Chapter 6: Mirrors

She lived with her parents in the south part of San Gabriel, close to the 60 Freeway, I think. It was so long ago, I don’t remember quite well. What I do remember is the butterflies in my stomach whenever the car bounced a little as we went uphill on Paramount boulevard. I remember laughing at the music to that classic Super Mario game she had on the old Nintendo Entertainment system, especially that abrupt, silly jingle that played whenever he died and you had to start over. She would try and make me giggle by doing speedruns, passing by all the powerups and playing recklessly, saying oops whenever Mario died. I preferred playing the other game she had, Duck Hunt, that had the little plastic gun you pointed at the tv screen to try and hit a duck. Whenever I missed, she would point out that little dog that pops up laughing in the background to make me feel better about losing. She was very tall, towering over not only me but also Liwei and Andrew, despite being the same age as they were. Our parents saw a lot of each other that summer after first grade. I could often hear them talking about houses and which ones they wanted to see together. I wouldn’t learn her name, Jing, until much later because my parents just called her xiao jiejie, meaning Little Big Sister.

That summer, my parents seemed busy. They often left me at home with my grandparents. My grandfather took me to the Alhambra Library every week, the old one that isn’t there anymore, on the corner of Fourth and Main, with the wide arches and the beautiful tiled roof. At that point I could read but not very quickly, so I often checked out read-along books that came with a cassette tape like Winnie the Pooh and Frog and Toad are Friends. My grandfather also read Chinese books to me like “100 Thousand Whys” and an illustrated children’s version of Water Margin. We also borrowed a VHS copy of the Ducktales movie that I watched with Liwei over and over again. I loved Frog and Toad because it reminded me of my friendship with Liwei. I imagined I was Toad, since I was shorter, and he was Frog. At the library I felt engrossed with the story where Toad has a dream that he was a celebrated performer and Frog clapped in the audience, but kept shrinking Toad was applauded until Toad decided Frog’s safety was more important to him than anything else.

My mom often took me to Almansor Park, sometimes just the two of us, and sometimes playing with Liwei and Andrew. I remember one day a church was giving out free meals for children, and my mom grabbed one for me. It had a sandwich, an apple, and a carton of milk. By then, I had developed a very strong gag reflex with milk, and spent a very long time arguing with mom because I didn’t want to drink it. We had a standoff, sitting there on the picnic tables under the shelter, as I watched the other children play in the small wading pool. I wanted to join them but mom told me I was not to leave the table until the milk was finished. Finally I gulped it down, vomiting behind a tree later when she wasn’t looking. I caught up with the boys at the ice cream truck. Andrew had some money to buy a popsicle shaped like Batman’s head, the eyes made of little gumdrops. He complained that it tasted bad and ate slowly as it began to drip down his arm. I sat on a nearby curb as I watched Andrew and Liwei poke at it with sticks on the sidewalk as they sang “batman is dead” to the tune of the wedding march. 

Some time later, I was in the car with dad, waiting for my mom to finish shopping at the Super A Market across the street from the library. We were both bored, and it was very warm in the car even though we had the windows down. Suddenly dad asked, did you know you can burn things with a magnifying glass? He took out a glass and pointed it at a small piece of paper. I watched the small white dot and imagined it get hotter and hotter as we waited until I yelled don’t do it, because I started thinking what if the car exploded like in the movies? He laughed and stopped, chuckling until mom appeared in the side mirror with a cart of groceries. Later that day, near sunset, I walked with grandmother and Liwei up the block on Fourth to the corner of Mission Street with the overpass above the tracks to watch the train pass by.

One day, my grandfather took me to Almansor Park alone to play and I was making sandcastles when two 9 or 10 year old Hispanic girls came and began to give me trouble. They called me an ugly Chinese boy with a Chinese grandpa. I thought it was so strange, why is Chinese an insult? And being a Chinese boy, wouldn’t it be very obvious that my grandfather would also be Chinese? It was an awkwardly redundant sentence. I was also perplexed as to why they found a reason to insult an old man about 8 times their age. I had no words to respond with, simply sitting and staring at them with a confused look on my face. I don’t remember if I froze because I was scared or genuinely intrigued as to what they were thinking, and I must have been daydreaming when they began to kick sand and ask if I was stupid. I retreated to a tall rocket shaped tower with a thin spiral ladder. The tower must have been designed for smaller children because the girls could not fit and scowled menacingly as I climbed to the top level, which was small enough that even my 6 year old self had to crouch. The tower was very high and I felt they seemed small from the top, as I waited until they left.

