Where is home?

Soon after I left home, someone installed a large tail on me.

Many other people have tails, too, mostly women. As many as one in every three women has had at least one tail, I was told. The tails come in different sizes and weights. Once installed, it becomes an integral part of you, and it’s almost impossible to get rid of it on your own. The tricky part is no one can see your tail unless you reveal it to them. But like many, I was ashamed of my clunky, ugly tail, the thing that I thought I asked for. So, I never told anyone about my new identity as a “tailer.” I just kept dragging it around.

For the first 20 years of my life, Beijing was home, a city with a population of 20 million. When I came to the United States for college, I started off in a city with just a little less than half a million population. That was where I got my tail. Then, on a hot summer day in 2012, I stuffed myself and my big tail into a car and drove across the country to Nowhere, New Hampshire, a small town with just over 3,000 population.

Nowhere was cheaper than the larger towns around it, even though it was farther from my medical school. I think my being a tailer had something to do with the decision to rent an apartment from Nowhere: fewer congregates of schoolmates, less chance of exposing my tail.

“Where’s home for you?” People asked me.

“Beijing, China.”

“Oh…that’s a little different than Nowhere, New Hampshire, isn’t it?” Sometimes, they would joke.

“Maybe just a little…” I answered.

The day I arrived in Nowhere, I was not ready to present myself to anyone. Having been in the car with nothing but my tail for days, I was fully convinced that no one would like me anyway. “Live Free or Die,” read the welcome sign of New Hampshire when I drove across the river. How ironic. I glanced at my tail, which was big enough to occupy the entire passenger seat.

My new landlord, Bill came to meet me at the car, holding a large shotgun. I was thoroughly startled. “I think it really should be Live Free or Kill,” Bill said, planting his gun by his left foot and reaching out his right hand to shake mine. Oh gawd, what have I done? I thought to myself.

Though in his 70s, Bill was a tall, built man. He had short, curly hair and a large nose. He wore a black T-shirt that wanted to say “peace” in Chinese but said “and” instead. Bill wore this T-shirt in an effort to help me feel more at home. He must have deduced I was Chinese from my name. Turned out Bill was out on his massive property by the river shooting skunks that were digging in his grass. In fact, Bill was far from a threatening person. A retired physicist, he was a bookworm and an avid environmentalist. A few years back, he went to the town hall meeting every single month to advocate for solar street lamps. They finally got tired of him and installed the lamps. Later, I discovered that Bill took everything quite literally and had a very dry sense of humor. That explained our first interaction with each other. One should not judge a book by its gun-holding or killing-for-freedom cover.

Lisa, Bill’s wife was a well-known seamstress in town. Many older people had worn clothes altered by her. Lisa’s real claim to fame was her baby pajama designs with adorable farm animals on them: a fat cat, a fluffy llama, and a nerdy skunk. Almost every baby in Nowhere had a pair. A few years younger than Bill, Lisa was not as healthy. She was bothered by arthritis in her hands, which sometimes made tailoring difficult. Lisa was a short, large woman. She proudly wore her grey hair, where her reading glasses always sat. It was not infrequent that she asked me if I had seen her readers while wearing two pairs in her hair. “If I ever want to hide something from you, Lisa, I know where to put it,” I pointed at her hair.

Many years later, when Lisa recalled the first night I spent in the farmhouse, she spoke of an invisible weight I carried. “I looked over to your window to see if you needed anything. You curled up in the corner of the bed as if someone else had occupied the center, and you were only allowed to sleep on the edge.” She was not wrong.

Once, I went to the fleamarket in town to shop for a body-length mirror. Nowhere didn’t see Asian people often. Many looked at me curiously. “Hello! Do you want to see a pretty lady?” An older man saw me checking out his mirror, so he held it up in front of me and pointed to it: “Here she is!”

