Amidst

I wanted to make chicken wings. No one in the family was particularly interested. But when I asked my cousin Heyi if he would like chicken wings and he said “Sure,” I decided to make them. He said, “Make them a little spicier.”

But my chicken wing plan was postponed for days. The first day of the holiday we spent at my uncle’s. The second day there was enough food and I was told to make them another day. The third day I finally got some wings from the market, but a little too close to lunch time for me to prepare them. Heyi said he’d go out with friends for dinner. “You should have told me!” I said; the fourth day he would leave. “Maybe I’ll stay for lunch tomorrow,” he added. “Can you stay?” I sought confirmation. “Well, if you are making chicken wings then I have to,” my cousin responded with a smile.

The fourth day came and my uncle and aunt asked us to go shopping in the city center. I decided not to. Instead, I went to buy the ingredients required by the recipe, defrosted and cleaned the chicken wings, made the sauce, and marinated the wings. The defrosted wings looked worse than normal: some bones and meat were broken to pieces, covered with extra fat. When finally put into the pan, the dismantled wings had absorbed too much liquid to make the frying possible. I regretted not getting better quality wings from the supermarket. My complaint annoyed my mother. “What’s the point? Who cares?”

Fortunately the ingredients I used, including Grandma’s honey, were not bad. I simmered the wings after adding in the rest of the sauce and a bowl of water. It was all going well until Grandma came by and suggested turning the fire bigger—she was waiting to use the stove to cook lunch. The boiling sauce in the pan gave me the false impression that it would still take a few minutes. I covered the pan with the lid and went to make a quick phone call. When I returned to the kitchen, where Mom and Grandma were busy preparing other dishes, the pan had been removed from the stove—the wings stuck to the bottom and the sugary sauce burned.

“Oh no!” I exclaimed, “The fire shouldn’t have been turned bigger.” “So now it’s Grandma’s fault,” Mom mocked. I scraped the wings off the pan and stacked the dry meat on a plate. I might as well thrown them away, I thought. But I wouldn’t have another chance—this was Heyi’s last meal at home. I rinsed the burned pan under the tap. “Give it to me,” Grandma said, taking over the pan, “With your speed we’ll never be able to have lunch.”

Something in me was exasperated. Knowing I would regret it, I took the plate of wings and dumped them into the trash can, leaving the plate on top of the garbage, and walked out of the kitchen. Behind was my mom yelling, “Why are you throwing the plate away!”

And I paid the price I expected to pay. I was tortured by the guilt for throwing away what I wanted to share with my cousin.  

*

I shared everything with my cousin until Mom made me go to live with her in Shanghai. For a few years I lived with my grandparents and Heyi. Technically with his parents too, but they weren’t always home. With Heyi I went to school and came home every day. I took him to play with my friends around the neighborhood. My girlfriends all knew I had a little brother—in Chinese a “cousin” is a “brother” or “sister,” more so for single children like us—who followed me around day and night. I guess I was proud of it. I liked him but I was also proud of it.

He was the closest person to me, not just because we played together all the time. He also knew my secrets. When the adults played mahjong in the living room, I played kissing games with my third-grade classmate in the bedroom, and Heyi was there with us. The six-year-old boy that he was probably didn’t know what was going on. I later worried he would betray me by telling the adults my secret, but he never did.

He was a shy boy, so shy that he never said a thing in front of the adults. When they blamed him for something, often my mom or our grandma, he never had a response. Silence was his response. He stood in front of the adults in silence as they kept talking to him. Finally tears would come down his face, and still, he wouldn’t utter a word. I watched him as he went through this, as he watched me when my mom yelled at me. I didn’t know if he ever felt for me but I thought I understood him.

The adults didn’t think he was very clever. We both weren’t as clever as our older cousin Chengcheng, who knew how to say witty words. Clever as Chengcheng was, he also got into lots of fights. At home he would bully us, me more than Heyi as I remember, maybe because I was a girl and was closer to his age. Chengcheng would say or do something to make me cry and Heyi would cry next to me. That was part of the comfort—he cried next to me.

Heyi had even less advantage than I did because he wasn’t as good a student. I soon came to be the top of the class while he remained mediocre throughout the school years. I am afraid that was what eventually separated us.

Mom called one day telling my grandparents to take me to Shanghai, where she had bought an apartment on the 26th floor. 26th floor?! Heyi and I were amazed.

The 26th floor later became a prison for him, when our grandparents took him to visit my mom and me during the summers. I had become the hardworking student who structured my days around homework and piano practice, while summers meant to him the loss of the neighborhood and friends. He was made to study following the example of his model cousin. The only moderately fun time was when I took him to swim or ride bikes.

I tried to teach him English and make him love it as I did. I asked him once, while he was in the shower, what he would like to say to his mother—I knew she wasn’t around much but he missed her—and I would teach him those words in English in hope that he would become interested in the language.

But he never did. He started to respond to my questioning and tutoring the same way he responded to the adults. He stayed silent for a long time until tears came down his face. “Why are you crying? I haven’t even cried!” I was the frustrated teacher.

As he grew older, old enough to not follow our grandparents around, he stopped coming to Shanghai. He would rather spend a summer taking care of himself, with his occasionally-present parents, than come to sit next to his cousin and do homework in a 26th-floor apartment.

