Trace of Blue

JANUARY 2, 2002

"How can you do this?" my mother asked. I kept staring at the small spaces between the wooden boa rds of the living room floor. She walked straight at me and pulled my face up by the chin, waving my high school yearbook around with her other hand. She had found out I was part of the gay-straight alliance.

"Don't, Mama," I pulled my face back and wouldn't look at her.

"Just tell me you're not," she says, flinging the book across the room. Her voice wavered. "Just tell me it's your friends that are, and you're not."

I looked up at her. I realized I had a chance to get out of this mess. Our fights never escalated this high-not even when my brother showed her a picture of me in the newspaper, proudly waving a purple banner around in the youth pride march. Looking at her, her eyes red and hair wet with sweat across her forehead, I realized I couldn't.

I had walked down the same part of Boylston Street where the newspaper picture was taken that very morning. My friends and I had Dim Sum at Chinatown and were walking past Boston Common, towards Prudential when my mother called my cell phone. It was around 2 p.m.

"Come home, Ki," she said. "It's time to go." I had lied to my mother and told her college started early this spring. I could not stand living with my family any longer.

"Oki come back soon," I said. I raised my voice to sound clearer through the phone. "No worries."

"How dare you?" she said. I pulled the phone away from my ear. I could still hear her. "Don't you respect me anymore? You don't speak to Mama like that."

I expected her to be upset that I was not coming home, but I realized something had happened. She had never talked to me that way before. I tried to hide my thoughts. I spent another two hours hanging out with my friends instead, strolling down Newbury. We played spot the fag, just like in high school. I'd quicken my pace and catch up with a random attractive guy and then slow down, just enough to check them out.

Most of the times they'd pretend not to notice, but would sway their hips at me instead. I'd sniff the air and smile, casually turning my head towards them. Sometimes they blush. Sometimes they look back at me and say hi. No matter the case, I'd turn to my friends and nod. "Martini with a twist," I'd say. They'd laugh, and we'd move on to another one.

It wasn't until I reached a boy who was about my age that I decided to stop playing. His backpack was about the same size of his torso. It was covered in pins with clever sayings, and ribbons of all colors, including a rainbow one. When I caught up with him, I couldn't stop watching how awkwardly he walked. He was watching me more intently than I him. From the side I could see the blemishes on his face, and how his curly hair was trimmed just to the point where it does not stick up to a fro. I saw myself from two years ago, walking down that exact same street, pretending not to notice people like me who got a rise out of feeling they were better than everyone.

I left my friends, took the nearest T and found myself walking up St. Alphonsus toward my house on Mission Hill. I would come home from school every day, and trod up that same hill with my backpack in front of me-pulling off the pins that say "boys will do boys" or ones with images of pink triangles, rainbows and the like. I'd hide them in the front pocket, zip it shut and wait 'til the next day in homeroom where I'd replace them.

Back in my living room, the room I slept in all through high school and on visits back from college, my mother was waiting. She called in sick to drive me up to Amherst. My bags were in the hallway. She tried to close the door shut when I came in, but could not-too many cables were in the doorway, linking the television, computer and telephone to the rest of our one floor apartment.

"Ki, just tell me," she said. "What were you doing with these people?"

I looked up at her with the saddest eyes I could give. She stared back at me, but no matter how hard she tried she couldn't ready herself for what I was going to say. "Oki gay," I told her.

"Don't say that," she pushed me. I did not even have a moment to close my mouth. "Don't you fear God? How can you say that to me? How?" She held me by the shoulders, squeezing just enough to hurt.

"Oki feel this from little," I said. "Oki remember."

She let go and sobbed. My father was coming up the hallway. "If only I stopped you," she said. "I could have fixed everything-everything would be right." She glanced at me abruptly. "Why don't you go to church anymore?" she asked, shaking me. "Why?"

"Oki don't believe in God." I could feel tears welling up from inside, but I wasn't ready to let them drop.

Moments passed and we were silent. The floorboards creaked from every movement we made, and I could hear my father sneaking up from behind the door. I saw him peek in, but I could not stand looking at him for too long. He walked back down the hallway, towards the kitchen, this time trudging loudly to make sure my mother heard.

"Don't tell your father," she said. "He will die soon anyway." She picked up her purse. "We'll drive you to your dorm. Don't ever come back."

She walked to the doorway. I could still hear my father's footsteps. She turned around.

