Central Conservatory of Music. On the plane ride over, Arlo pulled out a book from her deteriorating backpack. I recognized the cover, where a large oak stood unsteadily, on the precipice of wilting.
Haven’t you already read that one? I asked her.
Yes, but it’s fun, she said.
Can’t you do something useful?
Do you think I’m wasting my time? Arlo shut the book.
The flight attendant slapped me lightly on the shoulder and informed me semi-enthusiastically about the position of my seat. I pressed the slick metal button on my armrest. Arlo’s face was impassive but indignant.
Yes, I said, and don’t talk to me like that.
Well, what do you want me to do? she asked.
I sighed. I could not adequately explain to her my belief— shared by Catholics and struggling artists— that her progress and fulfillment would be directly proportional to the amount of suffering we both endured. Okay, you can read for an hour, and then we have to work on theory. Professor Liu wants you to finish the workbook before you arrive.
She pulled the blue book out of her backpack. I’ll just work on it now.
We were assigned a 7th story walk-up in an apartment complex off-campus. The green-gray buildings jutted out at random from the ground like the teeth of a particularly uncouth shark.
The campus itself consisted of one large pale yellow building, harshly rectangular and austere. The grounds were nice. There was an old reflecting pool and a traditional Chinese garden. Nobody went outside, though— the heat was such that it suffocated and robbed you blind.
Did you practice at all since the last time I saw you? Professor Liu asks Arlo, a month into our stay in Beijing. Fuck, I mean, what is this? You are making the exact same mistakes in the exact same places. Arlo looks down and says nothing.
Professor— I try to interject. Arlo had been practicing. I had made sure of that.
Mama, he says, I need to see results in class. Competition is in 3 weeks, do you understand? Do you know how long three weeks is?
I try again, yes, Professor, but I just don’t—
Three weeks is a very short time, Mama, he says. How are we supposed to win if she isn’t
practicing?
The train ride home is silent save the steady well-oiled hums and chimes of the Beijing train system. Chinese train systems are utopian in every way—no blaring sounds, no homeless people, no panhandlers, no one talking, never any ear-splitting screeching. Despite the Beijing train system’s objective superiority, Arlo still prefers the New York subway system. I do not understand her.
You think I’m dumb? I explode as we enter the apartment. Perhaps the clean, meditative trains were not good for me. Just because I don’t know music, you think you can get away with this?
She doesn’t look at me. I’m trying! I promise I’m improving, she says.
How were you still making the same mistakes in the same places then? My voice gets screechy when I’m angry. Her father says I need to lower my pitch. I try to lower my pitch. I notice it has started to rain outside.
I’m not! I’m playing it right. I know I am. He knows I am too.
I forget about lowering pitch. Are you telling me that Professor Liu is stupid?
I don’t know what you want from me. He has it out for me!
Don’t you talk about the professor like that. In China you can’t just disrespect your elders like you do in America.
He just hates me for some reason, she says.
Ah yes, of course, I sneer, he hates you, that’s why he’s taken you as a student.
I don’t know why he has! I didn’t ask for this. He’s a fraud! her upper lip quivers in parallel with her voice.
You think you’re so special. I stop pacing the apartment. Without him, you are nothing! He’s the only one who can help you win in Moscow. You know how many people play piano in America? All of them! Every single one of them. How can you possibly stand out if you continue to act like this? Don’t come crawling back to me when you can only get into UCLA, you understand?
She is on the brink of tears.
Do you want to go to UCLA?
She says nothing. Arlo, do you want to be like everyone else? Do you want to be ambitionless? Do you want to have people believe you are mediocre? Is that what you want?
No, she says.
No? Well, good, start practicing.
I hate you! She shrieks at me. It is a protrusion. It is sudden. And it is in English. The words linger. And then there is a stillness in the air.
You use “hate” huh? I think about what it means in Chinese. You hate me? That’s fine. I don’t need you to love me. I don’t even need you to like me. I just need you to practice.
Well, I’m not going to practice, she stands and moves towards the bedroom we share. I don’t want to play anymore.
Everything is about you, isn’t it? Your father is breaking his back to pay for this trip. I point to the piano. You’re not eating until you practice.
You didn’t understand me. I’m never going to play again, she says almost to herself.
