All the women in my family are Orchids. Big Orchid, Baby Orchid, Medium Orchid, Fat Orchid, Bald Orchid, Belly Orchid, Honey Orchid, Hurt Orchid: at birth, they were badgered into dirt and dug up as women. My mother is Meat Orchid, because she is famous for having eaten a stray cat sometime during her girlhood, stoning it to jelly and grilling it gold on a skirt of chicken wire. She is also famous for having saved her father from a heart attack by slitting open a vein in his shoulder and fishing out the clot with her finger, a clot the size of a strawberry, sweet and terrorized by seeds. My mother clots at night, sits in front of the television watching baoliao, all the latest news about The Island’s Imminent Independence. On TV, women wear another language and say: Taiwan will be Independent Someday. We will not let ourselves be seized by the mainland. We will poison mainland tourists by dissolving narcotics in their water, we will ban the sky from carrying them here, we will remind them that they are uncivilized and we, in contrast, are modern as canned meat.
My mother the Meat Orchid says: If you ever see a mainlander, do not attempt any of those things. Instead, play dead and they will leave you alone. My mother believes that if the entire island plays dead, if everyone flops fish-like onto their backs and buttons up their eyes and lies still for a little while, the mainland and their military will say: nothing here to harness and take. Let’s practice winning, my mother says, so we play dead together, her on the sofa we stole from the neighbor who got evicted for making a mural of fishguts on the ceiling, and me on the floor so warped by the neighbor’s blistered pipes and frequent flooding that the boards buck out like teeth and chew me. Eyes open or closed, I ask my mother, but she says shh, the dead don’t talk, though we both know that isn’t true.
Big Orchid is dead but sometimes animates our window, opening and closing it like a jaw, contouring the wind into a word: tell-your-mother-to-stop-watching-TV-at-night-because-it-will-ruin-her-eyes-I-know-a-woman-who-watched-baoliao-all-night-every-day-and-her-eyes-turned-blind-as-hardboiled-eggs-so-you-see-stop. Before I was born, Big Orchid and my mother used to squint together all night, sewing skirts at home for the factory to collect. Now they sewed alone in the evenings, a city apart, my mother spotlighted by the TV, her scissors parting the fabric like water. At night, I hummed the symphony of their machines, the fabric rippling out of their hands, bright as fish skin. I hummed the sound of them together, close as a shoulder and its socket, a hook and its fish.
By the time I was born, Big Orchid and my mother only spoke on the phone, for a reason like wind: we could only gesture vaguely at the direction of its origin, this fight without fists. Big Orchid was the oldest of my mother’s nine sisters, with a smile as small as a coin, the kind I wanted to keep and spend when I was sad, her teeth silver-capped. She lived south of us in Artesia, her apartment made of concrete because it had once been part of a pre-sliced ham factory, and her balcony was peopled with orchids, all the pots chipped like teeth, all the orchids of different colors no one could name but a butcher, colors of flesh and fat and bruise and scab. Her favorite orchid, the one she shuttled around in her arms like an infant, was the color of my foot. There were moles on the petals, ones that looked cancerous, but Big Orchid didn’t believe in cancer. She said in Taiwan, people believed cancer was karma, that each cancerous mole was a penny of debt collected from a past life. She said every illness was invented to scare us away from consuming preserved meats. At Big Orchid’s apartment, where my mother dropped me off on nights she wanted to quit her body, nights she spat out the name of the man who seeded me, nights she said: your mother is so tired now, she will lay down in the street for the cars to cancel out, Big Orchid fried foot-thick slices of spam and ate them with me, spoiling them with oyster sauce, ketchup, our sweat. Big Orchid’s apartment was devoid of television, a fact that I found more startling than if she didn’t have any walls or windows.
What is your source of light, then, I asked Big Orchid. She pointed at her own face.
Out on her balcony, we watered her potted orchids, their stems shaped like shin fractures, the petals broad as my palms and thin as the skin beneath my chin, the part of me that was always shaded. She watered the soil black as our eyelashes, watered them with a teapot painted into a peacock. Afterward, she spritzed the soil with a spray bottle full of her honeyed piss, which she said was the best kind of fertilizer, organic. The spray bottles lined her windowsill like cupped suns, and when I indented my thumb into the plastic, I felt the heat of her, the hum of her thirst.
