Chemistry Read online

  Flip over the note and find a Spider-Man sticker to be put on a hand or a lunch box that’s already covered in stickers.

  In sixth grade, Eric finally writes back to this mother, Please stop writing me notes and sending me stickers. You’re embarrassing me in front of everyone.

  I meet his entire family at his thesis defense. Mother, father, aunts and uncles, both sets of grandparents. They sit in the back row and stand up after he has finished, not having understood anything but cheering wildly.

  At his celebratory dinner, one after the other, they offer him questions.

  How does it feel to be the most successful one in the family? How does it feel to be the smartest one in the family?

  Are they joking? No, they are being sincere. I stop eating at the word brilliant.

  His family does not all live in that picturesque town but close by. One week, there is a picnic. Another, a family barbecue. I suspect this is the real reason he leaves. All that attention can be suffocating, he now says. But what does he experience when he first comes to the city for a PhD? Isolation? Shock? No, he is incredibly happy. He thrives.

  I find a story like that hard to believe. Maybe this is why I ask, What is the worst thing your parents have ever said to you? What is the worst thing you have ever seen them do?

  He is taken aback. He thinks for a long time. When he comes up empty-handed I say, There must have been a moment when you realized the meanness of a parent, and the look he gives me is the one that says this is not a competition, our upbringings, this is not up for discussion.

  So I shut up.

  ···

  How do you predict things like angst and risky behavior? How do you predict things like ungratefulness? We’ve mapped the entire human genome but don’t know what most of it says. And then the other problems—heart disease, cancer, poor vision.

  When I watch that movie Gattaca, I think, What a perfect society, to build your own child, what a great idea.

  DNA unzips to replicate and undergo meiosis, to make things like egg and sperm that come together to make things like babies.

  It is this unzipping that I find sensual. It is like the unzipping of a woman’s dress.

  ···

  In Arizona, a PhD advisor dies. Authorities blame the grad student who shot him, but grad students around the world blame the advisor. No student can graduate without the advisor’s approval. This advisor had kept the student in lab for seventeen years, believing him too valuable to be let go or simply having gone insane. I think, Kudos to the student for making it to seventeen years. I would have shot someone at ten.

  My advisor is more reasonable than that, which is why he is still alive. His door is always open. He visits my desk often, asking for results and, if I do not have any, asking if I am unwell.

  I’m fine, I say.

  Your lab mate is working steadily, he says. She comes in on weekends and holidays. Have you been doing the same?

  Not really. Not Christmas or Thanksgiving. Or the time I was bedridden with the flu.

  My advisor has never shaken his head at me, but he won’t smile.

  If alchemy doesn’t work, I will move on to desalinating all of our oceans and providing freshwater to the people.

  ···

  In traditional Chinese culture, the bride gets married in red. The dress is called a qipao. It is very slimming, with capped sleeves, a high collar, and a button in the middle of that collar that sits in the valley between the clavicles.

  Last summer, I pass a qipao store that says FREE FITTING. I am in Chinatown buying cake. It is Eric’s birthday and sponge cake can be bought no place else. The qipao store I have never noticed before. Should I go in? I hesitate but the seamstress at the door is very convincing. Every qipao on sale, every qipao under fifty dollars. Silk. Handmade. Just try. Take five minutes. I don’t believe any of this but then she adds that I look very skinny from afar.

  The woman makes clear that the qipao is not for anyone who is fat. She says, If you’re fat, wear an A-line.

  But after putting the dress on, I realize that the fit is not for me. I don’t have the shoulders for it.

  Too broad, she says, and horizontal. She keeps trying to push them down with both hands.

  I learn from this woman that the qipao is not entirely Chinese, not Han Chinese, which is the majority ethnic group in China, which is what I am. It actually came from the Manchurians in the north, who are known for their excellent archery while riding horseback across the great northern plains.

  I learn from this woman that the qipao is not even a wedding dress. It is simply a traditional dress, for any occasion.

  Yet I don’t remember either my mother or grandmother wearing one. Quickly I realize something. While beautiful, the qipao is hard to walk in, the legs bound together, the fabric constricting, the slit up to the mid-thigh.

  In the end, I buy the dress anyway. I can’t see myself in the red and choose a deep burgundy color. Though don’t ask me how many times I’ve worn it.

  ···

  See how red clashes with your skin tone, my mother says, putting her pale arm up against mine. She does this often, especially when I am a teenager.

  You have your father’s skin, dark and swarthy, fitting if you were to live in the countryside and blend in with the soil.

  ·

  My mother grows up in Shanghai, in an apartment building with a terrace overlooking the Bund. It is the mid-1970s and she is thirteen, watching from this terrace shipping boats with large quilted sails come through the Huangpu River. The Pudong skyline is not what it will be in twenty years. The Oriental Pearl Tower will not be built until 1994. There are few cars and buses on the road, but there are thousands of bikes. The youngest of two, my mother does not always like going to school or learning but she does every dare her brother tells her, like scale this wall in your best dress, like stack all the dinner bowls into a pyramid. She scales the wall and ruins her dress. She stacks the bowls and breaks every one. But she is rarely ever punished. She is a beautiful girl with large eyes and everyone tells her so.

