The woman remembered falling dust under yellow streetlights. She heard a song in pentatonic scale, the crowd humming along to a melody she didn’t know. Hands under the bar, she carved the strokes of her Chinese name into her upper thigh. It was only a little funny how her name contained the character for forgetting. 

 

It was her mother’s voice on the skipping record player. Her voice singing in Cantonese, a high, lilting song from her days as a professional Cantonese opera singer. The woman could imagine her mother in full makeup, face painted white, red on her cheeks and lips and black around her eyes. It’s the weight of it that’s grounding. The heaviness of the powder and rouge and ink, the gold-lined headdress and layers and layers of robes made to look like satin and silk. 

 

Her drink was bitter, and the man across the bar spoke in tongues. His mouth formed words that could be read as “I think you’ve had enough.” The woman shook her head. “Bring me another.” 

 

“I don’t think that’s a very good idea.” 

 

“It’s my mother. It’s her voice. Her song.” 

 

A drink was shoved into her hand. The woman brought it to her lips without thinking. Something pineapple and rum. She vaguely recalled a doctor’s note detailing her pineapple allergy, but she focused on the burning in her throat and everything went away. Outside, it was snowing, and the concrete was lined with white that would be grey come morning. Two hooded figures leaned against the glass windows, mouths intertwined, bodies leaving blurry imprints against the Nativity scene stickers. 

 

Her mother’s song on the record player of a bar in the urban nowhere of a city. College students making out in the wide open, not even sneaking into the alleyway three stumbles away. A worried bartender who kept her glass filled and her keys in the safe. What keys? She sold her car five years ago to pay for the degrees on her wall, sheets of paper displayed in a picture frame lined with cracks. 

 

Her ma had dreams. She painted her nails red and gold for prosperity and made longevity noodles and tangyuan from scratch. Live long, she always said. May our family always stay together spoken at a table set for five and visited by two. She displayed fine china in glass cabinets and hid rags under her pillow. A matriarch who dreamed of white coats and penthouse apartments faded in fluorescent light, and her loving, unfilial daughter sat in a bar, nursing a watered down pina colada and a hatred for her field. 

 

What use was knowing how to heal when she couldn’t save the one who mattered? What use was knowing that “you can’t save everyone”? At the end of the day, none of it mattered. The same white cloth was pulled over still bodies. 

 

She drank some more. 

 

In her head, she could still hear the voice skipping on vinyl telling her a story. When I was a young girl… The lights in Guangzhou… If you go to the market by the sea… I will teach you how to sing… 

 

“Don’t make the mistakes I did,” the woman said. 

 

The bartender looked up. “Excuse me?” 

 

“I lived my life for someone else, and now she’s gone.” The woman put her head on the bar and felt every grain and notch of the wood against her cheek. If she closed her eyes, she could grasp the heavy weight of a work-calloused hand in her hair, a voice in a wave, washing over her heart. In the space between the drink in her hand and the roaring city a glass door away, the woman grieved. 

 

She grieved a mother’s love and daydreamed about going back to school. She had exchanged ten years of her life for a stethoscope and proud smile, and she would do it again. Born to a legacy of 4,000 years but brought up in a 200-year-old country half a world away, she dreamed of carving her tongue out of her mouth and replacing it with the voice singing from the record player. 

 

She had come home. She had come home without her mother. She had come home too late. 

 

The bartender hummed in sympathy and misunderstanding. “Part of life is moving on. Some people call it the greatest lesson there is to learn. Besides, a pretty young thing like you, you’ll find someone else in no time.” 

 

Profile outlined red in neon, the woman turned her face towards the door. “Yes, that’s what they say, isn’t it?”