Interviews

Or 'Waiting' rather than 'Interviews' - because that is what interviews lead to:

Me, waiting for the bus at the cold bus stop.
Me, waiting for the BART at the dark BART stop.
Me, waiting to cross the street -

But am I even standing at the right intersection?
I asked an elderly woman who looked like she knew the place:
"Where is Sutter St., ma'am?"

"Oh!" the dormant woman came alive
and rambled on as the light changed twice
before she gave directions that led me rambling down the wrong street.

Me, waiting in the elevator to the 37th floor,
where I was led through the waiting room door,
because I had done the right thing and arrived fifteen minutes early.

Me, waiting until my stomach knotted itself so many times there was nothing else for it to do but release and begin again.
Me, waiting fifteen more minutes because the man who was to interview me was on the phone - or perhaps waiting for someone else to call him back.

Me, waiting, memorizing my spare resume
while the receptionist typed away,
while balding men and young interns -
my predecessors - came my way and went away.

Me, waiting thirty minutes for a twenty-minute interview.

Me, waiting for the BART to arrive,
for my stomach, my brain feeling barely alive,
to settle and for the cold feeling in my fingers to go away, because up here, I am always waiting for the weather to turn warm again.

Now I am waiting for the phone ring,
a phone call, a message, anything,
from a strange number because I refuse to save their damn numbers until they welcome me with open arms.

Me, waiting for 'experience',
for a steady stream of small paychecks,
so I can wait in line at the bank and say, "Deposit, please."

And me, waiting for the time to pass,
for the dimes and pennies to amass,
So that one day I might be king,
and n'er again wait for any thing.

Weddings

On the drive home from our cousin's wedding, my brother and I sat in silence, dreading the coming week. He had a red-eye flight that night back to Pennsylvania and class the next morning - no long President's Day weekend for him. And while I did, it was to be spent on a seven-hour drive back up to school, where a slew of assignments and interviews awaited. The 91 freeway was loose and I sped past slower cars, wondering if I had always driven so fast.
"That was a nice wedding," I said, and from my peripheral vision I could see him nodding, his right elbow resting against the window.
Then I said what I always say after a cousin's wedding: "I can't believe Daniel is married now."
My brother nodded once more in assent.
"It's strange though," I continued, "The more weddings I go to, the farther away the whole thing seems for me."
At this my brother broke his silence and I was surprised to hear the relief in his voice, as though he had been waiting with bated breath for me to say this.
"I know," he replied, "I feel the same way. I'm so happy for Daniel, and I had such a good time - but I just can't see that for me right now. Not anything close to it."
Now I was curious - what couldn't he see? The wedding itself or the obvious happiness written over the married couple's faces? I suppose whatever alienation I felt, he felt it ten-fold, for Daniel is the same age as my brother.
As co-best man, my brother was in charge of the slide show, which he lovingly put together to show dozens of pictures of Daniel's childhood, which was replete with snapshots of a happy youth filled with cousins. At the center of this was the trio: Daniel, my cousin Andrew, and my brother - all three boys born in the year of the Rooster: Andrew in January, my brother in July, and Daniel in August. Andrew was married too, this past August, to his childhood sweatheart in a beautiful ceremony by the sea, and towards the end of the slide show there were photographs from that wedding as well.
The progression is thought provoking - not just of the physical size of the people, the broadening of shoulders, the gaining of height, weight and sense of self - but the aura the photographs possess of a splendid past-bright, young faces beaming at a beautiful future. After all, these boys weren't smiling for nothing. The childhood photos were surprisingly vivid despite being taken so many years ago: here the boys are, standing in a row wearing matching denim jackets, a glorious, thousand-year old mountain range looking not quite as large as their young frames; here, the boys hovering excitedly over a birthday cake from Honey Bakery; and here, the boys laughing gleefully in the snow, hands outstretched to peg someone (probably Kathryn, the littlest in the family) with a poorly made snowball. And then came photographs of Carol, Daniel's wife and my new cousin-in-law. It had been startling for me, sitting there in the dark, to see how far apart they had started out (Carol was born in China and did not emigrate until her late teens) and then to look over a sea of relatives and spy the two sitting peacefully at the same table, now sharing a family, a name, a future.
Alienation in the softest form: we welcomed Carol to the family just as we welcomed the others, and yet in some twisted way I felt I was the one being slowly edged out of a larger pattern. The core of the family I had always known was expanding... and yet. In a fitting moment for an English major, I thought of Yeats' "Second Coming":
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold..."
But it was preposterous for me to think this, to compare my cousins' happiest days with a poem about uncertainty and some other themes I don't quite understand. After all, my family was certainly not falling apart - it was growing, and I was happy to see it grow. But somehow I imagined something overgrown, grown over, a network of people so grand, an entity so massive that none of my relative's houses could contain it. And in this physical sense, it was true - the center was not holding, and our recent family holidays were a testament to this. The night before Daniel's wedding was Chinese New Year's Eve, normally a boisterous affair with the entire family packed into my aunt's house. But there was a wedding the next morning and it took priority, along with Carol's visiting family. They stayed at their house while my parents hosted a separate dinner at ours. It was strangely quiet for a family party and I, out of an ingrained hostess' habit, walked from room to room, expecting each threshold to burst with noise and cheer, but was encountered with but a few faces.
Cousin Andrew came alone - Caroline was at a wedding - and during dinner he too, sensed the gaping social hole left by our absent family members.
"Where's Wendy?" he said, "Wendy will come, right?"
I shook my head more sadly than I meant to. "No," I replied, "She's probably celebrating with Daniel and Carol's relatives." Then something else occurred to me, "Or...she might be with Lawrence's family. That's what happens when people marry."
And what is all this division between "our" family and "their" family - the old-fashioned, Asian-thinking - a woman marries into another family and belongs to them...backwards! Archaic! Anti-feminist! No one asked cousin Wendy to choose sides, but then again, she doesn't have to - the implication of marriage is that you choose - every holiday you choose. That is the way it is.
The next day at the wedding I asked Lawrence how his Chinese New Year dinner was. "It was great," he said, "we spent it at my parents' house in Temecula."
So I was right. Even cousin Wendy had gone a separate way; she was part of another family now, as well. And briefly his wife, my cousin, came to our table to talk with Hoyt and Lynn, the first to marry in the family. "Babies?" Lynn asked Wendy. "Not anytime soon." Two years, they both agreed, two more years of married life before children come into the picture - and even then the picture might just be mental. I found myself split down the middle- intrigued yet losing interest, wondering when such questions will ever apply to me.
In the car I drove on, trying to make a list of all the things I had to do once I returned to school, and wondered if my brother was doing the same. I had a few part-time job interviews and two papers due, all things I was ill-prepared for, the interviews especially. What was this sudden rush to get a job, to make "progress" towards the future, to establish what? Stability? A stepping-stone to stability, more like. That's all I can ask for at this point. I'm not on a ledge, but rather on the border of some town I might leave or stay in for a few more years.
My brother too. I looked over briefly. He had shut his eyes for a moment, and I expected his lips to be pursed in that thin frown, but it was strangely relaxed. Was he looking forward to flying back or did he want to stay at home, as I did? To wake up in our childhood rooms, eat breakfast in the sunny kitchen, putt lazily about the house then eat dinner with our parents, watch TV as my dad checked email and read the newspaper nearby, then go to bed with a book in our childhood rooms. The schedule of the nuclear unit I had known for so long had been spinning apart for the past few years as the children begin to leave.
Marriage is still a ways off, I thought, pulling onto the driveway. And then standing on the driveway, facing the house I grew up in, I realized that home, too, felt very far away.