1.



 



In the reign of George III, Captain James Cook, who was called captain out of necessity, he was a mere lieutenant before that, left England for that land mass in the Pacific Ocean called then Terra Australis Incognita, to observe the planet Venus as it traversed the space that stood between the Earth and the Sun. He sailed on a ship called the Endeavour and he took with him: botanists (Joseph Banks, who brought along Daniel Carlsson Solander, a disciple and former student of Linnaeus, who brought along his friend and fellow botanist Herman Sporing); artists (the painters William Hodges and Sydney Parkinson); and scientists, and it is in this way that the Second Age of European global domination begins. Cook and his crew left England in August, 1768. They stopped off in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where they noticed that there were no beggars on the streets. And if anyone told them that those former beggars now owned land and owned people to work that land, and so therefore had no need to be beggars anymore, I can so far find no record of this. 



 



2.



 



A Scottish geographer named Alexander Dalrymple was originally named captain of the Endeavour on this first voyage, but the First Lord of the Admiralty, a man named Edward Hawke, objected to Dalrymple because he was not a seaman, only a mere geographer. I note Edward Hawke because I grew up in a section of Antigua called Ovals, a term associated with cricket, a sport with rules said to embody the honorable character of the English people. This place is a neighborhood made up of five streets, and each street was named after an English maritime hero/criminal: Rodney, Nelson, Hawke, Hood, and Drake. Among my daily duties was to pick up our bottle of cow’s milk from a woman who lived on Hawke Street. We lived on Nelson Street, and this was only two streets away from Hawke, but for me the journey was full of dread, for I was afraid of dogs, and there was always a dog who would bark at me, and I imagined that the bark and the bite were the same; and there was also a house in which lived a beautiful girl, not so much older than me, who did live with her mother but had silenced her, so that her mother’s commands not to play calypso music very loud, and not to congregate with boys or men were completely ignored. Her name was Marie, and she frightened me, but not for very long: She ran away to Trinidad to be with The Mighty Sparrow, and we all knew the song by him, “I love the way you walk Marie, I love the way you talk Marie,” was about her. She lived on Hawke Street, I lived on Nelson Street. The Mighty Sparrow was of Trinidad, and Trinidad is a word of Spanish origin, a word born of the imagination of that other greater and earlier explorer, whose name does not appear in James Cook’s Journals, as far as I can tell.



 



3.



 



In Rio de Janeiro, the women are addicted to gallantry. Solander notes that in the evening, women appear at every window to present “nosegays” to the men they favor. 



But Solander knows flowers, and a nosegay is made up of flowers. What flowers made up these nosegays? He does not say. In any case the climate of Rio, which in August is not Summer, he finds okay. The soil, he notes, produces all the tropical fruits: oranges, lemons, limes, melons, mangoes, cocoa nuts. And then this: “The mines are rich, and lie a considerable way up the country. They were kept so private, that any person found upon the road which led to them, was hung upon the next tree, unless he could give a satisfactory account of the cause of his being in that situation. Near 40,000 (forty thousand) negroes are annually imported to dig in these mines, which are so pernicious to the human frame, and occasion so great a mortality amongst the poor wretches employed in them, that in the year 1766, 20,000 more were drafted from the town of Rio, to supply the deficiency of the former number. Who can read this without emotion!”  That was on August seventh.



 



4.



 



On the eighth, they left Rio and sailed on into the Pacific Ocean where nothing happened until the twenty-second, when they came upon a colony of water-dwelling mammals, grey in colour. On the twenty-third, they witnessed an eclipse of the moon, and the next morning, this: “a small white cloud appeared in the west, from which a train of fire issued, extending itself westerly; about two minutes after, we heard two distinct loud explosions, immediately succeeding each other, like those of cannon, after which the cloud disappeared.” 



 



(Right here I want to interject something: for the journal keeper, and this is Cook, the world is still familiar: he knows beggars and so the absence of beggars is interesting; women who are in a confined role and now women who are whores and borrowing the symbols that flag purity and worthiness; the contents of the mines being extracted by forced labour.)



 



5.



 



On the fourth of January, 1769, Cook’s crew mistook a fog bank for an island. On the fourteenth, they encountered a storm in the Strait of La Maire, but found shelter in a cove which Cook named St. Vincent’s Bay. Banks and Solander went ashore, and the journals recount: “having been on shore some hours, returned with more than a hundred different plants and flowers, hitherto unnoticed by the European botanists.”



 



6.



 



On April tenth: “looking out for the island to which they were destined, they saw land ahead. The next morning it appeared very high and mountainous, and it was known to be King George’s III’s Island, so named by Captain Wallis, but by the natives called Otaheite. The calms prevented the Endeavour from approaching it till the morning of the twelfth when, a breeze springing up, several canoes were making towards the ship. Each canoe had in it young plantains, and branches of trees, as tokens of peace and friendship; and they were handed up the sides of the ship by the people in one of the canoes, who made signals in a very expressive manner, intimating that they desired these emblems of pacification be placed in a conspicuous part of the ship; and they were accordingly stuck amongst the rigging, at which they testified their approbation. Their cargoes consisted of cocoa-nuts, bananas, breadfruit, apples, and figs, which were very acceptable to the crew, and were readily purchased.” (But how was this purchase made? There is no account of it.)



 



7.