Once, when she wasn’t looking, I plucked the petal off a pink orchid nearest the railing, the kind of pink that reminded me of all those slapped faces in soap operas starring pearl-pale concubines warring with each other, murdering each other’s sons. No one bothered to slaughter the daughters.
At Big Orchid’s, I slept on the ground – she had no furniture, only tatami mats and a low enamel Japanese table and a futon rolled into a sofa. That night, I kept the stolen petal pinned under my tongue. In the morning, it was vanished, solved by my spit, and my mouth tasted of smoke. Big Orchid sat cross-legged beside me, giving me a look she only ever aimed at her orchids, a gaze that meant grow. Did you do this, she said, and lifted the pot with the injured orchid inside it, its central petal knocked out like a canine, the other petals pink as gums.
No, I said, tucking my tongue away, gnarling the word. Big Orchid said nothing, but that morning when she left for the factory, she told me to atone. What you take you must give back. While she was gone, I filled my mouth with sour sink-water and spewed it at the orchids on the balcony, all of them nearly taller than me, but then remembered it was deadly to overwater them. They don’t have throats like us, she said, they’ve got not muscle to swallow, no way to lift their own bodies to the light. Whenever I woke on her futon, she told me to do a hundred jumping jacks in front of the window, to exercise my right to light. I did them facing the balcony, naming with my eyes a favorite and least-favorite orchid. Favorite: Big Orchid’s favorite. Least-favorite: there was one orchid with petals that were bloodshot, reminding me of my mother’s TV screen when there was a funeral scene, everyone robed in white silk. I decided to pee on that orchid, but instead I sprayed my legs and drizzled the railing.
When Big Orchid came home from the denim factory, she laughed and wiped between my legs and said I was like my mother. How, I asked. You have ideas too broad for your body, she said, and told me that my mother once tried to give me my one-hundred day haircut when I was a baby. But the shears she bought for shaving my head were designed for a larger species: sheep, goats, cattle. The shears nearly flayed my scalp off, Big Orchid said, and my head was slick and spat-out, strands of my buzzed-off hair combing the air like embers. My mother wept into a salad bowl of my lost hair, collecting each strand from the floor with sheets of flypaper, and feared forever that my hair would never grow back. But Big Orchid told her not to worry: at least someday I could be a nun and make my hairlessness holy.
What I didn’t believe about the story was my mother weeping. Weeping was a symptom of want, and I couldn’t imagine my mother wanting any strand of me. I prayed sometimes that Big Orchid was my real mother, but she said she couldn’t have children. Why not, I asked, and she stood me on her balcony, her hands folded on my shoulders, the orchids bobbing their chins. Do you know how orchids have children? I said I didn’t. The wind spits their seeds across the country. She said wild orchids originated in her hometown, in the hind part of her house, in her left hand cupping me under the chin. The wind blew all my seeds away, she said, and I didn’t get to keep any.
At home, while waiting for my mother to wake from the sofa, I plucked the TV remote off the floor and held it upright like a bouquet. It was empty of batteries, and my mother never used it, always reaching forward with her feet to press the TV’s buttons with her toes. I watched her sleep, pretending that every time I blinked, the channel was changing, the room rearranging. Blink, and my fists filled with orchid stems. Blink, and beneath my tongue was the ghost of a petal: rough as sandpaper, scouring my mouth into a glass fishbowl. Big Orchid kept a fishbowl on her kitchen counter, except instead of a fish inside, there was a dead tapeworm that had once been tugged out of her asshole. It was magnified by glass, waltzing with the water. Your mother was the one who pulled it out of me, Big Orchid said, but I couldn’t imagine my mother rescuing anything. She wasn’t rescuing the worm, Big Orchid said, she was saving me. That worm bloated me big as a man, she explained, and everybody thought I must be pregnant. Even me. For months, Big Orchid wondered if a baby was making a bowl of her. But the worm began to subtract from her body, siphoning the water from her veins. It was my mother who determined: parasite. But in the end, was I wrong about calling it my child? It made a home in me. Big Orchid laughed, and for a week she nicknamed me Worm Baby. My Worm Baby, my little jelly knot. Why do you keep it? I asked, watching the worm float and flutter. Big Orchid she said it was my mother’s idea to preserve the worm in a bowl of soybean oil, their baby forever.
