New look for the new year. The marble was giving me a headache. The dates are in the format I use at work now, because I type them forty times a day anyway.

12/19/98 -- Saturday

At the office all day on year-end planning, with the radio on. This afternoon the House voted to impeach the President. Stan turned it up. Nobody said anything. Then a client called about his estimated taxes and we went back to work, which I think is what most of the country did.

The real news: I have received my first e-mail from my father.

Wei-ming set up a computer for them in October and has been teaching Ba on Sunday afternoons. Ba tried to write in Chinese, but the characters came out on my screen as rows of garbage, so Wei-ming told him to write English. Here it is, exactly:

DEAR JOYCE.
THIS IS BA. WEI-MING IS TEACHING ME.
CHINESE COMES OUT WRONG ON YOUR COMPUTER SO I WRITE ENGLISH.
IT IS 14 DEGREES THIS MORNING. COLD.
A-MA IS WELL. YOUR MOTHER IS WELL.
EAT MORE.
FATHER

All capitals, because he couldn't find how to turn them off. Fourteen degrees Celsius, which is 57, which in Taichung is cold. I've read it about thirty times. I printed it and put it in the folder where I keep his letters, the paper ones, all eleven of them, 1983 to now.

Debit: the country.
Credit: EAT MORE.

10/5/98 -- Monday

Mid-Autumn again, and late this year, in October. Wei-ming barbecued on the sidewalk. Hao-hao, five now, reported by phone that he is too old for the pomelo hat, and then Shu-fen got on and said he's wearing it.

My pictures from May finally came back from the drugstore. I left the roll in a drawer all summer, because I didn't want the trip to be over. Thirty-six pictures, and in eleven of them somebody has their eyes closed. The one I like best is crooked: A-ma in her chair at the head of the banquet table, in red, with the longevity buns in front of her, and all of us crowded around behind her, three generations, and Ba at the edge, half out of the frame, not quite smiling, the way he stands in every picture. It's on the refrigerator now. Father's Christmas card from last year had to move over.

Debit: eleven closed eyes.
Credit: everyone in one frame, almost.

5/20/98 -- Wednesday

Home. I mean Los Angeles. I don't know which one to call home and I've stopped trying to decide.

The last morning, Ma filled every empty space in my suitcase: pineapple cakes, dried shiitake, a jar of her pickled mustard greens wrapped in three plastic bags and a towel, a sweater she knitted in case the airplane is cold. The suitcase wouldn't close, so Wei-ming sat on it. Ba carried it down seven floors in the elevator and out to the taxi himself, even though Ma said not to let him carry anything heavy. I didn't stop him. You don't stop him.

From the back of the taxi I looked up at the building: pale green tile, the iron grilles on the windows, the water tanks on the roof, Ma's orchids on the seventh-floor balcony, Hao-hao waving a dish towel from the fourth. I noticed things I never noticed before. The stains running down from the air conditioners. A crack across the tile in the lobby that Ba says has been there since 1986 and is nothing. How old it all looked. How old they all looked.

Five years since my last trip home. It won't be five again. I told Ma that at the airport, and she said, "Mm, we'll see," which is what she said the last time too.

5/16/98 -- Saturday (typed in later from my notebook)

A-ma is ninety.

The banquet was at a restaurant with a red carpet up the stairs and a gold character for "long life" on the wall behind her chair, as tall as a man. Eleven round tables. Relatives I haven't seen since I was a girl, who all said I looked exactly the same and then said I had gotten old. Twelve courses: cold platter, shark fin soup, a whole fish, a whole chicken, sticky rice with crab, the long-life noodles that you must not cut, and at the end, steamed buns shaped and colored like peaches, pink at the tips, for longevity.

Before dinner, all of us lined up by generation and bowed to her. First Ba and his sisters. Then Wei-ming and me and the cousins. Then the little ones, Hao-hao in a clip-on bow tie, bowing so hard he nearly fell over. A-ma sat very straight in a red jacket and nodded to each of us, the way Ba nods. Now I know where he got it.

