Fiction / Nicola Koh
:: Houses in the Sky ::
Okay, sure, fourteen’s a bit old to be building treehouses. But a) I’d never had one and Sally Long said I’d been deprived, and b) this wasn’t going to be just a few rotting planks nailed to a branch, this was going to be the best goddamn treehouse east of the Mississippi. After all, our parents were architects at the best firm in Minnesota, and we researched for months, trading design ideas and learning to sketch.
It was codenamed Operation House in the Sky and kept strictly classified. It was going to take a lot to convince said parents; specifically, my mother.
The Maternally Oriented Parental Unit came from Malaysia, a country where kids apparently had no rights. There were zero discussion about eight pm curfews, the two hours a week allotted for video games (pending good behavior), or the list of chores which could have taken a whole toilet paper role. We got top grades and won awards, or else. Any sniff of dissidence resulted in hours-long lectures on ingratitude, selfishness, and my-house-my-rules.
When I’d point out my mother never pushed her subordinates half this hard, she’d say, “With them, there’s too much to fix. You’re like a pot with only a few cracks, so of course I want to fix the ones that are there.
Sally thought the best time for me to bring up H.I.T.S was around my birthday in late July, when she’d be more amenable to requests. I said she’d just think it impertinent to ask a favor on the anniversary of the twenty-three hours it took to pop me out. It turned out to be moot either way when early in the month, the mother yelled at me and my brother to come to the living room. We assembled, exchanging the universal look for what the hell did you do this time.
My mother hated that living room: trapezoid with a ten-inch depression that provided less separation than a place to trip and a faux-marble fireplace with Greco columns designed presumably by someone who’d only watched Disney’s Hercules. When she summoned me and my brother there, it was almost certainly situation critical.
“You two are losing touch with your roots.”
Shit.
“We’re taking a trip back to Malaysia.”
Shit, shit, shit.
The H.I.T.S timetable was officially in tatters. For that matter, so was summer. Hell, my life might be at risk—no exaggeration. I’ve been chased by packs of monkeys, twice, and the last visit I’d spent three days in the hospital with food poisoning where the nurses poked me five times looking for a vein. We were also warned to be careful to wear our bags away from the street because people on motorcycles might snatch it while you were walking.
Even sans outright tragedy, the prognosis was grim. Flights so long we’d be at genuine risk of deep vein thrombosis. Days of shitty-long jetlag, the first in the middle of an eight-hour-minimum welcome by the family (which for Eurasians means cousins, aunts, uncles, second cousins, and sometimes dentists), where we’ll be constantly told we look tired and should get some rest, but won’t actually be allowed to, and receive the multiple verdicts on whether we needed to eat more or less. Then it’s sweating nonstop for weeks while eating gameshow-weird food and visiting one site after another full of great cultural relevance and nothing actually interesting. Not to mention at least ten giant family dinners and the days-long marathon of goodbyes.
But Sally’s voice floated into my head. Lose the battle, win the war. She’d said that when the mother vetoed an Ariana Grande concert in May and again when I was forbidden from piercing my ears. It was attributed to Sun Tzu the first time and Aristotle the second, but it was almost certainly from a meme. It did make sense, though, not that I’d tell her. So I just nodded and asked when we were going and what I should pack. My father and brother may have stared like I’d gone certifiable, but my mother’s lips curled ever so slightly in surprise.
Three cultural-horizons-broadening expeditions in, however, I was starting to wonder if the war was really worth it. By the fifth, I was ready to dump Sally in one of the many muddy rivers, preferably one especially full of snakes and eels.
The trip in question was a visit to my mother’s childhood home in some railroad village a thousand miles from modernity. Everything smelled like mud and cow dung and was surrounded by sprawling bushes and trees with leaves so green they shone. My mother didn’t know who was living there in her old house, so we just walked around it. It was barely more than a hut raised on concrete stilts in a dirt clearing.