When you are a tailer, you see your tail everywhere you go, even when others can’t. In fact, that day on the lawn in front of the town hall, I didn’t see any pretty lady. My gigantic, ugly tail was all I could see in that mirror. I hadn’t noticed how big it had grown until then. Like a vampire exposed to sudden sunlight, I inhaled sharply and jumped over to turn the mirror around.

“Gosh! I am so sorry! He’s not a creep, he’s just awkward!” The mirror seller’s wife saw the horror on my face and grabbed the mirror from her husband’s hand. “Would you like this mirror? You can have it for $2 dollars!” The marked price was $15. I gave them the money and fled the scene with my new mirror. For a long time, I didn’t mount the mirror at the farmhouse. It faced the wall instead.

There was a cat on the farm who put the mice in their place. She had a very creative name, Puss. Puss was relentless when it came to terrorizing the mice. “Only if she could do the same with the skunks,” Bill complained. When Puss finally realized I was not just some passerby but here to stay for the long term, she brought the insides of a mouse to my doorstep under the big crabapple tree. When I stepped out to go to class, Puss proudly swept her tail left and right and let out a big meow as if to say: “I brought you these! You are welcome!”

“Thanks, Puss. I wish I could command my tail like that.” I patted her on the head, and she purred under my hand.

Once, when I was sitting out by the river to read, Puss came over to rub her sides against my ankle. I noticed she had a couple of ticks on her neck — a New England special. So I pulled them off for her. “There you go, Puss. Now you are free!” Then she walked around to my back and hissed and crawled. She jumped a few times as if she were punching something in the air behind me. I think perhaps Puss could see my tail. And she didn’t like it. So she wanted to set me free from it like I set her free from the ticks.

Sometimes, my tail felt light enough I could function somewhat like a normal person. I went to school, attended labs, and made friends. Other times, my tail felt so heavy that walking felt like dragging myself through mud. When I was brave enough, I would turn the mirror around to check on its growth and immediately regret it. Then I would spend days in bed, making up excuses to skip lectures.

On my lease, it said “No washer or dryer. Tenants can use the coin-operated laundromat located 7 miles from the apartment.” I did use the laundromat a couple of times before giving up. Washing and drying clothes meant making three round-trips in the car with my enormous tail; it hardly seemed worth the effort. Having a tail could make everything feel like it was not worth the effort.

One night, I heard a knock at my door. It was day three of one of my hibernation stretches. Lisa, having noticed that I hadn’t left the house for days, came to check on me. “Every Wednesday night at 6, you come to the main house to watch the news with Bill. Then at 7, after Jeapoerdy, we will have dinner. Today is a Wednesday. I hope you like fish.” I was not prepared for such an invitation, but Lisa didn't give me a chance to refuse.

“Oh. And bring your laundry basket! ” She pointed to the corner of my room, “If I ever wanted to hide anything from you, I know where to put it, too!” From then on, Lisa did my laundry for me. When the weather was good, she would hang my clothes up the lines she put up just outside of my window, facing the river. That’s how my mother did it when I was little. The smell of the sun lingered on those pieces of clothes and reminded me of home.

Sometimes, Lisa waved her arthritic hands at me through the window. I hopped out of my apartment onto the field of green grass to help her, temporarily forgetting I was dragging a tail.

“What’s that?” I pointed at a pair of black goggles hung on the string that looked like it was straight out of a science fiction.

“Those,” Lisa chuckled, “are my old motorcycle goggles. Bill has been fixing up his ancient BMW motorcycle in the shed. And every summer, he takes me out for a ride, and we brunch at King Arthur’s Cafe.” Bill traveled the world when he was younger and spent a significant amount of time in Africa. He had his BMW shipped there and rode it across the continent. “Bill spends more time every year fixing it up than actually riding it. But he will never sell it.” Lisa shook her head but couldn’t hide the smile on her face.

