The Ends of Kinship. Sienna R. Craig
It is unthinkable that she would not offer him libations. What unfolds after that remains veiled. There is nobody to see.
Maybe a singular visit plants the seed of her. Maybe the affair goes on for months. Wangmo cannot know. She wonders about rough words, tears, the violence of a slap, talk of responsibility. She wonders about tenderness. She imagines that her mother would have found herself as startled by the cessation of her monthly bleeding and the swelling of her belly as Wangmo herself had been when the blood began to flow from between her legs at fourteen.
Thankfully, Wangmo does not remember feeling shame during the years of her life that she spent in Monthang. She remembers hunger and the wisps of winter air that slid under the door and through the one small window. She remembers how her mother filled the water offering bowls each morning and lit a butter lamp each evening, never thinking about the butter she might have spared for tea. Now, Wangmo understands that this act of faith could be many things: a reclamation of dignity at the bookends of long, invisible days; an enacted sense of duty; a hope to win favor with the gods.
Wangmo also remembers joy. She and her friends used to play games: finding the nests of Himalayan snowcock and sucking out the warm, yellow life from their eggs; building towers of stone with the flattest rocks they could find; using patties of frozen cow dung to sled down snowy embankments at the edge of the village; making bouquets of wildflowers and placing them on the household shrine.
Robert, the Swiss man who became Wangmo’s sponsor, discovered her while she and her friends were giggling and gorging themselves on sweet peas. He had been wandering through Monthang’s fields in midsummer, taking pictures. The foreigner had a strange face: a reddish beard that reminded Wangmo of the wrathful masks worn by monks during festivals but green eyes that seemed kind. In their unequally imperfect English—she with the words one photo, chocolate, pen and both of them with phrases like How old are you? What is your name?—they made some sort of connection.
Still, Wangmo registered alarm when a knock on the door revealed this foreigner again, along with a local young man who spoke some English. She realized the door to their house was small only when she watched Robert fold himself in half to walk across the threshold.
Her mother spoke no English, but the message was communicated over cups of weak butter tea. This foreigner was from a place called “Swiss” but may as well have been from another universe. He would like to send her daughter to school in Kathmandu. Wangmo’s mother smiled, nodded. It was a gesture of imperfect consent. Wangmo remembers her saying, “I hope that education will give her a better life than her mother.”
It only occurs to Wangmo after that chance encounter in a New York bathroom that the young intermediary who appeared at her door with Robert was the nephew of her father, that they were unacknowledged cousins.
Several days after Robert’s visitation, Wangmo found herself bundled up in all the clothes she owned, with tsampa and dried cheese stuffed into recycled instant noodle and powdered milk bags tied with string, heading south. She had never before left the village. She could not have imagined the worlds she would see in the capital, a place many from Mustang simply called “Nepal.” In retrospect, she found the trust implicit in this transaction as astounding as the release of parental responsibility. What, now, was her mother to do?
Those first few months at Buddha Heart passed slowly. Each new experience had a vividness to it: the damp cots, the delight in steamed buns and curried goat every other Friday, but also the sharp edges of loneliness. Until Maya befriended her.
When Wangmo left the village, she did not know that she would never see her mother again. Some part of her understood that the lack of contact was a function of distance, poverty, and language. Still, she felt like an orphan during holidays when family members would arrive to collect their kin. But she knew that she wasn’t an orphan.
When the principal of Buddha Heart summoned her to his office on a rainy day in class three and told her that he’d had a visit from someone from Monthang who said that her mother had fallen ill and died, Wangmo herself fell into a silence inside a silence. She held her chest. It felt like the time she had fallen off a horse back in Lo. No breath, no breath. When she took days to recover from the fall, people had said that she must have TB, but this, too, remained mere speculation.
Over the years, Robert wrote Wangmo letters into which he would fold chocolate bars and a few francs, but these gifts came infrequently. He told her that there were mountains in Switzerland, even yak. She drew pictures of white-faced herders beside yak wool tents. She did not tell him about her mother, although she guessed that the principal may have passed on the news. Robert never mentioned it.
As the years went by, though, Wangmo began to wonder about this relationship. She heard peers talking about their sponsors, comparing the letters and gifts they received, wondering about their lives in other countries. As she grew older, Wangmo remained grateful for Robert’s generosity, but she wondered how he talked about her. She was grateful for the education, but she began to imagine herself as a curiosity, a burden, a charity case. Wangmo asked Maya to help her read Robert’s letters and write thank-you notes in return. Their exchanges became formulaic. Robert was someone she had never really known but who had changed her life. In this way, he was like her father.
When Robert wrote his last letter, it was to say that his wife was ill and that he needed to take care of her. This was in the middle of class nine. He told her that he was sorry but that this would be the last year he could pay her school fees. He knew she only had one more year to complete her SLC. He hoped she would forgive him. He wished her well.
It was her friend Maya, of course, who read these words aloud to Wangmo. Before this news had softened into air, Maya had already planned a response. She would ask her uncle—a wealthy trader who moved between Nepal and Hong Kong—to pay for Wangmo’s last year of school. Wangmo had spent enough time with Maya and her extended family during vacations that a request of this sort did not seem unreasonable.
“My uncle will do it,” Maya said when Wangmo could say nothing. “My aunt will like to brag about helping a poor student.” Their friendship could tolerate honest irony. “She’ll think she is earning merit.”
Maya and Wangmo made it through class ten together and, each in their own way, found passage to New York. That was a decade ago.
This sense of time astonishes her. Wangmo thinks about the fact that her daughter is now the same age she was when she arrived at Buddha Heart. This child over whom she frets. This sweet girl who can write birthday cards. This Mustang-American who, as a toddler, was sent off to live with her father’s parents in Kathmandu for two years. This was during the most difficult phase of a new marriage, with no money to speak of and the daunting process of immigration paperwork a daily stress. Still, there is a continent of difference between her own childhood and that of her daughter. She is different than her own mother; she has always had a plan. The separation that she and her daughter endured was not permanent. And yet …
Wangmo’s husband is a good father. He treats their daughter gently and enjoys reading bedtime stories, which he does each night after he comes home from his job at a Thai restaurant. He is not from Mustang but shares, generally speaking, Wangmo’s Himalayan roots. For Wangmo, meeting him and falling in love has been a great and enduring gift. There would have been nobody to arrange a marriage for her anyway, even if she had wanted that.
Together, Wangmo and her husband are figuring out what this word “parent” means. They speak with each other about what has and hasn’t changed between their childhoods and that of their daughter. Wangmo knows she can be judgmental about the ways some in her community raise their children—here in New York and back in Nepal. Still, she bristles when she hears news about Himalayan people, now transplanted to New York, being called in by Child Protective Services because one of their children reports a slap or a spank to a teacher at school. She thinks about the distances between parents and children, the ways the ends of kinship can stretch and fray, and about the different forms of love and anger and grief.
Wangmo gets up from the couch and clears the breakfast dishes. She should have left for work ten minutes ago. The train will be packed at this hour, hurtling immigrant workers