BIG BANG
The first week we moved to Italy, my sixteen-year-old daughter, Julia, began having second thoughts. She said we could escape Italy together, like we had both been wanting to bust out of jail and my boyfriend, Michael, was the warden. She said we could go back to Hoboken, New Jersey, where we were living. She said it like it was as easy as turning the car around.
“Where would we live?” I asked. “We gave up our apartment.”
“We could rent another apartment,” she answered.
“What about all the things we gave away, like the TV, lamps, and kitchen appliances?” There was no point taking anything electrical to Italy since the European plugs and voltage would be incompatible.
“We could get new stuff,” Julia said.
“What about Michael?” I asked.
“He’ll be fine.”
“What about John? He just moved to Amsterdam.” John, her brother, was attending the University of Amsterdam. He was half the reason we had moved to Europe.
“He’ll be fine too.”2
“What about Domo?” Domo was our dog, a terrier/basset hound mix I adopted after my divorce.
“He could come back with us,” Julia answered.
I didn’t say anything. I was quite certain Domo wouldn’t want to get back on a plane.
There were a few issues going on. One was that Julia’s ex-boyfriend (from Hoboken), who had broken up with her at the beginning of the summer, was now telling her he wanted her back. He knew perfectly well that she had moved to Italy. Two, she didn’t like her new school. (We had done our research, but the reality of it, I supposed, was another thing.) Three, she concluded that Modena, a small tertiary city in the Emilia-Romagna region near Bologna, and the town we had chosen to live in was not going to offer her much. It was too dissimilar from Hoboken, where we had resided for four years, a dockside town that sat across the Hudson River from Manhattan and “the sixth borough” of New York City, some called it. Though, it was also a punchline for New Yorkers and historically home to infamous mobsters like Bobby Manna “Mots” Casella, and “Petey” Caporino.
“We can do it,” Julia persisted. “You and I have always been a team.”
“Exactly,” I said. “We are a team. We need to stick it out together here.”
“Why not in Hoboken? We were happy there.”
“Yes, but we’re here now. We all agreed to come here. We discussed it, remember?”
“I know, but I’ve changed my mind. I want to go back.”
“Honey, it’s not possible to go back now. I mean, where would we even go back to?”
“It is possible! Anything’s possible,” Julia stubbornly maintained.
While we were discussing the move to Italy, we reminisced about all the other places we had lived, and there had been many. “We’ve done crazier things,” Julia pointed out, giggling. Like the time she and I went to Israel in 2012 after her dad and I separated. Shortly after we arrived, Israeli forces killed the military leader of Hamas, and Palestinian-armed groups in the Gaza Strip retaliated by firing missiles into Israel, the first time ever reaching Tel Aviv. Sirens blared, and everyone ran into bomb shelters while Israel’s revolutionary rocket-defense system, the Iron Dome, shot down incoming missiles by Gaza militants. It wasn’t funny, but the fact that I was in the middle of a very contentious divorce prompted us to roll on the floor laughing in hysterics at the ridiculousness of our situation.
“Honey,” I said, taking a deep breath, “we just landed in Italy. We’re all still acclimating. It’s true we’ve had some . . . crazy experiences in the past, but you don’t move to another continent to turn around and move back two weeks later,” I said. I was pacing around our sauna-like apartment. It was August, and Italians didn’t believe in air-conditioning. They complained it made their neck hurt. To escape the heat, everyone fled to the seaside, leaving Modena deserted and shut down like a nuclear apocalypse had occurred.
It didn’t help that we had landed in a sparsely furnished apartment in a four-hundred-year-old building with dark hallways and a painfully slow elevator. Even the front door looked like something from two centuries ago that required a large metal key and five turns of the lock to open, in contrast to our three-bedroom apartment in Hoboken in a doorman building. I reminded myself that my mother once lived in a dingy apartment in Taipei to study Chinese. It was on the ground floor, had smelly toilet drains, and sat on a busy side street in Tien Mu. Like this apartment in Modena, it was temporary.
“But I hate it here,” Julia said. “It’s not a good place for me.” She wouldn’t let up.