Another day, Lisa came into my room without knocking, wearing those ridiculous goggles. Her disobedient grey hair under the straps and these bulgy goggles made her look kind of crazy. “Come on, Zed!” Lisa widened her stance and spread her arms apart as if she were holding onto the motorcycle handlebars. “Vroom! Vroom!” She turned her wrists to start the imaginary engines. “Let’s go! It’s 6 PM news time!” On a stretch of my down days, I didn’t notice it was Wednesday. I burst out laughing at Lisa’s silliness, totally forgetting why I was feeling bad for myself.

The farmhouse was over 300 years old. When Bill and Lisa bought the property, it had been used by a family of welders. A bunch of scrap metals and leftover parts from random machines were scattered in and around the shed. Lisa collected the funny-looking ones and put them together to build a sculpture. The end result looked like a mysterious forest creature with the head of a horse and the limbs of a praying mantis. But it also had a pair of wings made from vintage tin posters. Over time, the vines overgrew the sculpture, tethering it down further into the ground. But the alien-like creature always looked like she could fly home if she wanted to, refusing to be tied down by anything on Earth.

“Where is home for you?” I asked the sculpture like people always asked me.

Slowly, the seasons changed. When fall came, and the trees started to turn different colors, it was time for us to change my windows from summer ones to winter ones. Bill and Lisa were in charge of dismantling the windows and lowering them down from inside my room. I had to climb onto the ladders to grab the windows from outside before carefully climbing down to exchange for the season-appropriate ones.

A few of the screws were hard to undo from the frames because years of wear and tear and temperature changes had warped the wood, making the window and the frame misaligned. “Bunkers! Rats!” Bill would shout when he got frustrated. Lisa and I would look at each other and giggle at the former professor’s choices of curse words.

Then, after the winters ended and the ladybugs came out, we would do this again to change the windows back to summer ones. One time, Bill struggled with the bad screws so much that he accidentally broke off a bedpost from my antique wooden bed frame. “Oh Jeepers Creepers! Farts!” He yelled. And we laughed. Sometimes, I hopped on and off those ladders twice a year, feeling almost tail-free. Other times, I secretly complained about why we needed to bother with this.

Many years later, in an email to welcome me back to the farmhouse for a visit, Bill wrote about the bed. “I’m sorry I couldn’t find your old bed. Some jerk broke the bedpost a few years back and never fixed it.” By then, I had also broken up with my tail for a number of years. Bill’s inside joke made me chuckle out loud. And his warm invitation brought tears to my eyes. Lisa told me in a text that Bill was now walking with a walker, unable to do any more chores around the house.

Jeepers Creepers, what wouldn’t I pay to go back to those window-changing days just to hear Bill curse and laugh with Lisa?

The winters in New Hampshire were not for the weak-hearted. Later in life, I spent a year in Texas, where the clinic would be canceled if a single piece of snowflake dropped from the sky. But back in New Hampshire, classes were never canceled, even if snow accumulated so high you couldn’t open your door. Worst comes to worst, you could always snowshoe to school. (But then my colleagues in Texas thought snowshoes were Uggs.)

When the mist froze over the crabapple tree in front of my door, I would run back to take out my good camera to take photos. I especially liked the tiny icicles hanging from the red fruits, as if the timing of the freezing was so perfect it caught a dew drop in action. Then, when the sun came up, the icicles melted, and the fruits remained intact.

Puss spent more time in the house in the winter to stay warm. And she often jumped out of nowhere in the study when Bill and I watched the news. Puss loved to sleep on Bill’s lap. Each time a contestant made a stupid mistake on Jeopardy, or if Bill knew the answer but the people on TV didn’t, Bill let out one of his famous curse words. Puss meowed to complain and jumped into my lap instead.

I had a sedan with all-season tires. Once, after a snowstorm, I had a hard time getting out of the driveway. A snowplow vehicle passed by and saw me struggling. The driver made a detour to plow our driveway so I could maneuver onto the road and go to school. It took a village to earn an M.D. degree in New Hampshire.

On stormy weekends, if I didn’t have to go to a clinical rotation, I would sit on my bed by the big window to watch the snowfall. Where the field ended and the river started was no longer clear, and the mountains in the background indeed earned its name: the White Mountains. The world outside was a snow-covered paradise, but I was warm as can be. Thank goodness Bill made us change the windows year after year. If I woke up to such surreal scenery, I would slip back into my warm cover and wish time could just freeze here.

