Both Sides of the Ledger

(A note from 1999: this is the first year of this journal, when it was still called "Both Sides of the Ledger." I kept the marble background. I thought it looked like a bank lobby. I still do.)

Saturday, December 20, 1997

Christmas cantata tomorrow. I sing alto, which in our choir means I sing whatever the sopranos can't reach and the tenors won't.

Tonight Annie from choir and I went to see Titanic, which opened yesterday and is three hours and fourteen minutes long. I cried at the old couple holding each other in their bed while the water came in, not at the young people. Annie says that's how she knows I'm thirty-six.

Ba's Christmas card came. My parents aren't Christian. They keep the family altar, and A-ma goes to the temple on the first and fifteenth. But since I was baptized, Ma has sent me a Christmas card every year, because she knows it matters to me. Ma always signs for both of them. This year, under her name, in careful ballpoint, in English, Ba signed it himself: Father. Not Ba. Father. Like a letter from a school. It's on the refrigerator next to the picture from June.

Debit: three hours and fourteen minutes.
Credit: Father.

Tuesday, September 16, 1997

Mid-Autumn Festival. I called home at six this morning, which was nine at night in Taichung (fifteen hours ahead in summer, sixteen in winter; I have to count every time), and I could hear the barbecue through the phone.

In Taiwan, for reasons nobody in my family can fully explain, everybody barbecues on Mid-Autumn. It started after I left. Wei-ming says it was a soy sauce commercial in the eighties. Now the whole island is out on the sidewalks with little grills, grilling squid and corn and sausages and looking at the moon through the smoke. Wei-ming does ours in front of the building, and the neighbors from the fourth floor to the tenth come down with stools. Hao-hao, who is four, got on the phone and told me very seriously that he was wearing a pomelo on his head. That's a thing too. You peel the big pomelo in one piece and the children wear the rind as a hat.

The building: twelve floors, pale green tile, finished in 1985, two years after I left. Ba and Ma and A-ma are on the seventh floor, and Wei-ming and Shu-fen and Hao-hao are on the fourth. I've only ever visited it, but it's what I picture when somebody says "home." The balcony with Ma's orchids and the laundry pole. The elevator that stops a little below each floor, so you step up.

I bought four mooncakes at the bakery on Garfield, the flaky Taiwanese egg-yolk kind, and ate one at my desk at lunch. Stan asked if it was a cookie.

Debit: the moon here looks smaller. I know it isn't.
Credit: pomelo hat.

Monday, September 1, 1997

Ma called crying about Princess Diana. My mother, who never met her, who doesn't speak English, cried on the phone for ten minutes. In 1981 we watched the wedding together on the little TV in the old apartment, two years before I left. We sat on the floor. Ma said the dress was too big for her.

What Ma said today, over and over: "She was a mother. She was a mother."

Debit: Labor Day, and I worked anyway.
Credit: I remembered the floor, and the two of us on it.

Monday, June 23, 1997

Ba flew home yesterday. At the gate he nodded, which is how we hug, and then, and this has never happened before, he patted my shoulder twice, like he was checking I was solid.

The condo is very quiet. His teacup is upside down on the dish rack where he left it. I haven't moved it.

Tonight I found out what he was doing all week while I was in the shower. Under the new rice cooker, a note in his careful teacher's handwriting:

1. Kitchen faucet dripping. Replaced washer.
2. Bedroom closet door off track. Fixed.
3. Smoke alarm battery DEAD. Replaced. CHECK EVERY YEAR.
4. Refrigerator too empty.

And in the rice bin, an envelope with two hundred dollars in it, and on the outside, in Chinese and then in English: For emergency.

I am thirty-five years old and a certified public accountant, and my father hid emergency money in my rice.

Credit. All credit.

Saturday, June 21, 1997

His last night. We sat on the balcony after dinner with the tea he brought. You can't see the mountains in June, too much haze. I told him that on a clear day in winter they have snow on top, right here in Los Angeles, and he didn't believe me.

He talked about Hong Kong, which goes back to China on the first of July, and what it might mean for Taiwan, and I listened, because that was what he wanted. Then he talked about his students. He taught math at a boys' high school in Taichung for thirty-four years. He still gets New Year's cards from boys who are grandfathers now. He told me about one boy, in 1970, who could not understand fractions, and how Ba kept him after school every day for a whole semester, and how that boy is an engineer in Hsinchu now and sends a box of pears every year.

Then, looking out at the parking lot, he said, in Mandarin, "Your mother worries about you. I don't worry." I thought that was the end of it. Then he said, "I don't need to worry." And he got up and went in and washed the teacups.

I've been out here an hour since. I think that was the nicest thing my father has ever said to me.

Debit: tomorrow.
Credit: I don't need to worry.