When I asked my mother about this story, she said she didn’t remember. I said I didn’t believe her: she could recite every line from every episode of Huanzhu gege, especially if the scene was wrinkled by rain. Okay, my mother said, but don’t believe her when she says that’s her only baby. She had a baby before. Before what, I asked, but she didn’t continue, instead watching a commercial about stickers for glass doors to prevent birds from gliding into them, even though our windows were too wounded to need warnings, scratched from all the times my mother and I recreated soap opera fight scenes with real knives from the kitchen. It was the only time we ever faced each other, our arms attuned like antennae, channeling a current we couldn’t see. Strike me, she said, do it for real, but I winced away. Our knives never met, never slid against each other like palms in prayer, but we dodged each other’s blades anyway, pretending we had connected. The TV screen slackened behind us, the light losing muscle before sliding off-screen.
If there was a worm in my belly, would you pull it out of me?
My mother, not looking away from the TV, responded to me: there will never be a worm in you. In this country, you get to eat things clean. Where I was born, she said, you could buy a monkey at the night market, next to the stall where sausages swung like earrings, but that was the past, back when a country was also called a coffin. A thing to be buried in. That was all she said. I preferred Big Orchid’s stories about night markets: men bicycling with buckets full of sod, each seeded with a different orchid species, the product of secret breeding, orchids with petals elaborate as feathers or striped like tigers, orchids born from seeds of sun. But my mother never mentioned any orchids. That night, when the last episode was over–– in the last scene, a woman is tricked by a monkey-god into smothering her husband with a pillowcase of stones–– I fell asleep curled on the sofa.
When I woke, it was morning and my mother was stroking her belly, chin chiseling her chest as she bent her head. I wondered if she was remembering me inside her, if she watched for me daily the way Big Orchid watched her potted bulbs, prodding the soil with her pinky, asking me if I saw anything yet. Nothing, I said, but Big Orchid said there was always something. I had to imagine the shape of the flower before it was born, ghosting it up from the ground.
Before I was born, my mother imagined me a boy: in the only photo I saw of her, the one taped behind the television, she wrote a list of names I could someday grow into. Biblical names like Noah and Adam and Benjamin. There was another photo fried between two frizzed wires, folded so that I had to unfurl it in the steam of a shower: it was a baby without a face, a mouth too short-lived to say its name. Its skull small as an orchid bulb. I rescued the photo from the fried TV wires, slipping it into my waistband.
Big Orchid must have forgiven me for thieving one of her petals, because the next time my mother dropped me off at her apartment, she let me water the orchids all on my own. I recited the names I invented for their species: mother orchid, because its pollen looked like gold thorns, auntie orchid, because its petals were sandpaper on one side and suede on the other, and niece orchid, which was always thirsty, its soil dry as ash.
When I was finished watering, I dried my fingers with my own hair and turned to Big Orchid. It’s a week away from my birthday, I said, and I want to give you a gift. Big Orchid laughed and said if it was my birthday, I was supposed to receive gifts, not give them away. But I ignored her, plucking the photo out of my waistband and passing it to her. Big Orchid looked at it once, turning it over like a playing card, a losing hand. I fold, she seemed to say to me. Without saying anything, she stepped out on the balcony and bent the photo in her palm, using it as a scoop to shuttle dirt from one pot to another. You’re dirtying its face, I said, before remembering the baby didn’t have one. This is how I’ll bury her, she said, because they only let me hold the body for an hour. This is how I’ll carry her. The photograph sagged like a hammock, cradling dirt, giving it a name.
That night, Big Orchid lit a cigarette she fished from the folds of her futon–– her cushions were naked with stains, not plastic-wrapped like my mother’s–– and watched me on the balcony, watering the orchids with the spray-bottle and the peacock teapot. When I came back inside, it was dim and the room gripped us like a fist. All I could see was her chin and the cigarette, and she let the quiet curdle. Tell me a story, I said, not seeing her face. Wanting her to speak like she always did, about how Yilan is renowned for its orchids and for its Independence Insurgents, and then I could make her laugh, tell her about how my mother complained about the mainlanders who lived next door to us, how they spat in their sink every evening, and Big Orchid would say my mother’s brain was bad as a yolkless egg and that spitting is good for the throat’s plumbing.