And then Heat flashes and I am not there. I cannot see, and before I know it, I have grabbed all of her books— the one with the dilapidated tree and three others— and flung all of them out and over the balcony.
In a high-pitched frenzy, Arlo rushes out on the balcony, where incoming cars and pedestrians plummet the street.
She wails, rushing back into the room and hurling herself into a wall. Howling and crying, she starts punching the walls, first with the flat of her palm and then with her fists and then with her knuckles.
An icy chill runs through my body. I run wildly towards her. Stop. I’m sorry. Don’t hurt your hands. Mama is wrong. Just don’t hurt your hands. Please. I realize I have said please in English. Please is not a word in Chinese.
I grab her wrists and hold them against my body. She thrashes and pulls against my grip and I’m dragged momentarily off the ground. She pulls free and runs out the door.
The next speaker was a teary-eyed boy whose name I didn’t know. “I loved Arlie,” he said in English, “We... She was my everything. I loved her!” He looked at me briefly, as if afraid of some motherly disapproval.
This must be a prank, I thought. I waited for the 200 people in the audience to stand and for Arlo in her casket to stand and for all of them point and laugh at me. Arlo was not dead, I was sure. The boy’s name I didn’t even know. Arlo would have loved to be here. She would have found it funny.
But nobody stood and nobody laughed and the nameless, teary-eyed boy went on, “I don’t know what happened. We were going good. I mean, the texts she sent me just days ago were all normal!” It felt impossible that he had written these words down on paper. I stopped listening.
After the speeches, the organ music started and everyone began to leave— in pairs and droves out towards the cars. We were all to drive in a single file down to the cemetery where Arlo was to be lowered. I sat there as people passed me. Many prostrated themselves in offer in sympathy. I nodded.
I sat there until the organist stopped, until he too got up and left. I did not move for a long time.
I approached the casket. The lid was lighter than I expected. Inside, lay an unrecognizable body— it was too small for the casket and dressed in a smooth white dress. I rubbed her eyebrows, which I was always prone to do.
I pressed my cheek against her cheek. It was ceramic and matte. It was not the cheek of my daughter. I was afraid to breathe, dreading some cadaverous smell. But one must breathe. Arlo smelled like nothing— there was no necrophagous stench, no putrescine odor, but also none of Arlo’s lavender or cedarwood. Who was inside this body?
But her hands were the same— the same cold, whimsical fingers. Her beautiful, elongated fingers. They were the same temperature now as they were minutes before the stage in Moscow.
I hold them in my hands. I must warm them for her.
Arlo, it’s me. I’m here. I whisper in her ear. She could be five again. I could start over. We could simply live and go on living. We could visit the jovial Vietnamese father who ran Little Saigon, and he would give us free basil fried rice. He could exclaim how much you’ve grown! even when you haven’t grown. We could get oily, awful Pizza Hut from the location barely big enough for 3 people to stand in. You could eat three slices before we get home.
It’s my fault. I’m sorry. Don’t you understand? It’s okay, now. I walked to the back of the room behind the pews, where the plastic chairs lay scattered. I picked one up and walked back to Arlo. I would sit here with my daughter forever. I would rescue her from this.
You don’t have to go on stage anymore, I tell her. Her eyes are closed. We can go right now. We can call it all off. I never enjoyed piano music anyway. I found it all tepid and clunky. We should have had an open casket funeral, Arlo. We should have let the world see how beautiful you are. Who was that boy? You never told me about him. I never told you about my life. I never told you about how I cried when my father died in a cycling accident when I was 10. I never told you about how I thought your father was ugly when I first met him when I was 14. I never told you about how I sold all of my hair to a strange man in the street for some candy. Oh, how your grandmother hit me, when I came home with loose wisps for hair. Someday, I’m going to tell you all about that.
We can go now, Arlo. We don’t have to practice today. We can take a break. Just for one day. I rub her fingers with my thumb, but they refuse to get warm. Today, we can make dumplings together. Shrimp and chives, your favorite. I’ll let you use the knife.
I cannot start crying. I cannot be a crying mother, not in front of my daughter.
I’m sorry. Mama loves you. Mama is sorry. Mama loves you. Mama is sorry. I love you.
