Missing Pieces

The aunts owned a corner shop outside the Chinatown mall, and my mother worked for them.

We were under the Manhattan Bridge, its blue underbelly our sky, and the subways overhead drowned out street din with violent cracks and screeches. They shouted at each other to be heard, and my eight-year-old spirit always emerged after school to join their discordant roar. Their wooden stands stacked against the brick walls outside, leaving only a narrow strip of concrete for walking Cops threatened to fine them for taking up too much space, speaking with dramatic hand gestures because they couldn't understand English. But they continued to garnish the streets with jars of jujube dates, goji berries, sacks of dried shrimp, watermelon seeds, duck tongues, and the yellow peas I threw to pigeons. My mother stood on the sidewalk with the aunts, guarding the goods and tempting customers with practiced seductions, loosening lies like, “Of course they’re fresh! They just came in this morning!”

Throughout the day, someone would yell for refills and another would come running from the inside. I watched from the sidelines, my mother’s voice piercing through the clamor, her able body bending and lifting, strong arms straining, knees clicking. For five years, their backs ached and they smelled of dried squid. I contributed in my own ways – inserting myself between customers, chiming out prices, and pressing a finger into the wet sponge they kept on the side, gleeful when the plastic bags slipped open between my fingers. But when the cold began to numb and sting, I escaped into the mall and left my mother with the aunts, her bright eyes and redtipped nose peeking out between layers of scarves. The stacked cardboard boxes left little space for a child, and the aunts didn’t like me getting in the way. So I spent my time after school in the playground beside the shop, throwing myself off high poles and getting in trouble with strangers’ kids. When business slowed throughout the day, my mother allowed me packets of gummy candies and bottles of green tea from their fridge, even though the permission wasn’t hers to give. She ignored the aunts’ lingering gazes and urged me to escape with the forbidden goods tucked safely in my arms. My mother was on my side, and I felt powerful then. The faucet is running over scallions in the sink, and my mother is stirring the pan with chopsticks. “They were never good to me, ” she says. “Once, when the shop was finally shutting down, they didn’t want to pay me. So they gave me a quart full of coins instead!”

I’m sitting at the dinner table destringing a pile of green beans, but perk up at her new revelation.

“What?” I say, wiping the green off my fingers, and move closer towards her.

My mother picks up the plastic container we store utensils in and shakes it. “Yeah, one of these. They gave me a quart full of coins in this. As payment!”

I’m peering over her shoulder at the sliced tomatoes and eggs sputtering in the pan, unsure whether to meet her disclosure with reassurance or anger. “Did you take it?” I ask.

“Of course not! I still have some dignity!” She tilts a splash of soy sauce into the pan and turns her face away as she sets the bottle down. “It was too heavy anyways. I didn’t want to carry it home with me. ”

But I know her well enough to recognize hidden shame in her dignity. So I push further, “Did you say anything to them?”

“How could I dare? Your father wasn’t there to defend me and I didn’t know how to speak up for myself then. How stupid I was. ”

“Stupid” was often the label my mother assigned herself when others walked over her, and it was always her self-blame for others’ malice that lost my respect for her.

Dad and his two younger sisters formed the three pillars of our family, and everyone else was an extension. My mother’s side of the family was in China, and she was left to fend for herself in someone else’s family. But I merged us together and acted like we were the same, forgetting that my mother was only the sister-in-law.

The image of our family against the familiar storefront has always persisted in my mind, a wispy image reappearing in times of nostalgia or convenience. I had thought it was a touching image: the rustle of red plastic bags, crushed peanut shells between sidewalk cracks, and our united front. The streets were lined with Chinese bakeries, restaurants, traditional herbal medicines, and our family storefront selling our foods to our community – a glorified cultural mural I liked to exploit in my writing over the years. How lucky we were.

I’m watching my mother’s face under the stove hood light. Its yellow glow dulls her skin and I can see her pale scalp between strands of hair.

I imagine what she looked like then, face flushed with anger, eyes cast down in shame, swallowing lumps of bitter hurt.

These days, the aunts’ biggest offense to my mother is twisting her care with money into cheapness, telling her things like, “We’re big eaters. I always spend this much on dinner. You should cook some more for your daughters!”

Over the years, I’ve watched their aggressions slide, peeking at my mother’s reaction to gauge their level of offense. I let them measure us by their standards and escape unscathed, wondering where she hides her anger and where her strength has gone.

But there’s one of her and all of them.

I want to ask more, but my mother says, “Go set the table,” and I know she’s done. She preserves the deepest parts of her for herself and shares them only sporadically with me. Somehow, I’ve shaped an image of my mother I don’t recognize, using my ignorance to find answers and fill in gaps of her she’s left me with. I’ve twisted her patience into passivity and her goodwill into giving too much of herself away, hating her caution and seeing past all her good intentions. But it’s over sharing grievances that I can see the truth in her. So I cling onto the family history my mother feeds me, eager to learn something new about her, and use them to gradually rebuild my image of her. “You have to defend me, ” my mother says. “If they talk bad about me you have to speak up for me. ”

Now, another family owns the shop and we ’ ve all gone our separate ways. The subways still crack and screech, but they seem louder now without our grating shouts to fight it. The mall has hollowed out and vendors have fallen out of business. Remnants of the pandemic remain on the street as graffitied storefronts littered with “SPACE FOR LEASE” signs.

But I etch the bones of my mother’s history into that sidewalk, letting it solidify on the shelf of stories she’s given me, built only to store all the missing pieces of her.

-Pei Ying Ren