Instead she stood up and said I’d done a good job. Her hands dangled loose by her sides. In her mouth, the cigarette ticked up and down, the smoke jerked into illegible shapes. She lay down without looking at me, claiming a headache, an orchid stem spraining her brain. There was one other time I’d seen her this way, an afternoon when she’d locked me in the hallway and said my face had turned blank. She no longer saw its shape, no longer recognized who I was. After two hours, the door dawdled open. In the doorway, I thought Big Orchid’s face was my mother’s, that my mother was inhabiting the mole on her cheek. After she let me back inside, Big Orchid took me to church and said she would pray for forgiveness from the lord for abandoning her niece to the carcinogenic dust of a communal hallway. We sat shoulder-to-shoulder in the pews and she smelled like soil, sweet. Forgive her, I prayed, forgive her, and Big Orchid repeated the same. Forgive me for conflating her face in the doorway with my mother’s. Forgive me for being found. Forgive me for wishing I lived on that balcony, among those flowers, their faces fountaining all morning.
The day of this headache, Big Orchid did not banish me to the hallway. I kneaded her temples with the tips of my elbows and she said stop hurting me. I said she should invent a cigarette orchid: it would have petals with tips smoldering, petals like live embers that took a year to fall and ignite your feet. Big Orchid laughed, but the sound fish-hooked in her throat and choked her. Let’s sleep, she said, but started without me. There was an orchid on the balcony called the pillow, its petals bloated into bee mattresses, and I plucked one of its petals and slid it under her cheek. Don’t be mad at me, I whispered down to her, and prayed the petal could soak up pain the way it mopped up sunlight.
Years later, my mother revealed to me that Big Orchid was sick with migraines and all kinds of aches, that she took pills smuggled from Taichung by my cousin, who unscrewed the tips of pens and removed the wands of ink, refilling the hollow bodies with pills. I never knew what kind of sick she was, only that by fall, in my first year of middle school, she locked herself in the bedroom when I came over and told me to watch the television. You don’t have a television, I said, pointing at her cement walls. Pretend there’s one, she called to me from her room, and so I looked at her balcony instead, the orchids staggered like buildings, an entire skyline untended to. By summer the balcony would be overgrown, orchids entwining their stems like arms, touching heads. I wanted to lean that same way. I dreamed of twining arms with a girl at school, a girl whose name meant Land of Orchids but who had never seen an orchid before. I brought her one of Big Orchid’s blooms, thieving the smallest pot from the balcony, a sprout with a single petal the color of a bruise. Land of Orchids, whose hair was hazed into two braids so tight that her part was bright-white, told me that the orchid looked like a testicle. I said I didn’t know what a testicle looked like and she offered to show me her brother’s. No thank you, I said, and brought the orchid home alone.
Don’t bring that in here, my mother said from the sofa. The orchid bent like a knuckle. It might be carrying her disease. I said that diseases don’t transfer from human to flower, but my mother still barricaded it with a shoebox, suffocating it with a plastic bag. By morning it wilted, shriveled to a handful of gravel. Big Orchid never noticed I stole one of her pots, and that was how I knew the depth of her sickness, her forgetting–– there was a time Big Orchid recognized every petal placed like a wafer on my tongue, when she could differentiate me from missing. After burying the shriveled orchid in our garbage can, I decided to go to church alone, taking two buses to the one I remembered.
On the same pew we once shared, I prayed for forgiveness, for the petal I took and for the potted orchid I stole for a love as minor as a dime, a girl whose name I wanted. Big Orchid, Meat Orchid–– I was the only one in my family who didn’t rhyme. I didn’t want you to carry that name, my mother always said, but a name to me was weightless. It was wind-carried, the way Big Orchid told me orchids multiplied in the air, seeds steered by the sky. For years I believed that when women in movies shivered in the wind and were offered the home of their boyfriends’ coats, it was because they feared the wind would blow their seeds westward and they weren’t ready to plant children yet. I thought staying indoors was contraception. When Big Orchid stopped answering the door, I stood outside on the street while my mother knocked and knocked. The balcony was jungled with orchids, flowers dangling over the railing, waving to me. My mother shook her head at the knot of orchids and said she didn’t understand why Big Orchid wanted to bring those things here, those things they had left behind.