 



Twenty days later: “Tomio came running to the tents and taking Mr. Banks by the arm, to whom they applied in all emergent cases, told him that Tubora Tumaida was dying, owing to something which had been given to him by the sailors, and prayed him to go instantly to him. Accordingly Mr. Banks went, and found the Indian very sick. He was told, that he had been vomiting, and had thrown up a leaf, which they said contained some of the poison he had taken. Upon examining the leaf, Mr. Banks found it to be nothing more than tobacco, which the Indian had begged of some of their people. He looked up to Mr. Banks while he was examining the leaf, as if he had not a moment to live. Mr. Banks,  now knowing his disorder, ordered him to drink cocoa-nut milk, which soon restored him to health, and he was as cheerful as ever.”



 



8.



 



On Tuesday the ninth of May: “The natives, after repeated attempts, finding themselves incapable of pronouncing the names of the English gentlemen, had recourse to new ones formed from their own language. Captain Cook was named Toote; Hicks, Hete; Gore, Toura; Solander, Tolano; Banks, Opane; Green, Treene; and so on for the greatest part of the ships crew.”



 



9.



 



On July fourth, Banks planted “a quantity of the seeds of water melons, oranges, lemons, limes, and other plants and trees which he had brought from Rio de Janiero. He gave these seeds to the Indians in great plenty, and planted many of them in the woods: some of the melon seeds which had been planted soon after his arrival, had already produced plants, which appeared to be in a very flourishing state.”



 



10.



 



On the ninth of July, when Captain Cook wished to leave, two of his men were missing. He held important native people hostage, demanding his men be freed. But the “Indians” did not have them. They were in the mountains, they had taken wives. When his men returned, they told him that the Indians were right, they wanted to stay there, and had hidden themselves, hoping he would leave without them. In the middle of all this, Cook’s note: “They have no European fruits, garden stuff, or pulse, nor grain of any species.” 



 



11.



 



Between the fifth of August and the fifteenth of August: “The island of Ohiteroa does not shoot up into high peaks, like the others which they visited, but is more level and uniform, and divided into small hillocks, some of which are covered with groves of trees; they saw no bread-fruit, and not many cocoa-nut trees, but great number of the tree called Etoa were planted all along the shore.”



 



12.



 



On the twenty-fifth of August, the adventurers from England celebrated being away from home for one year with Cheshire cheese and port, and the port would have come from Portugal or Spain, places they didn’t think much of, but which all the same contributed much to their intimate identity, their intimate mannerisms and posture, the people they were when no one cared to look. The journal records that the port was “as good as any they had ever drank in England.”



 



13.



 



Sometime around the twentieth of October: “Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander visited their houses, and were kindly received. Fish constituted their principal food at the time, and the root of a sort of fern served them for bread; which, when roasted upon a fire, and divested of its bark, was sweet and clammy; in taste not disagreeable, but unpleasant from its number of fibres. Vegetables were, doubtless, at other seasons plentiful. The women paint their faces red, which, so far from increasing, diminishes the very little beauty they have.” 



 



14.



 



On the morning of November third: “they gave the name of The Court of Aldermen to a number of small islands that lay contiguous. The chief, who governed the district from Cape Turnagain to this coast, was named Teratu.”



 



15.



 



On November eleventh: “oysters were procured in great abundance from a bed which had been discovered, and they proved exceedingly good. Next day the ship was visited by two canoes, with unknown Indians; after some invitation, they came on board, and trafficked without fraud. Captain Cook sailed from this bay, after taking possession of it in the name of the King of Great Britain on the fifteenth.” (For me, it’s rare to see that: taking possession in the name of a monarch of Great Britain.)



 



16.



 



On the eighteenth (still November), Cook, Banks and Solander go off to examine a bay where a river empties. They find trees that are tall and thick in trunk, trees they have never seen before. Cook calls the river Thames, “it being not unlike our river of the same name.” 



 



17.



 



William Bligh was born on the ninth of September, 1754. He joined the navy at 16. At 22, he was appointed master of the Resolution, one of the ships accompanying James Cook on his third and last voyage to the Pacific. After this, he was placed in command of ships that protected trade in the West Indies. In 1787, Joseph Banks commissioned him to go to Tahiti and collect plants of the breadfruit tree, which were to be taken to the West Indies and distributed among the many British-owned islands, where they would be grown as food for the enslaved African population. This journey was not a success. His crew mutinied, and threw him and the plants he had collected overboard. He did not sink to the bottom of the ocean, but the plants did. In an open boat that was about 20 feet long, and accompanied by some sailors loyal to him, he arrived in Timor six weeks later. In 1791, in a ship called Providence, he sailed again to Tahiti, to get some more of that same monoecious tree, and this time his efforts were successful. The men did not mutiny, but they did complain that he rationed their supply of water, all to make certain that not one plant would die. Bligh was eventually made governor of the prison colony that Australia had become, but eventually the prisoners, like his crew, mutinied against him. He was arrested and jailed in Sydney for more than a year. He returned to England in 1810 and died in 1817. He is buried in a churchyard in Lambeth, with his wife and two of his five children. In that same churchyard are buried the Tradescants, Father and Son. I once saw these graves while visiting an exhibition devoted to Gertrude Jykell. The church is now a museum devoted to the garden.



 



18.



 



The breadfruit belongs to the genus Artocarpus, and in that genus there are some 60 shrubs and trees. The genus in turn belongs in the Moraceae or mulberry family. The name Artocarpus comes from the Greek language: artos means bread, karpos means fruit. These plants were named so by Johann Reinhold Forster and J. George Adam Forster, father and son botanists who accompanied James Cook on his second voyage to the Pacific. They were passengers aboard the Resolution.



 



19.



