#24 Flushing Away Mom’s Eyesight
A gray bathroom, toilet on the right side, the sink on the left, the shower more left, a concrete-colored tile floor. Daylight streams in through the window above the toilet where translucent glass frames a plastic fan installed into the wall.
Every bathroom in Hong Kong has one of these. Literally, it’s called a “pull stench fan”. Ok, it means “pull air”, but you know what kind of air we mean when we say it needs to be pulled and not blown in your direction. In Chinese, we do use a different phrase to name that type of fan.
I am two years old and a tiny dumpling wearing a dress made by my grandma.
We’re in her house, a flat twenty stories above ground with wood panel flooring everywhere but the bathroom and kitchen.
My mom and I are in the bathroom together.
A white plastic pod sits on the back of the sink, next to the chrome faucet and under the wall-mounted mirror cabinet. The pod is two inches long and has a flat top covering a bottom that is like two circular pods connected side-by-side. The flat top has some curved lines one can see in the sunlight and feel with fingers. The side covering its union with the bottom is evenly paneled like a pie crust. To my baby eyes with baby-sized hands, this pod is the perfect toy.
One of us finishes using the toilet and presses the lever and whoosh… water rushes into the bowl and begins to swirl up and to the left as I grab the white pod, the most grabbable thing in the whole room.
I grab it. My mom objects and tries to take it back.
Toilet water whirls and in the tug of war between mom hands and baby hands — ‘plop!’ goes the pod into the toilet.
“Aaahhh” my mom screams high and all her attention goes to the white pod whirling in the toilet. She reaches in, trying to grab it.
She yells, water whirls. Maybe she catches the pod, maybe she doesn’t.
She doesn’t catch what was inside the pod. Two brand-new prescription-made contact lenses, crafted just for her after rounds of evaluation by her eye doctor of choice, one of the many masters of their craft she saves for her visits to Hong Kong while living in the US.
Those curved lines on the flat top were letters and those circular pods on the bottom held the fluid bathing each individual delicate lense.
This is the mid-80’s. These things cost hundreds of dollars USD then. Think of how much that’s worth now.
I’m being punished. Why did I have to grab something so important? Why did I have to grab something that isn’t mine?
I’m not supposed to do that. I’m not supposed to grab anything.
She’s angry and I am scared.
Am I being yelled at or ignored?
I cry. My needs are ignored more as my tantrum adds stress to the financial and practical loss.
From there, my memory turns to static.
That happened in the apartment where my grandma and youngest aunt live, and as I compose this in their current apartment, I asked them if they remember this happening.
Neither of them do.
Then what happened? We all ask.
My aunt asks while standing holding one hand in the air face down and steady, the other one swinging back and forth under it, “did your mom hit your bum?”
Do you think she would? I ask.
I ask my grandma separately. She listens, doesn’t remember this happening, then asks — “and then what?”
I don’t know, I say.
“You should buy her another pair,” she says, organizing a bin of twenty or so boxes and bottles of medications.
Updated in June — Mom said, yes, it happened. She says I must have been curious. The toilet water was whirling and maybe I was wondering what else could whirl in there, so I threw in the white pod.
I remembered the bathroom layout exactly.
She stopped wearing contact lenses after that.
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This is Day 24 of Don’t Break the Chain, a writing course by Cole Schafer. Want to read his stuff? Sign up for his newsletter, Sticky Notes.
Today’s prompt — write down your earliest memory in as much detail as you possibly can. Then, read it to someone you shared it with and see if they remembered it differently.
