Pistachio
JIAQI GAO
I attended several weddings of relatives and family friends in my middle school years, and they were all remarkably similar, as though the same wedding planner was being booked and passed around. Most of these weddings happened in the tri-state area outside New York City, and because my family didn’t own a car, we would have to take a Greyhound bus from Penn Station to get to those venues. Testament to being a New York native, I was easily susceptible to hurling everything I ate earlier in the day, after even a thirty minute drive. Because of my sensitive stomach, I would simply not eat before the bus ride. My parents noticed this behavior and chastised me for starving myself, but my stubborn insistence, stemming from a deep aversion for vomiting, was unshakeable.
I discovered that if I lay down on my side, my head resting on my mother’s lap, my legs curled onto my bus seat, I could close my eyes and alleviate the motion sickness by escaping into my imagination. I would try to forget how the moquette on the bus seats are a navy, multihued graphic abomination, and ignore the traces of gas exhaust that were making me nauseous. Instead, I imagined being on the very canoe in The Great Wave off Kanagawa where craggy bus movements are coming from rough waves, not cracks and potholes on concrete roads.
I would nestle in the cradle of my mother’s lap and she would gently stroke my hair to comfort me. Every so often, she would readjust her posture slightly, likely to mitigate the numb sensation of pins and needles in her thighs from the weight of my pre-adolescent head. Each time she made a slight movement while I was still awake, I would ask “我是不是太重了？”
“没事，没事, 你睡吧,” she reassured me as she closed her eyes, trying to doze off as well.
Four hours later, we would arrive at the pristine wedding venue and I would be delirious from hunger. Given my parents’ frustrating habit of generously factoring in potential time stuck in traffic, we tended to arrive at the restaurant wedding venues significantly earlier than all the other guests. While my parents greeted the immediate families of the bride and groom who were already there, I would scour the vacant red wedding tables, pilfering the refreshments in the center of each table.
The usual suspects in the mix of refreshments were roasted nuts, plastic wrapped candy, and nougat wrapped in translucent rice paper. Even in my frenzied state, I would be fastidious over what I foraged to avoid drawing too much attention to myself. I decided that I would only eat a few of my favorite items on each table, quickly discovering that the best of the bunch was the pistachio. The lightly salted exterior, the clean snap from cracking open the shell, and the glorious, sweet savory morsel of happiness inside… I was obsessed. I could barely keep myself from picking out all the pistachios, then burying the empty shells underneath the other nuts and candies on the plate to cover up my plundering.
As terrible liars do, I would look over my shoulder at my mother who sat several tables away, engaged in lively chatter with the bride’s family. I was diligent in my one-sided game of red-light-green-light with my mother and the refreshments, attuned to her body language that might suggest a turn of her head in my direction. I would watch her laugh loudly and clap her hands together at things other people said, then chime in with comments of her own. The jade bracelet and silver necklace she would bring out from the safety deposit at the bank glittered in the light. Her hair, no longer showing strands of grey, would have the faint smell of ammonia from a recent dye job.
Next to her friends, my mother was youthful and glowing. There would be an aura around her that I couldn’t recognize; I was only familiar with my mother who was always moving quickly to work enough to pay the bills and still be home to prepare warm meals. I felt like I could only observe her like this from a distance, as though if I came closer, my mother would spot me, the magic forcefield around her would dissolve, and the weariness of motherhood would return and appear on her face in the form of dark circles and fine lines. I was happy for her but I also felt twinges of guilt that I couldn’t yet understand.
As new guests entered the venue, pixelating the background noise into loud unintelligible voices, I would watch my mother fall into place with the crowd, the way a puzzle piece fits into its place. I imagined my mother fully in her element, turning the dial on her charisma to maximum levels, the words flowing from her mouth soaked in honey.
My older brother and I kept to ourselves at the wedding dinners. We talked and bickered quietly while our parents babbled non-stop to those seated with us—relatives we instantly forgot our relation to after the initial introduction. Once my stomach was satiated, I would become uninterested in the continuous waves of food served to the tables. My mother, slightly flushed from drinking wine, would be so engrossed in conversation that her plate would still have food from the earliest courses. I would overhear my mother and her table companions yak about their children, each seeming to dramatize their children’s achievements more and more to one-up one another.
