02
“Look,” he said, holding my hand tightly in his, his thumb rubbing tiny circles into my skin, “my parents are crazy. My whole family is crazy. They’re going to say things about you and you won’t understand.”
“Obviously,” I interjected, unable to help the way my eyes rolled in annoyance. “I don’t speak Chinese.”
He stopped to stare at me pointedly, in the way he usually did when he was annoyed with me but didn’t want to try to reason with my logic, which was, granted, anything but logical. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“You make it sound like they’ll eat me alive.”
He shrugged. “We prefer to eat cats, anyway.”
We stood outside his house, a perfectly acceptable two-story building with a decent front yard with maintained shrubs and a tiny tree.
“You live in a house?” I asked, mock surprised, and all I received in response was a jab to my side that made me oomph.
I was scared in ways I couldn’t really describe. As he rang the doorbell and I waited patiently by his side, I felt my resolve crumble. I imagined that this was what it would feel like to stand on the other side of the gate, waiting for St. Peter to decide whether you were clean enough to go on through or send you to the pits of hell. Except this? Probably thirteen times scarier. I knew about Asian parents. He’d told me all the horror stories beforehand.
I had too many bad marks against me. For one, I wasn’t Asian. My skin was not reminiscent of the moon’s pallor, I wasn’t tall, I wasn’t thin, my nose wasn’t small, my cheekbones weren’t high, my thighs were far from exemplary, and my ass? I hoped they’d never let their eyes stray too low or else I’d probably be thrown out of their home. I wasn’t very good at math and the best job I’d ever have was probably working part-time at a retail place as I wrote away the night while my husband (who I secretly hoped was him) would slave away at a real job. And, at the end of all that, I wasn’t exactly pretty.
The door opened and a tiny, round, middle-aged Asian woman looked at me with curious, albeit somewhat displeased, eyes. Then she glanced at him.
“Come in,” she said in heavily accented English, moving aside and allowing us to enter.
I stepped through. I paused, turned to look at my boyfriend, and stared at his feet. In one easy motion his shoes were off, so I quickly followed suit. He smiled at me and gave my hand a gentle squeeze.
Oh, God. I was going to die. Straight up fall down dead. I was shaking.
“Ma,” he said, and the woman turned to look at him. “This is Andrea.”
This was it. In just a second, she would regard me with hateful eyes, turn away in disgust, tell him in words I could never understand that I wasn’t fit to be with him, that I was ugly, that he wasn’t supposed to waste his time with girls—with people like me. I dreaded it, almost as much as I dreaded the moment I told him I loved him and was scared he wouldn’t say it back. It was a terrifying moment where the earth stood still and my heart beat too fast and I felt like the world would end because if she didn’t like me who knew what I would do because I had never in my life been so sure that this was the man I was going to spend the rest of my life with because my heart had finally found another that beat in time with it and—
She gave me a nod. “Nice to meet you, Andrea. Welcome to my home.”
And all was well.
