Help the Shoots Grow, Pull Them
BY PLOI PIRAPOKIN
Fay Ku, Lotus Eaters, graphite on translucent drafting film, 20 x 30 inches, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
HELP THE SHOOTS GROW,
PULL THEM
PLOI PIRAPOKIN /SEPT 2021 / ISSUE 9
Part I of IV
2021.
Lily’s number flashed across my phone screen before I could finish my morning espresso. I thought she wanted to complain about her good-for-nothing Dan, who left wet clothes in the washer overnight again and now all their shirts smelled like mushrooms. Dan, who averts eye contact and ignores answering the question of whether they should have children or not, as Lily’s uterus simmered for the past ten years. Sliding into my chair, I practiced regurgitating supportive phrases like, “He’s being very Dan,” before answering.
But her reason for calling was not about him. Our best friend, Sprout, was gone.
“Vanished—no note, nothing. Her father called asking if we knew anything.”
“She doesn’t care about him, huh? Worrying her old man like that.”
I must’ve sounded callous, but with Sprout coming and going as she pleased since we were young, her disappearance seemed arranged. A wayward friend was easier to bear than an incompatible partner. “How many hours has it been?”
Lily tallied through what we might’ve missed: Sprout had left yesterday morning to buy water spinach for dinner. When she didn’t appear after work, her father assumed she had met up with friends. After several rings, Sprout’s dial tone flatlined. Her father tried again, reaching an automated recording, “The number you have dialed is not in use.”
This struck me as odd, since Sprout was tethered to her phone. “I saw her last week, when she admitted she kind of fell for the cousin,” I paused.
“And?”
“I told her a marriage, even a green card one, was legally binding for at least two years. She asked if I had any right to judge her.”
“Chryssa, who won that argument?”
There was no winning over Sprout. She had retreated home months ago, head hung low, as though her expired work visa sentenced her to a lifelong penance of tending to her surviving parent. She scowled and sniffed at our offers to help her find employment. Instead, she filled her time bartending at a hookah lounge by the riverfront, surprising me.
“She won’t tolerate a 9 to 5, but she’ll handle drunk foreigners?” I chided.
In retrospect, I should’ve said this to her face. In between three a.m. texts, drunk pounding on our doors, and frazzled lunches where Sprout would stride into a carpeted restaurant unwashed and hours late, she had waved her hand and chuckled about her on-and-off again boyfriend’s cousin who was willing to help her establish a Canadian residency.
“Do you think she went looking for them?” Lily asked.
“The aliens? Listen to yourself, Lils. Where would she even find them?”
1994.
Sprout had always relished in the fantasy of not being found. When we played Marco Polo, she never cried to recover the rest of us as “Marco,” nor did she answer “Polo” when it was our turn swatting around the pool for her. In Cache-cache, she’d climb up bookshelves and press into the ceiling tiles, only clamoring down water pipes after the school bell rang. Sprout’s first self-portrait—a personification of her character drawn during the Lycee’s intake audition—was of an ostrich with its head under sand. At fifteen, we spent more time explaining Sprout’s nature to our professors than we did trying to change her. Ostriches, we later learned in Biology, didn’t bury their heads to hide. They incubated their eggs in pits and reached their beaks deep into the ground to turn them. They weren’t scared. They were simply tending to their nests.
Even as girls, we understood why Mr. and Mrs. Watanabe didn’t alert the authorities when Sprout missed dinner after that Rugby Sevens Cup. They’d clash and Sprout would hiss, “Why send me to a school full of frogs and expect me to remain a tadpole?” I nodded with her. Our parents wanted us to imitate those “Originaire de France!” Lily exclaimed, but they didn’t want us to be them. After a week, Mr. and Mrs. Watanabe filed a missing child’s report. And to overcompensate for taking out a rattan reed to slap us when we were children, they told the police, “Sprout’s being very Sprout.” They shook their heads when questioned if she harbored any resentments.
For three months, everywhere we turned, “POSSIBLE KIDNAPPING VICTIM TURNS UP AT WET MARKET,” slapped us across the face. Reporters trumpeted sightings of our best friend with the fervor of refereeing a cock fight. Her black bob and thick calves were shoved into fluorescent nightclubs, tied aboard cargo ships to Burma, and slumped over in temple outhouses. Lily and I imagined Sprout hugging her knees instead, covering herself from being recognized.
It kept us looking.
Non-Frogs like us suspected otherwise. Rumors pervaded gambling dens, construction sites, and food delivery motorcyclists lingering in packs outside of rusty shophouses. “That traitorous slut,” we’d overhear them tsk, “probably followed a Frog for gold and got herself trafficked.”
