On the Curve of Infinity
    When I was five years old, I decided eight was my favorite number. It was a bold number in my mind, red and unafraid, and I loved the way the line of the eight curved and crossed over itself to form something unbreakable. I would sit at an easel and draw eights over and over again on a large pad of paper, pressing so hard with my pencil that ghosts of the eights haunted the pages underneath when I was done. And then I would tear off the page and start over. 
    The year I turned six, I learned the symbol for infinity: an eight, fallen onto its side. I couldn’t comprehend the concept of infinity, but I loved the idea of it. I loved the possibility of forever, the way every star and planet and year can be captured in a single shape. Maybe, I thought, the infinity symbol loops in on itself the way time could. Maybe, if we go far enough in one direction, we’ll have no choice but to turn back, and we’ll end up where we started.



    The day I flew to Beijing, the airport was quiet, the colors muted in the light of dawn. The footsteps of the passersby clicked on the floor with a hollow sound, and even the voice over the intercom system seemed hushed. Through the windows that faced the rows of airplanes outside, the sun was rising in faint lavender, and the sky was streaked with clouds like watercolor, wispy and pale. I sat next to my parents, waiting to board our flight, watching those colors and moving a crayon absently across the sketchpad that was balanced on my lap. I was bundled in a black sweatshirt just large enough to pull over my knees, the fabric soft under my fingers of my left hand that absently tugged at the hem. 
    Beside me, my mother’s face seemed like a canvas stretched too tight, tense with her wrinkles pronounced. I leaned my head into her shoulder, seeking comfort, and felt the vibration of her voice as she spoke to my father. It’s an odd experience to hear someone’s words through them; the sounds are muffled and you feel the words as much as hear them. But it’s a safe feeling as well, and I was content to stay like that for a while more, before we left to wherever we were going, before the world opened itself to me.
    As my mother spoke, her words not quite distinguishable, she slipped the crayon from my fingers and moved it across my sketchpad in thick, confident strokes before holding it up for me to see. Reluctantly, I raised my head off her shoulder and squinted at what she had drawn: Chinese characters in the firetruck red of the crayon, fluid and firm at once, beautifully foreign.
    “What does it say, Mimi?” she asked me.
    I moved my eyes across the page, recognizing the characters but unable to pronounce them. The meaning, too, was frustratingly out of reach. I shook my head.
    “Don’t be scared.” She gave the sketchpad to me and I wrote okay in English, a bit sloppily, my letters tilting to the right. I knew she thought I was scared of the plane ride, the first in my life, or maybe the move, but those were the least of my fears. I was afraid of the way my parents talked to each other, their words underscored by anger and resentment even when their voices were mere whispers. I was scared of the way their apologies seemed like the paper cranes I’d fold, clumsy and creased from starting over and over again. My mother’s shoulders curved inwards more and more each day, her eyes grew more and more weary, and trying to read her thoughts was like trying to read Chinese; you can grow up surrounded by the characters and yet never understand a word unless someone bothers to help you learn. 
     And I was scared of change. When you live in a house of cards, the slightest tremor can bring everything down around you.



    In preschool, I was told that the earth was shifting and spinning under our feet, orbiting the far-off star we call the sun. Nothing could have seemed more impossible to me. I remember my classmates and I asking, “How come we can’t feel it moving?” I paid extra attention to the floor beneath me, thinking that maybe if I concentrated enough I could sense the motion, but I felt nothing. The only evidence of our orbit I could find was the rising and setting of the sun. 
    For a while, it seemed my life was shifting in that way: too gradually to be felt, only to be seen. I saw it in the bills piled at my kitchen table, empty boxes of takeout, voices that bled into the darkness, books of Chinese and the search history on my father’s computer. But I didn’t worry too much, because for every night I lay awake, listening to the sounds of my parents’ anger, there was a night my mother would stroke my hair, her soft smile as reliable as the moon, until I fell asleep. The flowers of spring bloomed and withered, the tides came in and went out, and my parents would say they loved each other even after their worst fights. The constants in my life kept me from feeling the ground moving beneath my feet. 
    Then came the Chinese lessons, the talk of Beijing, the whispers of leaving. My mother had lived in China for several years when she was younger, and I knew she missed it in the way that we all miss our homes, the way we are pulled back to our past, following the curve of  infinity to the beginning again. But San Francisco was her home too, and despite the landlord, despite the bills, despite the arguments between her and my father, I tried to convince myself we wouldn’t leave. China was the country people talked about when they were referring to somewhere far, far away: I dug a hole to China. It was a shapeless place in my mind, blurred and strange, and I had no idea what to expect of such a foreign country. I clung to memories of my parents in San Francisco and tried to convince myself that we would stay. But whatever hope I held in my heart was temporary, as most beautiful things are. The leaves, petals, rain, they all pass. Some days, we cannot even see the sun. 