"If I had a gun," she said, "I'd shoot you."

SEPTEMBER 27, 2003

"Why do you want to write about women?" my mother asked. Shedipped her french fry, first into mayonnaise, then ketchup, and then sprinkled a bit of salt on it. "You hate women."

I smiled. I took my nephew's little palm, wet with grease and melted cheese, and wiped it with a napkin.

"You never liked children, either," she said. I dropped my nephew's hand, glanced up and gave my mother a look. "Why else won't you have any?"

It would be a long drive to my dorm room. We were waiting for my father to finish in the bathroom. The diner had quieted down. It seemed as if everyone were eating with his or her ears propped open and staring sidelong at my mother, my nephew and me. If I had a car, I would probably have left her right then, even though I never technically learned how to drive.

The waitress came by with a pot of coffee. She filled our mugs, then leaned over to make a kissy face at my nephew. "Aren't you just a doll," she said. "That boy is the cutest darn thing I ever seen." She stood upright, and leaned on one side with her hands at her hips, one precariously holding the tilted pot. "What's his name?" she asked.

"Philip," my mother said before I could open my mouth.

"Philip?" the waitress sighed. "What a perfect name for the cutest little thing I ever set eyes on." She leaned over yet again. Philip shied away, as he usually would from white people.

"His mum black," said my mother.

"What?" The waitress pulled back sharply.

"His dad dumb," she shrugged towards my direction. The people eating in the diner were looking straight at us. The waitress walked away, now holding the pot of coffee with both hands. When she was gone, I looked over at my mother.

"Ma," I said. "Why do that? Why lies all the time?"

She shrugged, poured a little cream into her mug and blew into it. I put my nephew in my lap because he had started to mash the pieces of macaroni in between his fingers.

"She likes you, Ki," my mother said, looking away, covering her lips with the mug. "The whore."

"Oki don't like," I said. I placed a french fry in Philip's mouth. "Oki don't like women."

My mother dropped her mug, spilling a little coffee from its side. We were both upset enough to start another argument, but my father came out of the bathroom. We turned quiet for the rest of the lunch, as we usually did when my father was around.

When we were in the car my mother loosened Philip's child seatbelt a bit. I could tell she was looking at me, but I had my eyes closed.

"Why don't you write about nice things, like rainbows," she said. "Or puppies. You like animals, don't you?"

RAMADAN, 1988

My dog, Bruno, was sick, but I didn't know. I was happy in the dusty streets playing soccer against a wall by myself. Cars occasionally drove by. When they did I would cover my face. Bruno howled from behind the fence. He wouldn't stop.

We got him from my next-door neighbor. He followed one of her children, and she tried to chase him away but he wouldn't leave. Being a devout Muslim, she could not stand dogs.

During Ramadan, my next-door neighbor purposely put heavy drapes over her windows, making sure no sunlight could get through. "It's not a sin to eat breakfast in the day if we don't know it's light out yet," she explained, patting me on the head. She had two children, one my age named Arun and the other two years older than me who was mentally disabled. Arun never came out to play until after sunset during this month. I remember having this sense of relief after the night's call for prayer, even though I was not Muslim. I would watch my neighbors break fast through their windows, this time with the curtains drawn to make sure not to miss when the last rays of sunlight had disappeared.

One day the sun had not set yet, but Arun was told to play outside. We played in the streets till we got tired. We snuck into his house to get some water, and I saw my mother there, hair pulled tightly up in a bun, holding Arun's brother in her lap while his mother cried next to them, curled up on the floor. Arun's brother's lips were blue, and he was shivering. At times he would kick, and my mother would hold him tighter, letting him elbow her in the ribs. He howled just as Bruno did. Arun and I watched his brother die from behind the shadows. I can still remember my mother patting the boy softly on the legs, rocking him back and forth humming softly as he let go his grip and his head fell forward onto his chest, letting the drool that collected in his mouth drop down onto the tile floor.

"Place your leg hair in his milk," said my mother, after my brother carried Bruno to our house. "And he will follow you to the ends of the Earth." I was too young to have leg hair, so I plucked some hair off my eyebrows as a substitute. I laughed when he gagged and choked on it, and cuddled with him till we fell asleep on the dry cement floor. He grew quickly-within a year he was taller than me. He found ways of sneaking into the kitchen to beg for food.

