“How can you say I don’t understand?” I interrupted. Especially when she had shoved miànzi down my throat to the point where it took an engagement to Hongbo to make me stand up to it. “I grew up in this community too. Maybe it’s not as… intense for me as it is for you and Bǎbá, but I feel those same pressures.” So much so that miànzi had dictated my life for nineteen years.

My mother shook her head. “If you understand it like you say, you wouldn’t have thrown our reputation in the toilet for no reason. Jing-Jing, do you remember the story about the emperor who overthrew a kingdom with the help of two generals? Then he worried about the generals killing and overthrowing him, so his solution was to give one general three awards and the other two. The one who received fewer was so ashamed—had no face—that he killed the three-award general. Then the emperor ordered the two-award general to be executed as punishment for committing murder, which, ta-da, secured his throne. See how important miànzi is?”

“See how dangerous it is?” I threw back. How was that story supposed to be enlightening? “And do you remember the story about Moses getting the tablets and one of the commandments being no murder?”

She made a spitting noise at me; I couldn’t be sure whether it was because I’d insulted her by joking she didn’t know the Ten Commandments, or because of how I’d interpreted her emperor story.

“Well, do you remember the phrase, ‘pō chūqù de shuǐ’?” she retorted. “Well, that’s you! Once you ruin your reputation, you become poured-out water I can’t take back.”

I’d rather be poured-out water than Hongbo’s girlfriend.

I wasn’t getting through. And I didn’t have much fight left.

I wanted to reach into my chest and hand her my heart so she could finally understand what made me tick. Maybe then she would also see how each of her words perpetuated the crack she and my father had put there months ago.

But since that wasn’t an option, I turned and grabbed the Band-Aid that was dangling in front of me. It wouldn’t solve the situation long-term, but had I really expected anything to change? Wasn’t that part of the reason I’d brought in Andrew to begin with? “Well, now that I’m a pariah in the community, you better be nice to Andrew. You made such a scene I’m not sure if he’ll stay around.”

“You made the scene, Jing-Jing, not me!”