“My love,” I said, keeping my voice calm, “if it’s any consolation, I also miss Hoboken.” And I did. I chose to live there after my divorce. It reminded me of make-believe towns I’d seen in children’s storybooks as a kid. The kind with big, colorful pictures of all the homes and businesses in town grouped together in a neat square: the church, the park, the grocery store, the butcher, the doctor’s office, the hair salon, and then Main Street. Sitting along the Hudson River, it had a stunning view of New York City. At night, looking at the gorgeous lit-up Manhattan skyline, we could see the bright lights of the tall buildings: the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the Freedom Tower. We joked we had a far better view than those snobby Manhattanites on the other side of the river.
It was too expensive to live directly in Manhattan, so Hoboken, to me, was the next best place to be if you want to be a writer. I took writing classes at NYU and workshops in fiction, memoir, screenwriting, and playwriting. I joined writing groups and made friends with other writers. I went to readings and book signings and met famous authors. I was impressed with myself for doing things like going to the Village to take a film class. I was living a writer’s dream.
Now, I was living the Italian dream—or struggling to, anyway.
“Look,” I continued, “if you still hate living here in a few months, we’ll move back, okay? Do we have a deal?” If she took me up on it, I’d have to honor the deal. But I was willing to do some serious negotiating.
“I don’t know . . .” Julia shrugged. “I’m having a hard time adjusting to this country.”
“But you’ve adjusted to other places,” I said, flabbergasted that of all the places we lived, Italy was the one she couldn’t tolerate.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t this time.”
After many exhausting discussions, I told Julia we’d at least try to live in Italy for a while, suffer through it as best we could. It would not only be wrong to go back—to give up after a few weeks—but it wasn’t feasible either.
***
Once September rolled in and everyone was back from their long beach vacations, the stores and restaurants opened once again. We shopped at the famous covered food market in the center of Modena called Mercato Albinelli, one of the oldest food markets in Italy that sold a beautiful variety of fresh produce, meats, fish, cheeses, and breads. We were surprised to see equine butchers. I read that Italy eats the highest amount of equine meat than any other nation in the world. It’s a delicacy that dates to Roman times, and Italians rave of its health benefits. Julia and I tried it, but it felt sacrilegious.
“The animal died of natural causes,” Michael said. Apparently, all the horses that were eaten in Italy died of natural causes, or so we were told.
We took walks around the Old City and discovered a small movie theater, museums, and an opera house. Along Modena’s main boulevard, Via Emilia, we passed a full range of chic and fashionable boutiques with trendy clothes, several bookstores offering a limited selection of English-language literature, numerous fruit and vegetable stands, family-operated restaurants and cafés, as well as bakeries with the aroma of freshly baked bread wafting through the air. Via Emilia encapsulated the fundamentals of movement. It had originally been a Roman road used by pilgrims and goes in a straight line through the entire region of Emilia-Romagna. Modena, which sits along this ancient road, became the center of automotive design and achievement, known as the home to car manufacturers such as Ferrari, Maserati, Lamborghini, and Pagani. Their prototypes regularly zoomed by at criminally fast speeds, engines roaring with pompous elegance.
I was hoping that with school starting, having a regular routine, and Julia making new friends, she’d feel differently about Italy. But she was more determined than ever—she didn’t want to be there. I desperately tried to talk her out of leaving, but one of the challenging things about being divorced when you have teenagers is that they have somewhere else to live: with their other parent. It greatly diminishes your parental power. And I suspected she felt guilty about not being near her dad too. He had been living in Seattle but moved to Maryland shortly before we left. I felt bad about that as well.
Yet, the main issue was that Julia felt trapped. When we took Domo for a walk in Parco Giardino Ducale Estense, we found out the park once had a zoo. Someone told us there had been lions there, and you could hear their lonely roars throughout the city. The thought of those poor, homesick caged lions roaring in sadness in the cold, foggy Modenese climate haunted me, and perhaps Julia could relate. She rebelled by not wanting to go to school. It wasn’t like her at all; she had always been a good student. I found myself dragging her out of bed to get ready for class, which exploded into a screaming argument. Then, after a rushed breakfast, we dashed to our comically small, rented Fiat Panda parked outside the historic center (we didn’t have a resident parking pass). We hopped in the car—or, rather, I hopped in, and Julia slumped in like a sloth—and then lurched into Modenese rush hour traffic and headed to her school in Montale. As other vehicles rumbled past, I navigated with a stick shift through narrow streets and countless roundabouts. I hadn’t driven in months. In Hoboken, I only drove a few times a year.