Nuances didn’t matter for girls like us. If we had dark hair, dark eyes, and our skin browned in sunlight but uttered French, we were traitors. We were sluts whether we were born in Mauritius, Paris, or this walled city; birthed from parents who ate sticky rice, pilafs, or steamed plates of long fragrant grains. “Traitorous sluts,” echoed in our minds when we dreamt of a life beyond the buckets of water we poured over ourselves when bathing before bed.
Our parents accompanied us to comfort the Watanabes on New Year’s Eve. Mine asked the Watanabes about their home life, believing Sprout’s history could point to how she evaporated. They approached their interrogation with the same intensity as they did for each watch they repaired “What could have been the catalyst?” my father probed, as if Sprout and time were suspended, waiting for the right tool to spring them back into movement. On the other hand, Lily’s parents, who specialized in the manufacturing and export of stainless-steel products, focused on—what Lily and I mocked in deep tones—the supply chain.
“We’ve forced them to memorize bus routes, train stations, and all the entrances and exits through alleys, down to which canopy to seek shelter from being pelted by dirty leaking air conditioners within the city,” Lily’s mother, Mrs. Ng, said. “Clever Sprout can’t be kidnapped. If anyone took her within 3,000 square kilometers, she’d recognize a way home.”
“They’re wily, our daughters,” Mr. Ng added. “They can be outright disrespectful, but we’ve prepared them for a world where big fish eat little fish.”
Lily’s eyes glazed. We’d both recited these mantras before. Only the strong survive. The weak are meat, the strong eat. Help the shoots grow, pull them.
I wanted to cry: Sprout volunteered to go! Who am I to stop her?
2021.
Dan drove Lily and I in a pickup truck to meet Mr. Watanabe. I had originally asked Lily for this trip to be just us, as Sprout’s coming and going was something her best friends should handle, not spouses. Yet, Dan insisted on driving, since the road near the peak was paved with our military’s good intentions yet left full of potholes we inched around.
“Thank goodness there are any paths at all—ouf!” Lily shouted.
From the back, I called over the engine, “We don’t have to get out to lift tree branches to pass, either.”
We didn’t remember how our feet carried us up these steep slopes. We’d only worry where and when we’d eat. Slinging rice boxes over our backs in cotton bags, we spent weekends popping through villages to relieve our bladders, before continuing deeper into the jungle in search of secluded waterfalls. I saw three slim silhouettes wading into clear pools, our limbs glistening with sweat, and the burgeoning thrill of growing breasts and pubic hair. We’d show off any slight dip in our stomachs, curves around our hips, and parts that began to weigh down our full form. These were the moments when we recognized that we were no longer fry, waiting to fully form as fish covered in shiny scales. These moments were lodged in my peaceful memories with Sprout. Back when boys, bills, and being were not burdens.
“How’s the visiting professorship going?” Dan asked.
“The students are great,” I replied. “They show up on time, turn in great stories, and complete the readings. They’re hungry to succeed.”
“I’ll bet they aren’t as talented as your American ones?”
Everyone seemed to think that because we’re in Asia, we can’t compete with the perceived rigor offered exclusively in American universities. “At least here, I’m not shaking every time a student comes into my office worried that they might pop out a gun to demand a grade change.”
“Yet she’ll still leave us back to that brutal country she calls home,” Lily cooed, keeping her gaze out the window.
“Hey, you were the one who scared your cats screaming when I got my visa.”
“I support your dreams,” Lily twisted around, smirking.
“Sprout said the same thing too. I don’t believe you two though.”
“We will support your dreams even if they yank you away from us.”
1994.
At school, Lily and I waved our arms at the reporters lurking by the front gate, screaming, Pedophiles!
“Because only pedophiles,” Lily huffed, “would be so concerned about how a teenage girl was examined by aliens, like how they took off her clothes and where they touched her.”
In between classes, if either of us had heard rumblings behind closed bathroom stalls about how our Sprout was a liar, we slammed our shoulders into the doors and warned loudmouths: “Watch it.”
By the end of lunchtime, everyone at our lycee knew of Sprout’s return.
She materialized a few days before, close to her house in a nearby village. Children of a hilltop tribe had discovered her snoozing underneath one of their bamboo houses, peering from behind the stilts exclaiming, “Lost backpacker cooling off from the sun!” Sprout then rose as if summoned and calmly asked where she was—in their language—scattering them.
The children shrieked to their elders like aimless chickens, who came running to find Sprout licking her forearms clean with her small, pink tongue. They held a council. Determined she wasn’t theirs by her unblackened teeth, all the women were called to probe more about this City Girl in their midst: “Do you feel any aches near your girly parts?”
The Watanabes were notified soon after the hill tribe translated to a missionary what Sprout described: I was dropped off by the Star People. They led me off their ship, hovering above the village swing by the gate.
