Perhaps my first clear memory of my mother was not of her but rather the moments without her. I would wake up to silent mornings devoid of the dish-clanking in the kitchen or the conversation between lovers on television, then I'd carefully walk down the stairs as if I held a huge bowl of water in me and knock on my father's door.
"Where is mama?" A voice so soft as if it were afraid of its own sound.
"She went to the market," He'd reply with a voice half muffled due to the barrier of the door, "Don't worry, she'll be back soon".
But that would already be too late, at age five that was more than I could handle, and at that very moment all the concentration I built up carrying the big water bowl downstairs would have tilt and ended with my face red overflowing with tears, like washing a ripe peach.
Most of my childhood was spent upon the dark wooden floors in my bedroom listening to countless stories on tapes and occasionally visiting my mother downstairs where she'd be sitting in front of the television blowing her nose due to tragic dramas. Once she'd see my appearance she would order me not to look at the television for I was beginning to get near-sighted, and also because soap operas were inappropriate for children. She would ask if I came to have her help me in origami, and before I'd get a chance to answer, she'd tell me that she knew nothing about it and could not offer any assistance. The pictures she drew were beautiful though, and she'd quickly sketch a figure on paper instead and hand it to me for coloring. I'd then run back upstairs and disappear for another few hours.
There were many afternoons where the sun in Taipei permeated the walls of our house and drained us with sweat. And there I'd stand in front of the screen door in a floral dress waiting for the breeze to stop by and dry off the strands of my hair moist against my forehead. The blue sky and cicada chirps were the basic ingredients of summer sometimes supplemented with motorcycle engines fading in and out as they passed. We would rarely have air conditioning on because my mother would tell us that coolness will follow if your heart was calm as if she were a wise Buddhist monk, and so I would lie upon the large mustard-yellow tiles in the living room which were the coolest part of the house. Her other methods of killing our heat involved us cutting grass jelly together, for the refrigerated gelatin was cold and slippery to our touch, and sometimes I'd secretly dip my hands into the ice-packed sweet soup just to enjoy the artificial winter a bit longer.