Eventually, the dinners would come to an end and we would take the late-night Greyhound bus back to the city.
In the privacy of our apartment in Chinatown, my mother confided in me her true personal opinions about the people she interacts with. The way my mother talked about people was so different from the way she talked to the same people. She would be polite and respectful in front of them, but with me, she would release repressed frustration over her younger sister who spoils her own daughter rotten, the street fruit vendor who sold a bruised apple to her, the apartment property manager who had yet to address the corroded staircase railing, and many others.
For all the bottled-up indignation she had for other people, it never felt like she had any bottled up for me. Anytime I did something my mother didn’t like, she would express her disapproval immediately, or it would simply diffuse and no considerable conflict ever came of it. She never said anything, but my mother must have known my bad pistachio habit at those family weddings because I would forget to throw away the pistachio shells I hid in my dress pockets before tossing my clothes into the laundry. I can imagine my mother exasperated, picking up the pistachio shells sitting at the bottom of the dryer after they’d danced around with all the clean, damp clothes.
It’s interesting how close we are now because we weren’t always very close, and truthfully I didn’t know her well then at all.
My mother was pregnant with me in the first year she immigrated to this country. Unable to speak the language, she struggled immensely to raise a newborn child alone in the United States of America, as my father remained in China. At first, he was only in China waiting for his late green card application to be processed, then later, due to complications with his job.
My parents desperately wanted another child after having my older brother. With China’s one-child policy still in effect, they intended to uproot everything and leave everyone they knew for the United States. They heard rumors that this country could provide great economic opportunities for their son and the second child for whom they hoped. My father only knew a few people in the United States—and none of them lived in the city my mother had her eye on—but my parents rose from rural poverty and perhaps that gave them their enduring tenacity and brash audacity to think they could once again build everything from absolutely nothing.
My parents must have wanted another child so badly because the move wiped out their life savings. My family’s livelihood became more tightly wound around the success of my father’s construction business in China than ever before, which itself became precariously tied to capricious government contracts that demanded consistent, stable results. This required my father to remain in the country for longer than planned and work long hours to increase momentum on construction projects—a lifestyle that has taken its toll on his health. The constant, careless lifting of heavy construction materials gave my father lifelong pain in his lower back and joints. To this day my father is inseparable from his analgesic balms; the pungent peppery scent of camphor diffuses in the air around him, announcing his presence and reminding us of his bodily sacrifices for our life in the States.
My father, chained to his work in China, left my pregnant mother in New York City with only the company of my three-year-old brother. Surrounded by eight million strangers, my mother had never felt lonelier. The stress of financial scarcity, caring for my brother, and finally, the arrival of a new baby all weighed heavily on her. During tear-streaked calls at odd Eastern time hours with her parents, my mother's façade that everything was okay finally cracked as she pled with them to look after me in China. In order to preserve permanent resident status in the United States, my mother couldn’t come with me to China, handing my infant self to my grandparents at the JFK airport.
There are grainy photos commemorating this moment at the airport. I am wrapped generously in a soft beige blanket and my mother is embracing me tightly, smiling in red lipstick. Could she have imagined then how much our separation would hatch into a long period of unfamiliarity for one another, despite being raised by the exact same people in the exact same place?
The first words I ever said to my mother in person were, “你不是我的妈,” meaning, “You are not my mother.” She laughed at the incredulous statement as she pulled me by my arms into the front door of the apartment in New York. I anchored my feet, locking my knees at ninety degrees, resisting my mother as she tried to carry me in her arms. I couldn’t recognize this strange place, with so many people walking outside on the streets. My arms flailed and I tried biting my mother to let go of my arms. I couldn’t understand why my grandparents brought me to an airport where a woman I didn’t recognize took me away. My grandpa later told me that he cried at the airport. I must have been bawling and kicking, refusing to let go of his hand.
