After the Rain

By Angeline Truong

Say it again. Repeat after me. I'll bury you on a day it's raining.

Lily is a first-generation immigrant in a family of unapologetic women. Throughout the story, Lily and her family must come face-to-face with their own truths, which begin as fragmented pieces that are slowly assembled over the course of their lifetime

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Dec 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781636760261

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After the Rain

After the Rain

Angeline Truong

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2020 Angeline Truong

All rights reserved.

After the Rain

ISBN

978-1-63676-506-8 Paperback

978-1-63676-025-4 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63676-026-1 Ebook

For my Bà nội and my Amah.

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

EPILOGUE

AUTHOR’S NOTE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROLOGUE

So you will, right? Amah glanced at me suspiciously. I shrugged and kept fiddling with my mud pie. I scraped the sides of my pie with a thick apple-leaf, smoothing the mud over the sandy interior.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. Do you want a slice, Amah? I can cut you the part with the dandelion seeds.

When I was a little girl, I spent hours and hours in our backyard, digging rabbit-holes in our faltering lawn, plucking weeds out of cement cracks, and carefully constructing mud pies. Though I know this couldn’t have been how our conversation went—my Amah barely speaks English—I still remember every word perfectly.

Lielee, Amah said. Listen. You hear me, you understand? Repeat, so I know you heard. She rolled a leaf between her fingers anxiously, crumpling it to a smooth dust in her hands.

Yes, yes. The rain. The mud is so soft. Isn’t it, Amah? Rain is so good for pies, I said. I placed a few smooth pebbles around the rim of the mud pie, which I had carefully chosen for their texture and color. The pebbles were small and round. I liked the way they blinked at me, a line of beady blue eyes smiling and winking alluringly.

Lielee! The rain!

Alright, alright! Don’t yell. I’ll bury you when it’s raining. Okay?

Okay, Amah said, satisfied. Okay. Wait, not so fast. Say it again.

Say what again?

Say it again. Repeat after me. I’ll bury you on a day it’s raining, she replied.

I’ll bury you on a day it’s raining. I paused to scrape a wad of dirt from under my pinky nail. Hey, Amah. Do you want some mud pie now?

Okay. No, not that one. The one with the dandelion seeds, please.

CHAPTER 1

I was born in my Amah’s home—a little beige house with a red roof on it. It had a big door made of shards of stained-blue glass that might have once been transparent but now were so dirty and broken that they might as well have been opaque. My mother was lying on the couch in front of the fireplace because it was a particularly cold day in May. Suddenly, her stomach started bubbling and straining.

What’s wrong? my father asked.

Nothing. It’s just the hot and sour soup we had for lunch, my mother said without turning to him.

You know spicy food can induce childbirth, my father said disapprovingly.

Well, so can sex, so I guess we’re not having that tonight, my mother replied, and my father shut up.

When my father wasn’t looking, I poked my little head out from between my mother’s thighs and looked out at the big white world, at the crackling fire-place in May and the thick jade curtains. I saw my father sitting over in the corner with big round eyeglasses looking like a strange owl. I thought, Nope, switch him out, too many men in one room. I’m not coming out here. My mother replied, Don’t be ridiculous. Your Amah is still at the market. Are you coming out or not? I said no. I was particularly good at being stubborn, even then, so she sighed and leaned back on the couch, and we waited for my Amah to come home.

When my Amah came back two hours later, she was very excited about what she had found at Lion Supermarket, which was her favorite place to be on a Sunday. Sunday was the day before the new shipment of fresh fruits came in, which meant there were only rotten and bruised fruits left on the shelves. This meant she could harass the little white boy who worked in aisle eleven from 9:45 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. to give her a twenty-five percent discount.

Amah came back with a thick bundle of cilantro, slightly wilted (five dollars off), one eggplant (free—she had stuffed it in the big eggplant pocket she’d sewn into her skirt for this very purpose), and two boxes of rice noodles (one paid full price, the second free because she had terrified the white cashier so much he’d forgotten to scan it). Amah came home and immediately stared me down, her gaze narrowing. She dropped her purchases on the floor and stormed over.

I felt my Amah’s hands moving over my mother’s stomach, poking and pinching at my little baby butt-cheeks, and she ordered, Come out, come out. We haven’t got all day. You are to be born. I thought, No, no, you are wearing a dress of violets.

My mother put a hand on Amah’s and said, Hold on. Go change first.

Don’t be ridiculous, my Amah said, and my mother glared at her with raised eyebrows. I did my best to look at her angrily too, through a haze of blood and placenta, until she sighed and stormed off.

You see, my mother and I both knew something my Amah didn’t—that in twenty years my heart would be broken by a handsome soccer player and a girl named Violet, and I wasn’t going to be able to stand the sight of violets for years, and it’s funny how much mothers know, don’t they, that even other women can’t understand. We both knew the exact day it was going to happen—October 21, 2018—and on that night, I’d call my mother from college sobbing my eyes out, and my mother would coldly say on the phone, You are being dramatic. You’d better finish your chemistry homework instead of wasting time over boys. Then she’d hang up, and I’d lie in bed not able to breathe until I fell asleep alone.

But on this day in May, at least I would get to come out into a violet-less world. Mothers are very good at loving you, at least when it involves being right.

