We Laugh at Our Clumsy Hands
by Cherry Leung
She doesn’t tell you you’ve been bad. You know, and you’re dragging your feet. Mah-mah, your father’s mother, holds your limp wrist in her stiff hand. You think your grandma looks like a tomboy, with her pixie cut and simple blue shawl. She walks you to your Poh-poh’s, your mother’s mother’s door.
You fear Mah-mah. Mah-mah is stern, her tiger-like gaze steady on the doorbell. Worse than a beating is the silent treatment. She hands you off to Poh-poh, who smells like herbal soaps, honey, and home. Poh-poh smiles grand but thin, her voice decorated with lilts meant for guests. She receives you in her arms.
You almost miss it: the emptiness of Mah-mah’s hand. You don’t see her jolt when the door slams shut.
For the next two feverish weeks, you wrack your body and weep in bed, wishing you’d never been to that strange preschool, where nobody speaks your tongue, and nobody forgives.
***
Your heart may burst. Mah-mah settles down the big bowl between you two and scoops a larger portion of fish soup for you than her. Your throat is clogged up, but she coaxes “drink,” and you force the pieces of fish down your throat. Smiling, you wipe your mouth, pretending your stomach isn’t pushing them back up. This piece of fish is your recompense, and Mah-mah glows at your enjoyment.
“I told you it was good,” she beams. “Have more. It’s good for the eyes.”
“No thanks,” you murmur. Your chopsticks reach to fill your bowl with broccoli instead. Your glasses have never been thicker.
***
They caught you shoving a twenty in your pocket from Poh-poh’s dresser. Poh-poh is displeased. Your mother, the third child of her family, is frightened of her own mother, and now, of you. The woman who birthed you stares at you like foreign flesh; your father inherited Mah-mah’s striking eyes.
“Go call Mah-mah,” he demands. “She’s terrified of her.”
“No,” you sob. “No, please don’t.”
Between shuddered breaths, they shove the phone to your ear. You won’t speak, so they tell Mah-mah straight. Tonight, you’ll go home, pack your things, and flee. Mah-mah is on speaker phone, so she can distress over your thievery as loud as she wants. Her voice is quiet in your hands.
“That’s not nice,” she says.
“I know,” you cry.
“Why’d you take it?”
“For snacks—at school.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Your parents, too, are tense, hinging on her for their last hope.
“Do you eat enough at school?” You shrug. She can’t see, but takes silence for affirmation. “You should never have to go hungry.” She tells her son to feed you better. Your mother’s face is red like a cherry. Mah-mah promises to let you eat at her place, whenever you want.
There’s pride in the kind of anger Mah-mah inspires in your parents. You think you might still run away. You entertain life at Mah-mah’s house, how things should have been.
***
Bak-yeem. Monkey-like, like your zodiac animal, a child running wild. That’s what she calls you, along with sui lui bao. That means rotten daughter, but she laughs when she says it, which makes you scratch your head. Uncle, with his royal sensibilities—he’s related, somewhere, to Emperor Puyi—prefers when you cover your mouth and laugh. His father broke his erhu for its sad weep when he was a child. Mah-mah sits you down while he’s gone.
She peels some roasted peanuts. “Now that you’re old enough”—ten fingers—“I'll tell you a story.”
You crane up your ear. “Okay.”
“Once upon a time, there was a long time ago. A long time ago, there was a time far, far away. In a time—”
“Enough!” You giggle and kick and swat. She hurls backwards in laughter, but composes herself quite quickly.
“And so—there was a very long time ago…”
A long, long time ago there was a little girl named Laiso, the fourth of six siblings. She tumbled in the schoolyard with her three friends, altogether the Seidaimeiyun, the four great beauties of China. They called the plumpest one “Fei-ti,” which maybe didn’t matter much to Fei-ti because she found great fun mocking their teachers with her friends anyway.
She could neither draw nor keep plants, but her great gift was her pen. For every exam, she wrote her essay, then drafted another copy for the poor girl behind her. Her pristine piece was pinned up on the elementary’s bulletin! And the poor girl’s parents—oh, they wished to meet the author so terribly! Laiso beamed every time she repeated this tale. One spring, she entered class, heart pounding, waiting to hear the list of students accepted by the most prestigious boarding schools. .
Laiso’s name came first.
“But why couldn’t you go?”
Her strong brows softened, “Because I was poor.” She hitched a train to Hong Kong instead, holding three dollars and her clothes and passport.
Mah-mah implores you not to focus on melancholy.
“I read every damn thing in that library!” she exclaims. “Years later, I came back to Hong Kong. The man at the desk took one look at me and cried, ‘Why are you back?!’”
Lurching backward, she places a hand on her chest. “I said, ‘You recognize me?’ and he said, ‘Yes! You’ve already rented every book, there’s nothing here for you!’ So, see,” she turns to you for the fable’s message, “you must keep reading. You can’t stop, even if you can’t go to school. That’s how”—she taps your head and you giggle—“I know so much.”
***
The neighbor didn’t quite like her little sister. The toddler cried crawling along the seventh-floor stairwell, the ninth floor heard it all the way up there. The man slapped her down.
Once news spread, fury sparked in Laiso’s heart. She rapped on his door.
TAK! TAK! TAK!
He cracked open a sliver. “What do you want?”
