6/18/99 -- Friday

Dragon Boat Festival. Gu-ma, Ba's younger sister, who lives out in Rowland Heights and who flew home for A-ma's banquet last year, dropped off a bag of her zongzi at my office at lunch: sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves and tied with string, the southern kind, boiled, with peanuts and pork and a salted egg yolk in the middle like a small sun. The whole office smelled like bamboo leaves all afternoon. Stan ate two and asked for the recipe. Gu-ma will never give anyone the recipe. She didn't give it to Ma, and they've known each other forty years.

There's a Taiwanese custom that at exactly noon on Dragon Boat day, you can stand an egg on its end. At 12:00 I stood a hard-boiled egg on my desk, on the blotter, and it stood. Stan said it would stand any day of the year. I told him not to ruin it.

Debit: Stan.
Credit: the egg stood.

6/6/99 -- Sunday

An e-mail from Wei-ming with an attachment, which took me forty minutes and a phone call to Tran to open. It was a drawing by Hao-hao, scanned at Wei-ming's office.

It's the building. Twelve floors, colored in green crayon, with every window drawn and the water tanks on the roof like little hats. On the fourth-floor balcony: three stick people, Daddy, Mommy, and Hao-hao. On the seventh-floor balcony: three more, Grandpa, Grandma, and Great-Grandma, who is the smallest and has a cane. The orchids are purple dots. And off to the side, in the sky, above the roof, floating, is a stick lady with long hair and a suitcase. The labels are in Wei-ming's handwriting, in English for my benefit; the drawing is all Hao-hao. Next to the lady in the sky it says: AUNTIE JOYCE AMERICA.

I printed it at the office on the color printer, which we are not supposed to use for personal things, and it's on my refrigerator now, over the crooked banquet picture. I'm the one in the sky with the suitcase. He's six and he already understands the whole thing.

Wei-ming says come for Mid-Autumn next year, 2000, and help with the barbecue. I said yes. I wrote it in my calendar in pen.

Debit: forty minutes to open an attachment.
Credit: AUNTIE JOYCE AMERICA.

5/9/99 -- Sunday

Mother's Day call. A-ma is ninety-one this month and she got on the phone and shouted at me for America to hear. Ma says the building committee finally fixed the elevator, so now it stops level with the floor and she keeps tripping, because for fourteen years her feet have expected the step.

Then, casually, the way she mentions the weather: last week there was a small earthquake at night, and the dishes rattled in the cabinet and the picture of Ba's parents fell off the wall above the altar. Nothing broke. She hung it back up in the morning.

Taiwan has small earthquakes all the time. I grew up with them. You wake up, the lamp swings, you go back to sleep. Ma stopped mentioning them years ago. She mentioned this one because of the picture. I asked Ba, when he got on, whether the building was safe, and he said, "Built in 1985. Very strong. This is Taiwan, we have earthquakes every week," which is the same thing he said in 1986 about the crack in the lobby.

I'm an accountant. I don't like a number I can't check.

Debit: the picture.
Credit: nothing broke.

4/15/99 -- Thursday

Tax day. 11:52 p.m. and I'm home, and I didn't have to go to the post office this year, because Tran drove the last bag of extensions over at nine. The extensions are good until August 16th, when it all starts again, smaller.

Final count for the season: 412 returns out the door from our office. 71 extensions. One client who brought his receipts in a bucket. A liquor store owner who pays me every year in cash and a bottle of Johnnie Walker I give to Stan. The Roth conversion people, all of them nervous about the four-year spread, all of them fine.

I'm going to sleep until Saturday.

Debit: March and April.
Credit: May.

3/28/99 -- Sunday

Annie from choir is engaged. He's a pharmacist from the Tuesday Bible study, very tall, laughs at her jokes a half second before she finishes them. The wedding is in October. She asked me after church, in the parking lot, to be her maid of honor. I'm thirty-seven. I said yes before she finished asking.

Then I went home and did three returns and didn't call Ma, because I knew what she'd say, which is nothing, very loudly.

3/14/99 -- Sunday

Seventy-one hours last week. I'm writing this at the office, on a Sunday, because the computer here is faster than mine at home, and because I'm here anyway.

Tax season has a sound. It's the ten-key at night, when everybody else has gone home. It's the fax machine at 7 a.m. It's a client on the phone saying "I think I have that somewhere." The parking lot at eleven at night, the security light buzzing, my car the last one.

Ma called at nine tonight, which is Monday lunchtime there, and asked what she always asks, the first thing, before hello: "Chi fan le mei you?" Have you eaten? It's how you say hello in Chinese, and it's also a real question, and with Ma it's more of a real question than a hello. I said yes. I had not. After she hung up I went to the Vietnamese place on Atlantic and had a bowl of soup by myself at 9:30 at night, because I don't like lying to my mother, even from six thousand miles away, even after the fact.

Debit: seventy-one hours.
Credit: the soup.

2/15/99 -- Monday

Lunar New Year's Eve. Year of the Rabbit starts tomorrow.

At eight this morning I called Taichung, which was midnight there, the exact turn of the year. They were all still up, the whole family, on the seventh floor. You're supposed to stay up late on New Year's Eve; the longer the children stay up, the longer their parents will live. Wei-ming said Hao-hao fell asleep at ten and they're going to have to count on Shu-fen and him. I could hear firecrackers through the phone, all over the city, so loud that Ma had to repeat everything. Ba said, "Happy New Year," in English, very formally, and then, in Mandarin, "Did you eat fish?"

Tonight I did. Gu-ma had her New Year's dinner in Rowland Heights: her kids and grandkids, her husband's brother's family, me. Twenty-two people around two tables pushed together, and in the middle, a hot pot, because in Taiwan the New Year's Eve dinner is called wei lu, gathering around the stove. Long mustard greens you don't cut, for long life. A whole fish that nobody finished, on purpose. I gave red envelopes to Gu-ma's four grandchildren, crisp new twenties from the bank, and felt, for once, like an aunt and not like the one who lives alone.

Driving home on the 60 at eleven, I thought: this is the sixteenth New Year's Eve I haven't been home for. Then I thought: that's the wrong way to count it.

Debit: sixteen.
Credit: twenty-two people and a fish.

1/10/99 -- Sunday

Stamps went to thirty-three cents today. I have four hundred of the old thirty-two-cent stamps in my desk at the office, so on Friday I bought four hundred one-cent stamps, and every envelope that leaves our office this tax season will have two stamps on it, crooked. Stan says the clients will think we're cheap. I said we are cheap. We're accountants.

Year-end is closed. The organizers are going out to clients this week, and the phone has started. The big question this year is from everybody who converted to a Roth IRA last year: yes, you can spread the income over four years. No, you don't have to. Yes, I'll explain it again.

New Year's resolution, from a list of one: call Taichung twice a week instead of once.

Debit: four hundred one-cent stamps.
Credit: twice a week.

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