When we finally reached the school, we’d jerk to a stop, and Julia would slowly melt out of the car. In the afternoon, I’d pick her up, and she’d sit miserably all the way home.
“You’re experiencing culture shock,” I said in the car coming home from school one day. “It happens to most people. It’s normal.”
“That’s not it,” she insisted. I kissed her head at a stoplight, knowing that adjusting to new places isn’t easy, even for seasoned travelers like us. She had some amazing learning experiences in Hoboken, which taught her to be part of a community. She had volunteered at a day care for low-income families, making packed lunches every Friday for the local homeless shelter. She’d also been in local plays and musical performances and starred in a low-budget film. But she was ready to embark on a new adventure. Or so she had thought.
Perhaps moving from New York City to a small town in Italy was too big of a leap. And yet, Julia and I had taken much bigger leaps. When I was married to her father, our family moved six times, including from Toronto to Beijing.
When we first arrived in China, the company hired a realtor to show us houses to rent on the outskirts of Beijing in a town called Shunyi. Our realtor was astonished that we had brought our dog to China. “You have dog?” she kept asking, as if we had been pulling her leg. We hadn’t dared to mention we had a cat too. Her driver drove us around in a beat-up car while her two cell phones rang constantly. She was either calling someone or someone was calling her. Sometimes she talked into both phones at the same time as we were jammed in the small back seat with the windows down because there was no AC. For much of the day, we sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic while the car thrusted forward then stopped, then inched ahead, and then stopped again. When the driver would have any space on the road at all, he would zoom ahead, escaping several near collisions with pedestrians and bicycles to get a few spaces up. There was no barrier between us and the sound of the deafening traffic, the choking exhaust fumes, and the mixture of pungent smells of roasting meat, decaying vegetables, and urine. But at the end of the day, we did find a house in an expat compound that had a clubhouse with a pool. It was an oasis. A walled and protected enclave. But still, it was a leap.
I had been taking leaps my entire life. My parents were US diplomats, and we lived in South Korea, Nigeria, Israel, the Philippines, and Burma (now Myanmar). By the time I was six, I had already lived on three continents, been in two coups d’état, and flown from Minneapolis to London by myself. My mother would ask me then, “Do you like moving around so much?” How could I have answered that question honestly? I didn’t know any differently. I suppose I didn’t mind it. When I grew up, I married someone whose job required us to move frequently. I subjected my children to the same lifestyle, believing in the importance of having worldly experiences and hoping to instill a curiosity about other cultures.
With each move our family made, I promised the kids we would have a grand adventure and told them about the time my mother lived in Beijing in the nineties, and during my visits to her, she and I would search for Beijing’s ancient beauty. We’d walk along sycamore-lined streets where old men sat on park benches with their caged pet birds. Sometimes we saw old Chinese women hobbling on bonded feet, and we’d peek into hutongs, the narrow alleyways where faded red gates offered a glimpse of ruined courtyard houses. The most special thing we did was visit the Ming Tombs in Changping Qu. We’d hike a short distance from the main renovated structures to the neglected areas, bringing packed lunches and eating on the crumbling steps of a deserted tomb, like travelers who just discovered an ancient place.
Years later, when I took John and Julia to the Ming Tombs, we arrived in a cloud of smog behind large tour buses as I asked our driver to find the deserted imperial tombs. We drove around the grounds but couldn’t find the crumbling burial palaces anywhere, only the polished, over-renovated ones. We pulled over, got out of the car, and walked around aimlessly, hoping to locate this memory I swore I hadn’t made up. It was a different place. It had changed.
Maybe it’s easy to make promises—to yourself and to others— before you move somewhere new, when the dream of what could be feels reachable. Before we moved to Modena, I’d come for visits while Michael was setting up his business there. He was an investment banker and spearheading a project that involved purchasing Italian old-age homes. He assured me that it was a solid investment opportunity since Italy, per capita, had the second oldest population in the world (Japan had the first). His Italian business associate, Marco, would promise me that if I moved to Italy, Michael would buy me a new car, as if that’s all that was needed to convince me.
“Ah-Jeni, would you like to own an Alfa Romeo Stelvio?” he asked me.