The morning Bruno got sick, he snuck in, jumping through the window, and licked the sweet pork buns my mother was cooking. She had finished frying one up before he came in, and took a large bite of it. When she noticed him licking the dough, she grabbed him by the thick of his neck and forced each one of the buns into his mouth. The sweet dough stuck to the yellow of his teeth, but he chewed ferociously and swallowed without a whimper. I laughed.

When I grabbed the bun my mother hadn't finished, Bruno attacked me. He bit my hand, and I let go, and before the bun fell on the floor it was gone-devoured. My mother kicked his side. As he scampered, my mother took my hand and blew at the bite marks.

When the sun rose too high to play outside, and the dust stormed up so much my eyes could take no more, I went inside and watched Bruno gag and choke, sprawled awkwardly on the very cement floor we usually slept on. I watched his pupils pull back as he opened his mouth. His tongue rolled out, a sickly orange, as bile and blood seeped out, covering his harsh brown fur. I ran to my mother in her bed.

Crying, I lay down with her as she sweated, brushing my hair and holding me tightly with feeble arms. She was staring at the ceiling and breathing heavily. She whispered softly to me things I did not hear and cannot remember.

The pork was poisoned. We heard stories that Muslim fundamentalists were going around the city, feeding pigs rat poison just before slaughter, but no one was ever sure. My mother recovered. Bruno did not. One night my father and two brothers carried him in a sack and threw him over a bridge into a brown, rushing river. It was Id-al-Fitr. The lights of the festival from downtown Jakarta were reflecting in the brown water. I watched the sack float towards them till my feet grew tired from standing on my tiptoes.

My mother never stopped tasting our food since-sometimes even raw.

FEBRUARY, 2001

During class one time in high school, I watched a film the Nazis made. The war was ending and Hitler was losing. The Nazi soldiers killed off those left in the concentration camps in masses. Dead bodies were flung around in piles and heaps, mostly skeletons with skin too dead to rot and flesh too soft to bludgeon. It was a month after my friend Tam's wake, when I touched her arm last, but I could still feel the cold of her skin. I imagined what it was like to be in that pile, still alive with blood-not my blood-seeping around me, covering me with what should be warm. In the darkness under those piles, I knew the blood was not red. It was black, like the darkness. I imagined how cold it must be, and how clawing my way up would be like ripping through veils of plastic skin.

I left the classroom calmly and walked over to the nearest boys' lavatory. Then, after I checked under each stall door for feet, I threw up. After wiping my mouth, I ran my face under the dirty sink faucet. Breathing in heavily, I nervously listened for someone to come in. I almost wished someone would. I looked in the mirror.

Seeing those dead bodies piled up on the screen reminded me of my ancestors' history-how my great grandfather rotted away buried alive in a dried up well, in a pile of men like him who decided that they were as human as the Dutch colonists who hated them. The colonists hated my great grandfather because one of their own loved him.

I hear the voices of the past through the stories from my mother, and now in my own reflection I see their sources. I think of the woman who bore my grandmother, how she must have felt when she returned to her European soil, belly emptied of a child that could never be her own. I think of that child, my mother's mother, how I never met her and how she never met her mother's mother, let alone her own. I think of my mother and me. Our eyes are deep black like charcoal, yet we carry the last remnants of the past in the very darkness that defines our Indonesian identity. I look into her eyes and she looks into mine, and we see what we share and no one else in my family ever could-the circles of blue around our iris, the last remnants of the past. Our heritage remains hidden, and our lives stay simple that way. She remembers, and when I look into a mirror closely, look directly into my own eyes, there is a trace of that memory, that blue, left over in me.

There will never be a lineage. The trace of blue will end here with me, in soil neither European or Indonesian.

1999-2002

My mother would tell me that I was too skinny. I never was. I never knew what it was like to starve. I only made myself hungrier and hungrier and would regurgitate whatever was left. It kept me sane, I thought. It wasn't hunger that made me feel good-it was the act of making myself hungry.

There are two words for rice in Bahasa Indonesia-one for cooked rice, and another for the hard grains that come out of the dried, golden hulls. Uncooked rice is always more important to my mother. She did not love the food I have seen her gulp down in one sitting. For her it was a substance with which she could sustain life. She would feed my brothers, sisters and me constantly, and I would accept less and less as I grew. She remembers as a child waiting in lines for rice, her bowl in hand.

