The Popstar & Me

Chapter 15 - One-Eyed Penguin

Chapter 15

Zhang Wei. I still can't believe I can finally put a name to a foggy, bittersweet memory.

It's jarring to finally meet a boy I only vaguely remember from my childhood. I was so young back then; I must have been only five or six. I have very few memories of our home on Huaihai Lu. One of them was being trapped under a pile of bus passengers when the driver narrowly missed being hit by a truck at an intersection. I remember my mother screaming my name as she dug me out from under a pile of angry, disheveled passengers as though she feared that I had been crushed as flat as a pancake.

Another memory was of her yelling at me for letting the boy downstairs rub his chocolate-smeared fingers through my hair. She laughs about it now, but I remember being shocked at what the big deal was. I had told him that I thought there were ants on my head, and he helped me get them out. I always had a big and (according to my mother) destructive imagination.

And to rub that painful memory in, my mother texts me the picture of Yang Yang and me. In the photo, six-year-old me looks confused in the camera's flash. Yang Yang had his arm around me like we're best buddies in crime. Between us was that old beloved one-eyed penguin of mine, the one my father mailed me. Back then, I had never met my father, but with the penguin came promises of a land far away which I only saw in the photographs my mom showed me. Even now, I recall the picture of the statue of liberty, the stone lions in front of the NYPL, and most of all — the New York skyline that my mom taped over my bed.

"Central Park Zoo," the penguin said around its neck. I couldn't read back then, but later, as the year passed, I looked back on those photos and remembered.

The penguin and I were inseparable. I left the penguin and my other toys back in Shanghai with Yang Yang because they wouldn't fit in my mother's luggage. I remember that day because I told Yang Yang I would come back for my penguin after my adventure to the land inside the black and white photographs was over.

There was always a sense of unfinished business regarding that penguin. I never intended to give it away. After visiting my father, I thought I was coming back that we would come back for my penguin. If I had known it was forever, maybe I would have said a proper goodbye, both to my toys and to my friend.

"Do you remember this place at all?" Lana asks as we walk down the shopping district of Huaihai Lu. Although stores are selling salted fruits and steaming vats of sheng jian bao like I remembered, there's also a Popeye's here now.

"A little," I reply as I retreat into the familiar comfort of my venti Ice Americano. "I remember the playground behind our apartment. There's a swing in the shape of a monkey there."

"It's still there," Lana replies. "It's rusty and old. Sometimes, I walk my dog there."

"Are there still red flowers that bloom in the park there?"

"Yup, red, that's both our mothers' favorite color."

"Yeah," I say, rolling my eyes. "Parents are so weird. In New York, we only wear shades of black."

"Zhang Wei moved away not long after you and your mom went to American," Lana interrupts as she sips on her Frappucino. She tells me that in China, people don't usually drink coffee that costs 30 yuan when a full meal at a sit-down restaurant might cost 12 yuan. So when she does go, she gets the flashy frozen Frappuccino as a special treat. "He moved back only two years ago from Fujian after his parents died. He owns the apartment on the fourth floor now."

"Oh," I reply. "I'm so sorry." I don't know what else to say. Did his parents even know my parents apart from photographing that chocolate disaster? Should I tell my mother? No, my mother didn't even know Zhang Wei's real name until I told her! If I try to relay more news of this evening to her, the more she'll think I'm some loser who went to Shanghai to look for a dumb boy who held my hand back when I was six years old.

"Why don't you stop by and say hi," Lana tells me as we come to the block by her apartment building. "I'm sure he'll want to meet you."

I nod and follow along, seeing as I have no other choice now. I'm starting to wish I had accepted Calvin's impromptu request to chill at his place.

At least Calvin with his tanned rolly abs (which remind me of plump hot dogs grilling in a row at 7-11) is the type of mistake girls my age are expected to make. I am dreading this awkward blast from the past more with each passing step. Maybe I don't want to know what happened to Yang or, as I know him now — Zhang Wei. Maybe in my subconscious, there's an idealized version of my childhood in China that continues in an alternate timeline where I never went to New York, never met my absentee father, and my parents never separated. Maybe, in this version, I'm happy.

Or not.

Over the years, even though I learned to suppress it — the memories of this place always lingered in the back of my mind as an idyllic childhood wonderland. This was a place where I was accepted for being me. It was a place where I didn't have to hide the second language (that we only spoke at home), where the movies and books didn't broadcast to me that the only way to be desired is to have Anglican facial features, where everyone ate soybean milk and fried dough sticks for breakfast (not just on Sundays with my extended). It is a place where I simply belonged.

This meeting threatened to change all that. Dread sunk into my stomach as we slowly walked to that chalky dilapidated apartment complex just off the main road in Huahai Lu. We went up to the old black gate, and Lana starts to rummage through her hobo bag for her keys. I hear crickets chirping from the bushes of half-wilted kalanchoe. There are vines of golden pathos snaking up the base of the apartment complex, concealing bits and pieces of sand-colored broken bricks. There is an abandoned bicycle wheel caught up in the greenery. Beside it, a glass cup with several cigarette butts floating in it catches rainwater. This place is rich in history, and it's nothing like the flashy futuristic megacomplex in which I was currently staying.

For the first time, I feel like this is the Shanghai I remembered. This is the place I had visited before in my fondest memories, but I had never seen it with my adult eyes.

I remember playing on the stark white steps leading up to this apartment building. Over the years, the fresh paint had curled away to reveal a weathered gray stone underneath. In the pictures my mother showed me, the walls were newly painted and fresh as the morning sun in her black and white photos. Photos are often deceiving, and the trials of time reveal truths that were better left covered by layers of white paint.

I wonder if meeting Zhang Wei would give me answers that I would rather not know.

"Let's just say hello," Lana remarks as we approach the row of doorbells by the ancient apartment building. A new sign in English saying "Huahai Park Residences" graces the doorway. Before I can say anything, she rings the doorbell to apartment 409.