“Don’t get too close, cobras like to nest under these houses,” she said, like it was a perfectly normal thing to say.
There were two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen, with a table out back on a slab of concrete serving as a dining room, sheltered by walls and a roof made of rusting tin sheet. My mother often told us how my grandmother favoured my uncle. She’d make her and my aunty mop while he sat and read the newspaper, only moving to raise his legs for them to get under him. She especially brought this up when we complained about our hours-long sets of chores. She’d never mentioned how little there was to mop.
“How come the government didn’t let Grandad have a better house?” my brother asked.
My mother shrugged. “He was just a railroad conductor. They didn’t get paid much. He would fight with Grandma a lot because she was careless with the money.”
In a house that small, where did you hide from yelling?
“Can we go?” I asked.
“Look at those vents,” my mother said, pointing to slits about three-quarters of the way up the house. “Such a simple and efficient way to keep a house cool.”
My mother loved shit like that. She paid her way through college and then got a full ride to Cornell for her Masters in Architecture. After my father joined her in Minnesota, people often asked him how he could leave his home and family to be with a new wife.
He’d say, “Have you met her?” My mother’s will is tsunamic.
It was hours before we finally got back to my aunty’s house in Kuala Lumpur. I flopped on the bed, got out my iPad, and Facetimed Sally. “How’s civilization?”
Sally snorted. “It’s not like you’re living in the jungle.”
“It’s probably less sweltering in the jungle,” I said, jabbing at the temperature button for the A.C. “My parents tried to make me eat chicken feet.”
“Ew,” Sally said.
“They already made me eat the fish head curry.”
“Fish head??”
“It was huge, too. I tried to make it talk, but my mother told me not to ‘act the child’.”
“You should have taken a picture.”
I snorted. “With what? They gave me a flip phone to use.”
“Oh, gross. That’s worse than chicken feet.” Sally sighed. “Still, I wish I was somewhere cool like Malaysia.”
“Trust me, cool it is not,” I said. “In any sense.”
The mother started yelling from downstairs.
“More familial obligations?” Sally asked.
I shrugged. “Probs screwed up the homework.”
“Homework?” Sally said. “Gabby. You’re. On. Vacation.”
“Tell that to Drill Sargeant Chili Padi,” I said. “We’re writing reports on Malaysian life.”
“Good lordy, have fun with that,” Sally said. “And keep buttering up your mother.”
“I still say we just plant a tree in your yard. It’ll be faster.”
The mother’s yells were growing louder and decidedly less patient.
“Get out of here,” Sally said and hung up.
Turned out the Portuguese colonized Melaka not Penang; Malaysia’s independence date was 1957, not some long-ass time ago; and the Dutch and British East India companies did not trade territories like Pokémon.
“Even your grammar is atrocious,” my mother said, whipping out one of the dozens of red pens she seemed to have sequestered in every bag, pocket, probably the linings of her clothes. After ten minutes, the pages were more red than black.
“You might as well rewrite it,” I noted.
“I’m not doing your work for you.”
“You did that auditorium project.”
Last Spring our class had taken part in a citywide contest to design a model auditorium.
“You know all the parents did it,” she muttered. “Especially Mr. Long.”
The last, at least, was true.
After another five minutes, I said, “Can we go to 1‑Utama again?”
“We didn’t come here to go to malls.”
“Did you know it’s twice the size of the Mall of America?”
“You looked that up, but you can’t spell Terengganu properly.”
“Maaaa.”
“No means no.”
Sally never had this problem. When I wasn’t allowed to watch Hunger Games until my mother vetted it, Sally told me drily that Mr. Long wouldn’t have cared if she’d watched Saw. When I was grounded for getting a B‑plus on midterms, she informed me airily she got thirty dollars for an A and twenty for a B.
“Do you get twenty-five for an A‑minus?” I asked.
She sniffed. “Daddy says minuses are just what teachers use to annoy their students.”
