The Funeral

A funeral in Urk is like the town itself: quiet, solid, not one word to spare.

The whole town came. Black formal clothes — their Sunday clothes. In the church, the psalms again, unaccompanied, slow as tide. I sat in the family row — Old Yang had seated me in the family row, without explanation, because none was required by anyone present — listening to songs I couldn't understand and had heard once before, looking at the quiet casket at the front, thinking: two weeks ago, these same voices sang this for the living him. He heard it. That is better than anything.

The graveyard is behind the church, within sight of the sea.

As the procession moved toward it, the skin on the back of my neck prickled.

A strange sensation. Not cold. Skin recognizing something before the eyes get there. I turned around—

At the very back of the crowd stood my father.

The dark grey jacket. A hat in his hands that didn't belong to any of this. Standing among the tall Dutch, looking small, and looking absolutely planted. He saw me see him and nodded. The three-word nod.

And beside him—

My mother.

My mother, standing in the wind off the North Sea. Her permed hair was blowing loose and she was not reaching up to fix it. She wore black, head to toe, and the black was conspicuously new — bought for this, in some Hangzhou mall, tried on piece by piece.

The prickle ran from my neck to my fingertips. And then, with no logic at all, heat surged up my throat — anger. Real anger, scalding, aimed at no target I could name: she disowned me. She hasn't spoken to me in half a year. What right does she have to appear now — now — when it's finished, when—

The fire burned halfway up and went out by itself. What was left was pure bewilderment. I stood rooted, unable to go to them, unable to not. How did they know. Who bought the tickets. How was there time for a visa. My father doesn't fly long-haul. My mother gets airsick. And the two of them were standing in a fishing-village graveyard on the far side of the planet.

Nobody spoke. Across half the graveyard, the three of us just looked at each other. My mother's chin was up — the angle I've known my whole life, the never-bow-first angle — but her hand kept working the strap of her handbag, knuckles white.

After the rite, the crowd thinned. I saw my mother draw one long breath, the way she does before a decision, and walk — directly, unmistakably — toward someone.

Not toward me.

Toward Old Yang.

My mother walked up to that tall old Dutch man and stopped. She has no English. She had no way of knowing his Mandarin existed. I watched her take out her phone, tap at a translation app, give up, and put it away. And then she did the thing I will be carrying for the rest of my life: she straightened, faced him, and bowed — low, and slow, and all the way down.

Old Yang froze. Then said something to her — in Mandarin. My mother's head snapped up.

Of the next few minutes I caught only fragments; I was too far, and the wind took the rest. I saw my mother speaking slowly, effortfully, stopping and starting. I heard, carried over on the wind, pieces — my daughter. your son. a fine young man. I saw Old Yang listen, and then turn his face to the sea for a moment. I saw that by my mother's last sentence her voice had lost its shape entirely — and her back was still perfectly straight. The women of our family cry standing straight.

And that was the end of my standing anywhere.

I don't remember crossing the graveyard. I remember my mother turning, seeing me, her lips moving without producing a word. I remember my father arriving at her side from somewhere. The wind off the North Sea closed around the three of us like a room.

I went into them, and wept.

The second time. The second time in my life. Harder than in the field — cried with no dignity and no strategy, cried out the half-year ledger and the twenty-eight-year ledger in one payment. My mother's hand moved on my back — that rhythm; I know that rhythm; it presided over every childhood fever I ever had. My father's hand rested on my head, light, like something he was afraid of breaking.

I said one sentence to them.

What it was, three people on this earth know. Let it stay three.

Late that night, in the guesthouse courtyard, my father stood beside me looking at the sea. At night the North Sea is nothing but sound. He spoke, low, out of the dark:

"A-Dai. Your father will nag you one last time."

"Mm."

"The days are now." he said. "Your grandfather's kind spend their whole lives living in tomorrow. Your father wasted years of his own — always arranging the days first, thinking I'd live them once they were arranged. The best ones all arrived unarranged." He paused. In the dark I couldn't see his face. "You understand it now. So I'll stop there."

I looked at the sea I couldn't see, and nodded.

This time I understood it all the way down. He'd said the same words on the phone months ago, and they had landed like a quilt. Tonight they landed like a stone laid on a grave — the same words, the same man, but the listener had needed to travel nine thousand kilometers first, to grow the ears.

My mother gets airsick, speaks no English, and spent half a year hating this love.

She flew twenty hours and stood in a graveyard on the far side of the earth and bowed — all the way down — to an old man she'd never met, on my behalf.

I have seen many kinds of I love you. That one is the heaviest.