So finally my Amah came back wearing a little blue sack that she’d stitched together from a bunch of old sweaters, and she stuck her cold hands into my sac and said, Get out. Finally my father noticed—because it always did take men longer to realize anything going on. My father was so excited. He said, "Hurry, come out, I want you to be born on the same day Star Wars came out so I can tell my friends."

I said, Shut up, don’t rush me, speaking human words aloud for the first time in my life, but my father was not listening. Men never do. My Amah finally got me loose and rudely pulled me out, and that is how I found out that I had been born.

***

My grandmother’s house was a terrible place to be growing up as a child. I say this with good reason. We lived in a house with many windows but no light. Every room had a minimum of three windows, but none of these windows ever opened into the outside world. The kitchen had a huge, long window that opened into the living room and another window on its other wall, which opened into the bedroom. Then the bedroom had a window that opened into the bathroom (which was terrible because my mother could watch me poop, and she always did love commenting on how long it took me to take a poop). These windows also meant it was nearly impossible to build a pillow fort in the bedroom without Auntie noticing from the stove, and it was equally as impossible to pretend to be asleep when Auntie called you for dinner on the days she only made bok choy and white rice because your cheeks were getting too fat.

So the house was quite dark, especially in the winter, which did not quite make any sense, as the house should have been equally as light in the winter and spring, given the lack of windows. But you will have to trust me. The house was darker in the winter. Auntie said she liked the house this way. They’d actually bought the house in part because of the windows. No peeping Toms or nosy neighbors to spy on you, she said. She said the most dangerous thing in the world was a snoopy neighbor who would tell the Communist government your family had had two eggs to eat this whole week instead of one. And then there you go, the hen you have hidden under the sink in the bathroom is gone and plucked for some government leader’s dinner, and your snoopy neighbor will get one silver coin to help pay for some makeup to hide the ugly mole on her chin. Thus, no windows.

My Amah had a closet in which she stored many things. On the left were traditional Chinese dresses, including the evening gowns my mother wore to her wedding. One was a deep-green velvet dress, which did not quite look like the white floofy dresses I’d seen in the movies. On weekdays when my mother was at work teaching, I’d sit underneath the green dress and let it drape over my head like a tent because I wasn’t allowed to take it off its hanger. If I stood up on my tip-toes, my head just barely brushed where my mother’s waist might have been. I liked the feel of the green velvet on my head and how thick and unforgiving the fabric was. It felt more like a cloth sack you might throw someone’s body in after you’d killed them in a shoot-out in the middle of a ghost town instead of a wedding dress. Somehow this made the dress much more appealing to me, and I’d sit under the emerald cloth for hours with a cowboy hat perched on my head, pointing finger-guns at my aunt whenever she walked by.

On the right side of the closet were my grandmother’s old sweaters and jackets—thick ones, which constantly shed lint. White specks of fluff covered the entire right side of the closet in a thick fine snow, a California snow. My cousins and I used to roll around in the lint and then sprint down the hallway, letting the lint storm off our palms and cheeks. There was one sweater I particularly loved; it was lavender with little dark purple flowers that lined the shoulders and tiny pearl buttons.

My aunt told a story about these pearl buttons every time my Amah wore the sweater. She said when they fled from Vietnam, a group of pirates cornered their boat, and they would have stolen the pearls from my Amah. So my clever Amah ripped the pearls off the jacket, popped them whole like pills, and picked through her poop for weeks afterward to recover them. When I first heard this story, I shrieked and backed away from the beautiful sweater in disgust.

You’re lying, I told my aunt. You’re definitely lying. That’s so gross!

My aunt laughed the way she always laughed when she told these stories and said, It’s true. It’s true. She looked so much like a witch, the way she threw her head back and cackled, the way her hair was still messy and bushy from gardening, and I was a little bit scared of her—but not that scared, not really.

Go ahead, if you don’t believe me. Touch the poop pearls. That’s not my problem, she said.

No, no, I don’t believe you, I said. I will never touch those pearls again. And I never did, not in front of her, ever again.

Sometimes, though, when playing in the lint underneath the sweaters, I liked to pretend I was a little penguin, bouncing in the snow. Sometimes I was a cold penguin, and then if no one was around to see, I liked to take the lavender sweater down to cover my little penguin body.

Many other things were in this closet. On the top shelves were three boxes of Huggies diapers, enough for all the little cousins who had run through this home. Old telephone books were stacked in the corner, which I was pretty sure my family had never once touched, as they did not have anyone to telephone anyway. I once opened the book and combed through the pages, pointing at all the different names.

Auntie June, do you know who Dave Rogers is? I asked.

No, she said.

Do you know who Elizabeth Graham is?

No, she said.

Do you know who Lee Archer is?

No, she said.

Well, who do you know? I asked.

No one, she said. No one here.

Why? I asked.

We would not know anyone stupid enough to put all their information in a book for everyone else to see, Auntie replied.

What about us? I asked. Are we in the phone book?

No, Auntie said. Never.

Aside from the diapers and the phone books, a whole assortment of other things was in that closet. A little broken angel clock had the right side of the face broken off so you could only tell half the time. The clock had two white pillars made to look like they