 



HMS Providence arrived in Kingstown, St. Vincent in early 1793 with many live breadfruit plants. By then, in St. Vincent as would be so in many other islands that were British-owned, a Botanic Garden had been established. In actuality, these places were not Botanic Gardens at all. They were primarily of economic importance, involved in the prosperity of the mother country. They were modeled on Kew Gardens, which was established by Joseph Banks, who became its first Director. (The second and third were the Hookers, father and son.) Some of this first collection of breadfruit plants was also sent to Jamaica, which was the largest British-owned island. 



 



20.



 



Near the end of the eighteenth century, there were many slaves in the West Indies. Certainly by then to say you were from the West Indies was to say you were black or of African descent. Europeans didn’t like living there. Most people who owned plantations paid other people to manage them. White people who lived in these places, where there were so many enslaved black people, were not considered really white people anymore: they were creole, the first meaning of that word. The word now can mean all sorts of things but it’s in that way it was first used: to designate a white person born and living in the black and enslaved world.



 



21.



 



Those many slaves had to eat food. And they had to have time to cultivate it. It isn’t hard to imagine the calculation: If an easy source of nourishment could be found for these people, they would produce more valuable goods instead of growing their own food. 



 



22.



 



The slaves never liked the breadfruit. They refused to eat it. With the exception of my mother, a woman who was born on the island of Dominica, I have never met anyone who liked the breadfruit. In particular, and especially, I have never met a child who liked the breadfruit. The breadfruit is said to be bland but there are other bland foods and they are not shunned. It is said to be starchy, but I can think of many other foods that are starchy and they are not shunned. 



 



23.



 



The breadfruit or Artocarpus altilis is a flowering tree in the family Moraceae. It is cultivated in a lot of places that are warm in climate all year round. It is native to the islands in the Pacific Ocean. It grows to an enormous height. Its leaves are large, thick and deeply incised. The plant yields a latex-like fluid that can be used in boat caulking. The fruits are seasonal, says a book I consulted about it, but I seem to remember it as always in season and readily available to my mother, who used to insist to me that it was of great nutritional value. The tree itself is of such generous height and breadth that it can be used as a shade tree, yet I have never seen such use made of it, even in a place as sun-drenched as the place where I grew up.



 



24.



 



My mother was born on the island of Dominica, and notice the way this is phrased: for of James Cook, I would say that he was born in a village, and that village would be in a country, not an island. An island is ephemeral, and yet James Cook was born on an island; but my mother was born on the island of Dominica, and she grew up there; she left when she was 16 years of age, taking passage in a boat that almost sunk when it ran into a hurricane in an area called the Guadeloupe Channel. She had quarreled with her family and did not see them again for 30 years. She continued her quarrel with them through letters, and those letters traveled through the postal arrangement that had been put in place by Anthony Trollope. When she was in her sixth decade of living, she began to return to Dominica and see the people who made up her understanding of the world before she knew men and children and other people. While there, she ate a breadfruit that to her had such extraordinary flavor, that she collected the seeds, and brought them back to Antigua. She planted the seeds just on the boundary of our yard, and from those seeds grew one tree of unusual height and of unusual beauty. Shortly before her son, my brother, died, there was a hurricane, one with a man’s name, and it was very destructive but we were spared, except that the breadfruit my mother had planted was destroyed. It fell down on her neighbor’s house, completely destroying it. Its loss was never spoken of with any sadness, it was just one of the many things that came from somewhere else and then disappeared into an even vaster somewhere else, which is nowhere nameable at all.



 



25.



 



If a want of food is signal of poverty, then as a child, I was never poor at all. I had an abundance of food, only all the food that was presented to me was food I didn’t like at all. I wanted food that had the names of food I had read in a book. I wanted food from far away. Once, I saw an advertisement in a magazine for beans: there were brown beans in a heap, saturated with brown sauce, and on the top of the heap was a piece of meat, glistening and large, which was pork, for underneath the image was a description of the dish, and it said it was pork and beans. I longed for it. No food my mother could cook came close to tasting the way the advertisement for pork and beans looked. I was an extremely tall and thin girl, and my mother was always making me foods that she thought I would like, and would also make me fat. Or stout. That was a compliment, a stout woman. One day she presented to me an unusual looking dish, something that looked in texture like potato, but was arranged in form like rice. I had never seen it before. In colour it looked like the breadfruit and knowing my mother, I refused it because I thought it was breadfruit. Again and again, she told me that it wasn’t breadfruit, that it was a new form of rice from England. I ate it, not with any enthusiasm, and all the time I kept saying that I was sure it was breadfruit. After I ate the meal of it, she said, yes, it was breadfruit and she told me how good it was for me. 



 



26.



 



Near the end of his third voyage, which was just as spectacular as the other two, regardless of the weather, interfering with views of the transit of Venus on the first outing, and treasured friends and colleagues dying before returning from the first outing, and all the rest, while trying to return to his beloved England, which is the seventeenth largest island in the world, Captain Cook was killed by some people who seemed to wish they had never set eyes on him in the first place. I am so sorry to say my belief that they boiled and ate him after capturing him is not supported by the facts.

When Sylvester first saw the Buddha in the shop window, it was marked at $200. With his right hand he fingered the felt-like softness of a worn five-dollar bill in his pocket, and with his left he held on to a wriggling younger sister of five. Her brown curls bounced as she stomped impatiently at being kept in the empty parking lot. She was not interested in the old and dusty statuettes, or the smiling fat man who sat on his rump and was as bald as an onion. She clutched a tousled Barbie to her chest and skipped impatiently on feet clad in clean white loafers — she wanted to go home.