When I finally returned Stateside, Sally and I went to the Coney’s Cones roadside shack to get ice-cream.
“You have no idea how good this tastes,” I said.
“It’s just a regular old twist.”
“Malaysian ice-cream sucks,” I said. “Their cows must be deficient.”
“Aren’t Asians lactose intolerant?” Sally said. “Maybe that’s why you fart up a storm every time we come here.”
“I do not.”
“It’s the worst.”
I shoved her almost off the railing, but she steadied herself and stuck out a strawberry covered tongue.
“Also, how are you not the slightest bit darker?” she said.
“The mother made us wear buckets of sun tan lotion.”
“One day on the lake, and I still got burnt,” she said, turning her back to show me.
I traced the burn. “Ouch.”
“Also, we’re in trouble,” Sally said after a moment, strangely breathily.
“Hmm?”
“Our auditoriums made the finals.”
The burn was the shape of a bird, I decided. It tingled on the sticky tips of my fingers as if it were electric.
“So what do we do when our parents find out we chucked theirs?” Sally said eventually.
I shrugged. “Ours were better.”
Sally giggled. “Daddy’s was sooo boring. How is he even a real architect?”
“The bigger thing to worry about is H.I.T.S.”
“You’ve got to talk to your mom. Today.”
“Dude, I just got back.”
“To. Day.” Sally turned around and wiped my cheek. “You’re such a slob.”
She jumped down from the railing. At the traffic light, she turned to salute me. When she disappeared around the corner, I touched the place where she’d smeared ice-cream on my cheek.
At nine-thirty, I found my mother folding clothes in the kitchen. “Hey, Ma?”
“What?” my mother said, not looking up.
“Can Sally and I build a treehouse in the oak?”
She stared at me. “Are you monkeys? Decent people live on the ground.”
“It’s basically a requisite for a suburban American childhood.”
“If Americans walked on their hands, would you do it too?”
I chose not to point out that I was, de facto, American. “We’d make it really cool.”
She huffed. “Everything with the Americans is cool this, cool that.”
“I mean sophisticated,” I said. “Like a model house. All our own design.”
My mother paused with a t‑shirt in her hand. For all the sermons on gratitude, I knew she hated our house. The layout wasted space, it couldn’t hold heat for shit, the walls were paper thin, and the exterior was a 50s cookie cutter suburban style that was outdated before the houses were finished. And the living room: the way she glared at it when she thought I wasn’t looking.
“It could be the best treehouse in the Midwest. They’d probably talk about it on MPR.”
“Why must everything in this country be best, greatest, most,” she muttered.
But I could see it working behind her eyes. After folding a pair of jeans and two shirts, she said, “I’ll think about it.”
The next morning, I patiently chased corn flakes around my bowl until they started to break while my mother was on the phone for almost an hour. When she sat down and started buttering slices of toast with infuriatingly careful strokes, still I kept graveyard quiet.
“About this treehouse,” she said, finally.
“Hmm,” I said with a nonchalance I definitely hadn’t practiced for an hour.
“We can build it.”
“Oh, cool.”
I washed my bowl with agonizing deliberateness, then went to fetch our design. It was a thing of beauty, printed with actual blueprint on professional 36-by-24 inch sheet, diagrams and extensive notes.
“What is this?” my mother said. She looked at it for a second, then frowned. “No, that won’t work.”
She flipped it over and started sketching. It looked nothing like our design.
My throat clenched. “Why not?”
“Too complicated to explain.”
“Can we at least try?” I asked.
“Why set yourself up for failure?” my mother muttered.
I realized then our fatal error. We’d been so focused on the need to convince my mother to build the treehouse, we forgot we had to also convince her to let us build the damn thing.
And just like that it was all in smoke. H.I.T.S mission report: failure.
My mother went through four drafts and ten revisions to her final design. Twice we had to build the imposter treehouse then tear it down because of some trivial flaw or another.
“Still working on that?” Sally asked, nodding at the bones of the latest attempt.
