1. Things My Dad Told Me, Part 1
Staring into the Sun
This is a serialization of short story collection, Staring into the Sun. Start here for more info and the full index.
England, 2015
“Your mother loved gardenias,” my dad always told me. He didn’t mean my stepmother, who was “Mom” to me for as long as I could remember.
He meant Bonnie.
You could see her in my eyes, literally, her Cantonese genes pinching the outside corners into an almond shape. My skin was fair, the easy tanning of my youth left behind—and in any case, England didn’t put it to the test.
In profile, I could recognize the outline of my father’s nose. From the front, I was Chinese and from the side, Eastern European Jewish. Inside, I didn’t feel much of either.
When I was in my early twenties, I bought a gardenia plant in an attempt to cultivate her. With a dull pain in the pit of my stomach, I watched the plant slowly die, its deep green leaves yellowing and dropping. Acidic soil and daily misting were not enough; it required some other kind of nurturing to ensure its survival. I would never witness the blossoming of its guileless white flowers touched by pale yellow at their hearts.
“Mama, can you pass me the pancakes?” There was no lazy Susan at our table at the China Diner, meaning no dishes whirling around, no serving spoons to reposition away from tall water glasses. It meant I could relax.
I passed the floury, paper-thin pancakes to my eight-year-old son, then plum sauce in a small dish—taking care to keep the teaspoon balanced on the saucer’s rim—then fine cucumber sticks. He reached over to help himself to more duck and barely wrapped up the pile before stuffing it into his mouth.
“Remember to chew, Arden,” I said, half-teasing.
Crispy duck, chicken noodle soup, rice, barbecued spare ribs. My grandmother, Poa-Poa Corri, loved ribs and peach pie. An image of her came to me, in her pink terrycloth robe, slowly counting out scoops of coffee into the machine, one, two, three; Californian sunlight fell onto the kitchen island through a pyramid-shaped skylight while unruly Pacific waves sprayed a salty film onto floor-to-ceiling windows.
Parker blew on the soup in her beveled ceramic spoon. Without warning, she dropped her spoon back into the bowl, splashing out some broth. She grabbed her chopsticks and brandished them at her brother, commanding, “En garde!”
Does she act like that at kindergarten, or is she saving this for us? So much for relaxation. Arden kept eating intently. I glanced over at my husband and caught him smiling to himself.
“Parker.” My warning tone snapped her out of fencing mode.
As we settled into a few moments of silence, I scanned my children’s faces. Arden had my eyes and nose; his full lips came from Christoph. Parker most resembled a cousin on my mother’s side.
I said, “My dad once told me that if I had kids with a Chinese guy, they’d be three-quarters Chinese.”
Arden and Parker both grinned at the impossible idea of their mother having children with someone besides Papa.
I thought of a half-Chinese, half-British girl they knew. “Arden,” I said, “if you had kids with Georgie, they’d be…” I found a pen in my purse and jotted on a napkin, 1/2 German, 1/4 Chinese, 1/8 Polish, 1/8 Lithuanian and next to it, 1/2 Chinese, 1/2 British. Then I wrote, 3/8 Chinese, 1/4 German, 1/4 British, 1/16 Polish, 1/16 Lithuanian. I converted everything to sixteenths in my head to check that it added up. Arden and Parker peered at the paper and chanted out the fractions through their giggles.
When we ordered dessert—fried apples, fried bananas, ice cream—the waitress wrote Chinese characters on her grey notepad. She noticed me watching and asked, “Can you read this? Do you speak Mandarin?”
“No. I’m half Chinese but I don’t speak it. The Chinese side of my family went to America four or five generations ago, so we pretty much lost all the language and culture.” That was the level one explanation.
“Oh, you’re American,” she acknowledged warmly. “I’m from Malaysia. Never actually been to China.” She nodded to conclude our exchange, then headed towards the kitchen.
I was relieved that she didn’t probe further; level one was simply saying that I was half Chinese and attributing the blame of my lost culture to America’s great Shake ‘N Bake, in which everyone mixes together and comes out as some new dish, an interesting one, but lacking clearly identifiable flavors.
Escalating to level two meant admitting that my mother died when I was young. When I got to level two, people usually shut up.
Maybe my kids thought their Grandma Pat was very pale and blonde for a Chinese woman, or more likely, they didn’t reflect at all on her race. In any case, they hadn’t realized yet that their biological grandmother was gone, and I dreaded telling them. There was no playbook for this truth—how much to reveal, and when. When I became a mother, I started to understand my dad, who had said to my brother and me, early on, “I vowed to myself that I’d only tell you good things about her. I didn’t want to dwell on anything painful or negative.”
But the truth was both painful and negative.
Sharing the whole truth—how she died—was level three. I barricaded that knowledge inside of me; it rarely saw the light of day.
One bedtime, about a month later, Arden chose a magician, a cowboy, and a pink-mohawked punk as his friends, a kayak for transport, and a suit of armor to wear on his adventure. His fingers skipped around the colorful illustrations in You Choose.
