Fishing for Mermaids

The Sweetest Orange

I've heard the story of my parents meeting thousands of times. The story begins during the Lantern festival celebrating the year of the dragon, despite having lived in the same village for the first 18 years of their lives. My father always tells the story: The moon shone fully that night, illuminating any unlit red lanterns that hung from the trees. In the distance, he says they could hear the beating of the waves against the shore, yet the river between them passed silently. Though neither of my parents are Chinese, this festival was always celebrated in great lengths in their Singapore village.

This part I could never understand as a child-I remember wondering why the marked names and addresses never washed off the oranges once they were thrown into the river-but my mother wrote her information on the outer peel of a mandarin orange, along with a few dozen other young women from their village, and tossed it into the river. My father dove into the orange speckled water and within moments, had my mother's orange in his palm. He peeled it, tucked the peel into his pocket, and took a bite from the orange.

This I am not sure if I ever believed, but my father swears it was the sweetest orange he had ever tasted, almost as sweet as a peach, he says.

We drove to the airport, a few days before Chinese New Year began, and the silence in the car seemed to spread like a gas between the three of us. My mother in the passenger seat, running her slender fingers over the cover of her Singapore passport, gazed ahead of her at the dry California earth around us. There was no visible sign of it, but she must have been so excited to see water and trees and tropical flowers again, for the first time since I was born an American citizen. I couldn't see what my father did, I sat behind him, but the car continued steadily down the road and his head never turned to see all that came with his job here. He was a professor of Chinese language and Eastern Asian history at UCLA, and I remember him always being very serious at the department Christmas parties. Then, after we'd clocked in enough time with his colleagues, my parents and I would get back into the car and my father would tell me stories of his childhood in Singapore, my mother sitting silently beside him. I always remember her silent, and have never been sure why my father had been so persistent in pursuing her after that Lantern Festival years ago.

He would muse about how difficult it was to contact my mother. He pulled the peel from his pocket after tasting how sweet it was, and read off her name and address. He searched the crowd of women, trying to find someone who had been watching him, hoping her eyes had followed the orange, but he couldn't find my mother. She had receded behind the line of women, embarrassed that her name was floating there at all, and left before my father could find her. The next morning, after all of the New Year celebrations had ended, my father went to her home, and asked for her. My grandfather had initially said no, but my father wouldn't give up and described the sweetness of the orange to him. How it danced on his tongue and surprised him. How he hadn't expected to find love that night, but that he had. How he could tell just from the orange's sweetness that my mother was an uncovered jewel and would forever make him happy. My grandfather must have understood the symbolic meaning of the oranges that my father often reminded me of as well, that the sweeter the orange, the sweeter the marriage would be, so he led my father to my mother, who had been spying on the interaction from the yard where she was hanging clothes. Now this is another part of the story I'm not sure I ever believed: Upon seeing my mother, my father knew in an instant that it was fate, for she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Right then and there he asked her to marry him, she nodded, and they were married the next month.

I opened my phone to check for any missed calls or texts every few minutes, though I would have felt it vibrate in my pocket. But there was nothing. Not even a "Have fun in Singapore!" text. I didn't mind there wasn't anything from Bryan or Mike. I only cared there wasn't a text from Sheila. We were friends before we began dating, but now the relationship status seemed blurred. I wasn't sure if it would be appropriate to let her know I was on my way to the airport, but worse, I wasn't sure if she'd even care anymore. My parents and I went through check-in, security, and boarded the plane. Before the pilot asked us to turn off our cellular devices, I texted Sheila: "Not sure if u care but on the plane to Singapore. See u in 2 weeks."