We were sitting on the lawn, which was growing unruly because no one had time to mow it. I plucked dandelions and blew their spores out.
“We’ll probably be going at the stupid thing until the zombie apocalypse.”.
“At least you’ll have a place to hide. Daddy refuses to build a bunker.”
“You can chill with us,” I said. “My brother will want to fight the zombies anyway.”
She started making a chain of dandelion stems. “I don’t know. Your mom would get on my case about how I shoot them.”
“Right between the eyes. Or no dessert.”
“She’d even nag the zombies,” Sally said. Her voice went low and staccato. “Backs straight! Stop limping! Chew the brains before swallowing!”
I fell over laughing. “Oh my god, don’t let her hear you,” I wheezed. “I’ll be grounded for a year.”
“You got spores,” Sally said when I got up. She started combing my hair.
My spine shivered. “At least it adds color.”
“Dude, your hair’s gorgeous. It’s so black and shiny.”
“But you have the best hair,” I said.
Sally fingered one of her locks, so pale it snatched the reds of the setting sun.
“Yours is better,” she said.
I started to protest, but Sally pointed to the treehouse. “Your mom’s calling.”
“What, Ma?” I shouted.
“Come hand me the level,” my mother yelled.
“Give me a minute.”
“Now.”
Sally looped the dandelion necklace over my head.
“You’d better go. Gotta finish that thing before the zombies get here,” she said, winking as she got up.
“Gabrielle!”
“O.K, Ma!”
When I brought her the level, my mother looked at me quizzically. “What are you wearing?”
“Nothing,” I said.
I tried to take the necklace off gently, but it broke.
It was two more months before the mother was satisfied. Two half-levels, a sloped roof, gently polished wood. And as much as I hated to admit, it was a virtuoso in American traditional minimalism.
Sally and I volunteered to be the trial monkeys. She said she was only coming along to indulge me, but I could tell she was just as giddy. Surrounded by all that red and amber and gold, it was like being cocooned by fire.
“I don’t know why more people don’t sleep in trees in the Fall,” I said.
“Because it’s freezing?” Sally said. “How are you only wearing one sweater?”
“It’s not that bad. Must be my tropical blood.”
“You’ve been to Malaysia like what, four times?”
“Blood doesn’t forget,” I said, solemnly. “Or so the mother claims.”
“I’ll never understand her,” she said. “No wonder you’re so weird.”
“Says the girl who eats everything in her sandwich one-by-one.”
“It tastes better that way,” she said. “Also, we should be taking pictures.”
“Why live life through a camera?”
“Wow, now you’re even sounding like her,” Sally said. “And the point of pictures is to make others jealous?”
She busied herself choosing the right filter and caption. “You see the way Carl’s been looking at you?” she said, peering at me from the corner of her eyes.
I shrugged “He’s got the yellow fever bad.”
“I mean three Asian girls in a row. But he is on the basketball team.”
“That’s because he’s already six feet. He can barely toss a ball into a canyon.”
Sally snorted. “So you’re not interested in him?”
“No dating until I’m out of college with a job, remember,” I said. “Preferably with a doctorate or two.”
Sally snorted. “Yeah, but if you could date him, would you?”
“No.”
Sally nodded. “Yeah, I wouldn’t date him either.”
There seemed to be an emphasis on him. My stomach clenched unpleasantly
Around eight, my mother came by to tell us to go to sleep.
“Oooh, bedtime for the baby?” Sally giggled until I shoved her over.
We got out our sleeping bags. “This thing smells like hot dogs,” I said.
“Tell your mom not to shop at Goodwill,” Sally said.
We talked for barely ten minutes before Sally fell into incoherence. But I couldn’t get myself to sleep. My breaths misted above me, but I somehow felt uncomfortably warm, like there was a heat gnawing through my chest. I wrestled my way out of the sleeping bag.
Sally’s face was a pale glow, cheeks trembling with every snore.
I nudged her awake.
“Move over,” I mumbled.
I crawled in and settled on my side, face-to-face with her, the bag squeezing us tight enough that our breasts just barely shifted against each other with every breath. When I opened my eyes, hers were fixed on me, almost emerald in the dark.
“Hi,” Sally said. Her voice was quavering.
It felt like hours before I leaned closer. I could smell the garlic from spaghetti dinner on her breath.
The only time I’d ever kissed someone it was rough and wet and gross. Some cousin of a girl from school at spin the bottle. I left the game making a face.
These kisses were rough, and wet, and beautiful.
In the morning, after we’d dropped Sally off, my mother asked, “Did something happen last night?”
“No,” I said.
“I’ve never heard you two be so quiet.”
“Why do you always have to interrogate me?” I said, foolishly.
She pulled over. “You’re hiding something, and I do not like it.”
“Nothing happened.”
“Gabrielle.”
“Oh my god. We kissed, okay?”
“Oh,” my mother said, starting the car again. “I was worried it was drugs.”
I couldn’t believe it. I texted Sally—my mom guessed and shes not flipping?
—holy shit. maybe the zombies got her
I started plastering the reply box with laughing emojis.
“Of course, you can’t date.”
The words didn’t register for a moment. “What?”
“You know the rule, no dating till after college.”
My blood turned ice even as my skull felt like it was on fire. “That’s bullshit.”
“Watch your language.”
When we got back home, I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling. I was so numb. I stared at the line of laughing faces on the unsent text, then deleted them one by one.
The next day, Sally found me at my locker. When she leaned into me, I backed away.
Sally flinched. “What the hell?”
“It’s…” I said. “I mean…”
Sally bit the corner of her lip. “It’s your mother isn’t it.”
I couldn’t look at her.
“Oh my god, Gabby, stand up to her for once in your life!”
“You don’t understand,” I said.
“Yeah, I don’t,” Sally said. “It’s the twenty-first fucking century. What kind of fascist bans a teenager from dating?”
My head snapped up. “Look, I’m sorry my mother isn’t some pushover you can bat your eyes at and get whatever the hell you want!”
Sally blinked slowly, like a lizard. “My dad’s not a pushover. He’s just not certifiable.”
“My mother only wants what’s best for me.”
“That umbilical cord looks real good on you,” she said, turning to leave.
“God help us all if you don’t get your way for once!”
Sally stiffened, then kept walking.
The silence between our two desks started to grow thicker than smog, then spread through the whole classroom as everyone nervously gauged the situation. Halfway through Wednesday, Ms. Walker asked Sally to switch to a different desk. She moved without a word.
If school was a cold war, home was full nuclear. My mother and I screamed our throats ragged as the battlefronts multiplied. My ridiculous extra homework. How Americanized I was. How many times I’d been grounded for missing a smudge of dust. How, when people at church asked me how I was, I would respond, “You know, just surviving the slavemaster. Wa-pish.”
When I called her a bitch, my mother’s eyes widened far enough for her eyeballs to roll out. Passing my brother’s room on the way to storming to mine, he was cowering on his bed.
“What the hell are you looking at?” I snapped.
The only time my mother and I paused hostilities was when my father gingerly brought up family therapy, and we concurrently let him know our shared pieces of mind.
Meanwhile at school, I’d taken to wearing gobs of concealer so no one could tell how much I was crying. I laughed loudly at the weakest jokes. Sally still wouldn’t look at me.
When my mother confronted me about my plummeting grades, something broke.
“I hate you,” I said.
Her head snapped back, like she’d been electrocuted. “What?” she stammered.
“You’ve ruined my life.” My voice was as monotonous as an answering machine. Press “1” for How Gabby Really Feels. “I. Fucking. Hate you.”
When I passed my parent’s bedroom that night, my mother was sobbing on my father’s shoulder. He was pleading silently for me to say something. I rolled my eyes and went to bed.