“Remember her?” The door opened wider. Laiso held her sister’s small fist. She peered up at this mister with eyes as big as saucers, short as she ever was. The baby sees him and her face scrunches up, the beginning of bawling.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he said.
“Good,” Laiso replied. “You apologize to her and her mother. If you refuse, I’m taking you down to the police station for assault.”
He laughed. “You just try.”
Little Laiso walked him down nine floors like a dog on a leash, returning her tired sister to the seventh. She walked him down five streets in Guangzhou and walked through the door with her fist around his hairy wrist. He was convicted. She was seven.
“Stupid Chinese girl,” the playground boy says. “Go home.” You imagine your grandma as a shield wrapping itself around your face, your skin. “Shut up,” she shouts, pointing with her cane. She throws a middle finger at the foolish child.
She wouldn’t pick on a kid. You’ve seen her flip off a rogue driver on the 495, though. The finger, after all, is universally understood.
You speak for Mah-mah. You stomp your feet and let the bird fly.
“We do not curse here,” she lies. “Cursing is for working men. People with rough lives. We are better than that.”
***
Laiso gathered her salary. Ten cents for her daily bread. Saving, saving, saving forty for a once-in-a-blue-moon steak dinner. If there’s one fine thing about poshness, it’s their insistence to use ten forks, ten knives, and ten spoons. But European cuisine tastes better in the colonies. Seared steaks with oyster sauce, soy sauce, onions, and black pepper, tender like nobody’s business. Books are necessities. But this is Laiso’s little luxury.
She keeps her head down while stapling bamboo baskets together. The ladies whistle and chatter overhead, but Laiso has numbers in mind. Twenty, twenty, ten.
“What’re ya calculating?” Lady smacks her lips. She’s double her age, thirteen years her senior. “You can keep counting and it won’t change a cent.”
In the future, Laiso cackles as she retells it. Here and now, her cheeks burn with shame.
She walks the way home for another few cents. She doesn’t follow boys home or go to parties. She’s a good worker and the boys love her. Her bosses plan for young Laiso to marry their oldest nephew.
You are thirteen years old when she tells you this. You stretch your broad nose and push your sparse brows in the mirror. You think you must be made of something beautiful.
Mah-mah keeps many secrets, but you’ve learned to supply them with your imagination.
She gazes out the glazed window. You can tell she loved him, that boy, both rich and kind. If she had gone with him, there’d have been pearls around her neck, her hair still silk-long, her lungs clean, her clothes decorated in Thai fashions. But she’s a wild horse, too great for mansions, veiled chatter, and one-upping dowries. The in-laws in the big house would have trampled her fire; she would have shriveled at fights, even at the Mahjong table.
He came back years later. They would meet at the café. He wrote to her, eyes as eager as he ever was.
“I’m getting married soon,” Laiso said. She watched his joy dissolve. Steady. She knew it would happen. She produces the gifts he gave her in a plastic bag—the jewelry, returning all but one.
He turned heel as quickly as he arrived. She sipped her tea and set it down carefully. You could barely hear the saucer crash.
All her life she spent running.
In the Guangzhou night, she drew her thin blanket over her head. The moon-sliver outside is not enough to write under. Flashlight beside her, she pried her little notebook open and scratched into it.
Sometimes, she drew herself into the world of her own creation. Other times, she felt the outside creep within.
The outside.
Outside the window.
Look outside the window.
A man watches you. Looming, searing. His hands were working the windowsill.
Pretend you’re fast asleep, Guan Laiso. Squeeze your eyes shut, as if the wrinkle in your brow were never there. Sleep like a baby.
In the morning, she ran to her own Mah-mah. “A man’s been watching me,” she insisted. She doesn’t cut corners when speaking to Mah-mah. “He pokes his arm through my bedroom window, like this.” Mah-mah keeps pulling the needle through the cloth. Thread and prick and pull and knot and cut. Pulling as taut as her lips.
Laiso shook her. She shook everyone in this damn town—then her mother spoke.
“Your uncle confided in me,” she whispered. “His son is getting older and is still unmarried. Since you can’t go to school, we are considering a few options.”
She doesn’t hear the rest of it. She marched to the police station with three dollars, her clothes, and her passport. Marched there like she marched her sister’s assailant. She filed residency for Hong Kong, feigning her mother’s signature.
She fled to Hong Kong, barely thirteen. She’ll make her own way. Nobody will know. Not her mother. Not her sons in the future. Not the boys who will love her. She bore her secret like a cross atop her heart, for her daughters.
For the singular girl that is you.
You’re thirteen in America. That’s worth half in Guangdong.
***
Mah-mah cracks open roasted peanuts by squeezing the shell centers. She gives you the bigger half. You’re attempting to help, but you must use teeth and brute force. She coughs a lot, and her pixie begins to gray. You think about her hair during your exams. She doesn’t tell you she’s ill.
You don’t tell her your secret, either. That you’ll never have a boy to keep. That you’ll leave them, the same way she did. That you harbor some great sin in your heart.
But here, now, we laugh at our clumsy hands.
SPRING 2025
Illustrations were done in collaboration with the New Media Artspace at Baruch College. The New Media Artspace is a teaching exhibition space in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at Baruch College. Housed in the Newman Library, the New Media Artspace showcases curated experimental media and interdisciplinary artworks by international artists, students, alumni, and faculty. Special thanks to docent Anika Rios for creating artwork for this piece.
Visit the New Media Artspace at http://www.newmediartspace.info/