Answer: B
)The conversation causes her to believe that she will never live up to her mother’s standards.
Explanation: There were other scores that mattered. Seventeen million of Mao’s youth were sent to the countryside for reeducation. Ten thousand arrested in connection with the June fourth movement.10 Hundreds to thousands killed at Tiananmen Square.11 “Isn’t that the scariest thing,” he says, “the fact that those death-toll numbers are missing?”
“Yeah,” I say, but the truth is that I don’t really know. I can’t imagine the difference between ten thousand and seventeen million. I can’t imagine something so abstract as death, or so concrete as Mom’s involvement in all this.
“Wait here,” he says. He puts down the sander and goes over to the metal shelves that line the back of the garage. Motivational posters land on the floor, and on top of them, the lids of cardboard document boxes. When he comes back, he’s holding a faded photo of people standing together in a half circle in front of a school. Mom is there in the center, her head turned and eyes just barely catching the camera, as though distracted in mid-speech.
“She was an activist,”12 he says. “This was taken in May of 1989. If you think about it, you’re in this picture too.” I imagine myself over on the other side of the world, a tiny embryo stuck to the inside of her, like a snail.
“You’re more like her than you think,” he says.
“Yeah, right. How?”
“You’re fearless.”
He hands me a can of Mountain Dew from the stash he keeps hidden in the garage. Mom says Mountain Dew is the color of cancer, and even though I know that cancer doesn’t have a color, the thought has put me off Mountain Dew. I drink the soda anyway, and it’s not as bad as I remember.
I’m sure Mom has reasons for running our lives the way she does, even if they only hold up in her own mind. Call them superstitions then, or the practices of a self-made faith. Somewhere there is a god that demands double-locking doors and triple-checking my homework. What I want to know is how the politics and the soda connect. In other words, at what point did she become so small in her living of life?
I don’t say any of this, but it’s as if Dad hears anyway. “They’re her stories,” he says softly. “I can’t tell them.”