It must have been such a scene to watch a four-year-old girl spit those stinging words at a woman whose pretend laughter increasingly morphed into impatient frustration out in public. In the end, I relented to my mother’s tugging but I remained bitter and resentful for a long time. I felt frustrated but the source of the frustration was too ambiguous, too complex for me to pinpoint as a child. I was quiet and filled with rage and angst. My bad temper came from the disorientating turbulence of a sudden change in environment. But my patient mother understood. My emotions were probably not far from the anxiety my mother had been carrying since the first year she came to this country.
In my first years in New York, I frequently withdrew to corners of our home where I would scribble with crayons in my brother’s half-used composition notebooks. One of my favorite spots to go into seclusion was the corner by the opening to my parents’ room, where instead of a door were long, olive curtains. My mother would replace the curtains every so often with ones that were clean from the closet. Coming from the bottom of the closet, the curtains faintly smelled of mothballs, which I found oddly comforting. I would wrap myself around the folds of the curtains, like I was putting on a cape, and curl my knees to my chest as I drew silently.
I remember one day overhearing a conversation between my parents in their room as I worked on a primary school homework assignment. It was a Sunday afternoon and my brother was outside, likely playing basketball in the park nearby. My father returned to the apartment from RadioShack with a new remote control, and from what I pieced together, the situation was this: my father went to purchase a TV remote control to replace our broken one, but whether by miscommunication with the store attendant, or reluctance to ask for help due to the language barrier, my father brought home a new remote control that did not work with our TV. My mother sounded very upset—more upset than I thought was reasonable. The new remote control only cost a little over ten dollars which, while wasn’t nothing, wasn’t everything either.
When my father left the apartment, I heard crying on the other side of the curtains. Crawling on my knees, I poked my head under the curtains and saw my mother sitting on the side of the bed, gripping the RadioShack receipt and crying softly, napkins clutched in her other hand. I had never seen my strong mother cry before. My chest felt tight and I felt an overwhelming resolve to fix the situation.
Crawling forward, I hugged her knees and took the receipt from her hand.
“没事，遥控才买了十几块.” I was only around eight years old but I felt stronger than my mother at the moment, having quickly learned English without a Chinese accent in the few years I’d been in this country. “我带爸爸去店里, 把遥控退掉就行了吧 .”
Being so close to my mother and seeing her vulnerable, I felt a contradictory push-pull to comfort her yet give her privacy. I softened a lot after this incident, the hard exterior of my shell, formed from my own pain of having felt like I was abandoned as a baby, cracking just enough for me to close the distance in this moment, to let myself wrap my arms around my mother.
Looking back now, I don’t think my mother was crying about the purchase of an incompatible remote control. Each of her tears were probably meant for the doubts and moments of grief, loneliness, and powerlessness that came from moving to a new country. I understand now the enormity of her sacrifices. They’re visible to me when I witness moments of my mother’s frustration living in a place outside her comfort zone, and in moments of happiness when she is with her Chinese friends and relatives. Immigrating to the United States may not have all been for me, but my existence and birth were certainly the catalyst for her move to a foreign country.
In my own time, when I was sure there was no one around, I cried for myself and for my mother.
In Chinese, “pistachio” translates into 开心果, where 开 means open and 心 means heart, and 开心 means happy. The name can refer to how cracking a pistachio requires opening its heart, or how the shape of the crack in the shell resembles a smile. 开心果 also has another meaning: it refers to somebody, usually a child, who brings joy to people. I didn’t know any of this until after I decided pistachios would be my favorite snack. It’s quite an expensive snack but my mother would frequently bring home a bag of pistachios for me from the grocery store.
Sometimes, before I leave home to return to college, my mother sneaks a bag of pistachios into the sleeve of my suitcase. The conspicuous tearing sound of the metal zipper coming from my suitcase gives her away, and we have an awkward exchange where I attempt to refuse her unsolicited gift.
“不用了妈，我的箱子已经太重了”
“这哪里算重？乖，带走吃吧, 你在机场会饿的”
“妈，你老是这样子。好，那这包开心果我你分一半可以吗？”
In the end, I concede to make my mother happy, still clumsy at receiving her love.