  My father grows up hundreds of miles west of Shanghai. There are no buildings taller than a story. There are no bikes. It is farm country and he is the oldest of seven. His father is a farmer and so is his grandfather. They grow wheat, sorghum, corn, and sell them in the city. But food is scarce in the household and there is strict rationing. No child has a second serving of anything. No child has more than two sets of clothes at one time. The house they live in is small, too small, and he shares a bedroom with all six of his siblings. Things like glass windows and wooden doors are expensive, so the house has neither. The door is an opening covered with a thin cloth. The window, another opening but not covered. At dawn and dusk, my father is studying. Whenever he does not have to be in the field, he is studying.

  How do they meet? Fall in love? All good questions. The story changes every time. They meet through mutual friends. They meet accidentally, at a train station, at a bus station, no, on a bridge. Though neither of them remembers the exact date of this meeting.

  And then they are married. And then they have me.

  My father’s is the classic immigrant story.

  He is the first in his family to go to high school and college and graduate school and America. He is the first to become an engineer.

  Extraordinary, some people have said when he speaks now of how he got here.

  Through hard work, he says, and the learning of advanced math.

  Amazing, others have said.

  But such progress he’s made in one generation that to progress beyond him, I feel as if I must leave America and colonize the moon.

  ···

  Genetics aside, I don’t see myself having kids.

  Not one? Eric asks.

  If I had one, I would want to have two, and if I had two, I would want to have zero.

  ···

  An object in motion stays in motion; an object at rest stays at rest.

  Wher
e is Eric today?

  In motion. He makes lists of places where he is going to apply. He applies.

  I glance at the first draft of his application essay, at the first sentence that describes his love of teaching, and lightly, with a pencil, cross out the word love.

  Afterward, I can’t even explain to him why I did that.

  The hurricane they said would come never does. Having boarded up her windows already, the best friend is now disappointed. She says, If doctors were wrong as often as weathermen, we would all be fired. Imagine if I told you that you had a 90 percent chance of diabetes and then you never got it. Wouldn’t you be pissed?

  I would probably be more relieved. Then I remind her that rain and diabetes are not really the same things.

  Instead of the hurricane, fall arrives early. On the first cold day, I walk outside and gasp at the sight of my breath.

  ···

  A Chinese proverb predicts that for every man with great skill, there is a woman with great beauty.

  In ancient China, there are four great beauties:

  The first so beautiful that when fish see her reflection they forget how to swim and sink.

  The second so beautiful that birds forget how to fly and fall.

  The third so beautiful that the moon refuses to shine.

  The fourth so beautiful that flowers refuse to bloom.

  I find it interesting how often beauty is shown to make the objects around it feel worse.

  This proverb is said and re-said on the day of my parents’ wedding.

  ·

  Throughout her twenties, my mother is complimented wildly. People stop her in the streets and say, You remind me of an actress from a movie. That actress is Audrey Hepburn from Roman Holiday.

  She likes this movie. The scene where the hand goes into the mouth of the statue—it is like a dare her brother would have had her do.

  Most people feel that beauty is not in the face but in the heart or the soul or the mind—any place that the human eye cannot penetrate is where beauty will hide.

  Most people say that I look nothing like my mother and everything like my father.

  Eric does not say this, because he knows that it annoys me. He says that all three of us look very different except for the color of our hair.

  Black is the absence of color, I reply.

  I am most proud of my eyebrows. They arch the right way without needing to be plucked. Also, my mother has never pointed at them and demanded they change.

  What my mother lacks in vision, she makes up for in hindsight.

  Your nose: if only slightly higher. Your forehead: if only slightly wider. Your mouth: if only slightly more upturned, less sulky.

  If only we could find the gene for beauty and bottle it.

  The corners of my mouth naturally droop. I can’t help this. But I try to combat it. I would say that at least 10 percent of my energy is dedicated to keeping my mouth in a straight line.

  What Doctor Who said: A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it is by no means the most interesting.

  ···

  At the Arnold Arboretum, in fall, observe many people looking at trees.

  Observe the dog misbehaving, gnawing on the leash so that he may run alongside bundled joggers and feel the breeze.

  And Eric pulling back on the leash and clucking his tongue as he has seen a dog whisperer do on TV. But it’s not whispering that you’re doing, I tell him. It’s just very loud clucking.

  Observe no changes in the dog’s behavior.

  Eric is discussing us and has been for a while.

  What are you afraid of? he asks.

  Lots of things. The worst dreams I have are when I am falling. I am tipping back in a chair and suddenly I am going backward, toward a ground that does not exist. Falling feels like someone has taken my heart and dribbled with it.

  I get no thrills from roller coasters.

  Also spiders.

  A few months ago, an egg sac hatches on our bedroom ceiling. I look up and see the ceiling move against little translucent dots with eight legs. Then the dots scatter. We stay up for hours killing them with toilet paper: him on tiptoes; me on a chair. We kill hundreds of baby spiders. We spray every surface with repellent and then sleep on the couch.