            “Five more minutes, Ruth,” he said, without taking his eyes off the display. Stout painted kittens waved their paws in endless homage, and red-blue dragons arched their scaly, snake-like bodies. The Buddha, however, was king. His golden stomach, as round as a pumpkin, radiated opulence, and his ears hung down as if they were weighted with heavy jewels. His eyes slanted like moons and his mouth was open in laughter. Sylvester’s chest tightened with desire.



His parents brushed his request aside.



“Do we really need it?” asked his father, sitting in his paisley armchair and not looking up from his copy of the *Times*. Sylvester pressed further — they hadn’t gotten him a birthday present this year, but Ruth had gotten a Barbie.



The ends of his father’s moustache turned down and he seemed to think for a moment. Then he ruffed Sylvester’s mouse-brown hair and said, “Ask your mother.”



“No space,” said his mother from beneath a criss-crossed curtain of leaves. He saw only a mass of frizzy brown hair, a plaid shirt, faded jeans. She was bent, snipping at leaves, and her rump stuck up in the air. The fern would need repotting soon, and there were some new sprouts. And her dahlias — they were incredibly successful this year, red-purple-yellow bursts blooming under her care. She was estimating that by next month all the ledges and corners of the house would be occupied, and under the windows too.



Ruth got the Barbie, he pointed out once more.



“Mm.” Leaves rustled uncomfortably. “Could you pass the shears, honey?”



He turned on his heel and stomped away.



Ruth refused to hold his hand the next day on the way home from school. Instead she trailed behind him, jerking the doll’s stiff legs like chopsticks along the curb. Sylvester sat cross-legged under the store window, where the Buddha smiled benevolently at him over its golden belly. There were seven dollars in his pocket, and his stomach growled for its missed lunch.



When he came home, his mother was sitting on newspapers, between piles of dirt and mulch. He couldn’t see an inch of carpet in his family room between the dirt, the papers, and the plants. “Well!” said his mother. “This will all get cleaned up soon.” She cupped a baby dahlia in her hands and beamed at him. “How was school?”



He asked her once more for the Buddha — slowly, in his best grown-up tone. I’m serious, it implied. I mean business.



His mother looked up and wrinkled her nose at him. Both of their eyes were almond shaped and almond colored, but his nose was sharper and mouth tighter. Were it not for his small face, weak chin, and baby skin, he could have had the older face. He was so severe, she thought. Except for the pleading in his eyes, which would have moved a machine, he was too old for his age.



“If you’re good, I think Santa will get it for you for Christmas,” she said, and winced to herself. Once again she had failed at saying the right thing.



“That’s too late!” His lower lip pulled downwards, showing his bottom teeth. “You * never* give me anything!” He spat these words like venom, left the room. His mother eased the baby dahlia into the flowerpot and tucked it gently into the soil.



***



It was getting harder and harder for Sylvester to get to the front door. An army of newly potted plants crowded the walkway and Sylvester needed to push past a few ferns before he could see the doorknob.



“Goodbye, dear!” his mother’s muffled voice came from somewhere upstairs. “Watch the plants!”



When he rounded the corner on his way to school each day, the sun would still be low in the sky, glaring orange off the shop window. He had followed the fate of the glass case’s inhabitants since July. They came in with the rich luster and exotic breath of the Orient. Then slowly, as summer wore into fall and fall into winter, they lost their shine, grew dusty. Their price tags became slashed with red ink, and each bore the humiliation of mark-downs until one day they disappeared, borne off in the arms of some pitying stranger. This fate awaited his Buddha, and he resolved to interpose on its behalf.



Under the sun the statue glowed bright and incandescent — a golden orb nestled in the store window. Ruth swayed sleepily by his side, her plastic pink backpack clashing with the store’s warm, Oriental tones. She took her Barbie with her everywhere. Its ice blonde hair and skinny rubber legs irritated him immensely when it chanced to venture near enough to the window for him to see both it and the Buddha at the same time. When his five minutes was up Sylvester would squeeze his eyes shut and pivot himself away in one brisk motion, walking with quick, knee-locked strides. He only allowed himself five minutes in the mornings.



His curious walk, and the constant companionship of his little sister, put him at the mercy of blacktop bullies like Jim Burkle and Big Joey.



“It’s Sylvester the Cat! Is Tweety-bird chasing you?”



“Why is he always doing that with his eyes? He must a eaten something sour!”



“Stinky Sylvie!”



Ruth latched both hands in the crook of his arm, and the closer she clung to him the louder the voices would scoff. Sylvester kept his hands in his pockets and his shoulders scrunched high up to his earlobes. Today a raspberry flecked spit onto his neck, but he walked straight up to Big Joey.



“I’ll do your homework for you if you give me a dollar,” he said. The bully narrowed his mean, beady eyes at him, but Sylvester didn’t flinch.



Big Joey had the nose of a pig. He wrinkled this at Sylvester. “One dollar?”



Jim Burkle overhead this and shouted it to the whole blacktop. “Sylvie the Cat here says he’ll do your homework for a dollar!” A crowd of boys gathered instantly around him and Ruth.



“I want in, too!”



“Do mine, I’ll give you * two* dollars!”



He stayed after school for three more hours, finishing the math problems of all the boys in the fifth grade. He was shrewd and auctioned positions in line, and he collected the money up front. That night he walked home by himself (he had told Ruth to leave on her own), and his tired hand was closed tightly and tenderly around a wad of thirty-four dollars.



The parking lot was empty as usual. His eyes caught the red smudge immediately. The Buddha had been marked down to $150 — a shiver of excitement tickled his bones.



