Stifling a yawn, Yulia Wu tossed a frozen waffle into the toaster oven, standing next to a fridge which opened the wrong direction, blocking access to the stove. Earlier, she had dressed in the dark, blindly pulling clothing out of her hamper. She ended up wearing a striped boatneck tee long out of fashion and yoga pants (though the chances of her doing downward dogs today were slim to nil). Yulia squeezed honey into her oolong tea, wondering which of her two dozen students would show their faces for class today. She hated teaching fiction to black tiles; she’d been an adjunct at the state university for eight years and didn’t know how much longer she could stomach it, especially since the latest round of budget cuts had slashed the English department in half. Bing! When she reached into the toaster, her knuckle grazed the rack. Hot! She ran her finger under the faucet, then extracted the waffle with a spatula, plopping it on the only clean plate she could find. A creepy baby face stared up at her.
She heard huffing. Her husband Keefe. When he lumbered into the kitchen, his face was pink-red, sweat dripping off his chin. He emanated an odor resembling a musk ox, which Yulia thought was fitting; he was born in the year of the ox. He was a head taller than her, his frame more solid than when they met at college twenty years earlier. His hair had thinned on top and he had resorted to coloring his grays. She had given him a razor cut at home, shaving too much off his sideburns. Sometimes if she looked hard, she could still see traces of his boyish face.
Keefe squeezed past her at the counter and grabbed a water pitcher to fill a pint glass they won at the school auction, the last date night before things shut down. The kids’ mascot, a dolphin painted royal blue, wore a toothy grin. They, a family of four, had lived in the house under a year, but the mess—stray legos, nerf bullets, wayward puzzle pieces, spilled crayons, homework, report cards, candy wrappers, half-opened mail, laundry mounds, dirty dishes, miscellaneous screws (god knows where they had come from), basically, domestic detritus—had exploded exponentially in the last six months. Yulia was on a cleaning strike; it was hopeless.
“Good run?” she asked. He panted out of breath, then grunted.
It was Keefe’s first run since the wildfires, a week after an orange glow of an apocalyptic sky had greeted them one morning. Day 182, though she had stopped marking the calendar in Sharpie at Day 122, too depressed to keep counting. Yulia never thought the lockdown would go past 100 days. She noticed the crooked calendar on the fridge, adjusted the magnets and took two bites of her waffle. She wondered if he would have to administer another VIP test today to the Boss and his family. Wasn’t there another doctor they could find in the whole state? Keefe had turned their garage into a makeshift clinic with latex gloves, masks and towels. They had been talking-not talking, zombie-ing through the days and nights, passing each other between zoom meetings, hurrying to brush kids’ teeth, feed kids, microwave frozen meals, bathtime, bedtime and running to the store to stock up on milk, rice, pasta, beans and toilet paper. Every day was more exhausting than the next. The cumulative effect was crushing. Yulia rubbed the back of her neck, trying to loosen a stubborn knot. No luck.
“That’s a weird gift,” said Keefe, pointing to the loaf sitting next to the toaster oven. It had been sitting untouched for three days, a round loaf with a shiny egg glaze in a clear plastic bag with the instruction “enjoy the freshness.”
“Raisin bread,” she said. “We used to have it at my house growing up. Sarah and Glen picked it up from Ranch 99 when they took Sadie out for the afternoon. Remember?” Yulia thought she could prod him toward gratitude.
“I know, I think it’s a little weird, that’s all,” he said.
At the second utterance of “weird,” her intestines wriggled.
Back when she was in second grade, Yulia wore her hair in pigtails with a maroon headband, bangs cutting across her forehead. Her school uniform was a green and navy plaid skirt, starch white collared shirt and an itchy wool sweater. Her parents and older sisters called her Bunny because she was born in the year of the rabbit. In all the family pictures, her sisters gave her bunny ears. She didn’t mind. She basked in their gentle shoal of attention.
