Go Home!

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781936932030
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Colecciones literarias asiáticas

An anthology of Asian diasporic writers musing on the notion of "home." "Bold and devastating... the very definition of reclamation." — The International Examiner Asian diasporic writers imagine "home" in the twenty-first century through an array of fiction, memoir, and poetry. Both urgent and meditative, this anthology moves beyond the model-minority myth and showcases the singular intimacies of individuals figuring out what it means to belong. "The notion of home has always been elusive. But as evidenced in these stories, poems, and testaments, perhaps home is not so much a place, but a feeling one embodies. I read this book and see my people—see us—and feel, in our collective outsiderhood, at home." —Ocean Vuong, New York Times -bestselling author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous "To be from nowhere is the state of Asian diaspora, but there is also a wild humor and imagination that comes from being underestimated, rarely counted, hardly seen. Here, we begin to draw the hopeful outlines of a collective history for those so disparate yet often lumped together." —Jenny Zhang, author of My Baby First Birthday "Language allows for many homes, and perhaps the writers—and readers of the anthology too—will succeed in returning home, or finding a home, through these words." —NPR.org "Effectively dismantling all sorts of stereotypes, Buchanan's anthology gives voice to notions of identity, belonging and displacement that are much more vast, complex and textually rich than mere geography." —Shelf Awareness "Revolutionary for all the iterations of 'home' it shows through fiction, poetry, and memoir, sure to provoke a full range of emotions to swoon and clutch in my chest." — Literary Hub

Esmeralda

Mia Alvar

That morning you are woken by an airplane, humming so close overhead it seems to want to take you with it. The clock says five—an hour ahead of your alarm. You’ve lived close to two airports for almost two decades. You’re used to planes. They even show up in your dreams. In last night’s dream, you died; your body crumbled into ash. Before you could learn what came next, before you could see where your soul went, a machine—some giant vacuum cleaner, which in real life was this plane—came down to sweep you off the earth like dust.

After today, you’ll never hear a plane in the same way again. But you don’t know that yet.

The boy whose bedroom you sleep in is now a man. He moved out long ago. His mother, Doris, keeps his room the way it was when he lived here: school pennant, baseball trophies, dark plaid bedspread. You pay low rent, and have agreed to leave this room and sleep out on the sofa when the son visits. (He never does.)

You know you won’t fall back asleep, so you switch on the lamp. Because the years of work have given you a bad back, bad knees, and bad feet, you like to pray in bed. A wooden Christ Child and Virgin Mary live inside the nightstand drawer. You lay them on the pillow next to you like shrunken lovers, wrap a rosary around your wrist. You interlace your fingers, shut your eyes, and squeeze your lips against your thumbs as if kissing His feet.

The God that you imagine looks like Father Brennan, the man who baptized you: tall and Irish, with white hair and kind blue eyes, shooting a basketball in black vestments on the parish playground. The Virgin is one of the nuns who ran the adjoining schoolhouse: a spinster with a downy chin, her veil a habit. Old and sacred words, they taught you. You would not invent your own any more than you would try to build your own cathedral. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Bead by bead, you whisper the same words Saint Peter spoke in Rome, the same words spoken today by all believers in São Paulo and Boston and Limerick and Cebu:

He rose again from the dead.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.

You pray by heart the way you’d plow a field of soil, the way you push a mop across a floor. One foot before the other. After looping your way around the rosary, you coil it in its pouch. You tuck Mary and the Santo Niño back into their drawer, thanking them for the strength to rise another day, on two aching feet.

“LIKE THE GYPSY,” John said, the night he asked your name.

You weren’t listening. “Eee, Ess, Em, Eee,” you started spelling in reply, as you changed the trash bag from the can beside his desk.

“Mine’s John. Not quite as fancy as yours.” He held out his hand.

“Pleased to meet you.” You stared at the freckles on his long, pale fingers. When he didn’t pull them back, you wiped your latex glove, still damp from the dustrag, on your uniform. Then, embarrassed, you snapped off your glove and tossed it in the mother trash bag hanging from your cleaning cart. His hand was moist and smooth. The hand of a man who studied numbers on a screen and now and then picked up the phone.

He had the kind blue eyes of a priest. His hair was white (though he had all of it), his face almost as pale, but pink in sunburned places. On his desk, three computer screens folded outward like a panel painting at church. A woman with gold hair and green eyes, probably his wife, smiled in a frame beside his keyboard.

This new night job had just begun. You were still learning the floor, along whose windowed edges sat men like John, who had their own offices. These men stayed later than the ones who worked in open rows along the middle of the floor. You’d notice, over time, that John stayed latest out of everyone.

SINCE DORIS IS still asleep, you hold off on the vacuuming and step into the kind of fall morning that really does remind you of a big apple, bright and crisp. You buy skim milk and grapefruits, whole wheat bread and liquid eggs that pour out of a juice box and have less cholesterol. Nineteen years of Tuesdays you have shopped and cleaned for Doris. Longer than her son lived in the room you rent for two hundred a month. On Wednesdays you clean the apartment under you, for the Italian landlord and his wife, whose children you have watched grow up and have their own. Thursdays you are in the city early, cleaning Mrs. Helen Miller’s loft downtown. And Fridays you clean uptown, for the Ronson family, who own a brownstone top to bottom. Saturdays your fingers smell like pine oil from polishing the wood pews of the same old church that found you Doris and her extra room, those nineteen years ago. And in between you’ve cleaned for other people, onetime deals—after a party, or before somebody sells or rents out their apartment, or as a gift from one friend to another—never saying no to an assignment. Nineteen years of cash in envelopes, from people who never asked to see your papers as long as you had references and kept their sinks and toilets spotless.

The other day you pulled a knot of Doris’s white hair from the shower drain, trying to remember when those knots were brown.

