In Which The Trees Turn Green Again

Applachian

by CATHALEEN QIAO CHEN

When I was growing up in the northern panhandle of West Virginia, my parents and I would road trip up and down the scenic parts of the Rust Belt in our hideous mauve ’92 Geo Prizm, windows down and equipped with only a handful of free maps from the local AAA.

I would stretch across the back, seatbelt wrapped around my entire body and nodding off to the sound of rubber tires grazing past the asphalt highway. The moment before I fall asleep, when I can still see the passing miles of green from the corner of my eyes, Mom would turn around and smile. That sort of assurance, I realize now, I will never know again.

I was nine and I had only lived in the States for seven months. Dad was a traveling scholar in the process of attaining his second PhD from West Virginia University in Morgantown, a pleasant riverside town of 28,000. He had been in and out of my life in pursuit of academia since I was born, so finally Mom decided it was time to drop her own life in Urumqi, China for the three of us to be together. And so we were together.

We didn’t have much in Morgantown, but I would’ve never known. Dad supported us on a sparse teaching assistant salary and Mom took up cooking and couponing. Every other Sunday, she’d take me to the public library on Spruce Street and we’d sit in the storybook section to learn English from the likes of Judy Blume and Jerry Spinelli. It was a 30-minute walk and on days when Dad didn’t have to work in the lab, the three of us would stroll down together.

And of course, there were the mini road trips. On a clear, April Saturday morning, Dad would announce our itinerary: we were to depart in 40 minutes to picnic in Blackwater Falls State Park, a little gem in the nook of the Allegheny Mountain. Sure enough, we’d pack up our yard-sale cooler and hop on the road within the hour.

When I was even littler, I used to get very bad motion sickness. But I never once got sick in that pinkish purple Prizm, a well-worn haven Dad had bargained for $4,000 from a family friend. Even in the most tumultuous peaks of the Appalachians, I would only have to close my eyes and then feel nothing but the alpine landscape pulsating through the engine and then through my body.

In the Prizm, time and distance sort of blended into one gliding dimension incalculable by arithmetic, channeling alongside trees, highway rest areas and a capricious horizon. The backdrop of mountains and woodland was always, unfailingly beautiful, and never once did I dare to ask “are we there yet.”

As Dad drove, Mom would play her favorite cassettes. Among standard Chinese pop classics, there was one tape of famous love ballads from 90s blockbusters — Titanic, The Bodyguard and my personal favorite, Ghost. We must’ve listened to it a thousand times, because every time I hear those songs in the occasional elevator ride or during a nostalgia-themed bar night, I find myself mumbling the lyrics, goosebumps rising on my forearms.

Mom and Dad never caught on with the lyrics because of the language barrier, but melodies were enough for them. As the chorus would swell into a cheesy, well-expected key change, Dad would grasp for Mom’s perfectly aged left hand over the gearshift, and in the harmony of their soft hums, I understood why Mom and I had left China in the first place.

Some years later, I would find myself in another series of car rides, this time in the front seat of a white Kia minivan on Route 79. My companion was a few years older, an enigma even to this day with his rusty red hair and mild demeanor. Driving through a western Pennsylvanian town — smaller and whiter and somehow sadder than my Appalachian hometown — he would also reach past the gearshift to hold my hand, sometimes in silence and sometimes in the drone of BBC Radio.

He was an intent driver, unlike my dad, who sang and hummed and whistled to every familiar tune. We shared the occasional chatter, but for the most part, we reserved conversation for immobile moments. Just like that, car rides became a sacred and understood time for us.

One night, after dew had already glazed the blue blades of grass in my front yard, I snuck out of the house to meet him. The familiar white minivan was parked by a stop sign up the block. With the windows rolled down, he smoked a cigarette and swept me into a dream.

In lull, we cruised around town and somewhere down Main Street, I fell in love with him and I fell in love with the sound of our silence against the whirring engine.

And just as I fell in love with him in that typical, brash teenage manner, he broke my heart in the same brash way. And once again, I found myself sitting in the backseat of my parents’ car, not the Prizm but a new silver Toyota Corolla. So much had changed, yet barely at all.

I was 16, angry, and spoiled with a two-story house and a white picketed fence — and the aimless suburban lifestyle that comes with a two-story house and a white picketed fence.

We had moved away from the beautiful, hilly town to a desolate black hole with nothing but a McDonald’s, two gas stations and 50-some Protestant churches within its three-mile radius. The ’92 Geo Prizm broke down ages ago and Dad finally settled with his multiple academic degrees as a professor at a small, liberal arts college nearby. 

On one Saturday during the latter end of my teen years, we were down 79 to go to the nearest Costco. As per usual, I was nodding off in the backseat as Mom and Dad were bantering to some old tune by a dead Chinese pop star. They got rid of the cassette tapes, only to replace them with CDs of the same songs and albums.

Twenty minutes into the ride, Mom turned around to face me. “How are you?” she asked.

Fine, I said. I didn’t look at her. I was afraid she would see my anger.

“The trees are green again,” she said, pointing to the remnants of a nasty winter along the highway.

I didn’t say anything back, as I had grown accustomed to silent car rides. So she went on with her conversation with Dad and I went on with my half-conscious brooding.