One day in the cafeteria, she sat with her friends Heather and Joanna and unclasped the top of her bubblegum pink Hello Kitty lunchbox. She had instructed her mom not to pack peanut butter noodles, pork buns or anything they ate at home. None of the other kids eat that stuff, she said. Please pack me PB&J sandwiches, doritos and ding-dongs. Your teeth will fall out, her mom said, laughing, and gave Yulia a playful cheek squeeze.
Slowly, she unwrapped the tin foil, closed her eyes for a second—please, Ma, please—and was relieved to see two pieces of white bread, sliced neatly in half. She peeked inside: tuna fish. Her mom’s compromise. She was always telling her to eat fish, that Eric Tai probably ate a lot of fish. He was the smartest kid in the class but didn’t have any friends.
“Ewww,” Heather pinched her nose and scooted away from her. “Does your mom work in a fish factory?” The girls giggled. She felt other eyes at the table boring in her direction.
She shook her head, her cheeks turning pink like Hello Kitty’s bow. She scratched a rash on the crook of her arm, counting down the minutes until the bell rang and she could throw her sandwich in the trash. She shrunk inside.
In the kitchen, Yulia pushed away this memory and stalled by taking her hair tie out and retwisting her bun. When she turned to face him, his blue eyes, the color of a half-awake sky, managed to surprise her. He was a white man, granted one she loved but as white as they come. He was raised in an Irish Catholic family and his dad was one of eight children. He was once a gifted cello player, but gave it up to focus on his pre-med studies. Practicality won out over passion.
Once, when their Indian friend, a doctor like him, asked if Keefe had to deal with race growing up in Boston, he mentioned Italians experiencing discrimination. Afterwards, she instructed him never to bring that up again.
“Look, for Asian kids, there’s a history of being teased at school and told the food they bring from home is weird.” She tried to keep her tone neutral, even as her throat constricted. “It’s a way of othering food that’s not white.”
His eyes widened, a paralyzed ox. “Well, I am white.”
She scooted a few steps away. She bit her tongue to stop from spitting out sarcastically, “Yeah, I noticed.”
She could see he was struggling to speak, his mouth frozen. He hated when she showed any sign of anger. He feared she would leave him, though she had never threatened divorce. He was a classic conflict avoider; his family dodged conversations that might get heated.
“Well, I like dàn tà (egg custard).”
She didn’t move.
“and oranges—”
“and sesame balls—”
She closed her fists, willing him to stop. She remembered years ago, after their wedding, how he had taken a Mandarin class and came home saying, “Wó ài wǒ de tài tài.” She couldn’t make out his words. Gibberish. I love my wife. She wanted him to stop. What she wanted from him couldn’t be learned in one language class. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings back then, so she pretended it was close enough.
“We don’t usually judge food that way. Like, if they had brought cookies, I wouldn’t say I wish they brought cake or brownies.”
His pupils were big, scanning the kitchen for a distraction. The marbled pendant lights above the kitchen island, the only witnesses, swayed above a bowl of mandarins and a wood canoe of onions, bananas and avocados. He scooched toward the sink. The sight of his sweaty back, a puddle growing in the center of his T-shirt from some 5k, infuriated her. She felt a sharp pain shoot up her side like heartburn.
Every day she read about Asians who were being attacked on the subway, on the street, on their way home from the grocery store. Amas set on fire, Apas shoved to the ground, children bullied, slashed by knives. She sent the links to him, but it seemed like for him, it was a minor interruption of his day. She was fearful when she went to the market. She wanted to scream, wail, fall to the floor and stomp her feet in a tantrum.
But she didn’t yell; she swallowed her anger. His whiteness protected him like a shield.
“I know you’re white,” she said, keeping an even tone. “I thought I could point out something I find othering.” She knew he couldn’t handle her voice rising half an octave, or any sign of conflict. He turned around, his eyes darting around the room, always looking for an escape. Running was his religion, a lifetime of avoidance.
She bit her lip. Penance would wait. “Okay, let’s talk later.”
Finally, he nodded, his eyes still wounded.
Go, she thought. Run. She watched him walk out of the room, the puddle disappearing with him. The room reeked of ox sweat.