Then a few days later, at lunch in the cafeteria, an announcement on the P.A from Vice-Principal Colne. Our model auditoriums had won prizes for the city competition. My chest clenched. Building those with Sally felt like an episode from some show we’d watched obsessively then abruptly forgot about.
“Our own Sally Long’s placed third, and Gabrielle Delima placed second!”
I glanced at Sally, two tables away, but she didn’t turn around.
“Please give them a big round of applause.”
The cafeteria clapped awkwardly. Sally’s voice sliced through the silence that followed.
“It’s because she’s Asian,” she was saying. “Affirmative Action bullshit.”
A meatball sailed through the air and splattered on the back of her head. It took me a moment to realize I’d been the one who’d thrown it. Sally whipped around just in time for marinara sauce to explode all over her face.
“Don’t you dare talk about me that way!” I screamed.
Sally grabbed a glob of spaghetti and hurled it back. Sally, perfect in every way but this: the noodles missed me by a mile and struck the theater kids.
“It’s called free speech!” she screamed. “Look it up!”
Anything else she might have said was lost in the ensuing maelstrom of food. We stood unmoving through it all even as pieces of boiled broccoli and disintegrating meatballs splattered on us, and milk and pop soaked our clothes. Neither of us would be the one to look away as fury redoubled between our eyes like microphone feedback.
“What the hell was that?” Vice-Principal Colne said, ninety minutes later, furiously dabbing an orangey grease spot on his shirt.
“She started it,” Sally said.
“She insulted me,” I shot back.
“I don’t care,” Colne said. “Who started what. Who said what. Detention, two weeks.”
He silenced our protest with a slash of his hand, then gestured toward the door. Mrs. Long and my mother walked in. They sat on either side of us, avoiding our eyes as they gave the standard words of contrition and promises of good behavior.
“Now apologize,” Colne said to us.
“Sorry,” we muttered.
“Not to me,” Colne said. “To one another.”
Sally froze too.
“Look at each other,” he said.
It was the first time in weeks that I’d been this close to her. I’d forgotten how green her eyes were. Concealer was flaking beneath them.
“Sorry.”
I was surprised how much it sounded like we meant it.
Sally looked away. “Good aim. You should tryout for softball.”
My lip twitched. “Maybe if they got better uniforms.”
When we got home, I started toward my bedroom.
“Wait,” my mother said.
“Can I at least take a nap?” I said.
“Please?” she said softly.
I froze mid-step. I couldn’t remember my mother ever saying that to me. When she collapsed into the sofa in the living room, I approached warily and sat down on the arm on the opposite side.
“I wanted to nurture you. Protect you. Push you,” my mother said. Her eyes were spider-webbed with blood lines. “I thought that’s what a mother is supposed to do.”
She leaned forward, staring at the fireplace, clasping her hands on her knees, as if praying. “Growing up, I felt so alone. Grandpa was always gone for work and Grandma barely paid attention to me.” She looked at me again. “I never wanted you to feel that way.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I just want you to understand. I get so caught up in it. You and your brother are my joys. You’re the best things I ever made.”
“Destroyed, more like.”
“Sometimes I want to shield you so much I forget you have to breathe,” she said. “But I’m trying, Gabrielle. I’m trying to be better.”
I stood up. “Too late.”
In my bedroom, I looked up Sally’s Instagram. Only five pictures down, there we were, in the treehouse, Sally grinning like it was her birthday and me looking like someone who hadn’t quite figured out smiling. The caption said: #BFFs <3
I texted Sally. —can I call?
A minute later the phone buzzed. —yeah
“Hey,” she said. “How much trouble you in?”
“Not sure. The mother bot didn’t even yell at me. Must be out of juice.”
“Mine went full soap opera. What are people going to think about us?”
I giggled. “I miss you.”
“Me too.”
“I want to be with you. No matter what my mother says.”
There was silence on the other line.
“Sally?”