“Sure,” I said, having only a vague idea of what Alfa Romeo cars were.
“Red or blue?” he’d ask as Michael looked at me and beamed.
“I’ll take either.”
“Maybe a red one,” Marco had said.
It wasn’t a promise of a new car that eventually got me to make the move; it was the promise of new experiences and possibilities. It was Italy!
I continued to hold firm with Julia that we were not going to move back to Hoboken so soon after we had arrived. We argued and cried, and Julia told me she wanted to live with her father in Maryland. It was not Hoboken, but at least it was on the East Coast of the United States, she said. Then finally, exhausted and defeated, I told her that if she wanted to live with her father, then I was not going to get in her way if she agreed to spend all her breaks, including Christmases and summers, with me. Michael, who had been pleading with Julia as well but had basically let me handle it, held me as I cried.
“What am I going to do without her?” I asked Michael, sobbing into his shoulder. “Once she leaves, we may never live under the same roof again!” Julia and I would lose precious time together—time we would never get back—and it was devastating. She was leaving home too soon.
“Pretend she’s going to boarding school,” Michael suggested. I thought this was a good idea. Many teenagers left home to go to boarding school. I had briefly gone to boarding school. But still, I didn’t want her to leave. I loved her so very, very much! When the kids were little and I’d put them to bed, I’d kiss their little foreheads and say, “I love you, forever and ever, no matter what.” I meant it, more than I had ever meant anything. Julia knew that my love was unconditional. Maybe this is why she felt safe enough to leave.
Even so, I thought about how I had lived in various countries with my mother when I was a kid—nothing as Western and picturesque as Italy—and I was pretty sure she would have never put up with me saying I was going to go live with my father. And yet, it appeared history was repeating itself: divorced mother taking daughter to live overseas and asking, “Do you like moving around so much?” It’s a question only a mother feeling guilty would ask. Julia undoubtedly gave me her answer.
The night before Julia left to go back to the States, we slept in the same bed with our arms wrapped around each other. She was wedged next to me, her arms grasping my shoulders. I laid there in the dark, thinking about how she had always been my rock. I thought about that one awful night in Beijing, when her father and I had gotten in a fight and I had left the house in a fit of rage, slamming the front door on my way out, needing fresh air and distance from our place. I got on my bicycle and was about to take off when Julia, breathless, came running out of the house. Without a word, she hopped on the back of my bike, and together we rode off against the night sky, the streetlights blinding and bright. I steered through the dusty Chinese roads in a daze. Julia’s little arms wrapped around my waist, holding on tight, gave me the only comfort I had in the world as tears rolled down my cheeks.
Though now I knew she was already seeing herself back in the States, like it was her refuge, and in the arms of her boyfriend, who was surely going to break her heart again. And maybe I had been equally naive. Maybe my visions were just as far-fetched and bound for disappointment.
The next morning, there was a steady stream of rain pouring down, and we dragged Julia’s suitcase along the cobblestone street that was half-flooded. Occasionally, a car whooshed by and splashed our legs. We walked out of the historic center to a street outside its walls to meet Marco, Michael’s business associate, who was waiting for us in his car. He had volunteered to drive us to the airport since the Fiat Panda was far too small for all of us and Julia’s luggage.
Silently, we climbed into his car. Soon we were on the way, as the rain drummed steadily against the windshield, mixed with the sound of my sniffles and sobs. No one dared utter a word. And what could anyone say anyway? There were no words for this situation. None. Whatsoever.
When we got to the airport, we checked in Julia’s luggage, though I was still hoping she would change her mind. We then walked her to security, hoping again she’d decide to stay. But no such luck. She was stubborn, and I supposed I had taught her to be that way. I had taught her to plow her own path, hadn’t I? I had taught her to forge ahead when she knew what was best for her. That’s what I did when I divorced her father. Now it was coming back around. It was karma.
I didn’t want time to pass but to freeze long enough for us to reconsider, to stop and think about it for a while longer. But we found ourselves at the gates too soon, and this was where we had to say goodbye. “Mommy,” Julia said, and we threw our arms around each other, sobbing and making a scene. Then Julia pulled away, and Michael and I watched as she got in the security line, then disappeared. I was now, without any warning or preparation, an empty nester. An empty nester. It was frightening how fast things changed. How could I have ended up suddenly somewhere else entirely? She is going to boarding school, I repeated several times. It’s just boarding school.
