Awakening

by Christine H Chen

Ah Ma came back from the overnight stay at the hospital in April, leaning on Ba’s shoulder, eyes vacant. Ba shushed us away. Ma went to lay down, didn’t come out from the bedroom for a week. When she emerged in her pajamas, hair tangled like a ball of strings, she went to the fridge, pulled out a box of frozen shrimp Siu Mai, and stared out at the kitchen window until water dripped from the box. We microwaved soggy pieces of dim sum. Ma took a look at the winkled dumplings on her plate, dropped her chopsticks, ran back to her room. For weeks, Ba picked us up from school with bags of Burger King and French fries, sometimes tubs of Moo Shu pork and egg noodle. We chewed as quietly as possible, not daring to break the silence. We stuck our ears to their bedroom door. Ba talking to Ma in a soft voice that rose higher and higher. “What about them? Your other kids, our daughters?” Early morning, a month later, we heard Ma’s old Honda pulling out of the driveway. We spent summer looking for Ma in the supermarkets, running through the aisles, craning our necks to stare at women with a shopping cart, while Ba was busy arguing with the butcher, agonizing over which brand of rice to get. The day our maple tree turned crimson, we heard keys jangling in our front door. Ma stood at the threshold, thinner and older. We squealed. She embraced us. Later that night, she lit up a fire in the backyard, gave us each a piece of a baby garment to throw in the fire. The smoke stung our eyes, the smell caught in our throat. We burned paper money. The fire leapt. Flames jumped. A soul sparked.

About the Author

Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction has appeared or forthcoming in Cleaver, SmokeLong Quarterly, Time & Space Magazine, and Best Microfiction 2024, 2025, Best Small Fictions 2024, 2025 anthologies. She is a recipient of the 2022 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship and the co-translator from French of the hybrid novel My Lemon Tree (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023). Her stories can be found at www.christinehchen.com