Suddenly “Unchained Melody” came on. The synth arpeggios were almost tawdry in the moment, and my first instinct was to scoff. The last thing any forlorn teenage girl would want to think of is the image of Patrick Swayze intimately throwing clay with Demi Moore like it was karma sutra or something.  

But as the chorus approached, I realized my parents were both singing along. I heard my dad’s voice, older and strained, alongside my mom’s clear, assuring refrain. And like second nature, I began to sing as well — the three of us together, not unlike a scene from National Lampoon’s Vacation, but maybe less silly and quite a bit more Chinese.

Cathaleen Qiao Chen is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Washington D.C. You can find her twitter here.

Paintings by Deborah Brown.

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In Which We Are Wheeled Around The Building

Death Proof

by CATHALEEN QIAO CHEN

Amour
dir. Michael Haneke
127 minutes

If there’s one thing that’s worth watching two hours of banal Parisian domesticity and a painful geriatric nude scene, it’s director Michael Haneke’s dead-on grasp on the ugliness — and the inevitability of — waiting for death.

From Amour’s very first scene, it’s clear that the movie will be difficult to watch. There is no swelling music, no fancy typography and certainly no heartfelt tone-setting dialogue. Instead, it opens with a police squad breaking into an expensive, reeking apartment. They enter a tape-sealed bedroom, where the decaying body of our soon-to-be protagonist lies in a navy blue dress, amidst a bed of flowers — morbidly appropriate and vaguely Faulkner-esque.

Her name is Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) and she is a retired piano teacher, as is Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), her husband. As indicative by their sprawling living room study and courteous discourse, Anne and Georges make up a cultured, respectable, albeit very old, couple.

Anne and Georges with director Michael Haneke

But you wouldn’t want to think of them as your grandparents, at least not in that Nicholas Sparks, My-Grandma-Has-Alzheimer’s-But-Love-Prevails kind of way. Sure, there are a few endearing tidbits about them, like that Georges, a benign, balding man only wears sneakers around the apartment and that Anne, with her shrewd demeanor, obviously wears the pants. Even after her hospitalization, she scolds Georges for constantly hovering over her.

Subsequent to her initial stroke, Anne’s condition quickly worsens, and the dementia sets in. Because her right side is paralyzed from surgical complications (I suppose greedy malpractice lawsuits are less of a thing in France), Georges has to lift her into bed. These trite instances were the hardest to watch. You’d expect a certain intimacy between them — it’s Amour after all — but it never quite gets there. Instead, we get two minutes of awkward silence as Georges struggles to help Anne.

Georges also suffers. He loses sleep and when Anne refuses to drink water, he slaps her. It’s a shocking moment, the ringing of flesh striking flesh, a stark contrast to the overall cinematic quietness of the film.

But even before losing her speech and her ability to feed herself, Anne had lost her will to live. One day, when Georges comes home early to find Anne on the ground, she tells him that life has become pointless.

In this scene, I think of my days as a volunteer. I was 16, and I desperately needed to rack up community service hours because my parents convinced me I had a shot at the ivies. So, every Monday night, Thursday afternoon and the occasional Saturday, I’d try my best to emulate a Miss Teen USA smile and head to Trinity Living Center, where I read bingo cards and made small talk with Vietnam vets. Wandering through the hallways of the complex — a “renovated” two-story penitentiary that used to be a hospital, complete with a basement morgue — I accidentally witnessed nurses strapping residents into risers and sponge-bathing them in tiny, yellow stalls. It was never an interaction as much as it was a transaction.

haneke

That’s exactly how Haneke characterizes the nurses in Amour. When Anne becomes too much for Georges, he hires two aides. One of them advises him to ignore Anne’s constant moaning. An inhumane gesture, but it’s hard not to dehumanize someone who gradually loses her humanness.

At Trinity, between daydreaming about having scones with the Harvard Alumni Association and repeatedly explaining to my geriatric friends the mobile function of my flip phone, I observed their lives. I watched them as they dragged on their straining breaths, tuning in Oprah on network TV and being wheeled around the building. They spent most of their time doing nothing. It’s inevitable that after a while in a pseudo state of life, life itself loses meaning. And capturing this sentiment — or lack thereof — is perhaps Amour’s strongest merit.

One morning, upon hearing her moaning, Georges hurries to her side. He takes her hand and tells her a story about a childhood summer camp. It’s a tender moment, until Anne grows silent and Georges smothers her with the spare pillow conveniently placed beside her.

Admittedly, it was a surprise and a pretty good plot twist. And all of a sudden, it became clear that Georges is our hero, not Anne — regardless of Emmanuelle’s Oscar nomination.

Before he falls asleep that night, he hears commotion from the kitchen. Of course, it was Anne doing the dishes. As proven by decades of dramatic cinema and perhaps a cross-cultural sexist cliché, dead ladies are prone returning to their kitchens. But she is not here to haunt Georges. In her typical assertive manner, she tells him to put on his shoes. And just like that, they leave the apartment together.

Amour is a not a first date movie. Nor is it a second, third or fourth date movie. In one scene, Anne flips through old photo albums. The shot lingers on the pages as she says, “C’est beau.” “What,” Georges asks. “La vie,” she replies, “a long life.” Here, for a brief moment, the veil of tragedy dips and we catch a glimpse of what precedes it – life and amour.

Cathaleen Qiao Chen is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in Washington D.C. You can find her twitter here.

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