I wrote about it once. "My mother would cut lines, grab rice with her bare hands and fill her mouth so she could carry more home with her," I once said to my class. It got me an average grade and, of all things, praise for my third world past. But this story was untrue. My mother waited patiently, with her mother and her four siblings, each holding a bowl for the white missionaries to fill up. My grandmother then gave cooked bowls of rice to her neighbors, her family, and her friends, and used the hard burnt rice from the sides of the cooking pot for her own family. My mother ate fish heads from my grandmother's fish farm not from poverty but by order of my grandmother. She let the rest of the fish be sold or given away. She wanted us to never feel the way she did.

When I was starving on my own accord, my mother stopped asking me about my eating habits. The skinny comments were gone because she realized they annoyed me. She thought it was the best thing to do. It was then that I wanted her to say something. I wanted her to take me aside and ask me why I stopped eating. I wanted her to stop putting out food for me in saran wrapped Tupperware that I would sometimes eat in the middle of the night, once or twice a week so she could not see me binge. I wanted her to catch me pushing food down the garbage can, covering it with paper towels so no one would notice. I wanted her to grab the rice, cooked or uncooked, and fill my mouth with it like she had done before. But she never did again after I told her no. Instead I would throw it up, fill my stomach to the brim, and throw it back up again not from disgust of her food, but from disgust of myself.

DECEMBER, 1993

"Ma?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Doctor say pull down panties." I pulled back uncomfortably in my chair, watching the silhouette of my mother on the examining bed as another figure approached her.

"Doctor say spread left right leg, lean back."

I swung my own legs back and forth, still not reaching the ground. I flipped through the pages of my book, not really reading.

"Ma," I said. "Mama pee?"

"Yes, I peed."

"Yes," I nodded. "She emptied her bowels, doctor." I started to fidget. I wished I had roller skates on. "Mama, you understand?"

"Yes," she said, after a long pause.

"Yes doctor, I told her. Yes, I really did. She understands. I don't know how...how to say it. No doctor, no. We don't need another person...no one else speaks it here. All right, I promise."

I waited a little, collecting my breath. I dropped the book on the floor, turned away from the curtains, and kept my gaze away from the shadows before me.

"Mama, doctor first look at thing. Then doctor say doctor put in thing look like duck mouth. Mama, don't push," I said. "Don't push Mama thing together and don't push where shit comes out."

I looked at fluorescent lights above me, and imagined the dead flies in them were stars, and I was flying through them. When my mother winced, I closed my eyes, kept them tight, and imagined I was an astronaut. I counted down. I was interrupted when the rocket was about to blast. I thought of broken light bulbs and performers who would eat them whole. I dreamt of flying geese and two men on horses in golden sarongs. One stretched out his limb wide to pull back his bow, and shot. The stars pulled back with the arrow.

"Mama get brush in thing. This call pap." I fumbled at the words. The stars were gone now. They turned into little fish, and I was an explorer, preparing to take under water photographs of monsters never imagined.

"Mama, doctor say." I dived into the deep. "Doctor say doctor put finger in mama thing, but mama okay?"

She doesn't reply.

"Ma, doctor push belly."

"It's cold!"

I bit my thumb. A shark was coming at me. I took out my knife but it was too late. The shark took half of my right limb. I struggled in the water, and gashed into its eyes with my trusty knife, deep into the monster's eye socket and prepared myself for the giant eighteen-foot squid coming straight at me.

"Mama want test for sex disease?" I asked. "Doctor say doctor can do that. That her job."

When college was fast approaching, my mother decided to get a job in the post office. I did her resume for her, filling nearly two pages of text for four out of five decades of work. She spent the last two months studying for the citizenship exams, and when she passed she hugged me the tightest, both because she did it for me and because she only missed two questions.

She started her own business at seventeen, when her mother died and she and my father eloped. They couldn't have any of the inheritance because my mother's family objected with my mother marrying a nonChinese, once-Muslim man eleven years older than she. She opened a boutique, named after my sister: Baju baju Ipin. She opened a small cafe under my parents' first house, Kape Oyo, after my brother. She would get her best business right after the Muslims' fast, and during Christmas we ate duck. I was still a baby. Her last business in Jakarta was Toko Oki, a convenience store. We lived in a harsh neighborhood. In the daytime all there was for me to do was push bottle caps deep into the hard ground. At nights, I was told to avoid the drunks in front of the store. One night I didn't. I played with a sparkler when one of them threw a bottle at me. It crashed onto my face and I started to cry. All I remember was my mother holding me as I heard some men screaming out "Chink" in the background. We never saw the store burn down, but my mother is still hurting from it.