  No, really, what are you so afraid of? he asks again.

  I pluck a fiery leaf and put it in his hair. He is tall. Six one. And willowy. When iron oxidizes, it makes rust. But Eric doesn’t like it when I call his hair color rust or even red. He prefers auburn. The first time he says auburn I mishear him and think he says autumn.

  What am I so afraid of? Do I have to say it? You of all people should know. I have told you the most about them.

  His argument is that they are not us and we are not them and their marriage is just one of many.

  But genetically, it is very possible that I will be like both of them. And then that’s bad news bears.

  A jogger whisks by. When the leaf falls out of Eric’s hair, the dog eats it.

  I used to think this was funny, Eric says.

  What’s funny?

  Us talking around in circles.

  It was never supposed to be funny.

  You’re right.

  ···

  There is a professor in my department who is no longer allowed to have graduate students. Under his tutelage, too many have committed suicide. He has unusually high work demands. He does this thing—asks students if they are busy and waits for them to cautiously say yes. Then he asks them to describe in detail what is keeping them busy for fourteen hours a day.

  The students would begin to list off.

  And also begin to sweat.

  Bathroom breaks do not count. Eating does not count. If all fourteen hours cannot be accounted for, the professor deems a student not busy and gives him or her more work.

  The last student to go has two roommates also in the apartment. He is considerate of them. On the bed where he dies, he writes, Danger: Potassium cyanide. Please do not resuscitate.

  This is many years ago. Before I join the department.

  How can something like that keep happening?

  I have a guess. You get too wrapped up in your own work. You start to take lab personally.

  Ninety percent of all experiments fail. This is a fact. Every scientist has proven it. But you eventually start to wonder if this high rate of failure is also you. It can’t be the chemicals’ fault, you think. They have no souls.

  One meaning of the word tenure is that if the lab as a whole does good work, as this professor had and won the Nobel for it, then certain things are overlooked. But after the potassium cyanide student, the school does make some changes. It adds a hotline for those who desperately need someone to talk to.

  Just call and we’ll listen, say the e-mails that are sent around.

  But the line is always busy, say the colleagues who are downtrodden.

  Is it?

  I call just to see and get the busy tone.

  ···

  My mother has a theory about hair. It is that the longer hair grows, the dumber a person becomes. She warns that too much hair will suck nutrients away from the head and leave it empty.

  As such, my mother keeps her hair boyishly short.

  As such, I am always pruning my split ends like a fiend.

  After another day of no practical projects, I leave lab for the salon. I tell the man with scissors to cut off six inches immediately.

  There is a scene in Roman Holiday, when the barber says, Off, off, and cuts off the princess’s long hair. Then says, Now it’s cool, hmm?

  I worry that six inches is not enough. I ask the man to cut off two more.

  Then I go back to lab and try again. Think small, I tell myself, think doable, think of something that might impress no one but will still let you graduate and find a job.

  I gaze up at the ceiling lights, which are blinding, so I gaze down at the floor, which is dirty, so I take to folding a sheet o
f paper until I can’t fold it anymore and then I fold another sheet.

  You must love chemistry unconditionally.

  But all I can think is how I am not up for the task.

  ·

  Another theory about hair, not from my mother, but from the best friend. A woman who cuts her hair drastically is set to make some decisions.

  Is eight inches drastic?

  Finally, the lab coat comes off. I place it neatly into the drawer. Then I smash five beakers on the ground.

  I shout, Beakers are cheap, while the whole lab gathers to watch.

  I shout, If I really wanted to make a statement, I would have opened the argon box to air.

  ···

  There is a prevailing hypothesis to why whales, in droves, will beach themselves on land. When the first whale becomes stranded, it sends out a distress call and then the other whales beach with it in solidarity.

  There is solidarity in science to a point, but not when a coworker seems to be acting deranged.

  Then it is best not to touch her or talk to her but to call the safety officer and watch the officer run down the hall with a fire extinguisher and a blanket.

  ·

  Sound doesn’t travel through space.

  Sound requires a medium, tiny molecules vibrating.

  Had I been shouting from a mountaintop where the air is thin, fewer people would have heard me.

  I did not think I was shouting.

  In my mind, I was whispering.

  ···

  At home, I do mundane tasks like laundry and dishes and am amazed at how well they work. I add soap to a sponge and the sponge bubbles. I wipe the sponge on a dish and it cleans. I think, Sponge is better than catalyst.

  I don’t need to tell Eric what happened when he comes home. He is my emergency contact. The lab secretary has already called him.

  He is kind enough to not ask any questions. Not even the most obvious one. Your hair, is it shorter?

  He makes me oatmeal instead.

  Am I a child? I ask.

  No, he says as he feeds it to me on a spoon.

  When we first meet in lab, he says that I have the steadiest hands. He has been watching me work.

  Not in a creepy way, he adds. Then looks around nervously. Then leaves.