Here's what I didn't know. A-ma grew up when Taiwan was under Japan, and went to Japanese school as a girl. An old woman from her village came to the banquet, even older than her, in a wheelchair, and the two of them held hands across the table and sang a song together in Japanese, from their school days, the whole thing, every verse, while the whole room went quiet. I don't speak Japanese. I cried anyway. So did Ba, a little, and pretended it was the pepper.

At the end A-ma held my face in both her hands and said something in Taiwanese that I only half caught. My Taiwanese is a child's. Later I asked Ma. Ma said A-ma said, "This one went the farthest."

Credit: I can't think of anything that goes on the other side today.

5/12/98 -- Tuesday (typed in later from my notebook)

Taichung. Three days in, and my body still thinks it's the middle of the night.

The heat is wet and thick, the beginning of the plum rains. Scooters everywhere, whole families on one scooter, a mother, a father, two children and a dog. The betel nut stands with their glass booths and neon. A 7-Eleven on every corner. The smell at night of the market two streets over, frying and sweet and the stinky tofu that I've missed for fifteen years without knowing it.

The building. The same guard at the desk in the lobby, watching the same kind of TV show. The elevator that stops two inches low, so you step up. Seventh floor: shoes off at the door, Ma's rack of slippers, the family altar with the ancestor tablets and a bowl of oranges and the incense, and A-ma's room at the end of the hall with the door open so she can hear everything. Ba walks in the park at five every morning, the same loop, the same men. Ma has twenty-two orchids on the balcony. I counted.

Downstairs on the fourth floor, Wei-ming and Shu-fen's apartment is the same size and full of Hao-hao: plastic dinosaurs on every surface, drawings taped to every door. Wei-ming works as an engineer at a factory out in the industrial zone and comes home at eight. He's thirty-four and going gray, which I have decided not to mention to him, and which he has decided not to mention about me.

Everybody asks: have you eaten? That's how you say hello here. Chi fan le mei you? I have eaten. I have eaten every hour for three days.

Debit: jet lag.
Credit: all of it.

5/8/98 -- Friday

Leaving tomorrow for two weeks. Packed:

For Ba: American ginseng, the good kind, in a box with a picture of a Wisconsin farm on it. For Ma: two big bottles of vitamins and a new cordless phone, because hers crackles. For Wei-ming: a golf shirt he will never wear. For Shu-fen: lotion from the department store. For Hao-hao: a Lakers cap and a book of American dinosaurs. For A-ma: a red wool shawl, very soft, because Ma says her shoulders are cold now even in summer.

For me: the notebook, since I won't have a computer. I'll type it all in when I get back.

It's been five years since I went home. That's too long. I kept saying next year, and it was tax season, and then it was next year again.

2/23/98 -- Monday

It has been raining for what feels like the whole month. El Niño, they say on the news, every night, with a map. My balcony drain backed up on Saturday and I bailed it with a saucepan at midnight. On the freeway this morning the right lane was a river.

Tax season has started for real. Sixty hours last week. There's a shoebox on my desk from a client who is a very nice man and who has given me his entire year of receipts, unsorted, some of them wet.

Ma on the phone Sunday: A-ma turns ninety in May, and the family is having a banquet, and I am coming. I said, Ma, it's tax season. She said May is after tax season. She's right. She's always right about the calendar. I bought the ticket tonight.

Debit: the saucepan.
Credit: the ticket.

1/28/98 -- Wednesday

Lunar New Year, the Year of the Tiger. I was at work. In January you're always at work.

I called home early this morning, when it was New Year's evening there, and got everybody one after another: Ma, Ba, A-ma (who shouted, because she thinks you have to shout for America to hear), Wei-ming, Shu-fen, and Hao-hao, who told me how much was in his red envelopes, to the dollar. I told him he'd make a good accountant. He said he's going to be a dinosaur.

Tonight I bought a steamed fish from the Chinese market and ate half and saved half, because you're supposed to leave some fish for a surplus in the year to come. Nian nian you yu. Fish every year, surplus every year. It's the same word, in Chinese. An accountant's holiday.

Debit: alone for the fish.
Credit: the surplus.

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