In my senior year of high school, I was sent to boarding school because my mother moved to Burma, where there was no accredited high school to attend. So, over winter break, twice a year for three years, I traveled to a place I could barely locate on a map. To get there, I’d fly through Tokyo, then to Bangkok, where I’d spend the night in the airport hotel. The next morning, I’d take another flight to Rangoon until, finally, I’d land onto a rutted tarmac next to a crumbling terminal building amid swaying palm trees in the hot dust. Rangoon was a decaying capital with mildewed Elizabethan-style architecture left over from the colonial period. It had lakes and parks and twisted old trees, and in the center was a golden-spired two-thousand-year-old Pagoda that loomed above everything. Outside of Rangoon, in the countryside, it was studded with pagodas and rice fields, farmers working the paddies in their conical straw hats next to their water buffalos, the scent of incense and jasmine in the air. It was a country that time seemed to have forgotten, and a traveler’s dream, but not ideal for its citizens. General Ne Win ruled with an iron fist. Civil liberties were nonexistent, and the population lived in a state of fear.
This was where my mother lived. Burma was far from family and friends, far from my boarding school. And yet, when you’re a minor, or in school, home is where your parents reside. In Julia’s case, she had two options, Italy or Maryland, and she ultimately chose the latter.
The world was a smaller place than when I was a kid traveling with my parents to the far reaches of the planet. Now, we weren’t so far away, having cell phones, the internet, laptop computers, and direct transatlantic flights. It wasn’t like it was when I was a kid living overseas, when we communicated by letters, mostly, and rare telephone calls with bad connections. For me, fortunately, I could get to Julia in less than twenty-four hours if I had to.
After a while, when we knew there was no hope that Julia would change her mind, Michael and I walked out of the airport, emotionally drained. Feeling shaky, I allowed him to lead me into the parking lot where Marco was standing next to his car.
On the way home, I sobbed as the rain continued to pour down and the windshield wipers struggled to scrape away the water. Everything looked so gray and ugly and sad. This was supposed to be our family adventure in Europe, and this wasn’t the scenario I had envisioned for us. I sat there in the back seat, shell-shocked, and reflected on the way things used to be before we moved to Italy. Had there been signs or clues that this would happen? Had I looked the other way? Now I was staring out the window into the fog, aware that I was in one of those surreal moments that would induce pain whenever I looked back on it. The understanding that the harsh realities of freeing ourselves forces others to change their lives, perhaps imprison them in a world they hadn’t wanted. Which one of us was forcing the other to change their lives? Which one of us wanted to be free? We are interconnected, whether we want to be or not.
When we reached Modena, Marco stopped the car in front of the Old City, where he had picked us up a few hours before when I still had my daughter with me, and now she wasn’t with us, and we opened the car door. I stepped a leg out into a puddle of water and got my shoes wet as Marco turned and looked at me, shaking his head. I was embarrassed that he had witnessed my deeply private family matter, something I wished I could have kept hidden. I had the urge to run, to get on a plane and follow Julia back to the States, but I froze, allowing the rain to pelt my legs like daggers. As I wallowed in my powerlessness, there was a part of me that admired Julia for being bold enough to take charge of her own destiny.
“Ah-Jeni,” Marco said sadly as the rain poured down on the windshield, making the wipers thrash side to side. Perhaps he thought life would get difficult for him and Michael. If I was unhappy, I was sure he was thinking, it could disrupt business.
Michael stood outside holding an umbrella, looking like a blur through the window. Everything looked distorted. Instead of going back to the States, I was staying behind in this? How I wished I was more like my mother, who had been resolute, and Julia, her granddaughter.
I looked at Marco as he shrugged. “Ah-Jeni,” he said again, “this is life.”
I sighed as I got all the way out of the car and stood in the pouring rain. I didn’t care that I was getting drenched. Everything I had known to be true had evaporated in an instant. I now couldn’t remember why we were in Italy. I had taken a wrong turn. And yet, when I retraced my steps in my head, I had gone down the path I had always gone down. I had done what I had always done. Move. Start over. Adjust. Then leave. I was on a perpetual cycle of impermanence.
I didn’t know how else to live.