    The intercom announced that our flight was boarding, and my mother stood, brushing off her slacks and slinging her purse over her shoulder. Every line in her face was precisely drawn, her features hardened into something resolute.
I closed my sketchbook and stuffed it into the backpack at my feet, but made no move to leave. Around me, other people waited for their flights, all of us brought together by some insignificant twist of fate before life ricocheted us apart again.
    What would I see if I could look at this moment through a stranger’s eyes? Would I see the turmoil, the sadness that lurked under my mother’s features? Would my father look as broken and small as he did to me now? Would I know that we were leaving him?
    Maybe I wouldn’t spare a thought for the family of three in the terminal, nothing more than passing silhouettes in my peripheral vision. We’re all on trajectory courses, on our own paths as we careen through space, brushing past each other’s lives. We are ablaze in our own light, our own fury and joy and misery following us wherever we go, to the ends of the earth and into the stars. But so often we do not spare a thought for those who pass us by. We do not consider that they, too, are heading somewhere, and leaving somewhere else behind. 



    One night, we went out to eat at my parents’ favorite Chinese restaurant, an unusual change from the takeout we normally ate at the folding table in our living room. I was worrying at the paper napkin in my lap, shredding it into tiny bits, when my mother said abruptly, “Mimi, your father and I have something to tell you.”
    As my mother began to speak, I tore bigger pieces from my napkin, balling the paper into my fist so my father would not notice the habit he had tried so hard to break me of. All I could feel was a sinking sensation, like the one you get when you jump cannonball into a pool and for a moment, when everything around you is blue, you forget you were supposed to swim to the surface. 
    “China is a beautiful country,” my mother said, her words reaching me through a thick fog. “You will be happy there.” 
    I was quiet for a while, the sounds of the restaurant muted around me. I could hear the faint buzz of silence in my ears. “Are we moving?” I asked finally, and then I couldn’t pretend anymore, and the water had been cold but the sunlight when I surfaced felt harsher somehow.
   The week before we left, I found out my father wasn’t going with us.



   I finally rose from my seat, lifting my backpack from the floor. My father stood as well. He looked as fragile as origami, like a breeze could blow him away. But he reached for me anyway, and I was drawn to him like the tide. There, in his embrace, I was safe, no longer teetering on the edge of the world. Take a step, and I could fall. If he let me go, I might never return. But for those few seconds, I was okay. 



   My parents had already signed the divorce papers, and my mother had booked tickets that would fly the two of us over oceans and mountains and continents, halfway across the world. The time difference between San Francisco and China, my mother told me, is 15 hours. As I awoke, my father would sleep; as the sun rose for him, the moon would stare down at me. I would leave each day without him.
   My father was the one who showed me the symbol for infinity. He told me the names of the stars, explained how vast the oceans are. He introduced me to the universe, taught me my first words, woke me up in the morning and tucked me in at night. A world without him was as unfathomable as a world without the sun.



   My mother made me read countless books on China before we left, about history and culture and language. Most I read reluctantly, finding nothing of interest within the pages. But there is a singular, obscure fact from my readings that has always stayed with me: in Ancient China, an eclipse was believed to be a dragon swallowing the sun. 



   Despite the incredible speed of a plane as it hurtles down a runway, nothing could have prepared me for the moment it rose into the air. It’s a miracle of some sort, to feel the plane leaving the ground. It makes you wonder, as cities and the stories they hold shrink beneath you and clouds rush in to take their place, if leaving is always this easy. If the price you paid for a window seat is the price of beginning again.
   My sketchbook was open on my lap, the blank pages pleading for color. My mother said that my art will be at home in Beijing, which is a world brought to life in the colors of crayon, vibrant and saturated hues. 
   My art will be, I thought as I watched the clouds outside my window, even if I’m not. And that was a small comfort.
The plane rose higher and higher into the sky. I thought about my father growing increasingly small somewhere beneath us. I thought about Chinese characters, origami, houses of cards. Dragons swallowing the sun, the spinning earth and oceans and moons. And I thought about infinity. 
   Someday, I would go far enough that I would end up where I started. Someday, I would come back to my home, to my father. I would come back to this exact moment, a girl of eight years old on a plane, her sketchpad blank with possibilities, tears on her cheeks. So I decided that I was not afraid.
   I picked up a red crayon and drew infinity.