I skipped school to come to work with her in the factories of Los Angeles. I watched her press little girls' costume dresses neatly, as I stacked hangers upon hangers in a pile next to her, playing. We went home on the bus that night, watching the flames from the distant riots in South Central.

She started a catering business in Boston, but she still walked me to school and back even when she was tired. I wished she never did, because it shamed me to be in high school and have a mother who lingered around me all the time, even when I woke at seven, and she would have been up for three hours. We trudged through the snow and she carried my violin- the one I swore to never pick up again. I'd fall asleep in my classes as she boiled down parts of pig into a sticky broth. We went shopping together in the summers, and I'd cover my face and bite my lips hard when men whistled at her or sometimes pinched her ass. I went to my first party and had my first sip of beer when she was holding her wrist tight, crying on our linoleum floor, hot curry seeping out of the cracked metal wok. When I got back home I asked her what was wrong, and she said nothing, and kept on cooking for the next day with a broken wrist she would keep for three months without telling anyone.

She got the job with the postal service. The days and nights of us studying together-me with my physics and her with her history of the United States: abridged-paid off. I tried to speak in nothing but English with her, but felt uncomfortable doing so. When she went to work at night she left food in Tupperware for me, and when she got back in the morning she washed the dirty dishes. During every Christmas we celebrated dinner early for her, but by 3 p.m. she was gone to work. I had my first sexual experience when a letter jammed in the machine she was working with, and she had to come home early holding her right hand with a bloody towel. I don't remember the name of the boy I was with, but my mother remembers to this day the name and address printed on the envelope that cut her. She kept working at the machines still, turning deafer and deafer by the night.

When she was laid off she went directly to the casinos, where I imagine she is right now, watching the figures on the slot machines-the dollar signs, lemons, and martini glasses turn into faces: mine, my siblings', my father's. They let out golden coins for her sometimes, but when they don't she curses loudly, and pushes my nephew's stroller to look for another machine-one that she thinks isn't fixed.

NOVEMBER 27, 2001

There is no word for he or she in Indonesian-just one word that refers to a third person singular.

"Oki love someone more," I said to her once. "When someone leaves Oki." I waited for the winds to stop, and the howling from the windows would end. "Oki want to leave too."

I looked at the anklet Tam gave me for my birthday, and cut it loose with rusty scissors. It was ten months after her suicide. My mother paused from her reading, looked up at me and stared. I let the beads fall from the elastic string onto my hand. The cold wind seeped through the floorboards. I pulled my legs up closer to me and held my knees for warmth.

"It was raining the day you were born," she said. "I think it was too when you were conceived. It wasn't when I was in the clinic." She stopped smiling. She leaned a bit closer to me, but stopped herself. Looking down, she continued, "I almost aborted you. I almost did."

I should have felt more uncomfortable, but I've heard it all before, so I focused on twirling my fingers around the beads in my hand instead. Our conversations would go on like this-I with my broken Indonesian, and she accommodating for it. I have grown used to interpreting everything for her, so much that I end up interpreting myself from English whenever I try to speak to her. This never works. Bahasa Indonesia is a language without tenses. The world to my culture is one cycle, and time does not have to be a part of it.

"I think back on that cloudy afternoon sometimes. The weather was ugly, like today. I had been Catholic since your uncle introduced religion to me, but I never realized until then what it means. I prayed. I prayed to understand. And at that moment, I truly did." She turned back towards me. "You love someone more when she leaves," she said. "But will never have more of her to love."

She looked back down at her reading as I glanced up at her. I realized then that she never translated anything to me-that of the few people in this world she could speak honestly and clearly to, it would be me. I was her voice, for doctor's appointments, lawyers, and phone calls in English. I realized only then that she already had one of her own.

My mother's voice is the sound of pebbles falling in the dark. She looms over her words in clutters, treading carefully not to break even one. They pile up between the crevices she lets them drop into. She goes on carefully, unwittingly, not knowing when the pile will fall, 'til it all crashes down in one swift breath. And no one notices but me.

- Antonius Wiriadjaja