HELEN CHEN
Silver Moon Praises
Does it end with devotion?
In its own ambiguous way, my family is a Christian household. Nai Nai (奶奶) is a churchgoer. Her desire to understand God’s message taught her to read and her stirring resentment for life then made church a multipurpose alleyway that shadowed over her agony and elevated her pride. It was where she forgot about her devotion to the family, a body of associations she labored for, but that she continuously grows weary of, and belonged to something she had chosen.
As the late nineties braced itself for the new millennium, Nai Nai and Ye Ye (爷爷) received their visa interview at the U.S. consulate in Guangzhou. She had gotten her eldest son, my father (爸爸), and youngest daughter, my Little Aunt (小姑), to America, where she envisioned they had escaped the dregs of life. Now, she waited her turn.
It is 1998; Nai Nai and Ye Ye arrive in New York. My father and Little Aunt pick them up from the airport. They embrace and, in a joyous atmosphere, Little Aunt’s husband takes a picture. The decade-old photograph still sits dormant in a picture book I’ve cobbled together one afternoon. Nai Nai is smiling and Ye Ye tries, but the smile ends up lopsided. I smooth out the photo print, although what I really hoped to smoothen was those saggy, scratched, and thick patches of Nai Nai’s face.
* * *
I sat in the last row, Flappy Bird operating on my screen. The thrill of the uncertainty, as I narrowly maneuver over the next obstacle, kept me grounded on the pew. When the stout flappy bird met another death, I restart, hoping it may live a little longer this time. Nai Nai elbowed my arm as she leaned over and whispered, “Pastor Peng is looking, put your game away.” She averted her eyes between the surrounding space a few times before slipping back to her original position. I barely spare a glance, my thirteen-year-old mind wired to be free-spirited.
She’s just a 小孩子, said a woman sitting nearby. Nai Nai rolled her eyes as she turned around to smile at the pastor. 她真是不懂事.
I didn’t see Pastor Peng’s reaction, but from the corner of my eyes, I imagined his smile, or some semblance of it, a tightrope stretched across the face, lurid pools of ink gathered around his pupils made for an insidious impression as he extended his claws to demolish the adorable, pixilated heartthrob. He paced behind me, putting on a smile that felt too forced.
Moments later, he walked over and gently tapped my shoulders. “Good child, listen to the sermon.” His teeth were slightly yellow, gums purple; what I would call chilling. Being singled out by him felt oddly humiliating, so in a moment of shame, I killed Flappy Bird.
* * *
They’ve been nice to us before. Nai Nai said as Ye Ye droned on with his cynical remarks. He reminded her of their daughter, who didn’t get her pay after a summer’s labor, and all the times that she made food for them. Nai Nai would pause for a brief moment before finding words to assert herself again. She reminded him of Pastor Shi, his wife, and how she helped me with my financial aid application.
“越 wouldn’t even be able to afford Columbia if not for her help.” It was a stretch. But in a household where men preferred to yell, I didn’t correct her.
I never bothered again with the Bible after paging through the picture book alternative of it in first grade, a gift from the pastors aforementioned. I left the book in some insignificant corner, now littered with drawings when boredom possessed my young mind and forgot it. But Nai Nai remembered. She remembered their kindness. She always did.
Nai Nai frequently made 粽子 for the pastor’s family. She tied the 粽子 methodically with a thin white string, placed them in a red plastic bag, and shoved them to me. Give them a smile and wish them a happy Sunday. So I did. I smiled and wished Pastor Shi, Pastor Peng’s wife, a happy day and felt relieved that Pastor Peng was still asleep. He was like Coraline, a seemingly harmless figure that possessed a contradictory inner persona.
* * *
“Which high school are you attending?” Pastor Peng asked. Did I already mention his smile? I responded with a brevity that reflected my unwillingness to dwell more. I teared up violently the moment I opened my high school decision letter, my thirteen year old self unfamiliar with disappointment of this magnitude; it was a crumbling sense of defeat. I felt shame for the first time.
In the social circles of the church, the prestige of one’s education was either a marker of exceptional academic achievement or a source of mediocre humiliation. Parents of the former gushed about their children enrolled at Stuyvesant or Staten Island Tech, high schools that represent the finest caliber of free education. Parents of the latter, like myself, choose to avoid these overly enthusiastic conversations, mostly because we weren’t part of the elite high school club. The pastor, for another, had stopped talking about his Stuyvesant son now that no one can be certain where exactly he is at.
I’ve stopped going to church, maybe to avoid questions, but more so to avoid the environment. Teens my age dot every corner of the church: taking piano lessons, dusting projectors, and everything else that tidied a corner of church; it was, at its ideal form, an intermediary that connected those uprooted from their ancestral home in China to the America their children will grow up in; the symbolism of a Christian church was so deeply American that many saw the door behind the church gates: that it added to the American resume in a way few other things can compare to.
* * *
A nonbeliever, or just a not-care type, my friend Cindy held tightly to Chinese culture. She listened to Chinese music, had TFBoys as her wallpaper, watched Asian dramas, and absolutely hated reading, especially thick English novels with small print. But despite our differences, we were the same. Her family, like countless others, held on to their corner of the Dream. Me and her were products of a generational strive.
Cindy flips another page of the Kaplan prep book, thousands of pages thick, and littered with blotches of red ink over distorted pencil marks. This was her 4 PM and 12 AM. Every hour was invigorated with the stretch goal of a glorious future. It steadied her life with meaning. Perhaps the Advils were contributing to her migraines, but I dared not suggest that to her. I told her she was worth more, just like what Nai Nai has told me, that life wasn’t a race. But those words, as they came out of my mouth, felt horribly meaningless, completely empty.