His mother tried to scold him for letting Ruth walk by herself, but she could barely be heard from behind a thick layer of palm leaves. He nearly tripped over a geranium going into the kitchen, but he caught himself on a chair. “Oops, son,” said his father, and Sylvester looked at the chair with surprise. Indeed his father was sitting in it, with a bonsai plant on his lap. Sylvester squinted to see him more clearly — he didn’t look quite right. Ruth was playing on the kitchen floor. Barbie’s clothes were beginning to fray, and the dirt clumped up in her synthetic hair.



When Sylvester went upstairs for bed, treading carefully over cactus bulbs, he found his room jammed with azaleas, Chamaedoreas, hyacinths, and ponytail palms. His pillow was wedged between a potted gardenia and a bluebell plant, whose drooping flowers hung over his head like teardrops. “They’ll only be there for a bit,” his mother assured him. “They can keep you company when you sleep.” Sylvester turned onto his side — the look of the blue flowers made his temples hurt.



“Sylvester, I can’t sleep.” Her small voice came from the doorway. Her pink flannel shirt was much too big for her and draped over her shoulders, and the tips of her toes were pink from cold. He felt sorry for her, clutching her Barbie and forever playing on dirty floors. She shifted over and she climbed into his bed, wriggling her small body against his frail frame. He hadn’t eaten lunch for two weeks. He felt a matted tuft of hair brush against his arm, and looked down to see Barbie staring at him with unnaturally large and blue eyes.



“Get that away from me.” He pushed it off the bed. Ruth began to quiver and to cry.



“In the land of Buddha…” he began quietly. They played this game nightly. He cradled her head in the crook of his arm as a means of apology, and as he talked, he began to doze, so that he half spoke, half dreamed of forests, temples, and cloud-ringed mountains coated with gold. The crying ceased, and the two lay side by side in sleep, like two tadpoles among the lilies and the reeds.



 



He began to feel a sense of urgency. At $100, it was a steal. He wished the shop window were made of lead, so that no passing stranger could witness its discounted shame. Someone would realize it was beautiful, someone would take it away. He had exactly fifty dollars.



He had stayed after school until dark this time, adding and multiplying in the woods behind school property for roughly four dollars an assignment. He changed his handwriting after each sheet, stopping only when he could no longer see his pencil in the dark. Counting up his revenue, he had made fifty-eight dollars, and had fifty more in his pocket. It was enough.



He ran from school down four blocks to the store, as quickly as his jerking gait would take him. Paranoia nipped at his ankles. Thirty feet away a terrible thought-vision came to him. An old woman was hobbling past the shop, and chanced to turn her head. Twenty feet — she looks at the Buddha, and she takes a liking to its grinning face. Ten feet — the lady is inquiring within. What would Sylvester do now, if a stranger snatched the prize from his grasp? He paled at the possibility. His backpack bounced up and down his back, as if to hurry him along.



The setting sun glared red off the store window, and there was no old lady in sight. In fact, the store was closed — 6pm closing time on Fridays. He pressed his face to the window, his breath coming in shallow gasps — it was there, it was still there. The Buddha looked back at him, lazy eyelids drooping over its smiling eyes. Tomorrow was Saturday; he could buy it first thing in the morning. It would be his by this time tomorrow.



When he reached home he saw that vines had crept up the sides of his house to an alarming extent. He could not find the door, so he climbed in through the living room window. His mother lay stomach down on the ground on matted palm leaves, untying two bickering vines with her fingers. A young, yellow vine snuck impudently up her wrist and she slapped it off lightly. She didn’t seem to hear him tumble in. Sylvester bent and kissed her cheek. It was soft and mossy.



That night he stuffed one hundred bills in his coat pocket — wadded it tightly and pressed it down as far as his pocket extended. He spoke breathlessly and squeezed Ruth’s hand. “In the land of Buddha…” he said, and could hardly contain himself. “In the land of Buddha, there was a little boy with glasses. He was the wisest boy in all the kingdom...” Whispered words slipped from his mouth like pearls. He spoke quickly and quietly late into the night.



 



“Good morning sleepyhead.” Ruth came into his room, her white loafers dancing from side to side. For the first time, she had risen earlier than he had. She stopped in the doorway when she saw him flinging clothes and sheets over his shoulder with violent motions. A white shirt flopped disconsolately at her feet.



His fingers were raking ferociously at the sheets, at the vines, at the insides of his pockets, which he already knew were empty. It was there last night, a definitive lump of bills against his stomach, the thick wad of his after school labors and hunger pangs stuffed in his coat. Where was it now? Had his mother cleaned? Impossible—there wasn’t an inch of furniture to be seen beneath the room’s layer of plant-life.



“Good mo-orning, I said!” Ruth planted herself in front of him and pointed her freckled chin at his chest. “What are you doing?”



Sylvester’s eyes riveted upon the Barbie in her hand. Its clothes were strangely new — an outfit of a matching green and gray. George Washington gazed back at him from the front of its shirt.



He grabbed her by the shoulders, fingers clamping on either side of her small frame.



“What have you done?” His voice was high. Her eyes grew wide with an uncomprehending fear.



“Sylvester, you’re hurting me.”



He shook her until her teeth rattled. “*Why is your Barbie wearing my money*?”



She squealed and started crying, the sound bouncing up and down in her throat. “It’s not my fault,” she whined between jumping sobs. She said over and over that it wasn’t her fault.



In the next room he found dollar bills strewn all over the ground. Some had been cut up, and one missed a chunk in the shape of a boot. Another crawled slowly across the floor, being pulled into the overgrown carpet by one curling vine. He caught it and tugged it out viciously. What he could salvage came to exactly thirteen dollars. It wasn’t fit to buy the Buddha’s left foot.