Now that you’re no longer hiding, you have one job on the books, at night, in the tower where John works.

The living room TV is on when you get home. “Good morning,” you call out, unloading bags onto the kitchen counter. Doris doesn’t answer through the wall. She likes to do Pilates—counting bends and raises, panting—to the news.

Putting the milk away, you hear a sob.

“Doris?”

She isn’t doing leg raises. You find her on the sofa, eyeballs red, fist covering her nose and mouth.

“Did Matthew call?” you ask. Over the years, her son has said things on the phone to make her cry.

She shakes her head and reaches for your hand. “Oh, Es.” Her other hand points at the TV screen. A city building, gashed along the side and bleeding smoke. You almost fail to recognize it. You never see it from this angle anymore: the air, the view on postcards and souvenir mugs.

A pipe or boiler must have burst, you think, watching the ugly crooked mouth cough flame. You think, A man in coveralls will lose his job today. There’s an Albanian gentleman whose name you know only because it’s stitched across his shirt. Valdrin. You never speak to one another. He bows as you pass him in the staff lounge; he blows kisses as you leave the elevator.

You’re wrong. They show a plane, show it and show it, flying straight into the tower’s face and tearing through the glass.

“What if this happened late at night?” says Doris. “Es, thank God you’re here.”

She weeps as you two watch, again, the black speck pierce the glass, the smoke spill from the wound.

Trying to count floors, you stand. “I have to go.”

“What? Absolutely not.”

“I’ll clean when I come back.”

“Forget about that. Jesus! What I mean is, you’re not going anywhere.”

“I have to see about . . . my job.”

But Doris will not hear of it. “No one’s working now. Not your boss and not your boss’s boss. You’ve been spared, don’t you see? You’re staying here. End of story.”

“OK.” You sit. “I’ll get your coffee, then.” You stand and go into the kitchen, think. You pour Doris’s coffee and bring her the cup. “I have to try to call my boss, at least.”

In Matthew’s room, you lock the door. You change into your panty hose and uniform, as if it’s afternoon. Beside the bedroom door, you hold your shoes, a pair of hard white clogs a nurse friend from your church suggested for your troubled feet, and listen to the wall. As soon as you hear Doris go into the bathroom, you tiptoe through the kitchen. You grab your bag and jacket from the closet by the door, race downstairs, and slip into your clogs outside.

A BOOK SAT open on John’s desk, the next time you walked in.

“Aha!” he said. “There she is.” He pointed at the page and read aloud. “La Esmeralda. Formidable name! She’s an enchantress.”

You thought about hiding inside the cart, between the toilet paper rolls.

He stood and came around his desk, still reading. “Your parents never found that name for you at the baptismal font.” He closed the book and smiled. “Where did they find it, Esmeralda?”

“Not there,” you said, pointing your chin at the book. (Your parents would have used a book that size for kindling.) “They liked the sound of it. Or liked somebody with the name, maybe.”

John wanted to know, if you didn’t mind saying, where you were from.

“So I was right,” he said, when you told him. “My wife’s nurses are Filipina.”

“Your wife is a doctor?”

“No.” He looked down. Darkness, like the shadow from an airplane overhead, passed over his face. “A patient.”

“Oh.” The woman with green eyes and gold hair, smiling next to his keyboard, looked healthy, but you didn’t say that.

Before John—and this is terrible to say; you’d never say it, but—the lives of Americans with money were not very interesting to you. Even the troubled ones, their troubles did not seem so hard. You’d ask, “How are you?” and they’d heave a sigh, winding up to tell you some sob story: how much they worked, who had it in for them, the things they’d wished for and were not getting. Try hunger. Try losing your house, a voice inside you, that would never leave your mouth of course, wanted to say.

But John’s trouble—that moved you. Enough to ask, “Your wife is sick? What kind of sick?”

“The kind you don’t come back from,” John said. She’d been sick for fifteen years. The photograph beside his keyboard was how he preferred to remember her. Before nerve cells inside her brain began to die, before the tremors started, before her muscles stiffened and her spine curled in. Back when she could walk without losing her balance, back when she could eat and use the bathroom on her own, without John’s help, and then a Filipina nurse, and then a second one for nighttime. Before she started to talk slowly, like the voice in a cassette recorder on low battery, and then stopped talking altogether. Back when she still knew who John, her husband, was.

“I’m sorry.”

“I am too,” he said. “It started fast, and now it’s ending slowly. When you love someone you never think a time will come when they’re a stranger.” He looked and must have felt alone. But the photo that you kept at home, on Matthew’s nightstand, was your brother’s baby portrait. Long before the lies, the cruelties, the face scarred up beyond recognition.

John’s family was Irish, and he grew up in a harbor town where his brothers still lived. “All five of them,” he said. “All firefighters, like our father. Or policemen, like our uncle.”

“You are not a fire- or policeman,” you said.

John shook his head. “Did you ever hear of a family where the finance guy’s the rebel? Me, and my cousin Sean, the priest. Plus we’re the only two who didn’t have kids. No sons to raise into cops or firefighters, either. I guess I never grew up dreaming I’d be some hero. No, I just looked across the bay at this skyline and thought, I’ll work there someday. “Plus”—he tapped his wedding ring against the picture frame—“she wanted to work in publishing. No better place for that than in this city. And we decided that if one of us was gonna work in books, the other better work in money.”

He asked after your family. You told him that your parents raised coconuts, coaxed copra oil from them, sold gallon cans of it to men who came in boats once a month. That you had just one brother. “Pepe.”

He said, “You’re not a farmer.”

“No. I’m not.”

“Are you and Pepe close?”

The first time Doris asked you this, you shook your head. Almost nine thousand miles. She laughed. “I don’t mean close o...