She banged the cabinet closed, trying to find some pleasure in the bang. Her gut was full of anger. If you don’t let anger out, her therapist warned her, it goes inward. She picked up the empty pint glass he left behind and threw it with all her force into the sink. Hitting a lopsided stack of plates and bowls, the dolphin shattered into pieces. Its smile disappeared for good.
Yulia remembered a time he told her about entering junior high. Keefe rarely talked about his school memories; he usually claimed he couldn’t remember. He was the new kid at an elite prep school and failing math. He sat with his friends, Ambrose Yum and Victor Ma, in the lunchroom. “Why didn’t you sit with the white kids?” she asked.
“I didn’t have the right clothes or haircut or cool shoes. Sometimes I went to Ambrose’s house and his grandma would make us noodles and dumplings for lunch. I felt comfortable around them.”
Before he told her that story, it never made sense to her why when they went out to eat, he would let her lead, pick the table, decipher the menu and order. She had learned how to navigate white spaces, well aware she would never look like him, could never disappear in a crowd. It was this realization—that he truly did not see himself as superior for his whiteness—that endeared him to her. She knew for all their spats, he would never deliberately make her feel small.
A year before they were married, she had invited him to a barbecue at her uncle’s house and he brought his younger brother Ian. Both tall with broad shoulders. You might mistake them from the back, but their faces were distinct. Keefe had a ruddier appearance with twinkling eyes, while Ian had a sharp chin, thick eyebrows and a serious countenance. “You look like twins!” my uncle declared, shaking his tongs in the air. Later, Yulia and Keefe laughed at the role reversal of his comment.
Keefe’s laugh was one of the very first things she fell in love with. He wasn’t afraid to ugly laugh—the kind where you have to wipe away snot. The kind you end up half-crying and half-peeing and peals of laughter are so contagious you can’t actually talk until you can catch your breath. She couldn’t remember the last time they had laughed that hard together.
In the window above the sink, Yulia caught sight of her reflection. Her black hair was pulled back from her face with a maroon headband, the same color as the one she wore in second grade. Wrinkles lined her forehead and her chin drooped, but she could make out hints of the girl once called Bunny. On the sill sat a trio of potted succulents and one lucky cat she bought in Chinatown on the last lunar new year, its left paw perpetually waving. This one had a round Buddha belly and happy countenance, eyes always winking, smiling whiskers and a tiny heart-shaped nose. She thought about how it never stopped its harmonious motion and kneaded a pair of knots anchoring her neck, releasing an armada of tension. After the pandemic is all over, she told herself, she would plan a trip to Taiwan. Yes, she would go see her grandparents’ graves, finally learn their names, find the village where her ancestors had once lived, take a conversational Mandarin class, teach their children about their heritage. She had to stop waiting for someone else to give her roots.
She looked around the kitchen. Sunlight streaked inside, sending a scattering of rainbow teardrops shimmying across the ceiling. She didn’t yet know they would take a race training workshop together, he would stop being asked to test the Boss, he would clean the garage so it could fit a new electric car, he would plan a surprise party for her 50th, he would buy her a vintage typewriter she had been eyeing, she would stop teaching and begin working on a novel, she would get his cello tuned so he could make music again, they would get a Havanese rescue named Tofu, they would retire in walking distance of the sea, they would volunteer together to save snowy plovers, their grandchildren would go to a Mandarin immersion school and greet them noisily demanding red envelopes for the lunar new year causing them to laugh and laugh. Hóng bāo ná lái!
Yulia’s eyes landed on the tower of dishes precariously balanced in the sink. There was a lot of cleaning to be done. She picked up the glass shards one by one and put them in a brown paper bag. Then she turned the faucet to hot and soaped a dinner plate, scrubbing off a layer of crusted cheese. She could make a dent before class. Besides, she had nowhere else to go. Someday, lockdown would end. Her marriage, she determined, would not. The beckoning cat, still winking, waved back in unconditional agreement. Yes, good fortune was smiling upon her today.