She didn’t understand what she had done. Sniffling and smoothing out her Barbie’s new skirt, she couldn’t understand why he looked at her so, eyes like black beetles in a thinning face.



 



Tuesday was a rainy day. No sun hit the store window, and Sylvester stood for a quarter of an hour under the elements regarding the spot where the Buddha had been. Someone had bought it on Monday, because it was no longer there when he came back from school. Perhaps now it sat in a forgotten corner of an old lady’s house, where her Pekingese took leaks in its lap. A rickety Chinese temple stood there now, made of painted straw and rice paper.



“You can ask Mom for that. It’s almost Christmas.” Ruth said in her plastic lime-colored raincoat. She looked up at him meekly. Even their mother finally moved the pots and groomed the vines to let daylight back into the rooms, but his eyes had remained beetle-black. She had the feeling that she had done something very wrong that day, so she tried to say something that would please him.



He considered the item, but realized he didn’t want it that much. “Let’s go.” He took his sister’s hand and directed their umbrella homeward.



“We never play that game anymore,” chirped Ruth, opening her stride to keep sync with his brisk step. “In the land of Buddha.”



Their reflections slid in and out of view as they stepped over puddles and pavement.



“So?”



“So—” She drew out the *O* in a long and dipping pout. When she received no response, she began: “In the land of Buddha, there was once a beautiful princess—”



He cut her off irritably. That game is over, he said. Ruth was hurt, and she clamped her mouth shut and jerked her hand out of his. They walked for a while in silence — a slouching fifth grade boy with one hand stuffed in his pocket and his kid sister in an insolent lime green. The rain beat dirt off the rooftops and ran in oily rivers into the gutters. After one block Ruth had already forgotten all offense, and she skipped and scuffed her rain boots ahead of him. Her fingers slipped back into Sylvester’s hand like a small, wet fish, and he let her pull him home.



 

 



My dad was the first in the family to get plastic surgery. He lost the tips of his fingers sixteen years ago in an accident at the paper factory where he worked when we first moved to America. My dad arrived on time and never made trouble with the other employees. Every morning saw him stepping out of our apartment in the same outfit: a tucked-in collared shirt with a small hole or two hidden in the armpits, faded dress pants, and a belt to hold up his pants on his skinny body. The clothes were all from Goodwill, just like his lunchbox, which was blue and white and had frayed plastic on the edges. Eventually, they promoted him to a management position, in which he had to watch over the cutting machine. It had a huge blade that cut giant cylinders of paper into smaller, more usable rolls. 



One day, the machine broke, and my dad was responsible for fixing it. While he was poking his hands in and out of the machine, something released, and the blade dropped down, slamming its edge onto his hands. It sliced off the tips of his four left fingers, cutting cleanly through the bones of the first metacarpals. What was left behind were bloody stumps with shriveled, blue skin at the tip and glistening hints of bone somewhere in that mess.



The doctors took chunks of meat from his thighs and sewed them on as fingers.



My middle sister came next when she decided to get a nose job and eyelid surgery. Then followed my eldest sister with her tummy tuck. Now, my mom is about to fall under the blade. 



 



* * *



We sit in the waiting room as the nurses shuffle around us. They wear heels and tight pink shirts emblazoned with jewels that spell out “BOTOX” across their over-sized breasts. The receptionist flashes us her abnormally white teeth and greets us with a face that is evenly powdered with thick, matte make up. All the nurses wear similarly sculpted faces. They maintain eternal smiles and speak with a tone too soft and sweet, like preserved cherries. I help my mom fill out the paperwork and translate some of the brochures into Vietnamese for her. We pass the time flipping through albums of Befores and Afters, page after page of magically shrunken bellies and tightened skin.



A nurse comes and escorts us to the screening office. A large mahogany desk takes up the far left corner of the room. On top of it sits a computer monitor set to a solid blue screen. A single bookshelf stands against the opposite wall, and a full-length mirror leaned casually adjacent to it. A few green plants dot the tops of the furniture, and certificates and paintings of flowers decorate the cream-colored walls. If it wasn’t for the breast implants lining the shelves of the bookcase and the examination chair sitting ominously at the center, the room could have passed for any middle-class family doctor’s office.



I remember such offices. I had gone with my middle sister to a consultation before she had her surgery. 



I think my middle sister chose the knife because my mom called her ugly all the time. Every time they met, my mom would criticize her nose or compare her to our ugly aunt, saying that they had the exact same face. Or sometimes she would joke, “Your nostrils are so big, you’ll never be able to be rich. Any money that you find will just slip right out of them.” 



Usually my sister doesn’t believe in superstition, but the jokes had some truth in them—of the three sisters, my middle sister was always the one who spent her money most lavishly on clothes and perfumes. Towers of shoes and once-worn gowns filled her closet. It didn’t matter that her boyfriend thought her nose was cute. It didn’t matter that she won a beauty pageant. It didn’t matter that my mom said she was just joking the whole time. These words entered my sister and tore her apart from the inside.



Of course I didn’t know how hurt she was until she told me late one night that she wanted a nose job, and I stayed up until morning trying to hold her back. I thought I could save her, but then I looked at her. Something in her eyes had already glazed over. I imagined her body being cut up into pieces by my mom’s words and reassembled into a different person by a stranger. I saw that my sister had already chosen to go down this path, and I cried.