I am carrying Arlo out of the casket when her father stops me. He carries me out of the room while motioning for the people at the door to close the casket. I pound his chest and slap his face, but he remains impassive barring the tears. I’m not done, I keep saying. I’m not done. Arlo’s not done. Let me finish. The casket closes.
The world was unendurable, yet everywhere it endured. A balding white man named Timothy led an insurance-prescribed group therapy session for deprived mothers... or was it depraved mothers. Or maybe it was estranged mothers. I didn’t know what those words meant. Sure, we should mourn together, talk about it. I resented his face, his too-gentle smile, the smugness of someone who talked about grief like it was something to be understood. It was an oblique, sad face, one undefeated by pain, or perhaps one mired in the shallow belief that it was on the other side of pain. We did hugging exercises. Screaming exercises. Timothy told us to share our happiest moments. This was a bad idea.
After the third session with Timothy, I had begun to recognize the faces of the other mothers, though I did not know their names. As I left, I caught a glimpse of myself in a dark glass window and instead of rushing by, I stopped to take a look. It had been a while since I’d seen my face. It had widened rather than thinned— the opposite of what the doctor had told me would happen— perhaps made plump by the Lexapro. I was always telling Arlo that she must slim down her face. Timothy caught up with me.
“Hi, Elana,” nobody had called me by my fake made-up English name since Arlo’s elementary school teachers during parent-teacher conferences.
“Hi, Timothy.”
“I really appreciate you coming back,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said.
He looked at me. I didn’t know what else to say, so I continued, “my car is over there.” I pointed towards the far end of the parking lot. We walked in silence toward her father’s puke-green Honda Accord.
I was about to close the door when he said, “Actually, I was hoping that we might get dinner together?” I was sure I had misheard. I once told Arlo that peeling an apple in one clean long stroke with a knife was the most romantic thing to do for a man. Now I’m not so sure. I didn’t say anything. These days I ate very little, mostly Nongshim Shin Ramyun Black and Chobani Yogurts. I planned to go back home and starve myself. We had entered a strange silence, one punctuated by his eye darts and shuffling. I simply stared at him, studying his face. My phone rang. I turned off the ringer without looking at the caller ID. I had not picked up a single phone call since Arlo.
“I’m sorry. This is perhaps too sudden.” He paused. “Well, I’ll see you next week. I’m sorry about this. I hope this doesn’t make the sessions worse for— ”
“Yes,” I said.
“What?”
“I’ll wait here.”
“So you will get dinner with me tonight?”
“Yes.”
Timothy made for a little jog back to his car, but by the time he had reached it, I had already left the parking lot, the exhausted Honda Accord hunkering away.
When I arrived home, I booked the next flight to New York City. Arlo was the happiest in New York. At Carnegie, her hands were the warmest. I found it remarkable— her inability to smell the garbage or see the cockroaches. In return, she found me unbearable since I was unable to empathize with her adoration for the city. She walked freely in the streets, against the Midtown concrete, her hands in her own pockets, not mine.
Her father came down the stairs and into the garage as I was putting on my shoes. “Where are you going?” He asked.
“For a drive.”
He looked warily at my coat and my boots, before saying, “Okay,” and sauntering back up to sleep.
LaGuardia was familiar, which was comforting, and I checked into the nicest hotel I could find in Soho. The room smelled like lavender and cedar wood, but also nail polish.
I took off all my clothes and climbed over the railing of the terrace. 30 stories. Maybe 40 stories. The streets below looked at once very close and very far. Gravity was meaningless. Here, I could perhaps see Arlo’s point. In the darkness, I could only see lights. No individual buildings, no individual people— just the orchestral horns and enjambments and the uncharacteristically low rumble of a siren. From this height, New York was inoffensive.
They told me that Arlo had jumped. She had not left a note. I could not find a note. She didn’t know how to write in Chinese. Maybe she thought that if she wrote it in English, I would not be able to decipher it. The piercing cold was such that within seconds I could not feel nor move my toes. Perhaps madness is contagious. Perhaps this was comedy. Perhaps this was the beginning and end of everything. Perhaps I would see Arlo again. But those were just stories for mothers with dead daughters.
Arlo once told me that at 0 degrees Celsius, the naked human body dies in about 20 minutes from having too cold of an internal body temperature.
In the end, I didn’t even have the courage to jump.
Renny Gong is a sophomore at Columbia College. At the present moment, he misses his mother.