Air (or Have Not Have)

Then Lung turned to Mae and both of them seemed to relent. They collapsed into a hug. For Mae it was like hugging some huge stranger. He kissed her forehead, called her his Clever Little Mama. Then he stepped back from her. He shoved on his army hat, and that was somehow heartbreaking. It was a boy's gesture, innocent and eternal. All the soldiers throughout history had pushed on some kind of boot or glove just before they left their mothers to die or to come back for ever changed.

This was the last of her boy. He would swell even bigger, like a great fat boil, and she saw how he would coarsen as he aged until his astounding beauty could not be credited.

'You remember what I told you,' he said, suddenly serious, pointing a finger at her.

'You remember what I told you,' she said, equally serious.

He nodded and hopped into the cab, and nodded to the sergeant to release the brake with – it seemed to Mae – a kind of relief. The truck crept forward, and suddenly Lung's face was flooded with a grin, wide and white between two cheeks like peaches. It was how both of them wanted him to be remembered.

Snow clung to Mae's hair. It seemed to be wrapping the village in lace. Lace was wrapped tightly around things in drawers, to preserve them.

Mae stood in the courtyard for many minutes listening to the rumble of the truck as the snow fell. She heard each acceleration, braking, or change of gears. The sound trailed away, away, farther into the valley, step by step, deeper and deeper down, away from her.

Mae turned to Kwan and said, 'I'm going, too.'

Kwan blinked. 'What? Why?'

Mae said, 'I'm renting my own house from Sunni. I'll move my business there. I don't want to be a nuisance.'

'You're not a nuisance,' said Kwan, and took her hand.

'Then I want to go before I become one.'

She went up the long staircase to the freezing attic room, and packed her bags again. She redirected her mail to the new TV of her own. She went back down to the kitchen. Kwan was putting together an evening meal from the remains of last night's feast.

'You won't have any food in the house,' explained Kwan. 'I thought you might like to have this. We have kindling and shitcakes in the barn. Take some of those, too, to warm the house.'

'You have been so kind.'

Kwan looked sombre. 'We have been through a lot together.'

'Oh! You could say that ten times and it would still not be enough!'

'But we came through.'

'We came through.'

Kwan hugged her. 'You can still stay, you know.'

Mae touched her arm. 'I really do not know what I would have done if my friend Wing Kwan had not been so kind. There would have been nowhere else for me to go. But the time comes, even with family, when one must leave.'

Kwan nodded.

So Mae took her one carpetbag, and another bag of food and fuel, and set out across the courtyard. Her slippers scrunched on the snow, and her breath rose up as vaporous as a fading memory. She knew Kwan would be watching from her diwan. Mae held up a hand and waved goodbye without looking back.

The Wang household was the first door she passed, on the corner of upper and lower streets.

It had been her home through most of her childhood. Mae stopped and looked at the doorstep. The single step would always get muddy and she and her older sister did not want anyone to think of them as dirty, so every day for ten years they had scrubbed it. The water in the plastic bucket was always cold.

Mae now brushed the snow off the step with her slipper. Here, in this house, Mae had slept in one tiny bedroom with two sisters. Their mother had slept on cushions on the diwan. Her brother and an uncle shared a room. The Iron Aunt kept the main bedchamber for herself. It was a fatherless house full of work and worry.

Mae realized she felt guilty for neglecting her mother. She felt a sullen resentment that her mother had not been to see her. She felt awkwardness and she felt a kind of twist of triumph. She felt many things she did not like herself feeling.

Come on Mae, she told herself. She knocked on the front door.

Her sister-in-law opened it, to a sudden swelling sound from within of a baby wailing. Her sister-in-law's face drooped and then froze, mouth open.

'Li-liang, may I come in?' Mae heard herself ringing a sweet little bell voice, which was designed to put rude people in the wrong.

'Uh… Mae. Hello.' Her sister-in-law was not an independent person. If there was a surprise, she could take no action without Ju-mei. 'Ju-mei!' she shouted. 'Your sister is here!'

And still outside in the snow, Mae thought, smiling like a row of tinkling windchimes.

My family really is as bad as I think they are, she decided.

The sister-in-law stepped back out of view, leaving the door hanging open and Mae standing outside. Mae heard steps.

Her brother Ju-mei's voice was dim. 'Why is the door open?'

Mae was not in a tolerant mood. 'Because your wife does not want to invite me in and does not have the courage to slam it in my face,' said Mae.

'I had my baby to look after!' said Young Mrs Wang..

Ju-mei swelled suddenly into the doorway. He needed a shave, his shirt was untucked, and Mae knew: They did not want me to see them as ordinary, scruffy, and so hated answering the door. That is the Wang family way: to be rude in order to preserve good appearances. I am probably the same.

'I am moving back into my old house,' Mae announced. 'I can afford to rent it from my friend Sunni Haseem.'

Ju-mei snorted. Friend? Haseem? And yet there was doubt. What if they were friends again?

'My business will move back there as well.' Mae kept smiling. 'I am sure you will be pleased that it is doing very well. And since the house has so long been in the family Chung, I was wondering if Old Mr Chung and my brother-in-law Mr Chung Siao would not like to occupy it with me.' Mae smiled. 'So. You see, I have not come to trouble you. I really wish to speak to the Chung family.'

'And not your own family,' growled Ju-mei.

'My own family does not invite me into their house, even when it is snowing. From that, I conclude I am not welcome. I do not wish to intrude.'

Ju-mei was very angry with her. 'Very well,' he said – and closed the door in Mae's face.

Mae heard a singsong wailing from behind the wooden door. That, she realized, would be Mama. She had time to wonder if Ju-mei had actually wished to spare Mae a scene with Mama. Mama presented her life as a continuing tragic opera.

Then the door was flung open, and Mae's mother, wearing her Quivering Flower face, stood trembling in the doorway. She held her head back with defiant pride.

'How dare you! How dare you show your face at my doorway!'

'Mother, you're being silly,' said Mae.

'You talk to me! You judge me! When you have behaved as no woman should behave. When you brought shame to me – yes, me. What do you think people are saying about me: 'There she goes, the woman who cannot control her wild daughter, who brings down respectable life in the village.' I cannot believe you would do that to me!'

'I didn't do it to you, Mother, I did it to myself.'

'Everything you do, you do to me. When your father was killed…'

Here we go, sighed Mae.

You can tell the truth so often that it becomes a lie.

Mae had not spent a day in her mother's presence without Mama telling yet again the full story of how their