Tuesday, June 17, 1997

Day four. I took the whole week off, the first week off in two years.

Sunday he came to church with me, sat in the back, stood when everyone stood, didn't sing, and told the pastor afterward that the building was well constructed. Monday we drove to the ocean at Santa Monica, where he rolled his trousers to the knee and stood in the water for twenty minutes looking west, toward home, and didn't say anything, and neither did I.

Today he wanted to see my office. On my day off. He sat in my chair and looked at my ten-key adding machine with the paper tape and asked what the tape was for, and I explained, and he nodded slowly, the way he nods when a student finally gives the right answer. He straightened my pencil cup.

We don't talk much. He reads the Chinese paper at my kitchen table and I read over his shoulder. He does the dishes before I can get to them. Last night at the Taiwanese restaurant in San Gabriel, he asked, once, not looking at me, "Is there anyone?" I said no. He said "Mm," and ate a piece of three-cup chicken, and that was all. I have been dreading that conversation since I was twenty-five, and it took eight seconds.

Debit: eight seconds.
Credit: eight seconds.

Saturday, June 14, 1997

Ba landed at 7:40 this morning. I was at the airport at 6:30, because he'd said "don't be late" four times on the phone. He came out pushing a cart with two suitcases and a cardboard box tied with pink plastic string, wearing his gray cardigan in June, and when he saw me, he nodded. I took the cart. He let me.

In the box: two tins of high-mountain oolong. Dried mango. Ma's dried radish, declared, which the customs man waved through. And a new rice cooker, the same kind every Taiwanese family in the world owns, because Ma decided on the phone in April that mine sounded wrong. My father carried a rice cooker across the Pacific Ocean.

At the condo he walked through every room with his hands behind his back like he was inspecting a classroom. He opened the refrigerator and said, "Too empty." He opened the cabinet under the sink and looked at the pipes. He tested the balcony railing with both hands. Then he sat down on the sofa and fell asleep for four hours, sitting up, with his glasses on.

Debit: none.
Credit: he's here.

Sunday, May 11, 1997

Mother's Day here, and in Taiwan too, same Sunday, but my call always lands on Monday there. I'm always a day late, like a letter.

Ma gave me instructions for Ba's visit, and I wrote them down, because I am an accountant and I write things down:

He can't eat too salty. He won't tell you if he's cold. Don't let him carry anything heavy. He drinks hot water all day. He'll get up at five. Don't argue with him about the tea.

Bought so far: a firm pillow (he'll say it's too soft), a thermos, slippers for the door, two weeks of the Chinese newspaper. My guest room is also my office, which is also where the client files live in boxes. The boxes are going in the closet. The closet door is off its track. It's fine. He won't notice.

Debit: four weekends of cleaning.
Credit: Ma laughed three times on the phone.

Wednesday, April 16, 1997

Tax day was yesterday. At 11:40 last night I was in the line at the post office with a hundred other people holding envelopes, and a man in front of me was still signing his. Then I went home and slept ten hours.

This morning Ma called. Ba is coming to Los Angeles. In June. Alone.

"Your father wants to see how you live," she said. My father has never been to America. In fourteen years he has not come once. Ma doesn't fly, because of her ears, and because A-ma is eighty-nine and somebody has to be there. So it's Ba, by himself, for a week, in my condo.

I have eight weeks to make my life look like something a retired math teacher would approve of.

Debit: eight weeks.
Credit: he wants to see how I live.

Saturday, March 22, 1997

Only an accountant would start a new hobby in the middle of March. Tran, our youngest staff accountant, who is twenty-four and does things with computers at lunch, made himself a page on GeoCities, and I said "How?" and he showed me, and here I am, eleven o'clock on a Saturday night in tax season.

I'm Joyce. I'm thirty-five, and a CPA at a small firm in Monterey Park, California. I came here from Taichung, Taiwan, in 1983 for graduate school, and I stayed. My parents, my grandmother, who we call A-ma, and my younger brother Wei-ming and his family are all still there, in the same building. I call on Sunday nights, which is Monday lunchtime there.

Why "Both Sides of the Ledger": in bookkeeping, every entry goes on two sides, debit and credit, and at the end the two sides have to balance. Taiwan and here. What it cost and what it paid. I don't know yet what goes on which side. I'm going to try to write down both.

Tonight the comet was up over the parking lot, northwest, after dark: a smudge with a tail, right through the Los Angeles haze and the streetlights. The news says it's as close to us this week as it will ever get. I called Ma and told her to go look, and she said the sky in Taichung is too bright and too dirty for comets, and then went out on the balcony with the cordless phone anyway. She couldn't see it. I told her where it was.

Debit: sixty-four hours at the office this week.
Credit: the comet.

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