Gradually, my tail seemed less and less significant.

One time, at our Wednesday night dinner, Bill wanted to share a joke he had heard during the day. It was a joke about farting. Apparently, he found it so funny that he couldn’t finish telling the joke before crying with laughter. I never got to hear the whole joke, but I laughed so hard with Bill and Lisa that my abs hurt the next day. Even though I don’t find jokes about bodily functions funny myself, each time I hear one, I giggle at the memory of Bill trying to catch his breath while laughing at his own incoherent joke about a fart. In this memory, I was tail-free.

The last summer I spent at the farmhouse was right before graduation. With the help of Bill and Lisa and all their goofiness, my tail was shrinking and almost broken off, and I was enjoying my newfound lightness and freedom.

One day, I saw that there might be a rainstorm coming, but I decided to go for a run up the cliff anyway. I wanted to take a panoramic mental picture of the farm one last time. I will make it down the mountains before the rain hits. By the time I arrived at the cliff that overlooked the farmhouse, the sky had become completely dark. Rats. I started to run down the hill covered in dense woods as fast as I could. But I lost my way in the darkness and ran off the path. When I finally reached the bottom, the storm was so fierce that I would choke each time I tried to take a deep breath. I was completely drenched. That was the end of my iPhone 5’s short life.

Yet somehow, a firetruck was waiting at the bottom of the hill. “Bill and Lisa called for us to take you home.” A firefighter told me. “Bill was my science teacher, and Lisa made all of my kids’ pajamas. Now, let’s get you home.”

Home.

When we arrived, the rain had subsided somewhat. Lisa had a big grin on her face when she saw the truck pull in. When I stepped down from the truck, looking like a totally wet chicken, she snapped a photo of me and started laughing.

Home is where people worry about you but can’t wait to make fun of you when the occasion arrives. The rain storm broke the reminiscence of my tail completely. Lisa brought over a deck of newly-dried warm towels so I could dry off and warm up. I looked in the mirror at the wound where my tail had broken off and saw that it was starting to heal.

For a while, after I moved away from the farmhouse to another state, when people asked me where home was for me, I answered “New Hampshire.” Few people actually bought it. But it rang true to me.

Yesterday, a decade after I left the farmhouse, I came back to visit. “Welcome home!” Lisa said to me, opening the door to my old apartment. The furnitures are largely unchanged from my time, except for the new bed. Due to old age, after I moved out, Bill and Lisa had not rented it out. I found a sticker on the door of the bathroom with my handwriting on it that said: “hand.” Apparently, I felt the need to label the hand towel aside from the bath towel. And apparently, it’s something worth keeping.

A decade ago, negotiating between the tail and my life was all I could handle. But things are different now. I have more space in my heart for those who love me. And I am determined to make that space a cozy home for them like they once did for me.

“Bill, I have something for you.” Bill suffered a good tumble a few years ago and is now having trouble with balance. I pulled out a copy of a newspaper clipping from an archive I accessed for research. Titled “Next Time!!”, it was a satirical article about how giving birth had become a fully medicalized process and was totally unnatural. “Next time your doctor gets really constipated, send him to the hospital to get ‘delivered!’” I read, unsure if I could get to the end without laughing aloud myself. And Bill started to laugh when he sensed some poop jokes coming. After I finished reading, Bill sounded like he was oscillating between snorting and crying, with tears at the corners of his eyes. There he is.

It rained all night last night. I kept my window open like I did many rainy nights before. The sound of the raindrops soothed me endlessly. I couldn’t wait to wake up the next morning and watch the sun lift up the mist on the farm. I might also dig up the mirror from the storage closet.

“Where’s home for you?” People ask me.

I am home now.

Disclaimer: Details and names were changes to protect privacy. And of course, the tail was metaphorical.