I didn’t believe in zodiac logic—Chinese or astrological, so my mother couldn’t complain I was “rejecting my culture” in this instance—but I still found myself panicking a little. Probably because I was drowning in lies. And maybe because there were already too many external forces keeping Drew and me apart, and I couldn’t handle another one, even one I didn’t believe in.

My mother gestured to herself and my father. “We’re a perfect match!” she declared with her chest puffed out. “Mouse and ox—we’re faithful, understanding, and…” She leaned over to whisper the last word. “Intimate.”

Dear Lord, please make it stop.

My father harrumphed, low in his throat, a little phlegmy and a lot loud, and I prayed for a subject change. “Are you sure you don’t want to transfer to Stanford, Jing-Jing? They have a great economics department.” It was a topic I normally hated, but welcome in this moment. That is, until he said, “I’d feel better if you didn’t live near Andrew and have to deal with… temptations.” And oh, the irony: Drew lived here. “I know you got rejected, but maybe their standards for transfers are different? And you’ve gotten good grades at the University of Chicago—that must mean at least a little something, even to Stanford, right?”

“Is there another reason you want me closer to home, Bǎbá?” I ventured. “Because I can take a quarter off.”

He shook his head rapidly. “No, no, that’s not what I’m saying. I just—”

My mother put a hand on my father’s. “I talked to Jing-Jing this afternoon. We can trust her with the sex. She may have lied to our friends the other day, but she hasn’t lied to us, not when it’s important. She was just so excited about her relationship with Andrew that she didn’t know how else to show us Hongbo wasn’t for her. Right, Jing-Jing?”

I nodded vigorously. “Yup, we can definitely move on from this topic now.”

“Don’t worry,” she murmured to my dad. “She didn’t even want sec-uh-see underwear.”

For parents who still called it “the sex” and “sec-uh-see,” we were talking about intimacy and whale tails a shocking amount.

But maybe this was their way of showing me they were coming around. This was the (dragon) fruit of my labor, a brief snapshot in time when my parents and I were okay, and I tried to make myself enjoy it even though I knew that if I turned around, I’d see we were on the precipice of a catastrophic fall. Because history showed that my parents and I could never be happy at the same time. The sand was shooting through the hourglass, seemingly quicker now that we were approaching the end.