A stack of more advanced books sat on the floor, but some evenings he preferred the comfort of pictures to words, a throwback to a younger version of himself.
I got up from the edge of his bed to close the blinds against the rosy sky. I turned back to find him looking up at the ceiling, eyebrows scrunched together.
“I’m blond from Papa and have green eyes from Papa. Why is my skin pale and Parker’s is dark?” Indeed, Parker chose a brown crayon when she drew herself, while Arden used pink.
So this is how it will unfold, I thought. Through genetics.
He had never asked why he had a bunch of Chinese aunts. The seemingly endless options of his day-to-day life, like those in You Choose, were probably more at the forefront of his mind.
I didn’t know how my mother would materialize for my kids: perhaps as a snow angel, ephemeral and light…or as a chalk outline, criminal and gruesome.
I sat back down next to him, my stomach churning. “Grandma Pat isn’t my biological mother,” I said slowly. “My real mother died when I was young. She was Chinese and had darker skin like Parker, and my aunts—your great-aunts.”
“What was her name?”
“Bonnie.” My Bonnie lies over the ocean, my Bonnie lies over the sea, my Bonnie lies over the ocean, oh bring back my Bonnie to me.
“Does Papa know?” His question was so innocent, thinking that I would share this fact with him, yet keep it a secret from (or somehow forget to tell?) his dad.
“Yes, he knows.” There was a photo Christoph took of me during a trip to Prague. My eyes were red and puffy because we’d talked about her the evening before. Level three.
“I’m so sad I can’t meet my grandma.”
That said it all, the same feeling I had about not meeting her properly, not knowing her.
Arden was silent for a beat. “Let’s talk about something else. I’ll tell you a joke to make you happy.” Now he seemed older than his years, using the tried-and-true parental technique of distraction. And very sweet, wanting to change my mood.
A couple of tears slid down my cheeks.
The inevitable moment I had been dreading for years had simply passed. It came and went in a whisper, padding in and leaving on tiptoes.
He added, “Maybe we’ll forget about it by the morning. I don’t want to not have a mama.” Heartbreaking. I felt awful for having introduced that possibility to him.
“It’s okay, sweetie.” I hugged him and rubbed his back. “I’ll always be here.”
Christoph and I agreed to tell Parker soon. We didn’t want to saddle Arden with a secret that could become a vulnerability as much as a weapon against his younger sibling.
A few days later, I found Parker tumbling around on our bed.
“Parker.”
She froze, waiting for a rebuke.
I took a deep breath and dived in, like a plunge into icy water. “My mother died when I was little,” I stated quickly and evenly. I was about your age. Actually, a year younger.
At first she looked relieved at not being reprimanded, then her face morphed to confusion. “Isn’t Grandma Pat your mother?”
“No, she’s my stepmother.” The one I call Mom.
“How did your mother die?”
My heart thumped. She wasn’t ready for my biggest secret. “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”
“Why when I’m older?” She started rolling across the mattress again.
“It’s just better to know in a few years. It’s too early now.” I couldn’t bear the subject anymore, or the flitting frankness of a five-year-old’s questions. How I had reacted to that horrible news so long ago, when I was even younger than her?
I pulled some vintage dresses from my closet, one by one. “Have you ever seen these?”
Parker’s eyes widened. “Whoa! Those are so beautiful!”
“These belonged to your great-grandmother. My Poa-Poa Corri.”
“Paw paw?”
“Poa-Poa means grandma in Chinese, the grandmother on your mother’s side. My mother’s mother. Her nephew was a fashion designer. She modeled for him, and he gave her these dresses. I used to wear them a lot at parties.” The smell transported me straight into my grandmother’s walk-in closet: a straight-shot maternal line that could tighten and propel me through time and space like a thread gathering folds of fabric.
“Why don’t you wear them now?”
“I don’t go to that many parties these days.”
“You could wear one when you go out for dinner with Papa tonight.”
“Hmmm, sweetie, it might be a bit too fancy for that.”
Parker screwed up her face. “Why too fancy?”
“Well, these are special dresses for special occasions. Look how they’re made, all the hand stitching. Look at all the work put into them. Our clothes aren’t made like this anymore.”
Parker glanced at the tiny stitches and then left the room, looking for somewhere she could bounce around without all this family history and confounding death. When I put my cousin’s vintage pieces back, my fingertips lingered on the feather-soft orange chiffon gown that I had worn as my wedding dress.
I wanted to protect my children from the bitter knowledge of the whole truth, but I knew that it had already begun to germinate—it was just a matter of time until it emerged. I wondered how they would deal with it, what it would grow into.
I thought about choices and consequences, what we speak about and what we keep hidden. What we toss away, resigned, and what we nurture with hope. Births and deaths, tragedies and triumphs.
To be continued on 9 August 2025.
“Things My Dad Told Me” was first published in The Hope Prize anthology, Tomorrow There Will Be Sun, by Simon & Schuster Australia.
Second time I’m reading this story, and it still packs a punch (in a good way!).
Beautiful each time I read it. So lovely to have your stories to look forward to each week.