Big Orchid died in the summer of my eighth grade. Of heatstroke officially–– she always refused to turn on the air conditioner because she learned from a monk how to lower her internal temperature–– but my mother said there had been a wind in her body, a zhongfeng. A wind in all our bodies, a grief we could not stop seeding. After she was cremated, my mother displayed the urn over Facetime so that my cousins in Taiwan could witness and send us photos of orchids, the same stock photo of a purple species that Big Orchid would call ordinary, nothing like her bologna orchid, her ham orchid, her Saturn-ringed orchid. They had survived her, all the orchids clotted on the balcony, outgrowing the railing, opening wide as jaws to swallow the day’s weather. My mother said they should all be sold. At Big Orchid’s apartment, which my mother wanted to visit because we needed a mattress and Big Orchid had a queen-sized one in her bedroom, I thumbed the concrete floor for remnants of her hair. Big Orchid’s shed hair was shorter than I remembered, some strands made of snow, dissolving when I touched it. Some of it clung to my hem like cat hair. I remembered she once told me: Never own a cat, because when you die, they will not hesitate to eat your dead body. What about owning orchids, I asked her, and she said, orchids eat your dead body too, but at least they have the courtesy to wait til you’re buried. Til you’re dirt.
I carried every orchid off the balcony, the bottom of each pot crusted with beetles. The pots lined the street, an entire block, and I remembered how I’d once tried to pee on them, my pants pouting around my knees. How she wiped me clean and laughed, said I had to be patient if I wanted to save enough of myself to feed anything. Collect water in your bladder like a coin purse, she said. Don’t spend it so lightly. I left the orchids on the sidewalk, waist-high and bowing their heads to morning, and I wasn’t sure whether I hoped someone would burn them or breed them.
When we drove home, my mother ran two stoplights and swore when she swerved the corner onto our street. In the passenger seat, something clanged against the door. I leaned forward and saw the fishbowl half-full of oil, the tapeworm embalmed inside it. You wouldn’t let me keep the orchids, but you kept this? My mother said to sit down and say nothing. At home, she carried the fishbowl in her arms like a newborn, someone she wanted to introduce me to. It glittered by the kitchen sink, oil refracting a rainbow, the worm bow-tied at the bottom.
My mother stared down at it, tapping the side of the glass bowl as if the worm might react, flicking its tail like a goldfish. Looking up again, she laughed. After you were born, she said to the wall above the sink, for days I kept thinking there was something else inside of me. She went back to the hospital six times, claiming the doctors had left something inside of her, and each time they told her that the baby was delivered and certificated. No, my mother kept saying, something else, something else, please. Take it out of me.
And I used to call Big Orchid crazy, my mother said, lifting the fishbowl to the level of her head, nodding it in her hands. She pressed her cheek to the glass, hard enough that it bruised her, and then she set it back down by the sink. In the living room, the TV flared on. It was the channel we always watched, a language we labored into. A commercial advertised curtains, which the man pronounced like certain–– it was the same way Big Orchid pronounced orchid like the whale, orca, or how she started stories with once upon a god. Once upon a god, she said, two sisters grew up in an orchid field. They were carried into another country. One had a baby and the other also had a baby that was blown away. Both of them were always thirsty, so they hired the sky to rain on them, except the sky was like a vending machine and sometimes you had to head-butt its blue belly to get the water out.
This was when I would interrupt her and say, get to the girl. The girl, she said, that’s you. The girl was not an orchid. She had feet that walked her forever. She relied on no wind. This was when I would say: I wish you had named me. Then I would be an orchid like the ones on your balcony, an orchid you bred yourself, a pride of petals. Big Orchid laughed and turned away from me, facing the balcony, a cigarette cradled in her fingers. But I didn’t name any of these orchids, she said, I copied what they called themselves. She gestured at the balcony, the sky pried open alive for its pearled moon. Bending down, she petted each of her orchids, touching the petals until they opened like umbrellas above me. What does it matter what they are named, she said, so long as they live. Long enough to call me mother. Long enough to mourn me.