Two Places I Missed by Barbara Hu

Two places I Missed                                                                                    

By Barbara Hu 

An eight-passenger minivan stopped in front of a decrepit Japanese wooden duplex. Before anyone else could move, my youngest son jumped out with his camera. 

Click. Click. Click. 

"Mom, are you sure this is the house Grandpapa always talked about?" 

I looked at the weathered wood and answered slowly. "I believe so. It's the first house in the second row of these forty duplexes. And look—that concrete unit on the right wasn't here before." 

The house itself surprised me less than how easily I found my bearings. I still knew exactly where the side yard had been. My brother wandered over and laughed. "Remember Jane? Papa rented to her and her husband. She knitted matching gloves, beanies, and scarves for all of us before Mom and Dad moved to Taipei." 

Standing there, memories return, some still hazy. These houses had once been a close little neighborhood where everyone knew everyone else. 

I told my family about the walks to the beach, the bicycle rides to school, and practicing my trumpet late into warm summer nights before the school parade. Across the street lived Mei-qing. On hot afternoons we would sneak away to swim in the Pacific while my mother napped beneath the luffa trellis, a pukishan fan resting loosely in her hand on the rattan chair. That spade shape and smell of the dry palm leave is what I remember most. No photograph would ever capture it, but it is always there in my mind. 

When The Typhoon hit, the sky turned almost black. We huddled together in the basement while the wind ripped shingles from the roof. Rain punched through the ceiling. In the silence after, we spent days without water or electricity. 

1983 

He came to San Diego in 1969. I arrived in 1980. Before our first son was born, the cove became our weekend routine. I would jog past the Children's Pool, cross the bridge, then sit in the car reading until he finished work. Afterwards we would swim together in the cold Pacific. 

At low tide, we carried an old laundry detergent bucket and scraped mussels from the rocks for fishing bait. Then we climbed onto a large rock overlooking the water. He cast his line and waited. Suddenly the rod bent. The dance began—reeling, pulling, and grinning. Soon a fish with bright blue eyes flashed in the sunlight and flaps lively on the rock. 

We stood there looking across the same Pacific Ocean that had carried us here, thinking of our families in Taiwan and Hong Kong. That ocean no longer separated two homes. It connected them. 

I still remember these places because they mark the two shores of my life. One taught me where I came from. The other showed me where I would build my future. Even now, I feel I belong to both places. My sons are completely at home in America. I still carry the Pacific with me.