A group exhibition of the Asian American Women Artists Alliance
at A.I.R. Gallery, 511 W 25 Street, NYC, July 20 - August 7, 2004
Peaches
From "Pang", a novel by Andrea Louie
Mama met Ba because the 3:15 p.m. bus from San Jose was late. A peach truck overturned on Route 82, spilling its plump cargo across the two-lane road and backing up traffic for miles. Thousands of fuzzy peaches lay across the tarmac of the El Camino Real, and everyone got out of their cars to stare at the spectacle. The truck driver, unhurt, crawled out the passenger side of the cab and stood there along with everyone else. It was as though they were witnessing a miracle, fruit sprouting from the very pavement itself.
Celeste Leong was on a bus a eighth of a mile back from the accident. She was on her way back to San Francisco after spending a weekend visiting her Aunt Bing Ching: age lucky eighty-eight, childless, arthritic and fussy but with her appetite intact. She liked to go out for dim sum on the weekends, and Celeste and her sisters rotated once a month to go down to what was then "the country" to take their aunt out for brunch on Saturday. Her husband, Marcus, preferred to stay at home, inviting his cronies over to play dominoes on the kitchen table. They smoked cigarettes and drank Chinese tea and listened to the Giants game on the radio. Bing Ching and her nieces would bring back soy sauce chicken for them, along with seafood lo mein. Sometimes, as a treat, they bought a walnut butter cream cake from the Chinese bakery, so light it was like eating a cosmetic sponge.
The weekend the couple met, the routine had been the same at Bing Ching's house. Celeste accompanied her aunt to church for the Sunday morning Chinese-language services. Afterward, they went with some friends who had a car to a pancake house for a short stack of buttermilk flapjacks with a side of bacon. Back at the house, Celeste put together her overnight bag and walked eight blocks by herself to the bus station in time to catch the 3:15 to San Francisco.
Forty-five minutes into the trip, the bus screeched to a halt. Nosily, all the passengers slid open their windows and poked out their heads. They saw a policeman go by on a motorcycle. Then more official-looking people came, all on motorcycles or scooters - it was impossible to get a car through that traffic. The passengers started hanging out the windows like on a Third-World bus. Word traveled down the line as to what had happened. People got out of their cars and milled around. The bus passengers finally persuaded the driver to open the door, and they, too, wandered down the road. Celeste remembered the scene as though it were a fairy tale, people eating peaches off the road like it was the most ordinary thing in the world, the fruit so fresh they could rub off the fuzz with their fingers. Women stuffed peaches in their handbags, and men still in their Sunday suits piled fruit in their hats.
"It was like a fair," Celeste told Elsie. "It was very exciting." She, too, gathered up a few peaches before the police began shooing people away. The fruit was warm from being out in the California sun, heavy in her hands like a wish. People got back on the bus and ate, a few pen-knives passed around to peel the peaches since they had no way of washing them.
"Aww, it doesn't matter," some fellows said, taking big bites. "A little dust ain't gonna hurt you.
After more than an hour, the traffic picked again, and everyone fell asleep, sticky and sweet, random flies sucked out the bus windows with the sudden speed. As Celeste drifted off, she stared out her window, the mountains dry and brown except for the occasional groves of trees.
She woke up with a start when the bus pulled into the San Francisco bus terminal. Still woozy from sleep, she gathered her overnight bag and purse and two peach pits wrapped in a page she'd torn from someone's newspaper. The sun was just starting to disappear behind the buildings, and Celeste felt disoriented, even though she'd made this trip plenty of times before. She looked around, trying to figure out which way was Sacramento Street, as she had to take the city bus now to get home. She turned one way, and then the next. She still had four peaches left in her bag and was worried they might be crushed before she got home.
That's when she walked right smack into Calvin Pang.
"Oh," Celeste said. "Excuse me." When Celeste told this story—and it was always she who told it, never Pang—she admitted she was more worried that she'd bruised the peaches than whoever this guy was.
Pang nodded. He would have tipped his hat had he been wearing one. "It's all right, I wasn't paying attention.
They looked at each other in the late midsummer light.
"He looked so sad," Celeste said. "He walked right into me; he wasn't even looking where he was going." She sighed. "I thought it was fate.
They were engaged in seven weeks and married within sixteen. It was 1955. Both were tight-lipped with Elsie about their courtship, leaving it with some cryptic remark along the lines of, "That was the way things were then," as if that answered everything. There were a few dinners, some Saturday matinees, a walk through the Presidio to the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, where Celeste lost a scarf in the too-strong wind ("It blew right out to sea, it looked like a piece of seaweed,") and a brief proposal while standing on a city bus.
Pang did not have a ring, but gave her a blue hyacinth in a pot, which he had been carrying around all afternoon in a paper bag.
"Your father was going to ask me all day, but I think he lost his nerve," Celeste said. "Here we were, on our way home, and he still hadn't said anything. I guess he figured if he didn't ask me on the bus, all the money for the flower would have gone to waste."
© 2004 AAWAA Asian American Women Artists Alliance
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