“It’s just…” Sally said. “I don’t know. You really hurt me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We hurt each other.”
“Yeah,” Sally said.
After a minute I said, “You still there?”
She exhaled. “My dad’s taking a position in Chicago.”
My throat shrank. I could barely whisper an oh.
“Yeah,” she said. She paused for a minute. Her breaths came soft and shallow. “Maybe it’s best… Maybe we just shouldn’t let anything happen.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll…” Sally said, “See you around, I guess.”
I didn’t let the phone drop from my ear even when the two beeps of the hang-up tone came, like the last beats of a heart.
Anytime now she’ll call back and say it was a mistake. We were BFFs.
The snow-coated roof of the treehouse turned gray, then red, then a bruised purple. Best friends forever. She had to call back.
How could forever end like this?
The treehouse was glowing in streetlight amber when my mother came to sit on the edge of the bed.
“You win,” I said. “Control my life all you want. I don’t care. Nothing matters anymore. Not a single goddam thing.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
It took me a moment to comprehend what she’d said. That impossible word had pulled some kind of plug in me, and the rage building in my chest drained in a rush.
“I’m going to make dinner,” my mother said. “I’ll leave some in the fridge.”
It was past midnight when I finally crawled out of bed. My mother was working at the dining table.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“We’re redistributing Mr. Long’s remaining projects.”
“Oh,” I said, sitting down. The treehouse looked gray and dead. I tried to picture the red and gold of that autumn day back onto it, but I couldn’t. I started crying. Her lips had been so warm.
“That damn treehouse,” my mother said suddenly.
“Huh?” I said, rubbing my eyes.
“It’s crooked.”
“Doesn’t look it,” I said.
“A serious structural flaw.” She sighed. “Too complicated to explain. We will have to tear it down.”
She glanced at me as she said it. “Ah,” I said. “Guess so.”
The next day, wrapped in a dozen blankets, we shivered in front of the fireplace, our coats pooling water by the door, neither of us saying anything. Whenever the fire started to fade, I grabbed another piece of the treehouse and shoved it into the flames. Each piece glowed brighter and brighter, then crumbled. Like a promise, like a dream.
From the writer
:: Account ::
The germ of this story was the phrase start over bouncing around my head which had me wondering what kind of story would revolve around that. It was while taking my first MFA class, almost a decade ago, taught by the inestimably brilliant and nurturing Deborah Keenan, who provided more prompts in a class than you could work through in a year, so many that I was now making one up on my own. And maybe it was because, while severely depressed and on an ill-fated journey with hormone replacement therapy, I found myself exorcising demons around my relationship with my mother, but the story I immediately fell into was about dealing with a perfectionist father who kept scrapping anything his kids did that wasn’t up to standards and telling them to start over.
But as much as the heart of the story was drawn from my own life, the details weren’t. And in a way it probably felt like when a friend tells a story that you suspect has all the important bits obscured.
Someone once told me that writers have to ask themselves: where’s their skin in the game? Because there are some stories you can’t tell by wading in the shallows. So the generic Asian father became a Malaysian Eurasian mother, the trip to Malaysia was stuffed with details that could be autobiographic, and the conflict between parent and child became the embodiment of all the anger and hurt that I felt growing up. What remained fictional, such as growing up in the U.S. for example, did so as a vehicle for the story, not a way to hide.
One mysterious thing is how I masked my mother at a time when our relationship was strained. But in the months that followed, maybe after having gotten all that out in that class, I found myself able to move past the hurt she caused by her mistakes to appreciate the love that was behind it, and somehow freer to be honest about the hard truths of our relationship. In the original, the ending involves Sally dying and Gabby’s father dismantling the treehouse and asking if they can start over with the plans the girls made, perhaps some kind of wish fulfillment on my part. The new ending feels a lot closer to the nature of my own acceptance of my mother.
And maybe that’s a lesson: art imitates life, but sometimes as writers we have to let it.