Journal Prompt #3

For as long as I can remember, my family has had no stories--at least not the kind with a definite beginning, climax, or conclusion. We operate instead on a concept of less is more, telling just enough to pique interest, to establish a context, but allowing the listener to fill in the details. This way no one can be disappointed, disillusioned. We invent out own stories for each others lives.

My parents' lives are mysteries even to themselves it seems. Sometimes I'll catch mom looking at old photos of China. She'll spread them out on the kitchen table in a fan-like configuration, a spray of faces in variegated grays and blacks. Black hair. Black Eyes. My mom and her two brothers posed in cascading order of height in a Chengdu garden, unsmiling, but happiness beaming from their eyes. There are photos of her and her college classmates. In them my mother is young, fresh-faced, dressed in demure knee-length skirts and filmy blouses, the kind of girl I'd probably be friends with today. In all the old pictures her hair is either braided in a long plait down her back or in girlish pig tails brushing her shoulders. She showed me a picture of an old boyfriend of hers once. He was swarthy and handsome with hard, attenuated features--nothing like the softness of my dad. It was hard to imagine my mom as the kind of girl who would date that kind of guy. Had she walked hand in hand with him in between class? Did they go on dates? Had her parents approved? These questions had flitted briefly across my mind but I let them lie fallow their, burgeoning on the thickness of my tongue, unsaid and irksome.

I wish sometimes that we had learned to talk, mother and I. Like Maxine Hong Kingston, I have things I'd like to say to her, accusations, confessions... the kinds of things I imagine other boys may say to their moms like I love you, I miss you, I'm sorry. I have questions I want to ask, about China, dad, her family (my family). But instead we communicate in meaningful silences. We call each other with requests and petty problems, dancing around the questions we'd never ask each other. How are you? Are you scared? Alone? Are you in love? Have you met anyone? Our stories are the trivial, the harmless, the desultory.

I've spent so long making up stories in my head. Stories about my life and that of my family. I watch television shows and read books to piece together from them what is happening next door where parents are nosy and the kids trust themselves to speak. And then I look at my house, my family, and imagine a castle of mute minstrels, stories raging unkempt and vicious behind locked doors.