Endless hills covered in bristly chaparral: this was the first time yellow was beautiful to me. Those hills were so round! But not smooth.
Chaparral: a word I learned a long time ago, somewhere I can’t quite remember. When I search the map of my mind, pins drop all over and none of them are sharp enough.
You see, I grew up on hills. They weren’t yellow. Think slick asphalt, bright and black, slurping up heat and spitting out rocks that rattled in my skull. Maybe my older brother taught me the word Chaparral? It would make sense because he taught me a lot of things.
I was looking for one memory, but I found another instead. Older brother is lecturing at family Dim Sum in Emeryville. A paper napkin is his whiteboard. He waves a golf pencil around, determined to teach me two of the most important things.
First, he writes out the word hapa and says, “that’s us!”
Hapa: a word that introduced me to the intoxicating ease a label can sometimes bring. Sometimes. A semi-permeable linguistic membrane: seeing comes in, something else goes out.
The second word Josh wrote on the napkin was: MMMBop. MMMBop is a pop song by the band Hanson.
I am older now than I was then and I have a few notes to offer regarding Josh’s paper napkin talk. First off, I think MMMBop is a catchy song, but I do not think it’s one of the most important things. And second: hapa.
Hapa is a Hawaiian word that means half. We are not Hawaiian. And I wonder if a question-mark-appropriated word that attempts to quantify race can be much more than fodder for constructed fire, real flames. Maybe a different word. Maybe no words make sense to me at all. I have one more memory for you, then I’m done. I promise!
There was once this red jacket that I had since ages 5 or 6. I loved it and wore it every day till I was in my 20s. One day, the red jacket disappeared. I have no idea where anything goes, especially memories and that red jacket.
For a while I stopped wearing red without thinking much about it. Some latent form of mourning? Eventually I noticed I’d accumulated a lot of blue clothes. And, if you talk about blue, you have to talk about yellow.
Chaparral is a brushy type of biome. It’s full of plants that preserve themselves through dry, hot summers by temporarily turning yellow, so they need less water. When the rain returns, the shrubs burst back into a brilliant green. Chaparral is evergreen, but not forever green.
Is there anything more beautiful than self-preservation via change?
Definitely. Definitely there are more beautiful things. But today I am a pitch of soft asphalt, recently unshaded, my body bleating in an unwavering sun. Today, I am thinking about beautiful, golden: chaparral.
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Unclasp that buckle clamping your eyes shut. Take a look! Into the wide valley below.
We could roll down from these brambles and find, at the pitch black bottom, a house bathing in sun. Like my brother’s.
It’s been baptized by brushy shrubs and yucca that – careful – could prick your finger, slice your hands, draw blood.
The tumbleweed that mom wrestled on the side of the highway dances. It is a feverish and acidic type of midnight. We are all prone to not stopping after starting.
In the process of forgetting, I come back to screaming in the hot valley driveway, desert night chilling the air while my bare toes warm up, clutching onto still-hot asphalt. Or was it all during the day? Dad is so afraid and he is mine because now we flow the same: hot. We will not ask for reminders of what happened out of resigned respect but I do not want to be the memory: forgotten.
Brush aside those rubberized eraser marks! I am there. I am hugging plush words. Protection lies between my forearms. Maybe I just do not want to forget myself anymore.
Let’s bathe. That always helps. Bathe me at the bottom of the valley in golden green, on the muddy shoreline where tumbleweeds melt to brass and every root plays a shining horn.
It’s a combo band of dad’s tenor sax and my middle school trombone, mom’s keys and brother’s bass, niece’s opera and sister’s grace, uncle’s grove and popo’s enamelware skin. We scour our surface with bright smiling sponges.
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On the shoreline from here to there, sand is more like mud and wide-smile-green-eyes is just a kid rolling through it. I’m frenetic, limbs thrashing damp towels to soak in her skin. Slurp. Just so.
The salads have to look like they fell from Heaven, he said to her, who said it to me. Random and perfect. Immaculate deterioration. My forearms widen into salad smiles. I am a goat! Bleating I love you!!!! from the back of my throat.
Everything was once bile vomited from the pit of my stomach. Endless dissatisfaction. I am not home still but now I see it all around me because mud is a mirror. A two-way reflection is still an offering, though thorny.
Gimme those brambles. Let me wrap my lips around each barb. Tongue my frenulum with coarse spines. I will gnash it all into a cud. I’ll feed you mine if you feed me yours.
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