 



* * *



That was four years ago. Now, I try my best not to let my emotions seep through as my mom and I go on with the consultation. We sit down in leather chairs, and the same pretty nurse with the BOTOX shirt sits down in front of us. My mom conjures up her best English and explains that she would like a facelift, tummy tuck, and perhaps eyelid surgery. The nurse smiles. She selects a few videos for us to watch on the computer and then excuses herself from the room. My mom and I go through them. The videos take us through a step-by-step methodology of each type of surgery. To perform a facelift, the surgeons make a long U-shaped incision that starts from the temples, reaches the base of the ear, and curves backwards to the hairline. This makes a pocket in the face. The surgeons pull up the skin, disconnecting it from underlying tissue, and scrape away any excess fat within the pocket. The skin is then pulled back to the ears. Any excess is removed, and the wound is closed. In cases when there is too much fat beneath the chin, they will also make a small incision at the base of the chin to suck it out.



To perform a tummy tuck, surgeons make three incisions in the body: a smile along the pubic line extending towards the hips, a frown below the rib cage, and a circle around the belly button. They cut the frowns and the smiles so that the ends meet each other, making an eye-shape on the stomach. This eye covers the areas of skin that will later be removed. The belly button is set free by the incisions surrounding it, so that it will not be ripped off from the body when the skin comes off. After these first three cuts are made, the doctors take a pair of clamps and peel off the skin starting from one corner of the eye. 



The videos present us with clean, spotless skin without any fat residues; seamless, bloodless cuts; and smooth, pink muscles in every diagram. When surgeons actually perform surgery, they have to tug hard because the skin is still alive and clings to the muscle throbbing underneath.



Human fat is yellow and clings to the skin in tumorous clumps, like gelatinous stalactites. All of the fat is removed, sucked out with tubes, cut away with knives. A considerable amount simply rips away along with the skin. Muscle is red, and its sinews run parallel to each other, forming tiny grooves in between the fibers of the meat. Blood sometimes gets stuck inside these grooves and clots, forming brown puddles during surgery. It looks as if someone threw embers onto the body, turning the flesh to ash in areas where the skin was burnt the most. 



Once the eye on the belly is removed completely, the surgeons lift it off the body. It looks like a sagging hide of road kill, though everyone knows that it belonged to something human. To finish the procedure, they pull the flap of skin above the gaping hole down, over the belly button, until it meets with the bottom lid of the recently removed eye. The skin is held in place as they suture the flaps back together. Finally, they locate the belly button hiding beneath the skin and cut a hole around it so that it can reemerge. To finish the operation, they secure the bellybutton with a few last stitches.



 



* * *



My eldest sister recently went through this procedure. I found out about it when I was roaming around Argentina. Sitting at an internet café, I opened an email from my middle sister explaining how she would be taking my eldest sister home after the operation. It would have been so easy if I could have just been mad. I wanted to place my sister into the paradigm of an insecure, needy middle-aged woman who complains too much. I wanted to be mad at her husband for agreeing, at my sister for being an ally. I wanted to have screamed in protest and written a long email in response. Then it would have been simple. But I couldn’t. Instead of words of rage, I found only sympathy.



I couldn’t blame her—not after having seen her real stomach. 



I had come to her house and found her lying down breastfeeding her youngest son. It looked as though she had taken a nap with the baby because the sheets were rumpled, her hair was tousled, and her shirt was pulled back from turning in her sleep. It revealed a small triangle of skin at her stomach. We started talking, and at some point during our conversation she saw me looking and lifted her shirt up to reveal the entirety of her scarred stomach.



It looked like a balloon that had been fully inflated and left to slowly deflate on its own, with wrinkles and dents and strange craters all over its sides. Stretch marks covered everything below the ribcage, and a smiling scar ran across her pubic line, the result of multiple caesarian sections. The skin sagged. It sank down the base of her pubic line. This was all the extra skin that her body had no use for after giving birth to three children. There was so much skin that when she clenched it with her hands, blobs rolled out from between her fingers, as if she were squeezing Play-doh. After her pregnancy, the skin realized its unnecessary role for the body and, on its own, willed itself to die—and turned brown, the color of rotting bananas. 



 



* * *



When my mom and I finish the videos, the nurse comes back and asks if we had any questions. We don’t. She smiles again, sweetly mutters some cordial phrases, and then leaves.



The doctor comes in, introduces himself, and asks us if we had any questions. My mom asks him about neurological dysfunction, which happens when the nerve endings are destroyed after surgery. In such cases, she would lose the ability to smile. He comforts her by saying that these cases almost never happened. 



My mom then asks if he could also do a brow lift and eyelid surgery. These were simple: a small cut above the temples along the hairline, a little tug to pull the skin up and lift the eyebrows. I watch him scan my mom’s face for a few seconds. His eyes give two quick glances over her eyebrows. “Yeah, it’s pretty simple—and to be honest it’s not that necessary in your case.”



In the prescreening, he asks my mom to sit on the examination chair. She is short—only five feet tall, so it is a bit difficult for her to get on. She wiggles onto the chair, sits, and then looks at him in anticipation. None of us spoke much. The doctor kneels down a bit to match my mom’s height, and then directs his professional attention to her face. With his left hand he guides my mom’s face up or down, left or right, depending on what he needs to examine. With his right hand, he places his thumb on her chin for support and uses two of his fingers to push skin back and forth in certain areas. After a few minutes he delivers his verdict:



“So in your case we would have to cut behind the ears and at the base of the chin.” He saw the puzzled look on my mom and directed his attention to me, “Your mom doesn’t need that much on the face. Just a bit of work on the chin should do it, and she doesn’t have that much in the first place. Here is a really extreme case on an elder lady who could not have surgery on her face.” He shows both of us a Before and After of an extremely old lady who got a chin tuck. The woman originally had so much fat beneath her chin that she had no neckline, only a large, sagging flap that formed a triangle where her neck should have been. The surgeons made only one incision on her chin, but they managed to suck out enough fat to give her a neck. My mom is impressed. 