One day during a taxi ride home, when I was about 12 or 13 years old, Mom told me Heyi’s parents were divorced. I cried and looked outside the window for the rest of the ride. I felt as if it was my parents that had been divorced, and my life changed.

*

Heyi and his father stayed with my grandparents for the following years. Whenever I went back to visit, Heyi was there. He was there but it was as if he weren’t. He never talked to us. He played games on his phone and went out with his friends. Grandma was worried about his schoolwork and wanted me to persuade him to work harder, but I rarely had a chance to talk to him.

Over the years I learned one or two things about him: he liked motorcycles and wanted to have his own one day, and he liked one or two girls. I was happy to learn those things from him, even though I probably never helped to persuade him to work harder as the adults wanted me to. I was his friend, not one of them—I was more eager to help him understand that.

Once I did try to help him change for the better. I wrote a letter to him and told him it was left under Grandma’s lamp after I left. Neither of us said anything about it afterwards.

Years later he did own a small motorcycle. That was after we both turned adults. He picked me up a few times from the train station and gave me rides when our family went to attend relatives’ banquets. Sitting behind him on his vehicle, I could see his silver-colored hair mixed in his black hair. He drove fast, though steadily, through the roads of the town. The wind blew with a bit of his smell of a young man. This was no longer the little cousin that followed me around.

He opened up a little more after he graduated from college, though his phone still seemed to attract more of his attention than his family. He changed jobs many times, from an ordinary office job to opening a small barbecue restaurant to buying a car and giving private ride services. None of them lasted long. Early this year he found a job in Changsha, the capital city of the province. No one knew what he was working in.

My mom commented it was useless to talk to Heyi; it was impossible to get any “real information” out of him. “You ask him how things are, and it’s always ‘All right.’ You tell him to come to you if he needs a job, he just says, “Okay,” and then never asks for anything.” I said nothing in return; she didn’t seem to expect a response either.

Heyi’s father, my uncle, asked me to ask Heyi if he would come home for this holiday. I messaged him and he said he wasn’t sure. A few minutes later he said yes he would. I asked about his job and he said it was something related to video games.

The first day at my uncle’s, we three cousins had a chance to sit just by ourselves. Chengcheng, now a father of a four year old, talked to me about my “problematic relationship.” He tried to convince me that I couldn’t be selfish by marrying a foreigner and I’d never be happy if I did. I felt an anger rising in me as he talked with such confidence. I looked toward Heyi, who sat between Chengcheng and me with a cigarrette in one hand and his phone in the other. Instead of helping me argue back, he turned to me. I felt helpless for a second. “It’s hard to say,” Heyi said, “It’s the cultural difference.” I was relieved when our older cousin left the apartment later—before any agreement was reached.

The second day passed by quietly. Late in the afternoon I asked Heyi if he would like to go out for a milk tea. We walked to a bakery near home. Looking at the menu, we both decided it was too late for a sweet drink. Then we walked home.

The third day I suggested going to visit a relative in the countryside, my mom’s cousin who took care of me when I was young. No one in the family was fond of the idea—visiting relatives means giving away money, as it obliges one to bring something. In the end only Heyi went with me. He drove me in his car to the village.

These years, whenever I want to go somewhere, like our grandparents’ hometown or our favorite beef kebab place during childhood, Heyi ends up driving me around. It’s not that he is more interested than others—he never has strong likes or dislikes—but that his sister does and for some reason he is willing to accommodate them. And that seems to be the remaining connection between us.

*

And this time, the chicken wings became the wish that I needed to realize though no one else cared. Why making frozen chicken wings when we have home-raised and freshly-killed whole chickens? But Heyi said he could have some chicken wings and he could stay home for another meal just to have them. I wanted to make them good, but they were ruined at the very end after all the hope and effort.

When I came out of my room, lunch was ready and the family were sitting around the table, including Heyi who got out of bed just a little before noon. Everyone including Mom had calmed down and asked me to join the circle. 

“Your sister was cooking for you all morning while you were still sleeping,” people said to Heyi to comfort me.

“Your sister said the chicken here is not as good as the chicken in Shanghai,” my mom continued to mock me. Heyi gave off a quiet laugh. “Come to Shanghai and she’ll cook for you again.”

The men were having beer, which reminded me of the drink I bought for Heyi, one of the Rio drinks that David would buy me on special nights. I went to get the drink from the fridge and handed it to my cousin.

“Your sister is very good to you,” one of the uncles said.

“Um,” Heyi responded, his way of saying “yes.”

When later getting rice from the kitchen, Heyi glanced into the trash can. “They don’t seem burned to me,” he said when back at his seat.

After lunch Heyi asked me quietly, “Want to go get milk tea?” It was often me that asked him. This was probably the first time he asked me. I shook my head and walked away, still trying to process the heavy feeling from earlier.

As I did the dishes, Heyi stood next to me and repeated, “They looked fine to me. You were too perfectionist,” he said it gently; he wanted to comfort me.

Heyi went out for an errand and came back with two drinks, one for me and one for himself. I disappeared into my room as the family started to play cards. He messaged me in a bit, “Did you go out?” I replied, “No. In my room.”

I might have hoped he proposed milk tea again but he said no more until it was time for him to leave. He waved bye and I waved back. Then he closed the old iron door behind.