GOLDSEA | ASIAN BOOKVIEW | FICTION
Pieces of Goldby Nancy Young Mosny
Bantam, New York, 1999, 212 pp, $9.95 (paper)
A first novel about the bonds between a Chinese mother and her American daughter.
EXCERPT
he wouldn't listen. She just wouldn't listen.
Ma Ma's face the day long was visiting all shades of gray, a chromatic match for her salt and pepper hair. Between feeling a little dizzy, an uneasiness in every step she took from the waiting room to the examination room, she was feeling less strong, less vital, lesschi, in her blood. She was hungry, as she always seemed to be, but today she didn't, she couldn't, stop to eat. Eating's importance was never lost on her and hunger disrupted her like a clock every four hours, she actually being one of the proverbial children starving in China. Ma Ma never lost a piece of food on her plate, even on our plates, her children's, and yesterday's leftovers were always highly respected and creatively consumed. Wasting leftovers was equivalent to losing years of your life, she had warned us. Kernels of rice stuck to your bowl will bring you a hideous spouse with pockmarked skin. But today her appetite was only a distant roar, taking a lesser priority, below her eyes, blinking and watery, and her vision, blurred and hazy. Ma Ma wouldn't take the afternoon off. How could she let a little physical discomfort, somehow feeling unnatural, intrude on her purpose, her job, her dedication, as the receptionist and office manager of her son's medical practice? She wouldn't rest.
Leave me alone, she waved her hand. "Yow ngor."
Her Chinese words were strong and swift, matching the swing of her head as she turned to look away. She continued to log the names of patients expected to be seen that day.
That night, no, it was pre-dawn, she tried to find her way half in slumber to the bathroom in the Chinatown tenement she had lived in for nearly forty years. Her bedroom was only a few steps away in the four-room apartment, number 12, we had called home as children in the 1950s, on the ground floor of a reddish-brown brick building six stories high, tall enough for a dumbwaiter for garbage but not for an elevator. It sat like a throne in the elbow of Mott Street, the center spine of New York's Chinatown, in the heart of our Chinese ghetto.
Ma Ma had arrived in this Little China as a young bride in 1949, pregnant with my older brother, the doctor, and now she had fallen, struck down by a stroke, an implosion in her brain, exploding her life apart.
And ours.
She had started down the hall in dignity and ended in a pool of urine, where she was to be found the next morning.
Only ten miles away but a world apart, mornings had been blending into nights and nights into mornings again for me, this time for baby Anni. Every four hours, Anni was awake and looking for her next cuddle at the breast. Snuggling was for me the purest highlight of motherhood. Still, I longed for the day when I could forego my button-down pajamas for easier nursing and slip back into a silk spaghett-strap nightgown.
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