The surgeon is now ready to examine her for the tummy tuck. “I’ll come back in a few minutes. For now, you can undress.” He hands her a white smock that opened up in the front. “Wear this, and you can keep your underwear on.”



When the door closes, my mom slowly takes off her clothes. She is slightly plump, with a bit of fat resting on her thighs, around her arms, and surrounding her waist. Her stomach swells out a bit, and it carries a few stretch marks and scars in it, the aftermath of carrying four children. After she finishes undressing, she wraps the smock around her body and climbs onto the examination chair again. I realize that this was the first time I have seen her this naked. She looks so soft. Her skin is pale and almost translucent, and I can almost map out the veins running up from her feet. She is sitting silently on the chair, dangling her feet, and staring expectantly at the door, and I have a sudden urge to cradle her in my arms. 



The door opens and the doctor returns. My mom opens her smock, exposing her little white belly, and he begins his second examination. After a few minutes of silence, he gets up and explains that my mom only needs a medium-size tummy tuck. “Again, it’s not that bad. After the surgery, we could reduce it to about half. You’ll definitely still be able to tell the difference though. The results will still be good. As for the rest, we can’t get to it because it’s located behind the muscle frame. But you can easily fix that by losing … maybe five pounds. It’s not that big, and that should do it.” With that, he shakes my mom’s hand and then leaves. My mom scurries to the door and put her clothes on. She avoids looking at the mirror as she passes it.



 



* * *



Perhaps my mom will someday be able to look at herself. My middle sister, after her surgery, claims that she, for once, feels beautiful in front of the mirror. She knows that the changes were very subtle, and that people can’t really tell the difference in most cases. She knows that being slightly prettier doesn’t affect her performance at work, but it doesn’t matter. She can smile at herself now. 



When my middle sister got her tummy tuck, she went to a family wedding dressed in a strapless, cream-colored gown that flowed to the ground. Small ripples of fabric ran across her torso and emphasized her curves. Her waist was tiny, and from the side, her stomach was completely flat. She hadn’t worn that dress in five years—not since she married and had kids. I told her how fantastic she looked. She smiled sheepishly and said, “Oh come on. It wasn’t like I exercised or anything.” That night we took many family photos, and my eldest sister gladly volunteered herself to take full-body shots. 



I thought of my dad, who never shows his hands. 



After his surgery, gravity pulled the meat to the sides as his fingers healed, and the tips look like they are about to slip off. The fingernail grew back on only one finger—the others have dents where the nails should be. They never regained their flexibility. They bend only slightly back and forth from the first joint, and when left unflexed, stick out like sock puppets craning their heads in jumbled directions. It’s almost as if the accident never happened because he hides his hands in every photograph. 



After his surgery he unwillingly joined my mom in the business and became a nail technician because there wasn’t anything else he could do. Work is more manageable now that he runs his own nail store. At first he started out working as a regular employee, performing basic manicures for customers. One time, he sat down to do a manicure for a young lady, but she recoiled and screamed when she saw his hand. Then she got up and left without a word.



Both he and my mom agreed that plastic surgery might be necessary if my mom was to continue working in the nail business. Her customers, when they come to the store, don’t know   that she works thirteen hours a day and comes home at eleven after thirteen hours of work, only to start cooking for tomorrow and do her accounting. They don’t know that she climbs into bed at two in the morning and wakes up at seven, and has been repeating this routine six days a week, all weeks of the year, for the past twelve years. They don’t see that she barely has time to put on her lipstick in the morning, never mind doing cardio exercise for half an hour three times a week. They only know that she has wrinkles, over-sized pores, white-hair, and pockets of fat forming at the base of her cheeks. Seeing this, how can they trust her to make them beautiful when she doesn’t seem to value her own beauty?



 



* * *



The last person to see us in the office was the manager of the clinic. Perhaps she thought I was stunned by her beauty, and perhaps she has received the same reaction many times. Her body had been cut, sewn up, altered, covered, pulled, twisted, and inflated in almost every possible place: a nose job, breast implants, facelift, hair-dye, heavy make-up, Botox, and a tummy tuck. She was around sixty years old, but packaged to be twenty. She looked neither old nor young. Her beauty wasn’t the sort of ageless beauty that some women gather as they age, when they manage to carry their gravity with grace. Her taut, flawless skin looked as if it could suddenly snap and spew out her contents. She turned out to be a sweet lady though, and an excellent businesswoman. She had been a patient at the clinic for sixteen years before she became its manager. Her surgeon was our surgeon.



She handed us the papers. The tummy tuck would be $6,000, and the facelift would be either $8,000 or $11,000, depending on whether my mother chose general or local anesthesia. The conversation drew to an end, and the lady asked us if we had any final questions. My mom wanted to see her scars. The manager stood up and showed us her belly, and we could see a very faint scar at the pubic line where they had performed the surgery years ago. Then she bent down and showed us the scars on her chin and face. My mom’s eyes lit up when she saw how faint they were.



In the car, my mom asked me, “Wasn’t that lady pretty?” I looked at my mom. She was looking at me. I turned my head back to the lines on the road, unable to say anything because of what felt like a knife in my throat. Instead, I kept on driving.