In fact, my trivial words of kindness were infuriating. I inadvertently forced her to contemplate with the prospect that she could be mistaken. That all her striving, her mother’s aspiration for her, and the sleepless nights she spent trying to inch closer to her glorious future marked by a glamorous acceptance letter, was misplaced. To question her effort was to demolish her world. But to question her, when just a bit down the path, I would be doing the same, was also hypocritical. She asked me where I was heading; what gave me meaning. I don’t know, I said. You’re lying to me? I really don’t know, I responded. Good, she replied. It would be horrible if we were all heading towards the same place.
H-A-R-V-A-R-D.
I have, on more than a few occasions, etched these seven letters on paper with fine-tipped Sharpie into my notebook. The words thicken and bleed through the crisp white page, either distorting it with permanent baggage or detailing it with new meaning. I don’t know if plunging forward is the right decision; indecision clutched me until it didn’t. It is. I told myself.
The gravity of my existence seemed to gravitate towards that single mission. I know this was an attempt to feel important. But my sense of self-importance was barely adjacent to the markers of age on Nai Nai’s face. Every crease on her face was a sorrow she never quite released herself from. I only want you to be happy, she said. No. I want you to be happy because you break my heart with your love that knows no boundaries.
I needed her to wrap her calloused hands around my back and part her plump crimson lips into a smile, knowing that she never needed to look for the “other kids.” As much as I want it to be sometimes, life is never a solitudinous journey. College, too, is not an individual choice. It felt like a matter of happiness.
It was during those days of scattered angst that God shifted from the peripheral to a more profound place. I prayed every night with Nai Nai. She prayed for the wellbeing of her husband, her children, her grandchildren, her friends, her relatives, her church. She prayed for forgiveness for her sins as if that was her only identity.
She prayed and prayed and prayed.
I wanted God to be there when I need it, to engulf me with gracious, boundless love. I chant, over and over, wondering if God listened to selfish souls. I wondered if God was really as perfect, as beyond mortality as the term God suggests. Everyone wants something, whether they ask, plead, or demand. But Nai Nai is a silver exception. She is consumed with selfishness– in the way that makes you question why selfishness has a negative connotation. Her selfishness is always for the sake of others.
She was a blameless disciple, but hardly a blameless person. She loved with every trembling breath of her existence. Her tender voice perpetually edged with urgency, spoke the kindest words with spades of fury. In life, she was a sinner—a liar. She perpetually fed me lies: that she only ate the head or tail of a freshwater fish and preferred to sew and stitch her decade-old shirts to busy herself; she nearly became a formless being to me, with no needs and wants, outlined with devotion. Nothing, no one, not even God, deserved love of this grade.
To everyone, Nai Nai was selfish. The bitchy mother with an insidious, irritating presence over the lives of her children. The bitch who cared too much and that everyone lashed out at when things went wrong because she just cared too much. I hear the screams all the time: at the edge of the stairs, over the kitchen table. It was so ugly, so grotesque that I wished they would see what I saw. That I saw her cry one day, over video. Her tears leaked down her roughened face just so barely. She missed me and it had only been two weeks since I last went home. With her tears still reflected with the light on her face, she smiled as she showed me the new pair of earbuds she brought me. It was twenty dollars, 原装, she said, because the last five dollar one had given out, and I told her a month ago to stop buying the 便宜货.
Then I told her to stop buying things for me because people always asked her for things, and she was just a seventy year old woman who secretly ate pills for her diabetes and high blood pressure and migraines and with nothing much else to give out.
Nai Nai’s refrained smile, the conscious control of the tips of her lip, remains etched in my memory. I will not look back at my ten-hour schedule, Allen Cheng’s famous PrepScholar articles bookmarked on my Chrome page, and private YouTube playlists featuring every single “HOW I GOT INTO THE IVY LEAGUE” video. It all felt and was a part of a feverish phase in pursuit of vain glory. But it wasn’t so vain after all when the gates of new possibility ushered a bloom on Nai Nai’s storied face.
In between phone calls with her church friends, she lingered over my name, prompting the question of my college destination. She smiled, her plump crimson lips parting into a generous curve. She told the pastor of the good news and sang me the chorus of “Ode To Joy” to celebrate. The two pastors smiled.
That’s wonderful. She should study medicine or divinity. Those are good paths, Pastor Peng said. I assured him that I was going to study neither.
Nai Nai demanded that I pray with her for two nights to savor this divine blessing. I agreed; not many people agreed with her. She was so happy. I’ve never felt so special, so invincible, so sure that I’ve done something right.
My skin twitches when Nai Nai thanked Christ for his “恩典 (ēn diǎn: generous divine grace).” The moment right after my college acceptance, I broke off my one-sided contract with God. The end of this tale is intense, unadulterated love blinded by kinship. It is not divine grace. She prays for me every night because to be a follower of God was to follow truth and when everyone else disappointed her, God didn’t.
This merry lady who walked me up the church altar to receive my holy blessing sat, her round, slump back hovering over the thin wood table— my study desk—at 9 PM, gently erasing and rewriting Chinese characters in repeated attempts to articulate a cohesive speech for Sunday service; her calloused hands bore distance to the pen. During these sacred hours, duties or distress did not bother her. Only Messiah guided her way. I loved seeing Nai Nai inspired, happy. The church, one that I never grew fond of, was her sanctuary. Every conceivable moment of living had been responsibility. But being God’s devotee had made her believe that all the wonderful things in life was God’s blessing and the not-so-glamorous a blessing in disguise.
Perhaps it does end with devotion.
Previously published in 45th Parallel
Helen Chen (she/they) is a Chinese-American writer and college student based in New York City. She currently serves as an editor and staff writer for Affinity Magazine and was previously an editor for The Brooklyn Reader. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming on Mitos Magazine, dreams walking, YCteen Mag, CCNY Poetry Outreach, and others.