Monsieur-in-charge-Beaufort, pulled Lily and I out of Math class to ask what we were hiding.
“Des êtres stellaires?” Lily and I suggested feebly.
“Extraterrestres?” He deadpanned.
Our response stayed the same when Monsieur Beaufort repeated the same question in fifth period. He separated us in two rooms, promising to release me if I confessed the truth.
“I know as much as you do,” I said. “I haven’t seen Sprout since the Sevens Cup.”
This didn’t please him. “I was told that both you three were spotted in the stands on a school day, but I will overlook that transgression since it’s our missing student we’re talking about.”
I traced the lines on my palm, steadying my exhales. I was afraid he could see into me, and the moment I had spun away from Sprout that day.
“I will also overlook any details that could get all three of you in trouble with your parents. The most important thing is to find out what happened. Sprout was plucked out from under our noses! If she has suffered any harm, wouldn’t you blame yourself for not letting us adults find a way to care for her?” He glared at me with his green eyes.
Forced hot tears streamed down my cheeks.
“Chryssa, those who protect and lie for the perpetrator are just as bad as the ones who committed the crimes themselves.”
I thought, if ostriches are mistaken for hiding when they bury their heads in sand, then what about teenage girls? Why aren’t we afforded that grace?
2021.
We parked outside of the Watanabes’ gates like our parents used to and thumbed the gatebell. Mr. Watanabe’s slippers dragged across the cement driveway, beaming, “Since when does an old man find himself in the company of beautiful young people?”
“You look the same, Uncle,” Lily exclaimed, before reaching for a hug.
Everything inside the house was preserved as it was when Sprout returned from the village twenty-seven years ago. The Watanabes lived in a raised house, with a wide porch that connected the kitchen to the living room. Mounds of opened mail lined the walls next to piles recycling bags. Water spots had sprouted atop the tiled floor, dulling the patina. Their furniture, carved cypress wood dressers, tables, and chairs—once the envy of all our parents who didn’t inherit such sturdy yet delicate décor—prevailed as antiques. Metal photo frames of a young Sprout holding up a baby chick on a farm; a baby Sprout being swung by both of her parents at Disneyland; a somber Sprout in a black gown and tassel at her college graduation, displaying her degree with Mr. Watanabe grinning next to her, accrued dust on the bookshelves. Mr. Watanabe ushered us outside for tea, as if lingering over evidence of how precious he found her made him weak. Overlooking the driveway, and rolling hills, I turned back to find the grass chairs we used to get scolded for jumping on. Their legs had yellowed and frayed.
After serving Mr. Watanabe his cup, Lily couldn’t help herself. “I think Sprout went to look for them.”
“The aliens?” Mr. Watanabe asked.
Dan slurped his tea a little too loud.
“Yes, the aliens,” Lily repeated.
“Uncle, I have no idea where she thinks she’ll find them,” I said.
“But do they want to be found?” Mr. Watanabe murmured. “I sound senile, I know. I’ve replayed every interaction I’ve shared with my daughter, even the moments when her mother was still around too. I’ve not been the best father, but I’ve tried. Even after paying off the business’ debt, supporting Sprout through college and through her efforts to reinvent herself, nothing I do makes her happy.”
“She’s grateful even if she doesn’t show it,” Lily said.
“I still remember when our first house caught on fire,” Mr. Watanabe said. “I had salvaged our passports and our safety deposit box. Maiko, smothered black by the ash, had held onto an emergency bag so tight her knuckles paled like the moon. We thought we’d lost Sprout, barely six at the time, but she was waiting for us outside back, seated on the ledge of the firetruck, dangling her feet. She had left all her belongings, even her favorite Hello Kitty plushie behind. She didn’t bring a single thing. I yelled, Thank the stars you’ve found a way out! She knocked back her head and cackled, Oto-san, why wouldn’t I find a way out?”
Ploi Pirapokin is a Thai writer from Hong Kong. She is the Nonfiction Editor at Newfound Journal, and the Co-Editor of The Greenest Gecko: An Anthology of New Asian Fantasy forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. Her work is featured in Tor.com, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, Gulf Stream Magazine, The Offing, and more.
Fay Ku is a Taiwan-born, New York City-based artist whose work is figurative, narrative and connects with past and present cultural histories. She is the recipient of a 2007 Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant and 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship grant. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally including solo exhibitions at the Honolulu Museum of Art ( Honolulu, Hawaii) New Britain Museum of American Art (New Britain, CT) and Snite Museum of Art (South Bend, IN); she has also participated in several artist residencies including Wave Hill (The Bronx, NY), Lower East Side Printshop (New York, NY), Tamarind Institute (Albuquerque, NV), and Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE). She attended Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont for her BA and holds both a MFA Studio Art and MS Art History from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY.