Diamond Head (33 page)

“Hi, Mom.” My mom, she did this with my grandparents. She didn’t answer their questions. She said something else. “There’s lisee for the kids.” She handed her the plastic bag. “Gung Hee Fat Choi.”

“I hope you didn’t wear this last night! You know, you can dress up a little when you come here, too. No, you look great. I’m just joking. I saw a blouse just like that at Sears.”

“Is B already here?”

“Inside.”

My Auntie B had six kids. She forced them to play with me, to include me every year. She said it like that, too. Play with Theresa. Include Theresa. It never bothered me until that year. In fact, I remember enjoying their company, poking sticks into the muddy stream, chasing the wild pigs that ran through the back fields, stealing sips of their parents’ warm, leftover beers. But that year I took my auntie’s orders as an insult, an assumption that I had no friends, and so I tried to impress my cousins with tales from Diamond Head and they hated me after that. I understand why now. I can hear my twelve-year-old voice saying
silver platters
and
golden flames
and
servants
. When they found out I got pregnant, when they heard there was no boyfriend, I’m sure they all felt some degree of satisfaction. The irony is that those stories, about how we used to light bottle rockets and explode them into the neighbors’ bushes, how they set chicken traps and hog traps and picked up chameleons by their slithering tails, watching their bodies detach and run—at a place like Punahou, these were the stories that could have defined me.

My Grandpa Chan, he avoided me like I avoided my NaiNai. A pat on the back, a
Good girl, Theresa
, that was about all I ever got from him. I understood his relationship with my mom was strained. There was something he wanted from her and Maku, a list of contacts,
something my Ye Ye had promised him before he died. My grandpa wanted their names. He wanted to take their photographs and it seemed my parents didn’t want him to.

We ate on our laps, all of us sitting on folding chairs with woven nylon seats. Huli huli chicken, macaroni salad, chicken long rice. It was hot and greasy and spilled between the compartments of my plastic plate. Chicken bones were thrown to the floor, for the dogs who weaved between our legs, sniffing us, waiting for more.

We left before the sun went down, and in the car, my mom released her air as if she were a balloon, slowly deflating, sinking into her seat until she’d emptied her lungs.

“Once a year,” my mom whispered to Maku.

“Once a year,” he repeated.

My plan worked slowly. Little by little, over the next year, I made my way into the circle of girls who had made me cry. I learned to talk like them, how to talk about others and how to talk about myself. I established myself as a Leong, the only heir to a fortune I knew nothing about. It was assumed that I was wildly, unfathomably rich. I made excuses for Maku’s unremarkable appearance. I said he dressed like that only at school, that he had to at least pretend to be a regular teacher. Our family’s name, it held so much weight, it seemed preposterous that we’d worry about money, but our reality was very different.

Every cent from Maku’s time working for my Ye Ye, from the sale of his house to my Uncle Kaipo, my parents saved in a high-interest bank account, sustaining themselves, their needs, their wants, with their two modest paychecks. All the presents for my mom, all the dinners on the marina, Maku saved for them. Every bottle of wine, every plane ticket, every single bird of paradise came from hours in the classroom teaching seventh-grade math. The money accumulating in the bank account, it was all for me. Private school, summer vacations, hula classes, a bike, a car, anything I could think to ask
for. For years, it seems, they had been saving, planning, waiting to say yes.

When I got to high school, I began to get glimpses into my family’s history. It wasn’t through my parents, who continued to tell me almost nothing, repeating their vague explanations, coming to each other’s rescue when I began to ask questions. They told me my Grandpa Chan was a drunk, my Grandma Chan an enabler, my Uncle Kaipo too busy to be bothered with us. They knew I was scared of my NaiNai so they made no excuses for her, but the general consensus in our house was that we were better off without them. Still, I couldn’t help but notice it was my Uncle Kaipo who called Maku to have dinner with him every month, who came to the house to pick him up, who seemed happy to see me when I answered the door. It was a collective effort, the way my parents avoided their families, how they kept me away from both Diamond Head and Kaneohe. And somehow, it worked. For the better part of my teenage years, I grew up thinking it was normal, sharing an island with relatives I saw just once a year.

It was through my friends and their parents, their chatter, their rumors, that my parents’ smoke screen finally broke. The effect was overwhelming, changing me overnight. I couldn’t believe how important we were, how famous. My Ye Ye built this city; charities were named after my NaiNai; my Uncle Kaipo was considered the most eligible bachelor in all of Oahu. I became a nightmare, a mean kid, but I was popular. I threw my Ye Ye’s name around like I knew him, as if I’d met him, as if he hadn’t died before I was born.

But my mom soldiered on, not letting my bad attitude get in the way of her plans for me. Until recently, her objective was staunch, unwavering: to stay close to me, to remain in my inner circle as I grew into a teenager, to always keep the door between us open, the conversation flowing. She refused to tell me what to do, how to feel, who to like. She wanted me to blossom on my own, never steering me in any one direction, never projecting her own failed goals onto me—
I see that now. She took pleasure in the possibilities she was able to offer, never pushing one in front of another, simply happy that she had made this happen. I was popular. I was happy. She had given her daughter a better life, and it seemed that was enough.

Every summer we vacationed on Maui, at a small beach house in Lahaina where I had my own room. I was allowed to bring friends, as many as I wanted. Maku would grill steaks on his hibachi and drive us to shave ice, handing us the car keys as we got older. We trailed sand through the house and left our dishes on the table, our towels on the floor. My mom, she never said a thing. She’d sweep behind us, clear the table, wash the towels. Put the dishes away, she’d ask, and I’d tell her I’d do it later. But later, it was already done.

My parents shielded me from anything difficult, either purchasing the solution or sweeping in and smoothing it out, fixing it themselves. I remember in the ninth grade, when the popular girls had Pan Am bags to carry their schoolbooks, my mom drove me to the airport and bought me one, at what expense I can only imagine. I remember hearing her talk with the airline director, telling him that she was not flying that afternoon but if he would check the flight records, he would see that the Leongs flew Pan America frequently, first class, worth at least a dozen of the bags she was willing to pay for.

I don’t remember saying thank you. I don’t remember being grateful. How my mom allowed this, how she continued to give for as long as she did, for me that’s the biggest mystery of parenthood. Does it happen innately, this kind of stubborn, reckless love for a child? Will I be capable of loving my child, of loving anyone this way? And why—between the two of us, he so much worthier than I—why could she never find this love for Maku?

Fortunately for everyone, things got better my junior year, when I got an accidental A on a test and discovered that Maku had passed something on to me—I was good at math. It was those last two years, before I got pregnant that I began to change. It occurred to me for
the first time in my life that I might be good at something. Numbers came effortlessly: learn the equation, solve the problem. And that’s exactly what I did, collecting As and small glimpses of myself, my real self, along the way.

Maku was my biggest supporter, his own numerical mind trying to light the fire in mine. He would write unfinished equations on a note card and leave them on my door, slip them into my locker at school, challenging me to solve them. They got more and more difficult, moving from simple algebra to more complicated statistics and probability—my favorite numbers game. He tried so hard to make his questions relevant to my life, to make math fun.

You drive to Sandy Beach and there are thirty cars in the parking lot. Ten are Fords, twelve are Chryslers, and eight are Cadillacs (the Series 62 that you like). If the Fords are three times as likely to leave as the others, find the probability of a Chrysler leaving first.

He was funny like that, always trying to trick me into learning, not pestering me to finish his problems, but waiting patiently until the card showed up under his door or on his desk at school. But it wasn’t Maku I was doing it for. I wanted it on my own. It was the first time in my life that my mind was being used for something that wasn’t stupid. I joined the Math Club that spring, lying to my friends and telling them I was at my hula
halau
.

There was a certain understanding between me and the rest of the math nerds that I did not belong there. This was their time to be free from kids like me—the kids they’d known for years, who’d been taunting them since middle school. They assumed I was there because of Maku, and I was fine with that. It was funny, sneaking around to draw bell curves and find their standard deviations, the only kid in the room wearing designer clothes. But soon enough, they warmed up to me, realizing that I was for real—that I could outscore
them all on the math SATs. They respected me, not for my name but for my mind, and I’ll admit, it felt damn good.

