As I approached forty, I almost persuaded myself to marry and
have a child. The man loved me deeply and spoke in the romantic verbiage of
destiny and diminutive nicknames that are too embarrassing to repeat. Naturally,
I was flattered and also touched. He was not handsome in a conventional sense,
but I found his genius to be powerful, and thus an odd aphrodisiac. He was
socially inept and had a number of strange habits, but on the basis of DNA
alone, he was an ideal partner for procreation. He spoke of our future child as
part angel, part wunderkind. I was intrigued with the idea of a child, but
inevitably it would arrive in a package called motherhood, which raised memories
of my stepmother. After I refused the man's numerous entreaties to marry, he
was shattered to the depths of his being. I felt quite guilty until he married
another woman, six months after. It was sudden, yes, but I was pleased for him,
really, I was, and I continued to be pleased when they had a child, then another
and another and another. Four! There was so much to be pleased about, wasn't
there? One was the most I would have had, and for years I thought about that
child that never was. Would she have loved me?
Look at Vera's two daughters, I often mused—they have always
adored her, even in their teens. They were the progeny that people can only
dream of. Might my child have had similar feelings for me? I would have seated
her on my lap and brushed her hair, smelling the clean scent. I imagined myself
tucking a peony behind her ear, or clipping in her hair a pretty barrette
speckled with emeralds. And we would look in the mirror together and know we
loved each other so much that tears would spring to our eyes. I realized much
later that the child I imagined was my young self, who had longed for just such
a mother.
I admit that whenever I heard that certain offspring of friends
had turned into misfits and ingrates, I received the news with schadenfreude,
and also was relieved to have missed the entire spectrum of parental frustration
and despair. What could possibly be more socially devastating than having your
own child declare that she hated you, and in front of your less-than-best
friends?
This question came to me as I watched Lucinda Pari, the director
of communications for the Asian Art Museum, rise and approach the lectern to
provide her own contribution to my eulogy. She had once told me that I was like
a mother to her. Now here she was at my memorial, praising my virtues: "The
money from Bibi Chen's estate"—she paused to toss her sleek curtain of hair
like a racehorse—"money derived from the sale of her deluxe three-unit
apartment building and gorgeous, bridge-view penthouse on Leavenworth, in
addition to her store, the legendary Immortals, and its enormously successful
online catalogue business, on top of a personal collection of Buddhist art—a
very fine and well-regarded collection, I might add—has been willed in trust
to the museum." Loud clapping ensued. Lucinda's talent has always been to mix
drama and exaggeration with dull facts so that words balance out as believable.
Before the applause could turn thunderous, she held up her palm and continued: "She
leaves us with an estate estimated to be—wait a minute, here it is—twenty
million dollars."
Nobody gasped. The crowd did not jump up and cheer. They clapped
loudly, but I wouldn't say wildly. It was as if my bequest had been expected,
and an ordinary amount. When the room quieted all too soon, she held up a
plaque. "We will be affixing this in commemoration of her generosity in one of
the wings in the new Asian, to be opened in 2003."
One wing! I knew I should have specified the degree of
recognition I should receive for my twenty million. What's more, the plaque
was a modest square, brushed stainless steel, and my name was engraved in
letters so small that even the people in the front row had to lean forward and
squint. This was the style Lucinda liked, modern and plain, sans serif type as
unreadable as directions on a medicine bottle. She and I used to argue in a
friendly way about the brochures she had expensive graphic artists design. "Your
eyes are still young," I told her not too long ago. "You must realize, people
who give vast amounts of money, their eyes are old. If you want this style, you
should give people reading glasses to go with it." That's when she laughed in
a not-so-joking way and said, "You're just like my mother. There's always
something not right."
From Saving Fish From Drowning by Amy Tan. Copyright Amy Tan 2005. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Putnam Publishing. No part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher.
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