I learned that my parents were often busy because they were looking at houses, and eventually we began to tour open houses as a family. One day we drove out further than I ever remembered. It was the first time I saw the 60 Freeway. I remember that I began to recognize the off ramp of the 10 Freeway at Rosemead and the feeling of excitement whenever our family minivan careened while turning at the loop that led to the 60 Freeway down the street. The first house we looked at was square looking with a triangular shaped roof that made it looked like all the houses I made in my crayon drawings. The interior felt dark and cramped and the stairs made a slight creaking sound as we went up. It had a small square yard with a swingset and a slide. I told my parents I liked this house because it had a swingset. “Why do you want the swingset so bad?” asked my mom. I told her I wanted Liwei to come over and play often because none of the other houses looked like they had a yard as big as the courtyard in front of our apartment. “The house is too tall”, said my mom. I told her I really wanted to live in a house with stairs, so that you can be really high up. That night my parents took me to Little Big Sister’s house where Liwei and his parents were also there. I remember watching them play Super Mario for a very long time while our parents talked until Little Big Sis handed me the Duck Hunt gun and started arguing with Liwei, asking if he can call it a day with Mario because little brother hasn’t played Duck Hunt for a while. 

A week later we toured another house with Liwei’s family and Andrew’s family. This one was a flat looking house with a large, odd looking tree in the front yard that was shaped like a pinecone. It had a giant two level backyard that reminded me of the illustrations from the Frog and Toad books. The inside also seemed dimly lit, despite the giant windows in the vaulted living room, probably due to an even larger tree in the backyard. It had three floors, but the two sets of stairs only had about 7 or 8 steps each, so the second floor didn’t feel very high. My mom asked me if I liked this house, and I said no. She quietly said, I think Liwei’s dad really likes it. I wanted to play with Liwei after we were done touring but he told me he wanted to spend time with Andrew instead, and hopped off into the Liangs’ car. I sulked on the way home, eventually falling asleep as I watched the dancing reflections from the rays of yellow streetlamps pole vaulting off the windows.

My mom must have noticed I didn’t really like playing with Liwei and Andrew anymore because pretty soon we stopped touring houses as a group. I also stopped seeing Liwei in the courtyard outside. I later learned they had moved into the flat house with the pinecone tree. Eventually we visited a house of mirrors. 

As we walked in, I noticed the living room had a slanted ceiling that went up very high. And the far wall was covered in glass tiles with a gold marble texture on it. I saw my parents’ reflection distorted but shimmering as we walked into the front entrance. Across from the entrance at the center of the house was a tall, somewhat imposing set of stairs that turned and made a giant V frame, finishing at a railing landing on the second floor. The interior reminded me of the images of Versailles that I saw in a picture book of famous places at the library. I ran up the stairs excitedly, making my way to the biggest bedroom that had a bathroom in it. Over the sink was a large mirror, facing another mirror behind me. I learned closer and looked at my reflection, transfixed at the many, many copies of myself that seemed to stand behind me. It looked like a hallway of selves, each one a little smaller, a little fainter, trailing off into some unreachable distance. I waved. They waved. I stared for a very long time, waving my hands, turning around again and again to see if I could catch a little bit of a lag, to see if I could glimpse the back of my head as I turned. I was so enamored with the mirrors that my parents had to coax me to leave. I turned around once more before leaving, just to make sure they were still there, all of them, waiting.

The next week, we came back to this house. My dad must have decided to take a different route, or maybe he got slightly lost because this time we went through a hill covered with thick trees. As I was looking at the lights peeking through the forest, a magnificent orange roof grew out of the background. It was curved gracefully upward and reminded me of the buildings I saw in China. My dad told me this was the largest Buddhist temple in America. At the house we met a Chinese woman who wore very thick makeup. My mom had told me we were buying the house from her. For the past year, mom had helped me store my extra money, mostly quarters, in a plastic green telephone shaped piggy bank. I held it out to the lady and said in Chinese, I have money, can you please give me this house? She smiled and rubbed her fingers through my hair as she continued the conversation with my dad. 

We would come back a couple of times again, my dad inspecting parts of the house more closely, and my mom moving a few items each time. One day, my grandfather tied the front gate of our apartment complex open with a piece of string and I watched as my parents and grandparents began to carry everything out of the apartment, into a van by the sidewalk. It felt like a long long time before everything we owned was loaded into the back of the large white van. The inside of the van looked really fun, like all the pieces of our home were in this little space. I wanted to ride in the van but my parents didn’t let me.

That night we slept on the floor of the living room in that house of mirrors. The world felt unnaturally quiet, missing the sounds of neighbors. I could hear only the crickets outside. The shadows of the trees on the hills behind the house looked like giant scary creatures and the room had an eerie yellow glow from the streetlights outside. I asked my mom when we were going home. She held me closer and said, this is our home now. I stared at the ceiling, where the streetlights shimmered in quiet patterns. Somewhere, all those mirrored versions of me were still waiting.