I felt something that spring that I haven’t felt since, a feeling that I fear now happens only once in a lifetime. That spring, I felt the world beginning to open up to me; I felt the weight of my life about to begin and the endless, boundless possibilities that lay ahead. I think of myself in the math room, serious and competent, and I know I might never forgive myself for what happened next.

My senior year at Punahou was a whirlwind. I was voted Prom Queen, I scored high enough on my SATs to get a full ride to the University of Hawaii. I think even my parents’ relationship improved that year—their spoiled daughter finally showing some real potential.

The summer before I started college, my parents sent me to Europe for a month with a girlfriend, paid for us both. We were supposed to see three countries, but I couldn’t tear myself from Italy. The architecture took hold of me as soon as I stepped off the plane in Rome. Everything seemed to be a math game; the symmetry of the cathedrals, the proportions of the columns, the geometry of the city. I sat on a bench in Pisa for three hours, staring at the leaning tower with a notepad and pencil, copying numbers from my guidebook and scribbling ratios, trying to get it to make sense. Italy was—is still—the oldest place I have ever been, and its history made me stop and think about things that had never before crossed my mind. Like how hundreds of years before I was born, when Hawaii was barely on a map, Italy was doing math. They were doing math and constructing perfect buildings that would teeter for a thousand years but never fall. When Captain Cook stumbled upon the Big Island in 1778, the Romans had already built Saint Peter’s Basilica—
twice
. And as I stopped to consider these foreign things, I was introduced to yet another unfamiliar sentiment: insignificance. No one in Italy gave a shit that my Ye Ye shipped things from China to Hawaii three decades ago, no one cared that my family’s name appeared periodically in the
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
. Looking back, I wish that I could live that moment over
and over, adjusting my narrow perspective of the world until I got it right—until something really stuck. But the weeks flew by and the moment would only last for so long, giving me what I thought would be enough inspiration to be better, to remove myself from the axis of the universe and learn some basic humility. When my month was up, I found I was ready to go home. Not because I wanted to leave Italy, but because I was ready to start my own career—to construct my own perfect buildings. And I was confident that I would return; I threw a thousand lire into the Trevi Fountain.

I’d be lying if I said that college was easy for me. Math was easy, college was not. I wasn’t popular in college. No one knew who I was; no one thought I was smart. I was good at math but other than that, I was just like everyone else. It wasn’t like Punahou. I was no longer a faculty daughter; no one took a special interest in me like before. I studied hard—I really did, but there’s something about living on an island that shrinks your perspective. I still believe that, having only been abroad once.
Everything you need is here—why leave?
It’s easy to imagine an island as the entire world, not able to get in your car and drive for miles in any direction just to see what’s at the end. There’s a certain doubt that begins to creep into your mind:
why leave, why search for something else when paradise is home?
You begin to associate the mainland with isolation and loneliness, and your island with comfort and stability, beauty and fortune. So the memories of Italy faded as I fell back into my old patterns. I wanted a boyfriend. I wanted to bitch about the workload at school, to call my teachers unfair and their grading practices biased. My perspective shrunk and shrunk until there was little left. Until I was back to the old me—to the island girl who wanted nothing more in life than to be an object of petty jealousy.

By the time spring came around last year, my grades had already dropped. They weren’t terrible—I could have still turned it around. It would have taken a final push, a week of studying to ace my finals, but I wasn’t willing to do it. I wanted a break and there was a dance—
some annual party that the university put on that took all my attention, all my efforts. For weeks, as my books remained in their Pan Am bag, as I dragged their idle heft from class to class, I could think of nothing else but that goddamned dance.

I didn’t have a date. Despite my attempts at popularity, no one had asked me and all the good choices were quickly pairing off, waiting for each other in the hallways, their coy smiles driving me slowly insane. I begged my friend to introduce me to her brother who was home from college in California. His name was Roy. He was twenty-one with a car of his own, she told me, and when he agreed to the date I was beside myself, my delirium larger than ever. I became obsessed with the idea of an older man, a stranger. He had gone to Iolani, Punahou’s rival school, and after twelve years of seeing the same kids, the same faces, I reveled in the idea that we had never met.