Beyond the Narrow Gate | Asian American Memoirs

Beyond the Narrow Gate
by Leslie Chang
Dutton, New York, 1999, 288 pp, $24.95
The Journey of Four Chinese Women from the Middle Kingdom to Middle America
EXCERPT

ater belongs to everyone and to no one. For this reason, I have always had a particular affinity for it, which may strike some as mysterious. Westerners ask me where my parents were born, as though the answer will enable them to glean some knowledge. The answer is Beijing and Luoyang. The truth is that this response signifies nothing. The meaningful question would be to ask where my ancestors lived. The answer to that is inland. My father's people came from Wuhan, birthplace of the Chinese republic and the capital of Hubei, that sweltering province sandwiched between Sichuan and Anhui. My mother's father was, amazingly even to me, from Inner Mongolia, land of desert and grassy plains.
Yet water calls to me. I remain convinced that I would find peace if I could only have a house by the ocean or even just a lap pool. I insisted on being married near the sea. This attraction does not come from my father. He does not even know how to swim. A celebrated family anecdote involves his falling from a sailboat and losing his glasses. A true inlander, he prefers to hunker down where it is warn and safe, preferably in a medium-to-large-size city with good Chinese takeout and daily access to the New York Times. There is nothing wrong with this instinct. It pulls me too. But I also love open water, and this bond, I know, comes from my mother.
She longs for a view more than anything else. Once, staying at the Mandarin Oriental in San Francisco, she insisted on seeing three different rooms before she found one with which she was satisfied. It was on a floor so high it made me dizzy, with a corner window overlooking the bay. Even so, my mother spent most of her time on the bridge linking the elevator bank to our wing. The bridge consisted almost entirely of windows. It offered a view in either direction that was brilliant and blinding. If there had been a chair, she could have sat forever, letting the gold sun and blue sea overwhelm her through the glass.

My mother may have descended from inland people, but they were also nomads. Her father once rode his horse practically the length of China, from Inner Mongolia to Guangzhou, a distance of some twelve hundred miles. Whether it was due to his heritage or to the chaotic circumstances of her childhood, I do not know, but my mother could only become a nomad herself -- forever moving, changing and going, yet always retaining some essential part of her being. In this she is like water, not dead water but fearsomely alive. When she gazes out on its shimmering expanse, she sees her own reflection. When I gaze out, I see her, my mother, always pulling away, returning and pulling away again. I drink from her, and she slips between my fingertips. She has borne me all this way from the stagnant pond of her own birth. I cannot decide whether I want her to stay or go. When she is here, I wish she would leave. When she is gone, I wish she would return. She pulls away again, a force as elemental as the ebbing tide. I remain a child on the shore, eagerly collecting the sea glass and driftwood she has left behind.

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